From Book of Blue by Eric Francis. Note to readers: Book of Blue is currently a free subscription website – until Tuesday. This is the last call if you would like access to the site, without charge. The way you arrange that is to write me a personal letter at blue -at- bookofblue.com, introducing yourself and expressing your interest in the work. Hard to believe but Book of Blue, the diary, not just the photos, has been going three years as of around March; the photos go back to spring 2005. –efc
We need a sexual revolution. One of the paradigms we’ve reached the end of, as a culture, involves the way we conduct our sexual relationships, and it’s time for something new. We are the ones who are going to create whatever that new thing is.
Yet in practical terms, how do we go about this? Let’s say you’re at the point where you recognize that the old framework of relationships – Cinderella or the one night stand – isn’t working for you.
The chances are if you’ve arrived at this point, you’ve paid for it dearly. You’ve paid in loss, in pain, in having your hopes dried out on the rocks and bleached in the too-hot Sun of desire; and you’ve probably paid in longing and loneliness.
You may have given up, or you dearly need to. You may have decided that there is no way you can have relationships that follow society’s norms and rules. You may have decided that you have too many issues to relate to another person — and then you wonder why others with more issues seem to do better. Above all, you know you’ve reached a branch of the road, where you can no longer go forward; where you must make a choice and go one new way or another.
And then what? The first thing to recognize is that you’re in new territory. People have been here before, but the trails are all overgrown. Previous explorers took notes and some of them are available: there is more wisdom and consideration of sex in art and literature there is about many other topics, but as Adrienne Rich once wrote, there are methods but we don’t use them. The stories of what happens in this forest are enough to keep away all but those who are truly brave of heart, or whose souls yearn to express more of their human potential lest they die of inhumanity. The reason is they call on us to be honest with ourselves and with others — and this seems beyond what most people are capable of.
Yet it’s not a hopeless cause. Honesty has a way of feeding and thriving on itself. Be honest with yourself any way you can. Write the words, say the words, tell others, stretch your language on the air and walk across it like a high wire. Notice what you’re feeling. See where your boundaries are. Feel your inhibitions. Feel whatever you’re feeling. If you can’t take another step, feel the awareness of where you are.
Check out the view!
You’re the one who is going to be leading the way for a while. Get used to that. Once you venture into this wilderness, you’re more likely to encounter others who are looking to you for guidance than those who can offer guidance. Therefore, you need to take everyone as your teacher.
Read whatever you can and be conscious about not taking on the fears of people who say you’re trespassing. This is self-exploration. You can’t be trespassing, even if everyone else has to deal with the fact that you’re becoming self-aware. If anyone doesn’t like that it really IS their issue. If you’ve lived an erotic and emotional life of passivity, you might find taking this kind of leadership refreshing. Once you know what you want and how you feel, it’s easier to speak about it; but you still have to be ready to let go.
The guy might think that masturbating together instead of fucking is just too weird. Maybe he’ll think it’s the hottest day of his life. Maybe your girlfriend will be offput by the idea. Maybe she thinks about it every night. One basic image in this journey is mirror-holding for one another. Relax until it’s easy.
Take that chance and suggest what you want. You’re hot for even saying it.
Gently weave community: community of conscience; of true affinity. Remember who you meet. Remember what they taught you and what you said to them. Remember that many people will initially step up to sexual liberation and then back down, because the inner confrontation makes them too nervous; they feel they’ve hidden so much. Notice how you’ve done the same thing and notice when you do it yourself. Others try to get there, that is, to a state of sexual enlightenment, without the spiritual content: that is, at the expense of love. There are many people you would never suspect want to break free, but most of them are scared, fearing judgment and, I believe, being declared unfit for relationship.
Beware of anyone who willfully lies, particularly if they just lie a little. I don’t think there is any point trying to convince them of anything, though I admit to having tried a few times.
Confront the issue of weird head-on. Okay, so you are. You are because you admit your truth to yourself. In truth, when it comes to sex, everyone is a little weird. Assuming you stay away from anyone underage, and you have a tangible concept of consent, sex is legal. Any fantasies of the police kicking in the door can be assumed to be paranoia implanted directly by the Pope, and removable only by you.
Forget your ideas about who and what turns you on; or rather, set them aside and venture into the forbidden territory of what you really want. Most of your old ideas are based on expectations and inhibitions. Most of them are probably written in a thick book of moral laws that must exist somewhere, of which rule one is: if it feels good, it’s bad. That’s what sexual revolution is about letting go of.
Don’t take your inhibitions too seriously. Sure, have a conversation with them — but they ain’t the judge and jury.
Desire is mutable. What turns you off, or even disgusts you a little today, can be a masterpiece of curiosity tomorrow. Curiosity leads to liberation because it sets your mind free to discover. Mingle your desire with the desire to find out. Be prepared to find out nearly anything.
Embrace embarrassment. The heat you feel is ego going up in psychic flames. Go there willingly and indulge the sense of relief. Right behind the veil of embarrassment is the real pleasure, but you need to go through the veil to get there.
