The Friday Sex Blog [Riding the Horse]

Hola mi gente,
The holiday season is upon us, and with it lots of good cheer and partying. I wish you all the very best but, whatever you do, please -- please: Don’t. Drive. Drunk.

Getting Comfortable in the Saddle

Statue of the 11-century noble woman, Lady Godiva, who reputedly rode naked through her town after her husband harshly taxed his tenants.

Alchemists sought to transform lead into gold. In the same way, we all have the natural ability to turn our moments of confusion or emotional pain into insightful clarity.

One day I went with a girlfriend horseback riding. I had ridden before, but my companion at the time warned me that we were going to ride “real horses,” real horseback riding. I was so intent on impressing her and I somewhat exaggerated my horse riding experience.

Big mistake. Out they came with this huge, fire-from-flayed-nostrils beast, and no sooner than I got on it and kicked, it just took off. No matter how much I pulled back on the reins this horse wasn’t stopping and we were headed straight to a fence that, it seemed to me, this motherfucker was determined to jump. Luckily, another rider was able to put his horse in the way, causing a collision that threw me off the horse. Fortunately, no one was hurt. As I lay there my ass and pride damaged, the animal just stared and I swear it was laughing at me. They asked if I wanted to switch horses for a tamer one, but I refused. I got some lessons that day on how to ride, but when I got back on that magnificent animal, I held the reins so tight it wouldn’t or couldn’t move. Cautiously, I learned to interact with the beast so that we were able to trot around the place. 

Eventually, my friend taught me enough where I became a pretty good rider and over time I developed a close bond with that horse, admiring (while respecting) its spirit and strength.

Of course, you know there’s a metaphor in here somewhere, right? LOL!

Personal growth is like that: in the beginning we might find ourselves holding on to the reins, white-knuckled, hanging on for dear life, afraid of the full power of our emotions. But if we venture outside that comfort zone, we begin to explore the more meaningful, and infinitely more rewarding, emotional landscapes. We learn to relax in the saddle, to ride.

For most people most times, violent emotions are destructive. People fly into rage, for example, and say things they don’t mean and later regret (can I get a witness?). We may sometimes lash out and hurt someone, or when hurt by rejection, we mope and eat and lay in bed, our hurt festering in the murky waters of self-destructive depression. Most violence has its roots in a form of self-abuse that manifests itself outwardly.

Therefore, at the earlier stages of psycho-spiritual evolution or self-actualization, growth means cultivating compassion and less emotional violence toward yourself and others. My experience has been that the more self-awareness you attain, the more you are naturally motivated toward peace and harmony. At this stage, when upset or angered, you learn to take a few breaths and calm yourself. You try to practice kindness rather than hate, acceptance rather than judgment, joy rather than anger.

In this way, you can become harmonious -- and frightfully bland.

In the stereotype of a harmonious individual, all joy and acquiescence, there is a loss of the depth of love power for the sake of a safe but superficial calmness. Yes, you may have progressed from irresponsible violence and poor impulse control to a practiced tranquility, but growth doesn’t stop there.

After developing the basic skills necessary to breathe through our emotional reflexes and to act graciously, there’s another world. There is a whole new experience, lover, out there waiting for you: you can learn to open as your emotion. Rather than striking out in self-destructive, knee-jerk ways, and rather than merely breathing through your anger in order to achieve calmness, you can actually use anger, or any other emotion, as a gateway to a deeper love, a deeper expression of truth and your lived experience.

If you look back to a time when you felt you wanted to hit someone, punch a wall, break something, you will note the presence of an overriding sense of feeling trapped, restricted. Whether by your own limits or by external circumstances, you most likely felt imprisoned and loveless. Violence is always a dysfunctional attempt to break free, an unskilled effort toward greater freedom or love. Openness is freedom and love. Even the most violent or self-destructive emotions are based on our need for openness, to be free, to give and receive love.

When you are open, then you are able to give and receive love fully, and you are free. However, when you don’t practice how to be open, then you’re unable to live as love, then your chi, or vital power/ love-energy, backs up and roils as emotional mayhem. In this reality, there is a feeling of being trapped and alone, powerless, unable or fearful of riding that magnificent and powerful force, to ride free like the wind. You become emotional constipated.

