Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Susie Bright is the editor of The Best American Erotica series and host of the weekly audio show In Bed with Susie Bright on Audible.com. She has been a columnist for Playboy and Salon, and has been profiled in USA TODAY, Los Angeles Times, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, and Vanity Fair, among other publications. An international lecturer on sexuality and feminism, she won the 2004 Writer of the Year Award at the Erotic Awards in London. Ms. Bright lives in Santa Cruz, California.

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The Sexual State of the Union

Touchstone

From the Introduction: The Wrong Question

When we talk about sex to each other, one-on-one, we open a well-worn box of lovers' lies: fake orgasms, promises of fidelity, boastful exploits. But on a social stage, lying about sex grows to such a grandiose level that instead of just answering with fibs and falsehoods, our collective breath doesn't even pose an honest question. The very premises of our education, our media, our aesthetics, assume tremendous beliefs about sexuality that aren't any more real than a flat earth. Instead, double standards and things that go bump in the night are the order of the day, the order of our childhoods, our daily bread.

My childhood was filled with pious and common messages about sin, femininity, romance, and virginity. I'm glad the nuns in my parochial school took off their habits; that was "the beginning of the end," just like the pope predicted. It was the sixties, we let our hair down, and the lies about good girls and bad girls fell from our heads like useless hairpins. I learned what the word "hypocrisy" meant in those years, what a social lie can do to a person. It made a tremendous impression on me, especially when I'm confronted with some of the whoppers that are served up today.

Today, I see a magazine headline that impeaches pregnant teenagers for their promiscuity and irresponsible decision making?what a tough little accusation that is. Everyone who actually works with pregnant teenagers or is related to a pregnant teenager?not to mention a pregnant teenager herself?knows that the girl-teen was probably knocked up by a full-grown man who is way past his adolescent angst. These men, these fathers, are like ghosts, who go unmentioned by the politician or the talk show host.

It would be interesting, of course, to find out how many of our social critics and leaders have had sex with teenagers themselves?or had sex when they WERE teenagers. But that's not the question being asked. We don't ask political pundits about their sex lives: we listen to them question ours. The result? Something as idiotic as the Bad Teen Question hangs around like a foul smell, a blame game with a voiceless target.

Blame 'n' Shame is the spinning bottle of sexual politics. It's such a winner because it covers all the essentials with a mountain of blankets, each embroidered with somebody else's sins. The naked truth, when it drags up questions that are not doused with shame and blame, is usually not as attractive to the public appetite?it doesn't fit the "How could you?!" agenda.

"I could, and I did, and you would too, if you had half a chance" is the answer that bears repeating, but it takes a lot of guts to say it out loud. The class yell of the sexually repressed society?"Tha --- at's sick! "?is an appropriate insult from those who put sex and pathology in the same bed. We know how to say no to sex in fifty different languages, in every mood, place, and time, but it's clear why it rings so hollow and aching sometimes?we never learned to say yes to sex, without duress, without a fall from grace.

Disease, in particular the specter of AIDS in our current consciousness, is a virtual geyser of opportunities for people to make moral conclusions out of ignorance. The fear-mongers' sense of righteousness and revenge is so cruel and omnipresent that even those who do become sick and helpless may turn on themselves and say, "What have I done to deserve this?"

Nothing, nothing at all.

"What have I done?" is not the real question. What has stopped us from discovering the origins of HIV?a far better and more difficult question?is not lack of money but lack of consciousness. We've been so busy praying for special favors and redemption, feeling unique, posting the blame, that the truth and the mysteries of our bodies become ever more elusive. Someday there's likely to be a scientific explanation for AIDS, and as with every great epidemic, people will look at the past and sigh, "If only it hadn't been for the politics?it was right under our noses." The "fag disease" has nothing to do with men desiring other men. In both plagues, transmission and proximity?your zip code?have had nothing to do with grace.

Sex is such an urgent message from our body that sometimes we call it our soul. Lust carries risks, sexual intimacy has consequences; it IS nature, not a gadget with a warranty. Nobody would go through it if the rewards were not so magnificent: the knowledge of one's body, the basic connection with another person. Without eroticism there is no love: even love between parent and child begins with such bliss, the end of the spectrum that begins at nurture and need. The most outstanding result of lust is new life, both in real births and in the birth of our creativity, and such events are nothing short of a sensation. Of course it's worth it, and what's more, what the puritans and their gong shows don't seem to realize is that it's inevitable. Their prudery is killing people, both metaphorically and literally, but they cannot mandate their vision of purity because it is, at its very core, an affront to our survival.

The ills and superstitions of our erotic poverty have been an enormous burden to bear. Double-talk and the bogeyman are the staples of public sexual debate. Someone is always trying to shut someone else up when it comes to sex, trying to keep it "out of the home," when it should be perfectly obvious that sex is home, chez nous?we don't need an outside line.

Now that technology spawns new litters of communication devices like rabbits, there are plenty of jobs and speaking opportunities for the censorship-minded. The latest burn-and-ban crusade takes place on the Internet, the marvel of millions of people gathered together on the same party line. What an opportunity to connect with a perfect stranger, to talk about perfect sex, to even have virtual sex on line! Yet if the censors have their way?our elected leaders, our school boards and administrators, our captains of media and entertainment?only THEY will get to stay on the line, while everyone else is going to have their toe tagged if they get caught thinking and talking about something that somebody else doesn't like.

The critical issue here isn't SEX, the issue is ELITISM. Some people think they are morally and intellectually qualified to view everything and then decide what's appropriate for the peasants. They talk about protecting children, with "children" as a code word for anyone they consider their inferior.

Last year I read an article by Marcelle Lean, a woman who sat for six years on the Ontario Film Board, a privileged group of prominent citizens who check out every new film entering the province. After viewing each movie, this group has a discussion about the film's merits, whether it should be seen by other Canadians, and whether any warnings should be carried along with its release. Her story revealed that she is part of the most fascinating weekly movie discussion group in the country. She adores movies and she loves to discuss them with a similarly motivated group. Her board has intense debates about sex, violence, role models, and politics?and she considers herself a more enriched person because of it, even when her opinion doesn't carry the majority.

At some point, Lean had to wonder aloud what it would be like if everyone in Ontario were allowed to have the same freedom of discussion that she enjoys! But this was a moot point; the people of Ontario were being treated like children who cannot be allowed to make a meal for themselves...