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

shop. Most of my customers were women, or men with a pretty liberal point of view. Liberal or not, they still came into this shop a little worried about how they would be perceived. One couple told me, after they’d calmed down a little, “We sat in the car for an hour outside the store arguing about whether we were going to come in here or not.” I’m glad they weren’t there the day some snotty

    little boy ran in the shop and screamed at everyone, “My daddy’s got a bigger dick than you!”
    Especially in the early days, customers came to Good Vibes because they’d been sent by a shrink or felt they were at the end of their rope about sex. They were so grim. I needed them to trust my judgment and empathy rather quickly.
    If I said “penis” in front of them, would they feel like I was a respectable person, someone they could talk with easily? Or would they think they had to be as cautious and veiled with me as with a medical doctor? If, on the other hand I said “cock” or “dick,” if I said “hard-on” instead of “erection,” would they let down their guard? Or would they think, “Oh, no, it’s trailer park trash!” I could win or lose it all because of my vocabulary.
    I think I succeeded in my vibrator sales talk right off the bat because I had great word-intuition. If customers started using even the tiniest bit of medical terminology, I’d follow their lead. Some people are so timid they blush at the word orgasm, and so I’d say “climax,” feeling a bit like one of those racy women’s novelists I’d read in junior high. Other people just beamed when I’d say, “Put this vibrator on your clit and you’re ready to go”; they wanted sex toys to sound casual, like buying sports equipment.
    Despite my frequent success at guessing right, I wish there were a whole lot more words to describe sex, from the bawdy to the subtle. Hawaiians have a whole dictionary of names for how a rainbow appears in the sky. Our English language is not as poetic with the weather, and it’s a total failure at sex. Our words are stunted because we are stunted.
    Some linguistic pioneers have wanted to forge ahead with new made-up words, but this erotic jabberwocky hasn’t really caught on. Language thrives on trends that capture the mainstream of imagination, not just the fringes. Sometimes a popular

    song or movie will make a funky sex euphemism popular, and you can see how happy everyone is to have this wonderful hot word that captures the essence of something we all want to say. People who learn or speak other languages are always adding foreign sex words to their English lexicon.
    A couple years back I read aloud, to a bookstore audience, an erotic story from Best American Erotica 1997. It’s a story written jointly by lovers, Rose White and Eric Albert. The heroine of the tale enjoys intercourse, but that’s not the kind of language she uses:
    “She’s on her hands and knees now, butt tilted up to get the best of his cock, to get his cock against the sweet spot in her ass. She puts a hand between her legs and starts to play with her pussy. She fingers her clit and he moans, he tells her how tight that makes her ass. She puts her finger in her cunt and feels his cock through the wall of her cunt. She presses against his cock and makes him moan again….”
    The story, as you can see, is earthy and frank, and the audience laughed and sweated as I read the whole piece.
    At the end, when I opened up for discussion, a man raised his hand, and he was blushing from forehead to collar.
    “How come you can say a word like…”—he couldn’t even utter it—“a word like the word you just used a minute ago, and everyone is fine with it? If I said that to my girlfriend, she’d never forgive me. There’s just no way a man can say it.”
    For a minute, I considered what he might be talking about. “Do you mean cunt ?”
    He nodded, cringing.
    “I love saying cunt, ” I said. “It’s a woman’s place to