Embraced skillfully, intense emotions can be a quick path to a deeper experience -- to a more profound openness. Ever heard of “angry sex”? Anger can provide you with the sharp clarity and thunder necessary to awaken from moody distraction, if you can release and really feel your love that moves as anger.

Sadness, something we all try to avoid at all costs, can expose your heart, too. Sometimes we harden ourselves against sadness, in the process creating dead zones in our psyche and body. It’s as if in our fear of unleashing our full potential, we’ve numbed ourselves against feeling fully. We have the reins tight in our hands, and we’ll never let go, lest we lose ourselves, we think. Soften yourself and feel your sadness. Really feel your sadness. Softness is like the ocean, while it is yielding, it is not weak. Yield, surrender to your sadness without falling apart. Soften your belly, feel the tidal swells moving through you, the heaves of gasps for yearning. There’s an astounding depth of love released by sadness. Ever heard and experienced the raw beauty of the blues art form?

Love can transform all these previously destructive emotions into something powerful and alive.

People mistake my work in social justice for anger. But aggression for love’s sake is passion. Even the word protest uncovers some this: Pro means being for something. Test is to speak, as in testify, or testimony. To protest is to speak for something, to stand for something. To speak truth to power.

In order to take the next step, we have to come to the awareness that true spiritual and sexual passion demands your capacity to open as wild as the moment does. Just like with me and that horse. Sometimes the force of our emotions can scare us, and we need to be careful, to develop psychologically safe spaces. But to refuse to venture further is to deny yourself life.

Smacks and shouts and dark desires can wield love as powerfully as gentle kisses, mild-mannered moods, and pats on the back. And yes, this takes practice, and you might want to hold on to those reins a little tightly at first or until you feel safe. It might take years to open freely in this way, but until you do, it’s as if you’ve entered an amusement park but have refused to get on the rides.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, please consider helping me out by sharing it, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or even throwing me some money on GoFundMe HERE or via PayPal HERE so I can keep calling it like I see it.

The Friday Sex Blog [Fantasies, pt. I]

Hola Everybody,

A few years ago I got the following in a text message from a psycho-ex “internet fiancé”:

9,000 people are fucking right now, 2,000 are kissing, 1,000 are getting head, and one lonely fucker is reading text messages. You hang in there sunshine… ” LMAO!

Fantasy

Repression is not morality.

The brain, my dear friends, is the largest sex organ, and if intelligence equates to sexual prowess, then imma bad ma’fucca! I’m joking!

While you may be aware of the brain’s vital role our sexual lives, it may never have occurred to you that it’s also an incredibly resourceful sex toy. Today, I’m going to write about fantasy, but it will have to be incomplete. This topic is much too rich and profound to attempt to tackle in a one-page, single-line MS Word document. In fact, one could fill a library with books written on this topic. Therefore, I’m not going to do that, but I will offer a (very) brief overview because it’s so important for our sexual awareness/ liberation.

First: you people are some sick muthafuckas! I’ve been inside your heads and you all have some of the sickest, dirtiest, nastiest fantasies. 

Yeah you! LOL

But I’m not going to get into the content of sexual fantasies this go-round. Today, I’m going to attempt some clarification, however briefly.

As I stated before, the brain is the most fascinating, most versatile sex toy you own. While it is a fact that without the brain responding to stimuli and sending messages to the rest of the body, you would have as much sexual feeling as a piece of wood, it is also within the brain’s capacity to gather a vast supply of erotic material. These are known as fantasies. It is your fantasies that make the brain such a powerful sex toy, since fantasies can be revisited an endless number of times for sexual pleasure. Here’s one of my faves:

Some say certain fantasies are corrupt. I would disagree. On the contrary, most mentally unbalanced individuals do not have a rich internal sexual fantasy life. Case histories of most sexually motivated serial killers, for example, show they are tortured by their fantasies. They spend an enormous amount of psychological energy repressing their fantasies.

