Editor's Introduction

Songs of Experience

Answers [M. Christian]
"If you’ve been on the phones, like me, you’ve heard a lot, and even if they sometimes fall into obvious categories, you really don’t have any idea who the next caller will be: a woman who has never had an orgasm, a little boy who wants to know what a blowjob is, an older man who wants to step out of the closet and meet other men, a fetish dresser who wants someplace to buy shoes, someone who wants to learn how to have anal sex, or someone else who wants to know how to find his prostate. ¶ San Francisco Sex Information is where those who don’t know can call to talk to people who do."

Transcendent Sex: When More Than the Earth Moves [Jenny Wade, PhD]
"The fact is, the ordinary act of lovemaking can be the most widely available path to higher consciousness for most people. People who have experienced a transcendent episode during sex usually believe they have tapped into divine forces, even if they are atheists or agnostics. These experiences are so extreme, they change people’s views of sex and spirituality. They have literally changed people’s lives."

Gala’s Divine Beauty Mark [Salvador Dalí]
"Her neck had pure grace in its slimness; her hair, her intimate hairs, her odors intoxicated me; her mouth, teeth, gums, tongue overpowered me with a pleasure I had never even suspected. I became a sex freak. I wallowed in it to the very paroxysm of cockcunt, voraciously gobbling, frenzied in the unleashing of my finally sated instincts."

My First Fist-a-Thon [Tristan Taormino]
"The premise was that we’d see how many people I could fist both vaginally and anally, plus how many could be fisted by others, in the span of two hours."

Blood [Jennifer Bennett]
"I have never let anyone else enter my body like this. Blood has been a pleasure, a torture that I have reserved for myself."

The Truth About Sex [Bill Brent]
"I have always liked that which offends nice people, because it is usually honest."

Love Without Limits: Excerpts From Polyamory [Deborah Taj Anapol]
"Our culture puts so much emphasis on monogamy that few people realize they have a choice about how many sexualoving partners they can have at one time. Even harder to grasp is the idea that multi-partner relationships can be stable, responsible, consensual, nurturing, and long-term."

A Baby Dyke Learns to Score [Jane Vincent]
"When I was twelve, I learned that boys are easy. But for a young bi girl, boys can only go so far. I fantasized about women, but my fantasies were very vague."

Egg Sex [Susie Bright]
"Steeped in a romance-novel notion of marriage, sexual advice to pregnant moms, whether revealed in print or in the strange silences at the doctor’s office, gives short shrift to the dramatic changes in women’s sexual physiology and desires."

Baby Love [Christen Clifford]
"As I became aroused, my breasts squirted milk. That was cool. I felt like a teenage boy trying to see how far he could shoot. When I told this to one of my mommy friends, she said, 'You should try masturbating while breastfeeding. It’s amazing.'"
• "My parents never talked to me about sex; my son may have the opposite problem."

A Middle-Age Manifesto: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Lube [Debra Hyde]
"Yes, I know. We’re all tired of 'boomers this' and 'boomers that,' but the fact remains that there’s a reason HBO’s Real Sex doesn’t always show lithe, svelte bodies. Most of America is flabby, fattening, and horny—and you’re going to see it reflected in everything from documentaries about swinger events to commercials hyping erectile functioning."

Teaching Rose [Jill Morley]
"She met me at the door in a black, sequined thong bikini and white feather boa. Not what I expected. Don’t get me wrong. I knew she wanted to learn erotic dance, but at 71, you’d think she’d take it slow. Not Rose."

Inviting Elder Sex Out of the Closet [Joani Blank]
"Societal norms dictate that older people, especially really old people, are not sexual creatures. None of the existing books asked older people to simply tell us what they do and how it feels."
• "'Sex is the real reason I jog, work out, gulp down vitamins; all this I do to remain, pardon the expression, fuckable.'"

People & Places

Everybody’s Sin Is Nobody’s Sin: Alfred Kinsey and the Breaking of Sexual Silence [David Steinberg]
"Kinsey’s basic method—a contribution to sexual science as profound and long-lasting as the data he produced—was to transcend socially enforced sexual silence so directly and unapologetically that the very act created a bubble of sexual sanity inside a sexually crazy world, a bubble in which speaking honestly and openly about sex was not only permitted but even highly valued and encouraged."

