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

me that my taste was in large part influenced by the most consumer-predatory display. I try to imagine what the world would be like if I’d had the opposite reaction. What if I were red in the face and nauseated by ads for jeans and perfume, and sought comfort instead by admiring pictures of people having sex?
    A year ago, a friend of mine who’s an editor at a men’s porn magazine asked me if I would review a dozen of the year’s most popular amateur videos. Jared wrote, “I’m very interested in your reaction,” with such a mysterious edge that I wondered if some dead body was going to float up on the screen.
    “Oh, no, it’s nothing like that,” Jared said. “It’s just that so many of these new videos are expressly antititillation. The actors don’t tease to get things going. It’s like reality sex. A director like Seymour Butts will film himself as he goes to the fridge to get a Diet Coke, as he answers the phone to argue with his mom, and then in the meantime someone rings the doorbell—and there’s the talent, saying, ‘Hello! I’m here for sex.’ ”
    Jared’s evaluation was correct, and I enjoyed the novelty of amateur porn’s nonchalance. The famous Mr. Butts started out with one star, his lover Shane, but then she broke up with him and started her own line of videos, Shane’s World. Shane’s character is a jock who seems happy whether she’s careening around in her go-cart or going to a sex toy shop to find enough vibrators to keep a whole slumber party entertained. At the end of her

    video, she edits in a piece of homemade tape that some fan made of their own Shane-inspired fantasies.
    If it weren’t for the porn taboo that threatens the high gloss of mainstream culture, Shane and Seymour could be effectively exploited by advertisers right now. Would Seymour be willing to hold his Diet Coke even closer to the camera? Could Shane make sure the logo on her snowboard gets as much attention as the come shot? The true capitalist would find a way.
    From the viewpoint of Madison Avenue, it’s ironic that the porn nickname for the male on-screen ejaculation is the “money shot.” In the nonporn world, the money shot is not one close-up of vicarious satisfaction, but rather the relationship between the object of desire and the object the advertiser wants you to buy. We yearn for completion instead of experiencing completion. We have to pay, pay, pay if we want to join the party, and there’s no guarantee that the stakes will ever let up. Do we have the right accessories and brand names to be a sexual success? That is where the present-day sex anxiety lives. It’s not about whether we’re ready to leave our sex guilt behind but whether we’ve brought enough cash.
    My own work has been antititillation, not by design, but apparently from intuitive rebellion. Even when I worked as a more conventional sex educator, I didn’t promote my information and advice as some sort of “hush-hush, on the q.t.” sort of spectacle. I didn’t want to charge for it. I wanted adult sex education to be available to everyone. I wanted people to be as familiar with the workings of their reproductive and sexual bodies as they would be with washing their hair. “This is your clitoris, not a mystery novel.”
    I also wanted my audience to appreciate that once they got the basic facts of life out of the way, their erotic lives above the

    neck would never be banal or formulaic. Sexual creativity is a mystery that will never be solved by commercialism. Our fantasy lives don’t know what a status quo is, if we’re honest about it. Anyone who subjects their erotic identity to preening for the crowd and to commercial comparisons is going to be turned off faster than they can smooth their hair back.
    I look at the people in my life who electrified me sexually, or the situations I found myself in that turned me on, and there’s little conformity—just some very splendid chaos. If you made a lineup of all the lovers