“Right,” I managed.
Later, as Patrick enjoyed his ritual post-coital cigarette, he noticed the time glowing on the digital clock. “Honey,” he said, sounding not at all sorry, “I'm afraid we've missed ‘Dynasty.’ ”
“Not to mention dinner,” I replied, sighing. “Do you think she'll call again?”
SEX IN THE DARK
By Marco Vassi
When the jaded poet in the film
Reuben, Reuben
falls in love with a college girl of 19, she asks him what he sees in her. Wistfully he replies, “Innocence is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” When I saw that scene I found myself nodding in agreement, remembering the delicious rush that comes when a trembling young thing exclaims in your arms, “I've
never
done
that
before.”
Shortly after seeing the film, though, I had the tables turned on me by a woman of 22 who would not make love with the lights on, not even the illumination from a TV screen. Her excuse was shyness, an acute embarrassment at having a man see her naked. But once we were plunged into total darkness, all her inhibitions dissolved and she became hot, wild and wanton. The affair lasted four months and not once during that time did I ever see what she looked like while we were having sex. The experience affected me powerfully and at the end of it
I
was the one left trembling and exclaiming, “I've never done that before.”
I don't have any principles or prejudice about whether sex takes place with the lights on or in the dark; each mode creates its own mood. But for the 15 years prior to this affair, I'd been moving in me direction of greater and greater exposure, not only through describing my individual adventures in print, but also by getting involved in swinging, party scenes, and erotic performance art, reaching a state where I felt completely comfortable having sex in a crowd or for an audience.
It was a heady period in my life, and in the history of the country, a period that came to be known as the Sexual Revolution. Like many others, I was swept up in the excitement and promise of a social movement and I lost sight of the price I was paying for pursuing idealistic visions, exotic sensations and a certain notoriety. As I became a cultic and even a public figure, my personal and private sexuality was sucked out of me and into the demands of the various scenes I was into, as well as into the lenses of many cameras. This left me without any organic sexual impulses, but rather with a highly stylized choreography that I could activate the way an actress can turn on tears. In short, I stopped enjoying sexual energy as a feeling and activity in itself and began using it only as a stage for mounting some erotic dance.
This wasn't so troubling when I was, say, at an orgy, but it worried me that I was no longer able to relax even when I was in bed with a lover. When a woman was giving me head, for example, I couldn't lie back and enjoy it but spent the time adjusting my angle of penetration to produce the most appealing curves on her lips as they stretched around my shaft. I was aware of all of this as a process, but only abstractly. It wasn't until I spent those four months making love in the dark that I realized how far I'd traveled from the ability to take a simple and uncomplicated pleasure in sex. One night, after we'd been together for almost two weeks, Becky went down on me for the first time, and I spent perhaps half an hour staring at my crotch in the perfect blackness of the room before I snapped out of my trance and registered the fact that I wouldn't see anything no matter how hard I looked.
I caught myself at a number of such posturings. I often assumed positions that established a certain angle between our bodies which, had there been lights and a camera, would have provided the most interesting shots. I carried over the tensions of erotic flirtation into the physical and emotional exchanges of intercourse, maintaining the psychological distance essential to the theatre of sex even while bringing my body closer to someone who had already surrendered all her roles. Instead of being a man expressing his desire, I'd become a performer endlessly polishing his act. And it was only in the dark that I became fully aware of how thorough the transformation had been.
I'm not at this point “denouncing” group sex or erotic performance art. These were extremely liberating activities for me and in a wider context they served the purpose of counterbalancing the repressive Puritan heritage of pushing everything into the closet. Taking part in an orgy frees one from the prejudice that two is some kind of sacred sexual number. Sex on stage makes one aware of the power of sex in commanding attention and even devotion.
And making love in the light under any circumstances fosters both an acceptance of the body and its functions, and an absence of shame or guilt. It also allows people to look into one another's eyes in which the transports of pleasure and joy shine through.