Recognize that the fear of sexual diseases is a form of genital anxiety: that is, general fear of existence projected onto the genitals (usually as a form of death). Know everything you need to know about keeping yourself safe, set some basic protocols, follow them and let it be. Be honest with your fear and decide if you’re going to let it stop you. Learn how to have explicit conversations about sexual diseases, pregnancy and your history involving either of these things.
Deal with your jealousy. Deal with your guilt about making other people jealous. The best way I’ve found to approach jealousy is as an erotic phenomenon. I know that not everyone can do this so easily. Jealousy exists many ways, at many depths in the psyche. If you’re jealous admit it – it will be ten times easier to get over. Then I suggest you build some scenarios that eroticize the experience and give you a chance to stretch your boundaries. If it makes you jealous that someone you want is fucking someone else, let yourself imagine their pleasure just as you arrive at the point of no return. The opposite of that jealousy is not “being okay with it.” Rather it is being so turned on by what you perceive that you cannot hold back your pleasure.
Embrace death directly when it shows up. If you find yourself in an avoid/approach pattern, this may be either about hidden guilt, or an unarticulated relationship with death. On an erotic journey death will arrive in many ‘smaller’ forms, all of them daunting, including orgasm, jealousy and the fear of abandonment. Let them draw you closer to yourself. It’s easier to share and listen about this stuff than you think. Be ready to let yourself go.
Pride is your enemy. That which makes you feel like you’re worthy of the approval of others is precisely the root of the guilt trip that necessitates that pride. Experiment with the indignity of sexual surrender. Consider how you’d feel if everyone knew. Fall in love with how unpresentable you are when you’re all splayed out like that, and how gorgeous.
Let yourself grieve that you are an impermanent being.
If you cannot imagine your mother, father or brother seeing you in this state, imagine it vividly.
Explore, taste and smell your pussy. Squat over a mirror with a bright light on.
Talk to yourself as you tip over the edge of orgasm. Record yourself and listen. Look in a mirror and watch your face let go over and over.
Smell, lick and make peace with your semen. Smear it all over your cheeks and mouth and go out for a walk. Notice how you feel after you ejaculate: how your personality changes, how your desire nature changes.
Sexual orientation is mutable. It can change from hour to hour and day to day. Gender is mutable. Your imagination is limitless. You contain all potentials.
Learn how not to get pregnant, and use the knowledge when it counts.
Indulge your pleasure. Allow others to be aware you do so. Practice the freedom that comes when you hide nothing from the people around you. Be a vehicle for others to embrace their pleasure. Help and encourage them. Embrace the growth, freedom, strangeness, frustration, sorrow, terror, passion and whatever ever ever else shows up when you do.
This heteronormative discussion is interesting. I’m not versed in it at all, but I can say that I experienced an awakening from my own conditioning when my inner girl came to life. I discovered just how like a man I viewed the world and, ah-hem, women. Ugh. No one ever could have told me that, though.
Patricia MoonRose
“I’ve really yet to fully experience sexual union or a full sexual exchange, the way that I see possible with man-to-woman sex.”
I meant this from the sole standpoint of physiology, and not at all what I think is right or normal or have been patterned to think is such. For vaginal pleasure, with a woman, a hand is required or a toy (sans oral sex), with a man it’s one body (penis) to another (vagina), and that’s strictly what I was referring to when I made that statement. So there’s the body-to-body, head-to-head, and both persons’ genitals being stimulated simultaneously by the other’s, the woman being penetrated, that’s not possible between two women. I might be wrong in saying there’s something to that because I do not know for sure, but it just seems like there might be to me. Stay tuned.
Patricia MoonRose
Yoo hoo, Eric, if you look two posts before the one in which you’re wondering who says sexuality is a construct, you will find the answer is waiting for you 😉
awordedgewise,
it runs deep doesn’t it.. all of those lies woven into generation after generation.
Ah MJ! My brother (older by a year and half) is aptly called “king” by a cousin who saw the truth of the family lie for years before i was able to put my arms around what was goin’ on.
I can quite imagine that intricate web of gender convention.
I have a twin brother. Throughout our childhood, the truth about our ‘separate’ status and personal power was transparent, self-evident, virtually sexless. Our personalities were somehow, as I recall, miraculously permitted to simply be what they were (there were bigger fish to fry).
Until adolescence. Then like fog rolling in, the elaborate complicity of instating male privilege (in a boy who would remain wholly unsuitable for many years) was devastating, professional and exhaustive. It wasn’t until last week! when, due to a serious illness of my mother’s, the veil concealing the shoddy mechanics of that privilege melted into black putrid smoke. Voila!
And here we are, Here.
(thanks for tolerating my dramatic flair)
“When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity – in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern. The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits – islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.” — Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Re heteronormative: I’ve begun to see how constructs of sexual orientation are related to nearly everything we experience in society. It’s the “girls get pink room, boys get blue room” on the most elaborate scale you cannot quite imagine. The latticework runs through our psyches, and it becomes the hang-up point for much baggage that we would be able to let go of much more easily, otherwise. Yes, a pillar of patriarchy. Or the thing itself.
