The Sexual Subversive [The Erotic Initiation]

¡Hola! Everybody…
It’s Friday and that means s-e-x!

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-=[ Initiation ]=-

Whatever the particulars of our personal erotic initiation, whatever the snags that were present at that time, whatever the circumstances, the dangers, the people, the setting -- even mundane details like the time of day, the weather, an article of clothing, a smell, as piece of music, the color of our partner’s hair, the shape of his or her body -- all these become eroticized for us, often forever, by the supreme intensity of the moment of erotic emergence. The erotic initiation, that almost magical process of exploring an uncharted erotic landscape, is embedded with unique elements of power and vitality. These are erotic events in a class by themselves, often felt and remembered like no other memories. Psychologically, erotic initiations are powerful formative experiences that shape much of our subsequent development.

Since our culture so powerfully defines this as the primary distinction between initiate and novice, most of us turn immediately to our first experience of sexual intercourse when we think of erotic initiation. But even if we insist on narrowing erotic initiation to sexual initiation, there is more to be considered than we first have intercourse. What about the first time we seriously enter the realm of sexual feeling with a partner, whether or not this involves intercourse? What about the first time we experience ourselves as sexual beings, or become aware of sexual feelings inside of ourselves, whether or not this involves a partner? What about the first time we feel a deep inner sense of liquid movement, the first time we are aware of an erotic awakening, whether or not this has anything to do with sex?

And aren’t there more than one erotic initiation? As we become more experienced (and hopefully more developed) as sexual and erotic beings, there are other erotic initiations as well: the first time we play with a partner in a new way; the first time we experience orgasm; the first time we experience a new depth or quality of orgasm; the first time we explicitly act out a long-cherished fantasy; the first time we use a new sex toy -- or any sex toy at all; the first time we find ourselves, for reasons we may never understand, in a corner of the erotic garden we never visited before, perhaps never even imagined; the first time we surrender more deeply and psychologically than ever before; the first time we open ourselves to a new sexual partner; the first time we open to a new community of partners, people we previously considered off the erotic/ sexual map -- perhaps people of our own gender, perhaps people significantly older or younger than ourselves, perhaps people we previously considered unattractive or undesirable, perhaps people of a different ethnic group.

Erotic initiation doesn’t necessarily mean a one-time, two-time, or three-time experience; it can be a continuing and recurring aspect of erotic development and discovery. The universe of sexual and erotic possibility is immense. There is no danger of running out of territory to explore, if we choose to make ourselves available to the wonder and uncertainty of engaging the unfamiliar.

In a society such as ours, terrified of the full power of the erotic potential, we are encouraged to be as narrowly and unimaginatively erotic as possible. We are conditioned to find a comfortable erotic niche for ourselves, a tiny corner of the vast erotic wonderland, and to be content to spend all of our erotic life within that miniscule clearing. Indeed, we often feel grateful to have any place of erotic expression at all. It’s like spending all your cyber time on Facebook and mistaking that for the immensity of the internet.

No wonder so many couples become bored with their erotic connections after a few short years, or even months. No wonder so many individuals lose their sexual appetite altogether, wonder how the youth passion and fire have evaporated, or secretly seek out new partners to rekindle a feeling of erotic adventure and exploration.

While accounts of erotic initiation often focus on adolescence they also evoke the general sense of aliveness that is so much a part of the process of crossing erotic boundaries of all kinds. These tales of individual discovery remind us how exciting, awkward, humorous, and complex these circumstances often are. Perhaps it’s these stories and our memories of erotic exploration serve the purpose of reminding us of the importance in the continuing cultivation of the creativity and innovative expressions of Eros in our lives.

Love,

Eddie

The Friday Sex Blog [The Heart of the Truth]

¡Hola! Everybody...
First, I get shanghaied into dinner with a former supervisee. Actually, I suggested dinner, but I didn't count on it becoming an extended convo about my project and a drinking binge (his). By the time I convinced to go home it was late.

Drunk people are boring, BTW.