Key to the Fields: Gershon Legman, Folklorist of the Unspeakable [Susan Davis]
"Born in 1917, Legman made an unprecedented career for himself as he struggled to write the unspeakable and publish the unprintable. He constructed an intellectual life off the radar of official culture, embodying and prefiguring radical ways of writing about sex."
• "He had been spied on by the FBI, threatened with arrest by the State of New York, and he lost his mail-based magazine-publishing business to Post Office censors."

Betty Dodson’s Revolutionary Open Relationship [Rachel Kramer Bussel]
"I’m a little nervous when I pick up the phone to call Betty Dodson. After all, I had sex with her live-in partner, Eric, only a few weeks ago."

Inside the Cave: The Rise and Fall of Plato’s Retreat [Jon Hart]
"Following Woodstock, before 'safe sex,' there was a club called Plato’s Retreat, the most famous swingers' club ever to exist.... It was an enigmatic palace of excess. Here is its story."

The House of Secret Treasures: Japan’s Sex Museums and Festivals [Ed Jacob]
"Visitors to a typical Japanese sex museum wander through a surreal wonderland of erotic art, horror sex, adult toys from around the world, copulating animals, X-rated carnival games, and life-size dioramas of sex in various cultures. The gigantic whale vulvas, Viking rape scenes, and woodblock prints of lustful samurai with dramatically enlarged sex organs all merge to form a bizarre, erotic dreamscape as the gawking visitor giggles and smirks his or her way through the exhibits."

Cunt Candy Factory [Tristan Taormino]
"Rarely do people ask themselves, 'Where do dildos come from?'"
• "In March 2005, the real Juli took me to the headquarters of Doc Johnson, one of the world’s leading sex-toy manufacturers."

The Archive [Jack Boulware]
"More than just retro raunch, these skin flicks represent a tiny nugget of pornography’s mother lode, the world’s largest repository of porn and erotica—three million items, including hundreds of thousands of films, which fill 22 warehouses throughout Northern California. The sex and porn industries know about the Archive. It belongs to the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. This specialized school has been squirreling away such materials for nearly three decades, valiantly cataloging what it refers to as America’s 'erotic heritage.' Everyone knows of it, but few have ever seen it."

Practices & Preferences

The Circle Game: Playing With Yourself Together [Martha Cornog]
"Writing a book about masturbation wasn’t a solo effort. In the process, I met all sorts of co-conspirators who fed me articles, factoids, tips, and encouragement. And I found out along the way that solo sex isn’t always solo."

First Person Sexual [Joani Blank]
"Although some women masturbate before a sexual encounter to get 'warmed up,' men apparently rarely do so unless they are trying to avoid ejaculating prematurely when later engaged in sexual activity with a partner. Women who masturbate are often willing and eager to try new positions, locations, and techniques for their masturbation, while adult men commonly masturbate pretty much the same way they did as adolescents. Why?"

Orgies: A Brief Paean and a Few Practical Thoughts [Carol Queen]
• "I was 30 years old by the time I had an opportunity to go to an orgy, and it changed my life."
"Orgies are like no other social space...and yet they’re just like any other social space. Rules of interaction and good conduct apply, and they’re not all that hard to understand."

Bed Knobs and Broomsticks [Fiona Horne]
"Below are questions I’ve received from various people pertaining to their love and sex lives, followed by my magickal and practical advice to them."

Sex and…Drugs [Preston Peet]
"Whether they’re aphrodisiacs for arousal, illegal drugs for thrills or enlightenment, or pharmaceuticals for staying power, drugs and sex go hand in hand, nearly inseparable."

Making Moves: Erotic Chess [Ann Regentin]
"The language of chess is very sexual. What are you supposed to think when somebody declares that they’re going to mate you in five moves, so you might as well surrender now? Things get taken in chess. They can also be pinned and skewered. If you’re going to nab the queen, you have to move in carefully, obliquely, much like a tricky seduction."

Pervert [Jill Nagle]
"I pinch and press the skin all over his back, holding and twisting in many places, as if I meant to execute a special neuromuscular technique—so that when I press and wriggle my thumbs around that special pore, he won’t wonder why."

Cocksucker Magnet [Lori Selke]
"They want a warm, friendly, female voice to walk them through the scary corners of their own sex fantasy life—i.e., the ones that are filled with men, with waiting cock."

Cat-fighting, Eye-licking, Head-sitting, and Statue-screwing [Brenda Love]
"Psychrocism (psychro: cold or freezing; cism: act) refers to those who are aroused either by being cold themselves or by watching someone else who is cold."
• "Dogging is the English term for a sport where people watch couples having sex in parked cars."
• "Another man became fixated on the size of female nostrils, thinking that if large enough, they could be penetrated."

