Sex Work: Not All Created Equal

In all my grown-up years on the planet, I’ve met precious few adults in my orbit who haven’t been grateful when they’ve had steady, fulfilling well-paying jobs. Right-wing conservative bloviating notwithstanding, most people I’ve met  - and most whom I haven’t, I suspect -  would rather earn a steady paycheck by their own sweat, talents and capabilities than subsist on the social safety nets put in place by agencies and governments admirably concerned about averting people’s personal disasters.

Moreover, here in the US as in numerous other places around the globe, there’s a long-standing belief that one’s ability to earn a living ought not to be limited by anything other than an individual’s talent, creativity, business acumen and personal grit so long as other people and society at large are unhurt by one’s money-making endeavors. In fact, the durable spine of any capitalist economy is pretty much dependent upon this notion of a vibrant, flexible, creative free market powered by individuals’ willingness to work hard and play by a normative set of rules.

That said, when it comes to sex work and the people who engage in it, the flinty fist of a yet-puritanical culture pretty much continues to stigmatize the sort of flexible free-market minded pragmatism that can be characteristic of sex workers.

Dell Williams: Planting a Feminist Garden

Dell Williams died last year at the advanced and venerable age of 92. But only after having earned some highly deserved fame as the brave feminist force behind the creation of Eve’s Garden, widely recognized as the US’s first women-focused sexuality boutique and mail order business back in 1974.

If you’re among the folk who’ve heard of Ms. Williams, chances are that you’re also among the countless millions who believe in their true hearts that women’s sexuality – specifically women’s orgasms -  are both a resource and a gift of the sort that keeps on giving, largely in direct relationship to how much we honor it.

Born in 1922, Williams came into her own after pursuing multiple other endeavors including acting and a stint in a branch of the armed services. After all, coming into one’s own is a process sometimes. It happened for Dell Williams after she attended a Body/Sex Workshop with the fearless, talented and wholly inimitable sex educator Dr. Betty Dodson in New York. There, Ms. Williams’ epiphany took a deep and life-altering hold on her as she learned to explore the liberatory experience of taking charge of one’s own pleasure.

She learned about the power of her female body, and most importantly, how to tap into the source of her orgasmic energy through tactile manipulation and the use of vibrators.  Not to the exclusion of partnered sex, but as a way to be independent in the pursuit of sexual fulfillment, Williams spoke of the sheer empowerment that derives from being in charge of one’s own pleasure and not dependent upon the involvement of anyone else.

Having Sex: The Case for Embracing a Wider View

I sometimes wonder where in the world some of us got the notion that the term, “having sex” describes only one single act – that of penis-in-vagina penetration. Taken from this narrow and reductive view, a term that ought to embrace a rich and wide-ranging diversity of pleasurable sexual behaviors has been shrunken and winnowed down in ways that minimize, even exclude, a panoply of exquisitely delicious acts to instead valorize one, single, supposedly ultimate, activity.

Moreover, it’s really rather sad that many of us never even contemplate how limiting, narrow and obfuscating this kind of thinking really is. But it's a very common notion, one that points to a larger social issue that seems to be at the soul of our considerable backwardness concerning exactly what’s meant by the term “having sex.” And as one might expect, our apparent unwillingness to expand our working definition of the term has created some rather unfortunate misconceptions, not the least of which is the erroneous notion that other pleasurable, empowering sexual activities somehow fall short of qualifying as actually "having sex."

Oral Sex: So What Do You Think? So What Do You Do?

As readers who drop in here regularly know, one of the last things I’m prone to do is advocate for specific sex acts of any particular kind. And as far as I’m concerned, this is as it should be; since the central purpose of my writing here is, for the most part, to inform, uphold and enlighten – to offer new and engaging perspectives on the breath-taking wonderment that is our universe-driven sexuality. Decisions about which actual sexual behaviors we choose to engage in are intensely personal and situated within each person’s constellation of likes and dislikes; they are choices shaped by desire, which in turn is shaped by a multitude of factors including how we were raised, how sexually open and adventurous we are, and of course, our mind/body responses to what heats us up and curls our toes.

With all that in mind, if I’m advocating for anything at all, if I’m standing up on my soap box and waxing philosophical, it’s for each of us, as consenting adults, to claim with both hands our right to be sexually empowered and fulfilled. To know what we like and to own our right to have it, so long as our sexual freedoms don’t impinge on the rights and agency of others. If I’d stake my credentials on anything at all, it would be on the need for us all to take charge of our own sexuality and to leverage its radiant power - especially for women - as a source of energy, strength and renewal, so long as we do it in ways that hold sacred each other’s humanity, as well as our own.