On my way home, I'm stoked because I have a fire in my belly about a post I have germinating -- inspired by the recent events in Wisconsin. But before I get to my place, I get a call from a former lover and she needs to talk. She's a dear friend, and she's always been there for me. Besides, she's like, one of the hawtest women I have ever known (I'm superficial, shoot me). Already long story shorter: By the time I get home, it's really late and that fire in my belly -- the story I had germinating for a few days -- it's gone...

It's Friday and that means it's all about sex...

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-=[ Knowing, Feeling & Living ]=-

Go through the motions and look as if...

My father loved telling us to “go through the motions” and appear as if we knew what we were doing. I don’t think he meant it as a way of life, but as a way to adapt temporarily to a strange situation. I think what he meant was that sometimes taking your cue from keen observation was necessary before knowing the truth.

Everybody knows at least some truth. For example, most people know it’s unhealthy to overeat. Of those who know this truth, less feel the truth as they go through a gallon of Rocky Road ice cream. Fewer still are able to change their behavior based on knowing and feeling the truth.

The truth, as many of us know, is harder to live than to feel or know. Knowledge is easiest. The mind is more easily changed than emotions or the body, so the mind is quicker to change. Of course, political and religious fundamentalists are the exception. For the rest of us, you can hear something and almost immediately, you know the truth of it. You might feel inspired to run around and tell others this truth. You might even write or blog about it. You can create a whole way of life based on this truth. And still not much will have changed in your life. For example, you might now the truth that exercise improves your cardiovascular fitness and still sit on your butt.

After your mind has understood a truth, the next to change are your emotions. It often takes years of suffering before the truth of something sinks in deep enough for your tears to flow and enthusiasm to grow in response to a truth. Yet even your capacity to feel truth with great sensitivity -- your emotional intelligence -- is not enough for real transformation.

The last part of you to be touched by the truth is your body. Being more solid than your mind or emotions, your body changes last. You can know what you are supposed to do, and you can feel the truth of it, long before you are willing to live it with your body. You may know that you shouldn’t date that asshole, you may feel the truth sending you messages from the pit of your stomach, but you may not be ready to live that truth, so you go through the guilt-ridden motions for yet another bout of suffering.

Your body’s habits, the motions you go through, are the least open to accept truth and last to change.

Because your body is the densest part of your self-process, sex is often the last part of your life to be transformed by the truth. For example, you might know that love could be the foundation for sex. Eventually, you learn to feel your lover emotionally during the clinch of passion. Finally, you learn to live your motions as love during sex.

Even during the most intensely erotic, pleasurable, or painful sexual moments, you can learn to breathe as love, thrash as love, thrust as love, receive as love, and speak as love with your entire body. Sexually, and in every moment throughout the day, you can be love by opening up, feeling, breathing in the moment whether it be pain or pleasure, and exhaling love from the deepest part of your heart as you go through the motions as love. Sex can become the doing of love with your entire being.

You can train your body, like an athlete, to reach the farther reaches of love -- to go the distance as love. And when you feel you are about to collapse from exhaustion, you can give love through your breath and through your actions just a little bit more. Something as simple as the offer of a smile, the invitation of an open hand, or a caress, for just a moment more than your habit would allow you. What happens is that over time your life blossoms as love’s doing stretched -- again and again.

Today, and throughout your days, try to slow down and feel your heart beating. Go in and feel deeply the source of the stream of love flowing through you. Let you body open as love, soften your belly, and imagine breathing in and out through your heart. Offer that. Offer the deepest part of your heart and allow more love to move your body every conscious moment.

Ask yourself, "How would love walk down the street?" Walking, breathing love in and out of your heart, feeling the outer edge of your carnally fashioned form, how do your hips sway as you walk down the street?

How can you make a gift of the truth of your heart to your co-workers, even when you find them disagreeable? Should you smile, tell a joke, act kindly, touch, or walk away to give them space? Every day, practice opening as love as your body’s offering. From deep in your heart out to a moments infinite possibilities.

Knowing truth, of it self, is pretty much useless; feeling it is profound; but living it makes all the difference in the world.