However, everything must find its proper balance. Prior to the 1960s we, as a nation, tried to keep everything sexual a secret. Since men we have indulged in a mammoth show-and-tell. What is intelligent, as always, is the ability to be flexible, which means neither suppressing erotic expression nor exploiting it. In our culture, both extremes have been tied to the visual. My spell of sex in the dark, by removing that dimension altogether, restored balance and flexibility in two ways. The first was simple deconditioning. All my “pornographic” gestures and attitudes became ridiculous with no one to see them, and so just faded away. The second was a restitution of the other senses, as well as elements of sexuality that are more basic than sight.
Take breathing for instance. A karate instructor I know is fond of saying, “It doesn't count if you're not breathing.” In the dark, as I let go of my attachment to form, I found that my breath became fuller, deeper. The more visual an experience is, the more cerebral it is. During such self-conscious behavior there is a strong tendency to hold the breath and crank up die excitement level through oxygen starvation and carbon dioxide intoxication. When the focus of attention drops from the eyes to the breath, sex becomes a far more sensual experience. When the breathing is restricted/ the muscles are kept tense, and sex turns into a charged skirmish that may be highly stimulating but not deeply satisfying. Theatrical sex always left me flushed and exhausted. But when I began to return to a more organic sexuality I found that an hour or more of hot licks made me feel refreshed and rejuvenated.
The next rediscovery hi the dark was the sense of touch. Instead of using my eyes, I let my fingers do the walking. I found it deliriously sexy to explore my lover's body without first sizing it up visually, to approach it like a child with an unknown object, without associations, sliding from smooth skin to eruption of hair to viscous center between the thighs. The most intriguing thing was to put my hand on her body and not recognize what part I was touching.
The second sense to come alive was hearing. Just as a blind man can make a map of the world from sound, so having sex in the dark made me far more sensitive to the noises my lover was making. I learned to follow the cycles and shadings of her excitement not from facial expressions and body postures, but from the sighs, moans, whispers, cries and groans she produced as we moved from the first light kisses of foreplay to the explosion of orgasm.
The third sense to assume new prominence was smell. Perhaps the greatest overall conspiracy against sexuality in our culture is the war on the sense of smell. Yet this is the most basic of the senses. We are bombarded with advertisements to scrub ourselves daily and rub deodorants into the body's natural hollows, and even to mask the aroma of the vagina itself. In the dark, when visual cues are removed, the body's smells are a voluptuous invitation to the most intimate exploration. The odor of sweat, secretions, and the crevices of armpits and buttocks make a compelling aphrodisiac.
In addition to breath, relaxation and the senses, sex in the dark awakens the feeling of mystery. In darkness it is easy to forget your identity, the identity of the person you're with, or even which planet you're on. With the two basic orientations of daily life removed—visual cues and vertical posture—it's possible to sail off into a mood of unknowingness. After a month or so of sightless lovemaking, I didn't feel that I was having sex so much as that sex was having me. All my egotistic concerns dissolved as two blind creatures pressed against and penetrated one another, and were hurled from the cliff of self-awareness into the abyss of rapturous oblivion.
At the psychological level, this melting into mystery emerges as freedom of fantasy and emotional expression. In the dark you can imagine anything and you can have any look or attitude you want. While visual sex does have its values and virtues, it also tends to inhibit us in the way we express ourselves. When the light is on we don't ordinarily let our faces show anger, stupidity, bestiality, boredom or other “negative” emotions. We become as polite in bed as at the dinner table. And the degree to which I'd become mannered hit home one night when, in the midst of one of my best ravishment routines, my entire body erupted with the sense-memory of the joyous wildness I used to feel before my sexuality was choreographed, at which point I began to ravish the lady in earnest.
Those four months in the dark served as a purification ritual for me. When that process was finished, I wanted to move into a regular, balanced cycle of darkness and light in our lovemaking. But she was afraid that if we put the light on, that would “break the spell.” Maybe it would have. The relationship was a failure in too many other areas anyway and we never found out what might have happened next. We parted and went our separate ways.