The fact is that most of our sexual fantasies are things we would never do. For example, an individual who would never have sex with an under-age adolescent girl, might still harbor such a fantasy and never act out on it. In fact, there is evidence showing that fantasies help relieve our frustrations and anxieties and, in cognitive terms, allows people to grasp its inappropriateness. In cognitive psychology, for example, one method of taking apart false beliefs is by helping the client take those often self-defeating and erroneous beliefs to their conclusions.

Simply put, sexual fantasies are illusions or daydreams people have about specific experiences. Part of the power of sexual fantasies may come from guilt (taboo) or fear (such as in the fear of getting caught sexing in public). Many fantasies have their root in childhood development and continue to be primary sources of pleasure throughout life. Other individuals change fantasies regularly. I would submit that there is a connection between actual sexual experimentation and the ability to create new fantasies.

The feeling of being overpowered by a sex partner is one of the most popular sexual fantasies. Studies show that some women have a deep attraction to abduction or rape fantasies and like to be “taken.” Right up there with being overpowered is the fantasy of having sex with a stranger. In fact, at least with research I have encountered on the subject, I would say sex with a stranger is probably tops. There is this powerful human attraction of sex with a stranger -- The Other. This is reflected in our culture when we fantasize about having sex with movie stars or performers. These are people we wouldn’t know from a hole in the wall (pun intended), and yet we entertain in some case elaborate sexual fantasies about these individuals (Halle Berry!).

As I stated before, certain fantasies evoke situations most people would not want to experience in real life. These fantasies are specifically designed to increase adrenaline and excitement levels to the point of being able to orgasm without the help of a partner. Believe me, you don’t want to know what’s in my mind (and I probably don’t want to know yours)! Just so you know, some of the fantasies of quite normal people can be quite sadistic and violent sadistic fantasies might serve the function of relieving stress and aggression more than sexual tension. If you feel guilty because you consider your fantasies sick or violent, you should read the case histories of otherwise tame and harmless individuals. In fact, you people are sick.

But that’s for the next post…

My name is Eddie and I'm in recovery from civilization...

The Friday Sex Blog [Talkin' about Sex]

Hola Everybody,
Today it’s all about sex.

Talkin' about Fuckin'

Sacred and Profane, Alex London

I find people normally don’t enjoy talking about sex. I mean talking about sex in a meaningful way. Most find it clichéd, offensive, insensitive. I will say that I’m somewhat sympathetic though I spend at least some time doing just that -- talking and writing about sex. But I have to say there problems with sex talk: the vocabulary is inept and the sex is, well, not so clear.

If you want to know the state of any issue, all you have to do is look at its nomenclature -- a fancy word that describes a system or set of terms (vocabulary) especially in a particular science, discipline, or art. When it comes to sex, we have a lousy vocabulary. We have a small set of words that offend somebody or other, even though they’re as old as the English language itself and actually convey important meanings. We have a sort of Jim Crow-era style mentality when it comes to certain sex words -- a linguistic segregation. We have the ones we can say in front of children. one for the “ladies,” others for the old geezers, the ones for the upper classes, the ones for lower classes -- god forbid if I were to try to all this in my sex blog! I wouldn’t be able to write anything! Our language, our nomenclature, for sex -- the medicalized, the four-lettered, and the romanticized -- is indicative of our anxieties about sex.

Take a good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon word like fuck, as an example. In our current movie ratings system, if you use fuck to mean actually having sex, then the film is deemed unfit for younger viewers and must be rated for mature audiences. However, If you use fuck as a swear word to express psychological violence such as anger or outrage, you can still advertise the film to children. It’s the hypocrisy of middle class values that they there is more concerned with appearances, and the act of fucking isn’t an “appearance,” it’s the dirty deed. We’re conditioned to use sex words for hostility but anxious to use them for the warmth or sex.

Fuck got a new lease on linguistic life during the counter-culture of the sixties, along with the rest of the underground language for the body. Fuck embraced free love and snubbed its nose at the Vietnam War all at the same time. Sociologists like to describe the so-called sexual revolution in the context of The Pill, but it was just as much a revolt of language -- sexual language. Artists of the time wanted to speak their minds with the entirety of public language at their disposal. Some, such as Lenny Bruce, were censored by the state and social norms. But in the end, the state lost. The words were emancipated -- at least for men. Blacks had been on the forefront of sexual language for decades, with artists such as Redd Foxx and those before him, exploring and pushing the sexual language envelope, but that was underneath the radar. Later black comics, such as Richard Pryor, did all kinds of shit to let loose all kinds of words.