Love,

Eddie

The TGIF Sex Blog [The Way to a Woman's Heart]

¡Hola! Everybody...
So, on Monday, I went at length on surrender as a tool for change. Yesterday, I attempted to show how surrender can be applied to relationships, and today you’re gonna haveta surrender to me sexually. LOL!

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-=[ The Way to a Woman’s Heart ]=-

I write the following fully knowing my POV is filtered through the lens of what it is to be a man in this society. I write from my own experience (or lack thereof). I will submit, however, that some here will find a measure of truth.

Simply put, a woman’s heart and genitals are usually deeply connected. When a woman’s heart is truly open to you, so are her genitals (or “coochie,” as a friend calls it), and when she opens herself sexually to you, she opens herself emotionally. For most women, emotional, sexual, and spiritual openness are all part of the same ritual of trust, openness, and love. In fact, for many women, their deepest sexual experiences are their deepest spiritual experiences.

This is why sex for sport, or sex with random strangers, is not a big attraction for women. Doubt me? Well, how many women are lining up in front of glory holes (note: if you don’t know what a glory hole is, you shouldn’t be reading my blog! *grin*). A man will stick his cock through a hole in the wall, and he would care less who’s on the other side -- he will find release. Remember, men seek release, women seek fulfillment.

Most women open emotionally during good sex. My experience has been that women don’t just want to open up like that to anyone. This is why a woman tends to fall in love with whomever she has profound sex with: her heart opens along with her vagina and she feels love for the man with which she has had great sex.

As a woman learns to surrender sexually, her emotions open and she feels the undercurrent of love -- yours and hers. No matter what you say you’re feeling on the surface, deep down you want to give and receive total love, and guess what -- so does she. Shit, she can feel your heart buried deep beneath the anger and shame. She can feel her own heart deep underneath her own resistance and hurt.

Want her completely? Then practice surrendering with her until you both develop that capacity of surrendering as love. Practice surrendering until you both learn to magnify that love even in the entanglement of the everyday dust of life: the boredom, pain, and superficial emotions that distract us from genuine presence.

To help her do this, remember her vagina and her heart are directly connected: treat her vagina as you would her heart… and vice versa.

Love,

Eddie

The TGIF Sex Blog [Sexuality]

¡Hola! Everybody...
Happy New Year my friends!

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-=[ Your Sexuality ]=-

Yes, there was a primal attraction, that’s true enough. But there was also a wild beast-like hunger for every inch of your body, every secret niche and shameful part of it, every smell. It yearned to throw you under me on your taut belly and fuck you from behind, riding you mercilessly, relishing in the smell and sweat arising from your ass, glorifying in penetrating your offering, your reddened cheeks, your helpless cries and tangled hair...

You are a sexual person since before the day you are born – from the time in the womb, until you leave this planet. Part of a healthy sexual attitude includes seeing sex as a positive aspect of life. Maintaining a positive sexuality and expressing sexuality in a manner that improves your life is necessary for developing the capacity for intimacy.

This perspective is vastly different from the traditional double-standard of most adults. Anti-sex conditioning and negative attitudes regarding sexuality, especially that sex is “dirty,” and that men and women are different sexually, creates dysfunction and separates us from our inherent sexuality. Sexuality is a normal way for you to express your human need for touching, sharing, and pleasuring. This need is equally valid for men and women.

The good news is that you can undo the conditioning and increase your awareness and comfort with sexuality. This does not mean that you have to feel sexual and perform at any time, in any situation, with any partner. That is the sexual pressure placed by tradition on the shoulders of men. It is a dehumanizing perspective of male sexuality. Equally dehumanizing is the traditional imperative that women not to be sexual at any time, in any situation, or with any person other than her husband -- and even then not be carried away with passion. I am amazed at the vast numbers of women going without sex these days.

Yes, you can learn to be comfortable with your sexuality and more accepting of yourself as a sexual person. The wonderful truth of the matter is that you have the choice to be sexual at a time and in a manner where you can truthfully celebrate healthy sexual expression.

