Fuck Me Free
by Eric FrancisPart Three Miami Series photographs by Maria & Eric Part One | Part Two | Part Four | Printable Edition The Masturbation-Compersion Connection _____Speaking of selflove.
_____During the past three years, several of my friends and I have conducted a creative experiment involving photographing one another masturbating. My friends Neal and Maria were my co-photographers, and Maria and I and two other female friends did the modeling. We experienced all kinds of fun and strife doing this project, spin-offs of which still continue both in Germany and the US.
_____We have learned a lot about ourselves and one another in the process, particularly about the nuances of masturbation as a vehicle for selflove, and what can happen when we allow ourselves to be deeply selfloving in the presence of others. Whatever you think happens during sexual exchanges, what we are really striving to do when we have sex is love ourselves and share that love. But this is often very difficult for people, especially those who judge themselves harshly. So it would seem that the way out of the maze is to practice loving oneself, both alone and then in the presence of other people. This is what we did, only with cameras in the room.
_____The photo sessions involved the person who was modeling undressing and, as naturally as possible with several people watching and with one or two taking pictures, masturbating. The real thing: with self-penetration, mirrors, moaning, vibrators, lube, squirming, asking for water, struggling, overcoming struggle, and experiencing (or not experiencing) orgasm. No faking it; no drama; just authentic, passionate, loving surrender. It is really amazing how the presence of the camera and observers open the way to deeper pleasure and selflove, especially in a highly unusual environment where we have agreed it's okay.
_____This is extremely intimate sex because under such conditions we need to accept the idea that people are aware of how intimate we can become with ourselves. The fact of laying oneself bare, pardon the pun, and having this both witnessed and documented, lifts a great burden off of the heart. These were experiences in which I felt truly normal as a human being, as normal and real as I have ever felt.
_____Then there is the mild shock of embarrassment and erotic joy and ultimately, liberation, when the model is confronted with his or her own photographs for the first time, always with other people present. Throughout all of these experiences, the only thing you can really put forth is compassion, which, in a sexual context, is compersion. And when confronted with the experience of shame or embarrassment that so many people are aware of our selfpleasuring and especially the emotion of selfloving, the only sane response is compersion for ourselves: allowing one's own feelings of pleasure and desire to be exposed to others without judging them within ourselves, and without assuming the people in the room are judging us.
_____I can give you a particularly intimate example of this process. On the last day of a visit to Miami last year, my friend and sometimes-lover Maria asked if I would model for her. Now, if a sweet, beautiful, brilliantly talented adorable blonde babe who loved you a lot asked to photograph you masturbating, what you would you say? Right.
_____So, she set up the room and I showered and sat down on the floor of the studio she had created, and it was my time to be really openly selfloving, and together we would co-create an experience and some artwork. Now, as background, Maria and I have a polyamorous relationship. She has her lovers in Germany, and I have my sexual freedom as I wish and as I can arrange. We were polyamorous as a matter of commitment from before the first day we met -- and had explored this for years before, so we have never had another arrangement, and we understand each other's needs rather well. So, in theory, it would not be a big deal if, during this photo session, I decided to look at my favorite book of erotic photos, portraits of women masturbating called I Am My Lover, which would be a pretty natural thing for me to do if I wanted to have sex with myself without her there.
_____Well, I got the book but suddenly found myself in heart-palpitating terror that I would make her jealous by desiring or thinking of other women in her presence. It rang through my heart and mind on an archetypal level as well: I was putting another Goddess before her, and expected her to be angry. I could barely do it, but I knew I had to do it. I had to surrender to the fear and my sense of betraying her, and let go into the experience, get turned on by my favorite pictures (Nina, straddling a strap-on strapped to a stool, with a most amazing expression on her face; Sheila, sweetly fingering her cunt and her ass, her eyes wide and gentle) and see what happened. What happened was truly amazing. Later on I took the camera and had one of the most intimate experiences with Maria that I have ever had, and I am blessed to be able to share a little touch of the energy with you in the form of our pictures.
Being In One's Feelings _____These experience are the most basic form of compersion, which is resonating with one's own feelings and pleasure, and then resonating with another person's self-given pleasure. It has become obvious to me that compersion begins with deeply experiencing loving masturbation, moving through the shame and resistance and going to real spaces of ecstasy. Once we can learn to vibrate deeply with our own feelings, we can learn to do so in the presence of others without shame or embarrassment; and then, we can learn to feel another person.
_____This is why I suggest that people masturbate a lot when they want to learn compersion, first on their own, then watching in front of a mirror, and then in front of a friend or their lover or someone you recruit specially for the project. A lot of our problem with sexual and emotional shut-down is that we will not allow ourselves to truly feel love in the presence of others. So often, we are embarrassed to love ourselves. And if we can't do that, we can't feel them, or our love for them. We are "safe," but numb.
_____A writer and sex educator named Cherie Byrd, who lives here in Seattle, said it very well in a recent article called "Cultivating an Embodied Inner Lover." She writes, "When we disconnect from our bodies, we generate a deeply diminished exchange of bioelectricity, or consciousness, for the conversations of the body/mind. The body becomes clueless and we experience a sensual disconnect. We no longer sense our emotions as they are happening, our experience of our physical body is blocked, we lack inspiration, and we feel cut off. We are no longer functioning as a whole system. Let's face it: It's next to impossible to leap into an experience of full-body orgasm when we are not being fully embodied organisms."