Eventually, feminism -- the non-puritanical, cutting-edge side anyway -- emancipated women to use all the “unladylike” words, reclaiming bold language such as dyke and pussy and claim them as women’s turf, not merely men’s labels.

People are sometimes afraid to use sex words because they fear they will be perceived as sexual. If we keep our lips sealed, we can maintain the illusion that we are not sexual creatures. Fuck became a word that so-called “well-bred” women could use and it also defined a generation gap. Popular music turned it into a lyric. But saying the word stills says more about your political stance than about your sexuality.

Think about it: words describing other controversial or problematic aspects of our lives don’t get people so upset. No one ever says, “I can’t stand the word war,” or no one goes off on a rant that “the word torture is too cruel to use,” or screams, “I won’t allow anyone to say taxes in my home!” We manage to discuss all kinds of horrible and psychologically conflicted issues privately and publicly without choking up. Even words that insult and stereotype, such as spic and nigger, get more public debate and defense than George Carlin’s seven words you can’t say on television. Sex is the only topic where we blame language for holding us back. We suffer from a collective sexual tongue-tiedness. Almost any sexual expression we come up with bothers someone either because it isn’t sensitive enough, or it’s too Disneyfied.

I had a woman friend who hated the word cunt. I happen to like it because it because for me the word cunt crosses boundaries. It’s subversive, profane -- like me. I have met people who can’t even bring themselves to say cunt. The point is that perhaps we do need more words that are sexual. As an English/ Spanish bilingual, I can tell you English misses the sexual mark totally, when it comes to matters of sex. We’re afraid of the words we do have at our disposal. In a way, we’re afraid that if we let the dangerous words out, sex will be more dangerous, life will be uglier, we won’t know what to expect.

I personally believe we need that surprise. There’s nothing uglier than silence and denial. We’re choking on our own sex words, drawing a line between this word and that. I have a cock, and I have balls, intelligence, and an active imagination and sometimes I have a range of experiences that begs for as many names as I can conceive.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

If you would like to support my writing, you can do so by clicking HERE. You can also donate via PayPal HERE.

The Friday Sex Blog [Sexual Revolution]

Hola mi gente,
The Holidays are almost upon us and, instead of spending some time around Fifth Avenue, taking in the sights and taking photos, I’m stuck on the obscenity of it all.

Then, there’s the “madness” -- people rushing around, on the edge, ready for aggression -- or what we now call “Christmas shopping.” My only wish is that can work on the holidays, so that I don’t have to engage in the pantomime of forced cheerfulness. Yeah, Bah-fuckin-Humbug, motherfuckers.

Let’s talk about sex… 

What Sexual Revolution?

We emerged rowdy with contempt for all those timid animals 

who still make noiseless love the darkened chambers of their shame. 

According to Judeo-Christian ideology, the world of sexual love (Eros), the body, and human sexuality is essentially framed as the domain of the devil. From this perspective, the realm of the physical is unholy, an animalistic distraction from spirituality -- the high, cerebral, sacred pursuit of God, and the good, ethical life. From infancy we are conditioned to fear and loathe the influence of Eros. We are told that the more we open and respond to the erotic impulse, the more we get in touch with our bodies, the more we enjoy and pursue our sexual natures, the farther we stray from “godliness” and emotional well-being.

When I write about human sexuality, I am submitting the exact opposite. I argue that the erotic impulse, honored and freed from the stigma of guilt and the forces of repression, can be and is a powerful path toward a psycho-spiritual transcendence and actualization. It demands of us to stop trivializing the erotic/ sexual world as we so often do, as if sex involved nothing more than sensory stimulation, ego gratification, and the pursuit of an orgasm.