Rules [Dirty Found]
"Must ask permission to do anything with or to my cock."

Necrophilia [Nick Adams]
"What happens to your self-esteem when you find out your man rejected your warm, moist, living vagina for a dry, rotting, corpse vagina? How do you cheer up a friend whose boyfriend has just left her for a dead body?"

My First Fetish: Or, How I Fought Mediocrity [Audacia Ray]
"After many withering looks upon the admission of my un-deviance, I decided that it was high time for me to look into getting myself a fetish."

Profile of a Zoophile: Bill Brent Interviews Clive Grace
"I’m completely open to the advances of both male and female, dog and horse."

Porn

Margins to Mainstream: Pornography Refreshes American Culture [Joseph W. Slade]
"In short, sexual materials enjoyed in secret, long characterized as insulting to religion, offensive to various genders, intellectually worthless, and socially and politically subversive, seem now to be operating as a source of cultural energy."

American Sex Ed: Porn as Sexual Disinformation [Violet Blue]
"On my right, the male performer’s exposed, sweaty, disappointingly flaccid crotch smelled like feet. Between us sat a naked, nineteen-year-old woman wearing nothing except clear, plastic, six-inch heels and LA-trendy, skunk-striped, frosted blonde hair."
• "I had a sneaking suspicion that Rain Man was running the porn industry, counting reverse cowgirls and doggie/mish/oral sequences, in between rocking himself in the corner and telling the directors, 'Uh-oh, fifteen minutes to Wopner….'"

Black and Blue: New York’s Roughie Grindhouses and the Films That Played at Them [Michelle Clifford]
"Another big draw at the Hudson was Joe Davian’s films, including the supernaturally bent Night of Submission and the deranged women’s prison melodrama Domination Blue."
• "There was a payphone booth in the lobby, which afforded Avon’s staff a smidgen of privacy while making and taking drug orders."
• "In the mid-1970s, the Cameo became the superdome of the rough-sex action picture."
• "Forced Entry features some of the most hate-driven talk ever documented on film."

Girls Gone Wild [Greta Christina]
"'Girls Gone Wild' seemed way more transgressive than hardcore porn—because the girls themselves felt that way. The girls in the TV ads are crossing their own boundaries, breaking their own rules. They aren’t 'Wild Girls'—they’re 'Girls Gone Wild,' emphasis on the 'gone,' on the idea that they didn’t used to be slutty exhibitionists and you’re getting to see them cross that line."

Fire, Brick, Sand, Concrete: An Unlicensed Sex Shop in Britain [David Kerekes]
"Hardcore pornography was illegal in the UK, but in the center of Manchester, on a busy intersection next to a takeaway café on the one side and a flash car showroom on the other, stood an unassuming bookshop."

Showing Pink [Paul Krassner]
"The next month, at Hustler’s Christmas party, Flynt announced that I was going to be the new publisher. This was the first that I had heard the news."

The Daily Schedule of a Porno Copywriter [Libby Lynn]
"Welcome, lovers, to my small adult world, where I have one singular and specialized duty: to write product descriptions for porn videos, sex toys, and all manner of erotic products. Welcome to the company I’ll call Sex World. ¶ My job is a mix of the ennui of marketing and the anomaly of pornography."

Violence as the New Porn [Cecilia Tan]
"Action-film directors have figured out what I—the slobbering audience member—want: a visceral, physical experience which is akin to sex."
• "[In Kill Bill,] Uma stares lovingly at a rack of swords. She reaches hesitantly for one, shy, nearly fumbling like the eager ingénue at a man’s belt, but then her grip tightens on the hilt, and in ultra-close-up she slowly but firmly glides the blade several inches from its sheath."

Working Hard for the Money

Some of My Best Friends Are Naked: Interviews With Seven Erotic Dancers [Tim Keefe]
"'What is your favorite type of customer?' ~ Erotic, exotic, and X-rated, along with me. One that can show me some motion. If he’s gonna jack off, jack off right! [Laughs.] Show me some motion. Someone being there with a smile on his face, happy, showin’ me some response."
• "I do come onstage, and it can be just from undulating and moving my hips rather than putting my finger there and wiggling it. That’s how I was masturbating when I first got there. A lot of times people have to remind me to take my break."
• "Now it’s been proven to me that anything with tits and a cunt can do anything to a man."

