Full Exposure: Opening Up to Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression by Susie Bright Page B

How do they know that promiscuity does not have its own divine level of spiritual communication? The celibates who offend me the most are not the ones who want to erase below the waist, but those who seem to be taking down the antennae.
    Some of my favorite celibacy rants are the ones that concern the release from romantic illusions, from living as a prisoner in that peculiar state called “being in love.” An anonymous contributor to an Internet celibacy forum writes,
    Whether you are married or celibate, there will be failings, feelings of loneliness, frustration, happiness, at-one-ness, and love. I think our media wrongly pushes the message to couple when not all are meant to or even want to. I wonder if all the consternation about finding a mate comes from too many people trying to pair off for the wrong reasons….
    I agree. So many people think that a flush of erotic chemistry with another person is reason to forsake their friends and family, ignore their solo callings, go into escrow with a virtual stranger, and gener-ally make fools of themselves. Disillusionment is inevitable and real. The mythology of romance that we grew up with in childhood is a candy heart waiting to be broken.
    However, the fault doesn’t lie with the erotic surge but with the role models we have for attending to our new relationships and feelings. It’s so special when we find a sexual bond with someone; we yearn for a mighty ritual, and society gives us the

    old standbys of elopement, marriage, divorce. Some people feel that they’re saying good-bye to their individuality when they get married, or that they are undoing one monogamous knot and stringing up another one. Why can’t we celebrate and respect the bliss of a new partnership without thinking that something must die in the process? Why does feeling something transformative in our erotic life mean that we are “risking it all”? We need a space and a respect for our erotic inspirations, without the fear that can drive us to annihilate everything and everyone else from our intimate circle.
    I can’t fashion a lover or a relationship that would “make me happy,” because other people can’t simply hand us a bowl of cher-ries. I’m genuinely happy when someone hands me an ice cream cone, I’m happy to hear my favorite song, I’m happy to feel the embrace of someone I adore. But those feelings come and go like butterflies; and if there weren’t something at my very core that’s filling me up and making me feel independent and alive, those fluttery sensations would be very fragile. I know this, not because I’ve refrained from sex, but because I’ve been so sexual. I took another ticket there, albeit a less pious one.
    When I was sixteen and first started having sex with other people, I decided to keep a secret coded diary of lovers. I would put down my age, their age, whether I had an orgasm—very important to me at the time, and not something I could count on—and then, the most tricky code of all, whether I was in love with this particular sex partner. The thing was, almost every time I had a new steady partner, which in those days was a matter of weeks or months, I would decide that this particular affair was real love, and I had to change the code to show it was better than the old love. If the previous love had been four hearts, then this one had to be five, then six; then I got rid of hearts altogether

    because they took up too much room on the page, and I made up some other Super Love Symbol.
    I still have that yellow legal pad around somewhere, and I can’t even figure out what the love and orgasm notations mean anymore. Even the simple score I had for evaluating my sexual satisfaction became impossible. What if I had intense orgasms but didn’t care too much for the lover? Or the reverse, where I adored my partner even though we had the clumsiest, most pathetic physical encounters? Or how about people who turned me on so much that it seemed like they