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Long ago, in my early days as a sexually aware young woman, I made a key sexual discovery: That sexual arousal felt wonderful. Up until then, my mother had guided the sexual messages I received, messages born of her generation's fears, fears that centered on loss and failure. The loss of one's virginity and, hence, one's reputation. The failure to prevent pregancy and, hence, one's reputation. The loss of future possibilities because, hell, you ruined your chances by having sex.
No lie: My mother once told me "whatever you, don't."
Hers was a generation that entered adulthood in the early 1950s. She would become a high graduate, a before-marriage working girl, a wife and a mother in the span of five years. (That she managed to put motherhood off until the age of 23 was almost scandalous to her Midwestern relatives.) She would be a young parent during a decade of extreme social conformity. And the sexual messages that saw her into adulthood would try to invade mine.
Except when I realized how good sexual arousal felt, I couldn't believe a just and caring God would give mankind something so wonderful and make it a sin. And I refused to believe that, in an era where family planning information and birth were easy to come by, sex would automatically lead to ruination. I decided pretty early that one could be a responsible hedonist.
I decided my mother's pat phrase was bullshit.
The reason I share this with you isn't to make some lofty claim about throwing off the shackles of sexual repression or that I knew more and better than my well-meaning mother. It's to illustrate what was, essentially, my first embrace of the sex positive.
The "sex positive." Basically, it's the attitude that sex need not lead to Bad Things. That it could be a bright and meaningful force. At the risk of sounding new-age mushy, good sex was good karma.
Sex positivity was a backlash to the dim view previous generations' held towards sex. Dimestore novels -- what we today call vintage sleeze -- always enticed its readers through titilation and provocative, but your vixen pretty much always ended up ruining her life. Lesbians looked hot in the cover art but never had a happy ending. Extreme sex always led to an extreme and violent end. In fact, the sex negative was employed so publishers could routinely escape the grip of vice-and-suppression watchdogs. Miserable fates actually gave such novels redeeming value. The facade of a moral outcome fed into a message generations previous to mine found all too intimidating.
I actually gave up on reading erotic works when I was a young adult because so much of what I came across was bleak. And came with a death toll. Candy? She presumably died in the end. Story of O? She chose suicide. Young Adam? He killed his pregnant girlfriend, for Pete's Sake. And that was the literary avant garde. Can you imagine how it went down in dimestore sleeze?
I wanted work where people didn't die of their excesses, but actually achieved some level of happiness. Sadly, I didn't really see that until the big box boom brought a Borders to my neck of the woods. There, I discovered erotic writing that celebrated sexual enjoyment and actually advocated for pleasure. I hadn't seen such positivity since The Joy of Sex from my early adulthood. Four novels into it, and I wanted to be part of this sex positive movement. I wrote my first erotic short story soon after and never looked back.
Next: schools of thought
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