The so-called sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s supposedly freed us to explore the heady carnal pleasures of the erotic world, when it was relatively safe and there was reliable birth control. Combined with freedom movements, we were at once liberated from some of our heritage of sexual suppression and fear. But I submit that it is the failure of recognize the depth and complexity of the erotic impulse that doomed this mythical revolution and is the foundation of much of the current sexual dissatisfaction.

During the euphoric time of “free love,” when sex and sensuality broke and overflowed the dams of previous restrictions and became available to those who chose to immerse themselves in those waters, we seemed to collectively want nothing more than to consume as much erotic experience as we could. We were, after all, very much like starved ghosts emerging from literally thousands of years in the desert into a world of lush, green jungles bursting with ripe erotic fruit. While my point is that the moment was not as revolutionary as we like to think it was, it was a tantalizing moment in the cultural history of American sexuality, and important first step in freeing ourselves from the yoke of Puritanism.

But even as we feasted on the wider range of erotic delights we discovered at every turn, even as we gloried in our power to go beyond political, cultural, and sexual conventions long considered untouchable, we began to push up against the limits of the path we were on. In some ways, we were mindlessly recreating the very same power structures (i.e., patriarchy) we sought to dismantle. “Free love,” for example, often led to sexual coercion, as women were subtly pressured to engage sexually while still having to follow rules dictated by men. Or as Yasmin Nair puts it: “… the sad truth that many of us learn after years in sexual playing fields (literally and figuratively) is that how many people you fuck has nothing to do with the extent to which you fuck up capitalism.”

I am even going to throw Hegel in the mix: the new synthesis (sexual freedom) started to generate its own antithesis (repression). The crest of the wave, it seems, was moving faster than the foundation and there were rocks up ahead. The mythos of the three days of peace and love of Woodstock gave way to the mindless violence of Altamont; the use of mind expanding drugs morphed to addictive behavior; the delight of freely pursuing sexual pleasure turned into feelings of sexual emptiness and dissatisfaction, even before AIDS and other STDs came along.

We had achieved the release of the pressure of decades of sexual inhibition, but there was more to the picture than simply having more sex, having sex with more partners, having sex with less guilt and more information, having sex with less pregnancy and disease, or having sex in previously prohibited ways: with your mouth, with your ass, with a vibrator, or with people of your own gender. Jumping into the sexual rabbit-hole as naïve as Alice, we found ourselves facing sexual territories we could not have expected and did not know how to interpret.

As much as we would like to believe that we can jump in and out of erotic and sexual encounters as easily as we can jump in and out of a shower, a movie, or a subway ride, the experience of being fully sexual in rich, powerful ways almost always engages an entire range of complex issues, psychologically and emotionally. This can be problematic, because many people now want to be sexual more often and with more partners than they want to engage intimately, let alone relationally.

But we cannot simply go back -- we cannot put the lid back on the sexual Pandora’s Box -- and I don’t think it would be helpful. These deeper energies are essential aspects of the erotic experience, no matter how carefully we try to repress sex or reduce it to a simplistic pursuit of physical pleasure. Whenever we play with erotic energy, we engage the totality of our experience and tap into primal forces that have their roots in the very heart of who we are as human beings, in how we define ourselves and relate to our world.

Entering fully into the erotic world raises issues and feelings, for example around our (often unsatisfied) infantile desires to be nurtured and held, our prenatal memories of being as one with another human being, around ego-disintegration and the softening of ego defenses, and around surrendering control of our behavior. the erotic impulse inevitably raises all issues related to intimacy -- the desire to be close to someone else, the fear of being smothered, and all the past yearnings, fulfillments, wounds, and disappointments we have experienced in this regard.

Going deeper still, erotic experiences brings us face-to-face with the essential questions of existence and the meaning of life (and death) itself, even to a quality of experience that many describe as direct contact with the divine.

This is what awaits us as we decide (or not) to engage the next wave of sexual actualization. There are repressive forces, waging a cultural war, that want to put the lid back on the erotic impulse, looking to a repressive past (i.e., “make America great again”) as a viable model for sexual behavior/ guidelines. I have news for you: they didn’t work in the past and they will fail us now. In my book, that’s called entropy. But then again that’s what conservatism is really all about. No, we either engage the erotic impulse honorably, fearlessly, creatively, and joyfully, or we die.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…