Astonishing Tales of a Peep Show Girl [Pagan Moss]
"'Stand up so I can take off your panties,' I ordered. When she did, I jammed my fingers down the sides of her white cotton panties, ripping them down to her ankles so that her bare little pussy was staring me right in the eye."
• "I sat in my booth and watched them laugh and stumble down the hallway until they caught sight of me, sitting in a pair of trashy cut-off jeans and an obscenely cropped gingham top, which revealed just a hint of bare breasts at the bottom. I stood up in my seven-inchers and twirled one of my pigtails with my finger, flashing them a devilish grin. They all stopped and stared up at me."

Close Contact [Preston Peet]
"At first I hesitate, not having turned a trick for over a year, but completely without drugs, it doesn’t take me long to agree to it."

A San Francisco Whore in a Nevada Brothel [Lisa Archer]
"I’ve been working in this brothel for five days. Like many women, I started doing sex work to put myself through grad school. The inspiration for this trek to Nevada came from an acquaintance who made $10,000 in two weeks. I was sold."

Sex on Paper

How to Write Sex Scenes: The 12-Step Program [Steve Almond]
"Nipples are tricky. They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and shades. They do not, as a rule, look like much of anything, aside from nipples. So resist making dumbshit comparisons."

The Virgin Diaries [Victor J. Banis]
"The foreplay began, in fact, in Hollywood; no, not the Hollywood of stars and movie studios: the Hollywood of tawdry paperback bookstores. I strolled into one of these emporiums in 1963, leafed through a number of lesbian books—really, faux lesbian, the sort written by men for men—and thought, 'Gosh, I could do this.'"

Beat Off 101 [Earl Kemp]
"I am very glad that I accepted Don Gilmore’s offer to back his study of the effects of certain sexual stimuli on the test subjects. We used those results to formulate what became the basic background formula for all our sleaze paperbacks and visual publications."

The Man Who Screwed Things Up [Stephen J. Gertz]
"He was the Oliver Twist of the porn business, albeit Oliver Twisted, an Artful Dodger who grew into a porn-Fagin with a fondness for silk underwear."

On Being a Sexmonger [Jen Sincero]
"The book [A Straight Girl's Guide to Sleeping With Chicks] came about because I’d had a couple of experiences with women, found little out there to answer my questions, and decided I should write about it myself."
• "Do all my friends think I want to fuck them now? Did my dad read the part in my book where I talk about how much I love buttsex?"

The Love Hotel Diaries [Ed Jacob]
"The love hotel is a uniquely Japanese institution, a sexual space for rent that is used by everyone from young teens in love to parents getting away from their children."

The Sex Lit You Probably Haven’t Read: Obscure and Expunged Material Dealing
With Everyone’s Favorite Activity [Russ Kick]
"Windows on the World by Frédéric Beigbeder is among the first novels—if not the first novel—to deal with 9/11. Originally published in Paris by Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle in 2003, an English-language translation reached US shores in March 2005 thanks to Miramax Books. But some of it was left in France. Specifically, Miramax eviscerated the sex scene between two doomed yuppies on an upper floor of One World Trade Center."
• "[T]he Federal Aviation Administration’s flight incident reports reveal that things occasionally get pretty interesting and kinky at 20,000 feet."
• "In the section on women’s sexual fantasies [in the classic women's health book Our Bodies, Ourselves], only two of the original fantasies remain. The other ten have disappeared or have been replaced."
• "Thus it came to pass that in 1928 Charles Atlas published a series of ten books about sex."

Our Bodies Are a Wonderland

Vaginas, les Cons, Weather-makers, and Palaces of Delight: Excerpts from The Story of V: A Natural History of Female Sexuality [Catherine Blackledge]
"The belief in the power of the exposed vagina to repel foes or expel demons is also, it seems, an enduring and widespread one."
• "In about 1230, Gropecuntelane was a London street; other cities, too, including Oxford, York, and Northampton, possessed Gropecuntelanes in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In Paris, there was rue Grattecon (Scratchcunt Street)."
• "Chinese sexual manuals, such as the Taoist text The Wondrous Discourse of Su Nü, detail how vaginas come in eight different varieties..."

John Thomas, Lady Jane, and Little Elvis: Genital Pet Names [Martha Cornog]
"Eventually, I found out that that, yes, a fair number of actual humans do give pet names to sexual parts of the body: mainly the penis and vulva/vagina, and occasionally the clitoris, breasts, testicles, buttocks, and anus. I ended up collecting over 150 such names from adults in the US and Canada. It was cheaper than collecting teapots, and, boy, did it make for interesting conversations at parties!"

