Full Exposure: Opening Up to Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression Read Online Free PDF

is often ambivalent.
    So let’s start with our impoverished dictionary. We have a small pile of sex words that offend somebody or other, even though they’re as old as English itself and convey some really pertinent meanings. We have segregated sets of sex words—the ones you can say to children, the ones for ladies, the ones for old folks, the ones for the upper classes, the ones for criminals—God forbid you try to speak your mind to a mixed group. Our language for sex—the medicalized, the four lettered, and the romanticized wordage—is symptomatic of our apprehensions about sex.

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    Take a good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon word like fuck, for example. In our current movie ratings system, if you use fuck as a swear word, to express anger or outrage, you can still advertise the picture to minors. But if you use fuck to mean actually having sex, then the film isn’t fit for younger viewers and must be rated for more mature consideration. Middle-class values are, more than anything, concerned with appearances, and fucking isn’t an “appearance,” it’s the actual deed. We’re primed to use our sex words for hostility but squeamish to use them for warmth or sex.
    Fuck got a new lease on public life in the sixties, along with the rest of our underground language for the body. Fuck embraced free love and repudiated the war in Vietnam all at the same moment. We usually describe the modern sexual revolution of the era as a feat of birth control pills, but it was just as much a revolution in sexual speech. Baby boomer artists wanted to speak their minds with an entire public vocabulary at their disposal. Some were martyrs, like Lenny Bruce; others were censored and demoralized beyond recognition. But in the end, the state lost. The words were free, at least to adult men. Feminism—the wilder side of it anyway—also couldn’t wait to use all those unladylike words. “Reclaiming language” came into vogue, to take the richness and boldness of words like dyke and pussy and claim them as women’s turf, not as men’s epithets.
    I remember arguing once with a lesbian who told me she couldn’t bring herself to say the word dildo (let alone try one out). She had thrown women out of her bed who thought otherwise.
    “But it’s a lesbian word—where do you think it comes from?” I asked her. “Dildos are your Sapphic heritage!” Oh, forget sex toys. People are afraid to use sex words because they fear they

    will be seen as sexual—and their fear is indeed justified. If we keep our lips sealed from sexual speech, the illusion stays intact.
    Fuck did become a word that hitherto well-bred women used; it also defined a generation gap. Rock ’n’ roll turned it into lyric. But saying the word still says more about your adherence to or rebellion against your social status than it says about your sexuality.
    Think about other controversial or sometimes painful aspects of life, and you don’t see people so upset about the words we use to describe them. No one says, “I can’t abide the word war, ” or rails that “the word torture is so cruel on the tongue,” or proclaims, “I don’t allow anyone to say taxes in my home.”
    We manage to discuss all sorts of horrible, conflicted, and psychologically vexing issues in our public and private lives without choking up and confessing that we just can’t use “those words.” Even words that insult or stereotype, like spic or nigger, get more public debate and defense in their context than the “seven words you can’t say on television.” Sex is the only topic where we blame our language for holding us back. We’ve tied our tongues but good: almost every expression we come up with bothers someone either because it isn’t sensitive enough or because, at the opposite end, it’s pure treacle.
    The first time I had to be particularly conscious about the sex words I used was when I began a retail sales job at the Good Vibra-tions store, an education-oriented sex toy