_____Cherie runs a Kissing School once a month which is extremely popular (there is a five day retreat over the Summer Solstice). She offers other techniques which all essentially involve waking up to one's own feelings. We figured out that my selfloving workshops and her Kissing School classes are different forms of the same process (I am doing a two-day How To Be Your Own Lover process the same weekend, in California).
_____Masturbation is really the most basic sexual experience. It is erotic pleasure before the ideas of relationship, commitment, reproduction, diseases and other confusing, painful stuff appeared to mar our state of inner joy, or take us outside of ourselves. Masturbation is not about competition but rather being whole; it is not about procreating, but rather creating pleasure; it is not about seducing another but allowing oneself to be; it is not about dominating another, as so much sex is, but rather about surrendering to oneself.
_____Many of us were wounded in this inner joy by people inflicting guilt (that is, by inflicting attempts at control) and shame (which comes from people intentionally guilting us), and we carry these wounds today. When we make love to another person, we bring them into the energetic equation. We can work through this; we can learn to resonate with our erotic feelings and be free within ourselves.
_____As children we masturbate, and at some point we become self-conscious that others are aware of us. This is our first sexual relationship. I suggest you look very closely at how you expressed your feelings and thoughts about masturbation, and masturbation itself, in the context of your parents and siblings. In other words, did you hide your activities? Were you open about them? Were you shamed or persecuted, threatened or punished? Was masturbation ever explained to you, and did you ask? Any such early experiences will be influential in shaping your whole sexual reality today, whether consciously or not, and will help you make a map to uncover your real sexual values, and the spaces where we feel controlled about our sexuality.
Compersion, Compassion, Empathy _____Compersion takes the feelings of compassion, empathy and sympathy and brings them directly into erotic reality. We need to be open to feel these emotions, and that is the idea. Compersion is resonating with another person's humanity, and to do this you must feel human, in all your yearning, need, desire, turmoil, grief, ecstasy, jealousy and love. Compersion is a kind of ultimate erotic experience of humility and surrender.
_____Compersion is like empathy, only made of pleasure and love. Empathy means feeling another person's pain, or pathos. If pathos arises, we can, if we want, and if we remember love, move through it till we come to passion. Most of the time we are apathetic, which means refusing to feel pain, which translates to refusing to feel passion.
_____It is probably easiest to start with compassion. We can experience compersion in basic forms when we get off on another person's pleasure. But the experience that seems to call us most deeply into ourselves is surrendering to another person's pleasure of which we are not directly part, or a subject. This is the path to erotic freedom, as far as I can tell: inner freedom, and if we can find friends to play with us, outer freedom. And then erotic freedom calls us forth to every other kind of freedom, such as creative freedom and freedom of movement.
_____Yet for many people this state of mind and space of reality is very difficult to reach. Why would that be? About seventy people in the audience just mumbled, "It's too scary."
_____Yeah well right. And why would that be? The confirmed no-brainer explanation is because we're too attached to being neurotic to be free. Are we too convinced that our narrow-sighted, backwards-looking, paranoid, compulsive, conservative and stingy ways of doing love will get us not more love? Perhaps. But I think we also know these ways of thinking will keep us safer: safer from love, or passion, and safer from pain, or pathos. Indeed, when we shut down we are much safer from love, but we are beginning to see, even as a culture, and even as individuals, that our constipated ways of relating have brought us considerably more anguish than they have fulfillment.
_____However, this is only the first layer.
_____Consider another: even thinking about things such as compersion examples 63-69 makes us aware of a yearning, of a hunger for life, that we fear may never be fulfilled, and at the same time we may grieve at how much time has gone by in which we did not dare experience anything even half as brave or pleasurable as these things. We did not do so even when we had the chance. (Many, many people wake up to their desire for sexual pleasure in their 50s and 60s. I meet hundreds of them at sex and relationship conferences; they usually show up as married couples, with all their scars and stretch marks, minus their moralism and inhibitions, ready for fun with whoever turns them on and is willing to play).
_____When we taste love or surrender, one of the first feelings that may course through our hearts and bodies is how much we have been deprived, or how much we have deprived ourselves. We have been apathetic; we have neglected our pain, and thus our passion.
_____We have also been hurt so many times it seems difficult to trust. But anyone who has gone from a place of being hurt to a space of trusting knows that shutting down as a result of past pain only brings more pain. If we want to live open to pleasure, we need to live openly. This requires learning and practice, and speaking our hearts and minds till we find people who also want pleasure and are willing to learn and practice.
_____There are other reasons. There is plain fear. We are afraid of what will happen if we open up, if we dare to come out of the allegedly safe boxes of "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" and what everyone thinks we should be, and honestly explore our feelings and our desires. We may fear sexual diseases, but they are far easier to get from cheating or being cheated on than from being conscious about sex and telling the truth.
_____And I think we are lazy critters. I think we are afraid of change. Sex changes everything. Sex opens us up to the possibilities, especially the possibilities of who we are. If we open up to desire, to passion, to the hunger and thirst for life, we must also open to pain, and to healing pain, and as a result, we must change our lives. If people around us open up, we are reminded that we want to change our lives, or the energy of their opening directly reaches us with kinetic force.
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