Marriage Equality! For Now and Always

It’s been awhile since I’ve written about marriage equality here. And when I did, it was with a sizable impatience for the glacial pace of the process – the process by which many of us come to bestow upon others the very same rights we leverage for ourselves. 

And cynic that I am, for awhile I almost began to believe that it would never come to pass. Understandable, I guess, since our opponents’ venom was fierce. But so was our will to strive on – on behalf of basic human decency. On behalf of the bedrock moral certainty that our LGBTQ sisters and brothers deserved no less legitimacy in the fabric of their intimate lives than we demand for ourselves.

And so at long last here we stand, with same-sex marriage legal across the nation. Torturous in its prologue, the reality’s been a long time coming. And it’s no exaggeration to say that the credit for this enormous achievement goes to millions of honest brokers - millions of strong-hearted lovers of fairness and equality - our countless sisters and brothers whose bodies, energies and voices coalesced in the tireless quest for everyone’s right to marry whomever we love. 

Kissing: Notes on the Ubiquitous Lip Lock

At the risk of belaboring the obvious here, let’s just say that there’s a whole lot more about kissing in a sexualized, intimate context than lots of people realize. In contemporary Western cultures, most of us have been associating such kisses - soul, deep or French, or whatever we want to call them - with our most basic romantic/sexual/partnering behaviors since we first began thinking of such things. Here and elsewhere, the kiss in its romantic context, seems almost a taken-for-granted sort of ritual, one that most people engage in without much thought as to what’s actually going on during the lip-locking process.

In fact, about 90% of the world’s cultures kiss, an overwhelming percentage, to be sure, but certainly not inclusive of everyone. There are groups in Sudan, for instance, who regard kissing as a flat out dirty, nasty habit and don’t engage in the practice for that pretty compelling reason. Other groups regard the mouth as the portal to the soul from which a person’s true essence is able to come and go. These folks refrain from kissing to help insure that the soul remains intact and firmly entrenched inside the person to whom it was given.

Sex and People with Disabilities: So Basic a Human Right

So much of what I write here is informed/catalyzed/inflected by conversations I’ve been fortunate enough to have been a part of elsewhere. And by far, the talk that instigates most of what I share with you happens during my time with women and men alike, who’ve been conditioned by the culture to gloss over matters like sex, under the erroneous assumption that adults - by definition- most probably know all about sex that there is to know already. That is, by the act of achieving adult status alone, we’re somehow in possession of all we need to know about human sexuality.

On the other hand, many folks come to me, after thirty, forty, fifty years on the planet, rightly assuming that there’s still some “stuff” they don’t know, but not altogether sure about what that unknown stuff might be.

Either way, what transpires between us is almost always like gold, precious and beautiful, unnervingly empowering for nearly all concerned. This is particularly true for the so-called “aha” moments, the unexpected epiphanies large and small, when the proverbial light bulb comes on. It can happen for a single soul or sometimes for many in synchrony, due to nothing more than a serendipitous confluence of events bringing us together to discover something profound about our collective humanity.

Naming Genitalia: Of Pocketbooks and Peaches

In what seems like another lifetime, my exquisitely erudite mother introduced me to the legendary line from Shakespeare wherein the ill-fated Juliet declares that “a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet” regardless of what words we might use to signify it. Not moved to push back against my mother, or the Bard, I recall that I agreed. 

But if we’re going to import that reasoning to suggest that names of things don’t matter in the real world, I’d withdraw my support. Names do matter, and the words by which we call things really do impact our sense of what they are. The utterances that we assign to objects, artifacts, places, and people are pivotal in enabling our understanding of our relationship to them; in a very real sense, then, the language we attach to things shapes the reality that we experience every day.

So… every once in a while someone in a group I’m speaking with mentions talking with her/his children about their so-called “private” body parts. “Great,” is my usual and enthusiastic response. “I’m so glad you’re having that conversation!” And truly, I really am thrilled when people tell me they’re beginning what I hope will be an open-ended, candid and thoughtful discussion about human sexuality that will continue for as long as the parties involved are alive; since the role that our sexuality plays in our lives is both pivotal and ever-evolving throughout our time here.

Still, I’ve got to admit that I find myself rendered slack-jawed sometimes at the sheer numbers of folks who make the conscious decision not to use the correct names for male and female genitalia when talking with their children. And let me also admit that I’m certainly not suggesting that a kid’ll grow up to be a serial killer based on the happenstance that her/his parents referred to his penis as his “po-po” or his “tee lee” (or is that tea leaf?) or his “bing bang.”