It’s so insidious that you can even look at some “radical” feminist literature and smell the reek of patriarchy in the analytical tools that are used, and the assumptions that are made. And fortunately there’s a lot of room outside that cage.
“’sexuality’ does not exist — it is a construct”
Hm…food for thought for sure especially seeing as everything (in my life anyway) is sexual. Therefore, this idea makes perfect sense. I begin by understanding that the idea of “sexuality” then separates sex from “everything” else when in fact it is the integral part of.
Good stuff.
this is good reading.
a note on ‘heteronormative’. it’s a really important and effective term, not just for pinpointing unconscious habits and perspectives in sexual practices, but behavioral and societal practices as well.
there are still so many people who have never heard the word. i have found that the first time they do hear it- some new radical light clicks on in their brain.
it’s a bind none of us, really, want to be adhering to, a pillar of the patriarchy.
I am not sure who — one of the heavyweight ‘minor’ philosophers, 20c., said that ‘sexuality’ does not exist — it is a construct. I can see the wisdom of that.
I have found that sex among more than two people at once opens the door for more of the sharing masturabation themed adventure.
It’s all good.
Now that I’ve gone and written that, I suddenly feel that from a certain angle it is a sort of bullshit thing to say, and yet from another perspective it’s a fairly important thing to say.
Foucault says something like “sex” is just a propaganda term, and that really there is only bodies and pleasure.
This is a topic I’ve only ‘touched upon’ a couple of times: the point is encrypted in what you’re saying. There’s this word I don’t like: heteronormative. I like the concept but the word sounds too much like someone in a lab coat is saying it.; but it means sex with a ‘straight’ philosophy or conditioning guiding it. When we move from the kind of m/f sex we’re expected to have, in any other direction – especially toward selfsex – that takes a step away from heteronormaitve. And this is part of the reason why many of those other forms of sex, including sharing masturbation, are So Hot. There is that liberated sense of moving beyond this construct or set of expectations that are dropped over us like a cage when we are younger. That is in part the sense of liberation. One thing about sharing masturbation is that for people accustomed to thinking of themselves as ‘straight’, it’s pretty easy to do with someone of your own sex. And regardless of whether alone or with another, masturbation is same-sex sex – and that is part of the persistent controversy about something so natural, though few admit this.
Aha. Sharing masturbation is the right expression. Thanks for the clarification.
I should have noticed this. I once said that woman-to-woman sex is basically mutual masturbation. So, in a way, in a big way even, I’ve really yet to fully experience sexual union or a full sexual exchange, the way that I see possible with man-to-woman sex. The hands-free, clinging, clutching, separated only by sweat, penetrating/receiving type.
Patricia MoonRose
eric. i am a new reader, and now devoted reader. this is a total mind fuck. love it. thankyou!
your site is wonderous in its day to day everythings and ALWAYS appropriate no matter when I check in.
“I just keep it simple: dont expect your partner to please you, don’t expect to please your partner. Its all about sharing. Keep your boundaries intact while keeping an open mind. Be realistic not romantic. Know how to please yourself.”
We can say these things, but the question is: how do we actually get there? What methods do we use? Many people have heard of a boundary but cannot explain the concept. Many people are utterly enthralled with romanticism of love and, while they know it’s a trap, cannot get out of it. The idea of this article is to provide a starting point on tangible, grounded methods to make some progress, or even a starting point to the conversation.
Clarification of language: sharing masturbation is two or more people masturbating together, witnessing one another or coexisting in the same space. Mutual masturbation is usually defined as two people getting one another off. Because it’s unclear to many what this latter term means, I don’t use it in my articles.
@ hypnotic: Hang ups? I don’t get that. At this point in my 60 years of life, thinking about pleasing or being pleased doesn’t enter the equation. I don’t think it ever has, to be honest. Boundaries? A good thing under most circumstances, I admit. However I have this watery Pisces rising/8th house sun going for me. Seek and ye shall find, that’s what I say. I have sought and found a lover who dives into the sea with me… I flow and shift into whatever shape we are making together. Ecstasy? You bet.
This is a keeper.
I actually find mutual masturbation pretty hot, and although I haven’t yet tried it realtime, I use it in fantasy often while masturbating. I imagine a man in the room with me, which is interesting because most of my sexual partners have been women. But, I am experiencing an increased interest and curiosity about the opposite sex in that way, so no doubt that has something to do with it.
Perhaps a personal sexual revolution is coming my way as Uranus will enter my 8th house sometime during its Aries transit. Hmmmm. Or, mmmmm.
:0)
Patricia MoonRose
Gee whiz, sounds like a shitload of hang ups to me.
I just keep it simple: dont expect your partner to please you, dont expect to please your partner. Its all about sharing. Keep your boundaries intact while keeping an open mind. Be realistic not romantic. Know how to please yourself. Understand that your partner knows the best way to please her/himself If we can agree on this — Fuck, Just enjoy the moments, explore and let it take you higher… thats what sex is all about : ecstasy and union with the divine…
yes.