There are many ways we learn about sexuality, but the most primal one is through touch. The touching you received from your mother and father as a child is important; and your own exploration of your body. Before the age of six months, children discover the positive sensations of touching their genitals. Was playing with your penis or vulva accepted by the parent as normal and healthy, or were your hands slapped while being told: “No! That’s dirty!”?

My point here is not to get into a blame game for sexual dysfunction; your parents were acting out according to what they knew. It has only recently emerged that childhood sexual curiosity and exploration are healthy part of development. However, it is my belief that as adults we can learn to undo negative conditioning and build a healthy sexual awareness and sexual self-esteem.

There’s a lesson for all of us in a child touching herself that we need to heed. The child is experiencing positive, pleasurable feelings, not genitally focused sexual arousal.

Sensuality is the basis for sexuality.

The child feels she’s entitled to the warm, comfortable feelings of sensual touch. Genital exploration and stimulation are a natural extension of sensuous touch.

That’s the gist of it all. No one, or no book, can teach you nor force a sexual response. No one can teach you how to become sexually aroused and have an orgasm. The potential for sexual response is natural. What you can learn is awareness of sensual and sexual stimuli, how to nurture and cultivate sexual desire, the importance of clear and direct communication, and active involvement in giving and receiving pleasure. You have to be open to your sexuality, not inhibited by the obstacles that interfere with healthy sexual expression.

The most common obstacle is goal-oriented sex. That’s not sensuality, but a fast food version of sexuality. Call it Mickey Dee sex. No wonder so many women pack it up! LOL! (Use it or lose it!). Goal-oriented sex -- sex in which the ends (orgasm) supersede the process (sensuality) -- leads to a lot of bullshit. The list is exhausting: performance anxiety, peer pressure, forced sexual response, use of sex as a weapon in an argument or power struggle, use of sex for manipulation – and on and on the list goes.

Sex is not a performance to prove something to yourself or you partner, it’s not a spectator sport in the sense that it’s not a competition to see who can have the best orgasm, or last the longest, or anything like that. You hear people talking about sex in the most degrading manner: “I did that bitch,” “Girl, I did that ma’fucca good and he can’t get enough.”

That’s not sex, it’s rutting. It’s not even good rutting.

Sexual awareness is about being open and receptive to affectionate, playful, erotic, and intercourse touch. The essence of sexuality is giving and receiving pleasurable touch.

Sensuality is not something you either have or do not. It’s a range of attitudes, behaviors, and feelings which reflect you as a sexual person. Remember, sex is a good thing

::Martha Stewart smile::

Sexuality is a major part of who you are as a human being and your personality. You are responsible for your sexuality; express it so that it enhances your life and intimate relationships.

Love,

Eddie

The TGIF Sex Blog (The Heart's Truth]

¡Hola! Everybody...
I’m going to disappear this weekend...

* * *

-=[ Knowing, Feeling & Living ]=-

Go through the motions and look as if...

My father loved telling us to “go through the motions” and appear as if we knew what we were doing. I don’t think he meant it as a way of life, but as a way to adapt temporarily to a strange situation. I think what he meant was that sometimes taking your cue from keen observation was necessary before knowing the truth.

Everybody knows at least some truth. For example, most people know it’s unhealthy to overeat. Of those who know this truth, less feel the truth as they go through a gallon of Rocky Road ice cream. Fewer still are able to change their behavior based on knowing and feeling the truth.

The truth, as many of us know, is harder to live than to feel or know it. Knowledge is easiest. The mind is more easily changed than emotions or the body, so the mind is swift to change. Of course, political and religious fundamentalists are the exception. You can hear something and almost immediately, you know the truth of it. You might feel inspired to run around and tell others this truth. You might even write or blog about it. You can create a whole way of life based on this truth. And still not much will have changed in your life. For example, you might now the truth that exercise improves your cardiovascular fitness and still sit on your butt.