Circumcision and Sex [Diane Petryk-Bloom]
"As you read this, at least 100,000 men across America are taping, tying, and tugging their penises to stretch new foreskin. Most lost their foreskins in infancy when they were circumcised, but somewhere along the line they discovered that sex without a foreskin just isn’t what nature intended."

The Condom [Vern Bullough]
"At the end of the sixteenth century, the medical writer Hercules Saxonia described a prophylactic sheath made of linen soaked in a solution several times and then put out to dry. From that time on, there are a growing number of references to a penis sheath."
• "In one of the first American surveys of the efficacy of condoms, that of the National Committee on Maternal Health in 1938, it was found that only about 40% of the rubber condoms sold in the United States were fit for use."

Hooray for Sodomy: Is the Rectum an Easter Basket? [Simon Sheppard]
"Because if the ass is a tomb, it’s like the one Jesus allegedly was left in: It may seem like a dead end, but it’s a portal to transcendence, too. And if that transcendence is fleeting, equivocal, even stupid, well…."

Horniness Begets Health [Laura Moore]
"Sex improves our immune system. Sex helps us live longer. Sex relieves pain. Sex can improve vision and skin. Sex can reduce our risk for diabetes, as well as improve conditions in people who already suffer from the disorder."

The Sexual Is Political

"Two! Four! Six! Eight! Let Alabama Masturbate!" [Rachel Maines]
"According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, more than 16,000 murders were committed in the United States in 2003, along with more than 93,000 rapes and 413,000 robberies. In Alabama, Texas, Georgia, and Kansas, law enforcement extends beyond these obvious threats to what some legislators apparently believe is a more subtle and insidious threat to American morals: the sale of vibrators and dildos."

There Has Been No Sexual Revolution [Jay Gertzman]
"Having studied the publication, distribution, and prosecution of pornography in America in the twentieth century, I am convinced that the very same attitudes and procedures apply now as did a century ago regarding the red flags, or taboo signals, that sexual explicitness raises. Regardless of the groundbreaking changes in obscenity law, there has never been a sexual revolution in America."

A Perverted Utopia: It’s the End of Queer as We Know It, and I Feel Fine [Annalee Newitz]
"I was coming out as bisexual, kinky, and radically, massively genderfucked. I didn’t even have words for the thing I would be when I came out."

Queer Freaks: Why Legalized Sodomy Is Just Political Foreplay [Patrick Califia]
"There are still far too many deviants who can’t see beyond the edges of their own oppression, to see where all the freaks are connected in a crazy quilt of sexual repression and misrepresentation."

Holy Sex

Thumping in the Bible: A Brief Introduction to Sex in the Old Testament [Jack Murnighan]
"And such is the nature of the Bible as a whole: Couplings are common, incest omnipresent, and innuendo aplenty. The Good Book does not lack for good parts, especially the Old Testament; you just have to sift through endless lists of progeny and litanies of the scourges inflicted on the Israelites to get to them."

Burchard’s Medieval Sexual Menu: From History Laid Bare [Richard Zacks]
"The following is unquestionably the longest and kinkiest list of medieval sexual practices still in existence, and much of it has never before been translated into English from the original Latin."

The Sex Life of the Buddha [John Stevens]
"Even texts compiled by puritan Buddhists contain a wealth of information on his birth, early manhood, and sexual experiences, and it is not difficult to flesh out the romantic legend of Gotama in loving detail."
• "The girls also teamed up to perform the yogini chakra with the prince, a rite in which he made love simultaneously with three, five, seven, or nine partners."

Categories Suck

Sex by the Numbers: Excerpts From The Book of Sex Lists [Albert B. Gerber]
• "11 Inside Stories About the Making of the Film Caligula"
• "Sexual Behavior of Former Nuns and Priests (Before, During, and After Orders)"
• "9 Great Writers of Sex Letters"
• "2 Female Chimpanzees Who Experienced Orgasms"
• "11 Far-out Letters Received by the Project"
• "10 Jewish Sex Laws and Customs"
• "Bill Gaines’ 10 Foods That Are Better Than Sex"

Pandrogeny [Breyer P-Orridge]
"Editor’s Note: Breyer P-Orridge is the collective name of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge. Together, they form a third being."
• "You were in your mother’s womb for forty-nine days an androgyne.
Who chose your gender?
GOD?
Society? Family?
Only by YOU ending this separation, returning to that first
pure state can real freedom begin. When all are but one sex,
one species.
This is not about becoming an Other,
This is about returning to a state of perfect union."

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