Although the affair ended, its effect continued. I subsequently spent six months in celibacy and then began living with someone on the condition that I would say or write nothing about our sex life together, thus completing my return to a totally personal, private and even secret sexuality.
It feels good, although still a bit odd, to have arrived at such a conventional solution. One night last month I was talking about all of this with a few old friends and comrades from the early days of the Sexual Revolution and one of them remarked that I was sounding very conservative these days, and that some of my views could even be endorsed by fundamentalists. I saw that he was right and had to smile at the way the wheel of revolution keeps meeting itself coming and going.
When the wheel was turning in the direction of liberation, it was good to open all the closet doors and sweep away the stultifying hypocrisy that was our official national policy on sex. But now that the movement is back in the other direction, it's time to admit that the previous period of letting a thousand orgasms bloom did leave pockets of corruption—the wastes produced by commercial exploitation of liberated sexual energy and the diseases spawned by unbridled debauchery. Then perhaps we wouldn't have to swing all the way back to the “right,” but find instead a middle way between massive suppression and total license.
As individuals we have little control over the larger movements of history. But each of us can strike a balance in her or his own sex life and thereby be a stable element in the greater process instead of adding to the confusion. Those who are still keeping themselves in the dark because of fear or prejudice need to let some light into their bedrooms and their minds. Those who are overly dependent on visual stimulation, on sexual theatre and erotic imagery need to shut the door, pull the curtain over the window, turn off the light and, in what Dylan Thomas called “the close and holy darkness,” remember how to
get down.
When we are no longer afraid of or addicted to the light or the darkness, then our sexuality will be free.
FANTASY GAME
By Eric Perry
I knew Kevin for less than a month, and never met his wife. But when he invited Kathy and me to join them for an evening of erotic games, I could hardly contain my excitement. At first my wife was skeptical about a sex game for two couples with no swapping. “He said you didn't have to switch partners,” I told her.
“And she's pretty?”
“She looked beautiful in the photo … great legs.”
“And you're a leg man.” Kathy leaned over and kissed me. I fondled her breast and kissed her back. “Yes, but no one has better legs than you, darling.”
“And he's good looking?” she asked coyly.
“About 6-foot-2, slim, with sandy hair and a nice moustache—just your type.”
“M-m-m-m …” Her tongue found mine and she began unzipping my pants. “Okay,” she whispered. “Let's meet them.”
Kevin and Sheila lived in a lovely old section of Long Island. As we drove up the driveway, I had butterflies in my stomach. Kathy was attired in a skimpy black dress and red ankle-strap high heels that previously she only wore in our bed.
Kevin welcomed us warmly and introduced Sheila. Slim and strikingly pretty, she stood in four-inch black heels. Her tight skirt showed off the curves of her legs and ass when she moved, while under her filmy blouse was the hint of a lacy bra. I was utterly enchanted.
Soon the small talk turned intimate. Kevin and Sheila steered the conversation to sexual fantasies.
“Most of ours involve everyday situations that become sexual encounters,” Sheila informed us. “That's how we devised our little game.”
“Ah, yes, the game,” I mused. I was very aroused by now.
Kevin picked up a white leather binder from the coffee table and handed it to us. We started leafing through the pages with photos of two couples cavorting in various stages of undress.
“Each page contains a different fantasy to be acted out,” Kevin said. “There's a three-minute time limit for each one and we put our clothes back on between each fantasy. Then things don't get out of hand and everyone becomes more and more turned on.”
The fantasies were divided into categories. “Ones” were cute and flirty—like a man opening his partner's blouse and squeezing her breasts while the other couple watched. Another had him raising her skirt. The “twos” were more daring: a girl with her skirt pulled up around her hips, with one man pressing a vibrator into her cunt while she sucked another's cock. Kathy was beginning to breathe heavily.