After your mind has understood a truth, the next to change are your emotions. It often takes years of suffering before the truth of something sinks in deep enough for your tears to flow and enthusiasm to grow in response to a truth. Yet even your capacity to feel truth with great sensitivity -- your emotional intelligence -- is not enough for real growth.

The last part of you to be touched by the truth is your body. Being more solid than your mind or emotions, your body changes last. You can know what you are supposed to do, and you can feel the truth of it, long before you are willing to live it with your body. You may know that you shouldn’t date that asshole, you may feel the truth sending you messages from the pit of your stomach, but you may not be ready to live that truth, so you go through the guilt-ridden motions for yet another bout of suffering.

Your body’s habits, the motions you go through, are the hardest to accept truth and last to change.

Because your body is the densest part of your self-process, sex is often the last part of your life to be transformed by the truth. For example, you might know that love could be the foundation for sex. Eventually, you learn to feel your lover emotionally during the clinch of passion. Finally, you learn to live your motions as love during sex.

Even during the most intensely erotic, pleasurable, or painful sexual moments, you can learn to breathe as love, thrash as love, thrust as love, receive as love, and speak as love with your entire body. Sexually, and in every moment throughout the day, you can be love by opening up, feeling, breathing in the moment whether it be pain or pleasure, and exhaling love from the deepest part of your heart as you go through the motions as love. Sex can become the doing of love with your entire being.

You can train your body, like an athlete, to reach the further reaches of love -- to go the distance as love. And when you feel you are about to collapse from exhaustion, you can give love through your breath and through your actions just a little bit more. Something as simple as the offer of a smile, the invitation of an open hand, or a caress, for just a moment more than your habit would allow you. What happens is that over time your life blossoms as love’s doing stretched -- again and again.

Today, and throughout your days, try to slow down and feel your heart beating. Go in and feel deeply the source of the stream of love flowing through you. Let you body open as love, soften your belly, and imagine breathing in and out through your heart. Offer that -- the deepest part of your heart -- through your breath, and allow more love to move your body every conscious moment.

How would love walk down the street? Walking, breathing love in and out of your heart, feeling the outer edge of your carnally fashioned form, how do your hips sway as you walk down the street?

How can you make a gift of the truth of your heart to your co-workers, even when you find them disagreeable? Should you smile, tell a joke, act kindly, touch, or walk away to give them space? Every day, practice opening as love as your body’s offering. From deep in your heart out to a moments infinite possibilities.

Knowing truth, of it self, is pretty much useless; feeling it is profound; but living it makes all the difference in the world.

Love,

Eddie

The TGIF Sex Blog (Sexual Upbringing in America)

¡Hola! Everybody...
Looking to get away for the weekend! The office closes early today and I’ll be making a quick exit... Hope everyone has a great time... BTW, The Losaida (Lower East Side) Festival is this weekend and Eddie Palmieri, along with other big-name Latino/a acts, will be appearing free. Check out my calendar for details (click here). And while you’re there, head over to Adela’s, eat some of the best PR food, and don’t forget to tell them Eddie sent you!

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-=[ The Cruelest Abuse: Sexual Upbringing In America ]=-

Once you are exposed to sex -- you’re never able to regain innocence again -- from then on you have sexual thoughts -- you have sexual feelings -- innocence is forever gone. It encourages sexual curiosity that would not have been there...

-- Oprah Winfrey on Teens and Dial-a-porn

[Note: This is part of a much larger post on sexual upbringing. I hope to follow-up with more in-depth posts on the subject in the coming Fridays]

I believe Oprah speaks for many American parents and the sentiment that if “you don’t try to shield them from ... all this explicit kind of stuff until they’re ready to handle it, then you’re robbing them of their innocence, their one time in life to be somewhat carefree.”

At this point, I would like to make the observation that as a nation our teen pregnancy and abortion rates lead the developed world. Many are trying to blame this phenomenon on a perceived sexual permissiveness and lax morals around sexuality. The point I will be making is that the exact opposite is true: we are a nation incapable of feeling comfortable with our own sexuality and we pass on our sexual hang-ups and dysfunctions to out children. I will make the case that, contrary to the blather that passes for sexual discussion these days, it’s not permissiveness, but rather, repression that is at the root of our “sexual problem” If you doubt me, just hold on for a second and absorb the following fact: the vast majority of teen pregnancies are the result of an adult impregnating an adolescent.

::blank stare::

Recently, there was a hue and cry around the new teen sex “epidemic” called s-exting. In fact, prosecutors across the nation began convicting teens as sexual predators. The fact is that even the experts concede that s-exting isn’t as widespread as reported in the mainstream media. In addition, I find it the cruelest abuse to criminalize what is normal adolescent behavior.

I think when adults say children can’t handle sexual content, they’re really expressing their own hang-ups about sex. We even fight about whether children should be taught about protecting themselves sexually.

People seem to mean by “sexual innocence” the absence of sexual thoughts, genital responses, and the awareness of how one is sexually aroused. A lot of parents would probably feel more relaxed if childhood did not have any sexual component and if sexuality magically appeared at puberty or better yet at marriage. Many parents have mixed feelings about their own sexuality and any recognition of sexuality in their children arouses their own unresolved sexual anxieties.

But let’s be honest about preadolescent sexuality -- were you “sexually innocent” prior to reaching puberty? Is that an accurate view of your pre- adolescent sexuality? When you were a child wouldn’t you have preferred learning more about the meaning of your sexual development rather than being blocked from such clarification by parents who were trying to keep you “innocent”?

Sigmund Freud shocked most of the Western world when he observed the reality of childhood sexuality over one-hundred years ago.

Almost all of the subsequent research of the twentieth century supported Freud’s assertion that children were sexual creatures. Alfred Kinsey, almost a half century after Freud, shocked this country with his own revelation of sexual responses involving erection and lubrication not only in preadolescent children but even in newborn infants. There’s even research of in utero sexuality!

I couldn’t begin to cite the overwhelming body of research supporting children as sexual creatures. Yet, this is exactly what we want to deny and what we want our children to deny. In the process, we teach our children that their sexual natures are evil and we drive the sexual conversation underground, where the shadow aspect takes over. It’s no surprise our children act out sexually, we don’t recognize nor do we support their sexual natures. Shit, even saying children are sexual creatures is enough to get you in hot water!

Even parents who claim to be open-minded about sex exhibit sexual anxieties -- for when they do discuss sex with their children, they often fail even to mention the pleasurable aspect of sexual experiences. They want their children to emphasize relationships and affection, and so they hesitated to mention pleasure too prominently. Since intensity of bodily pleasure is the aspect of sexuality that most clearly distinguishes it from other activities, this omission surely sabotages any realistic preparation for sexual behavior. Children experiencing these bodily pleasures must wonder why their parents don’t seem to understand what they are feeling.

Adult anxiety about childhood sexuality is not based upon any sane assessment of what is happening in their child’s life. Rather, because parents see sex as dangerous and threatening, they conclude that kids should be kept away from it. As a parent, I can certainly understand parents can have a realistic fear that other adults may take advantage of their child’s lack of knowledge about sex and may sexually exploit the child. But if that is your concern, it follows that you should talk more about sex with your child rather than promoting ignorance by acting as if childhood sexuality is a trampling of some mythical “natural state of sexual innocence.”

Finally, even parents who accept a more modern view of sexuality are hesitant to prepare their child for sexuality. For example, the typical response I hear from self-proclaimed modern, liberal parents is: “I am open about sexuality with my children and I will always try to answer any question at all that they raise about sexuality.”

Consider whether we would wait for questions to be raised in any other area of great importance to our children. We don’t wait for children to ask before teaching them how to tie their shoes, or how to add, or why not to play in the middle of the highway. How well would children know how to read if we waited for them to ask us before we taught them how to read? We think these are things they should know and we make sure they know them, whether they ask about them or not.

Why aren’t we adopting the same attitude when it comes to one of life’s greatest questions? Is it because we’re sexually permissive? I think not. And our children suffer for that.

Love,

Eddie