Sex Feature

One summer at a Yoga camp, I'd watched a group of young men rolling their abs. When I asked the benefits of the exercise, they said it forced old blood out of the internal organs, allowing new blood to enter. They claimed that advanced male yogis could give them selves an enema by sucking in water and pushing it back out. Speaking in superior tones they let me know that as a woman, I could never master this exercise. At the time I thought, "Yeah? Just wait and see."

Ever since then, I'd been practicing how to give myself a vaginal douche while in the bathtub. One evening as I repeated the exercise, the muscle ridge stood up, my vaginal barrel opened, and I felt a trickling of water seep inside. Success at last! I got out of the tub, dried off and sat down on the floor in front of my free-standing makeup mirror. Isolating the muscles again, I sucked in air, and forced it out, making the sound of a loud "pussy fart". It made me laugh so I did it several more times. In the past, I'd accidentally get a pussy fart when air was sucked in my vagina during intercourse. Now I could do it on demand!

My feminist awareness first struck like a series of lightening bolts while reading Betty Freidan's The Feminine Mystique in 1963. At the time I was unhappily married. Although I never wanted to be a wife and mother, I surrendered to being "normal" in 1959. By the time I finished Freidan's book, I secretly began planning my escape from middle class respectability by resurrecting my dream of becoming a recognized artist with my drawings and paintings hanging in Museums. The dream got altered. I became a recognized feminist, a one woman masturbation revolution to liberate women's sexual pleasure with orgasms through art, articles, books, and videos along with numerous workshops that I ran here and abroad. Once the creative process is unleashed, I had the good sense to follow where it led me.

In 1968, my primary relationship with Grant changed. There was no big scene, just a mutual agreement to have new primary lovers and remain sexual friends- a friendship that would span five decades. Grant's new lover, Nicole Rameau, was Swiss and the most gorgeous blonde he'd ever dated. He had his tall, willowy blonde, and I had the tallest, darkest, most handsome prince of all. Adam Kadir was black and beautiful, half Eastern Indian and African American. I carefully explained we would both have the freedom to enjoy sex with other people without jeopardizing our primary affair. Listening to my ideas about non possessive love and sex, he agreed to everything. I thought it was strange he didn't question anything, but what guy would turn down a deal like this? A relationship that included sexual variety was what all men wanted, right? Wrong! I was about to learn men wanted a monogamous woman while they had affairs.

Walking to my studio on West 29th Street early one morning, I ran into a man who had worked as a commercial artist for my former husband. Sergio DiNolti had been fat and homely, but the man standing in front of me was trim and very muscular with a lean, appealing face. As I admired his miraculous change, he said he'd been doing Karate four times a week. As we walked towards my studio, I sensed some extraordinary sex was about to take place. Luckily my diaphragm was still in place from the sex I'd had with Grant the night before.

Growing up in Wichita in the forties, I didn't even know gay people existed until I moved to New York City in 1950. I'd just turned twenty. A year later when I enrolled in the Art Student's League, a woman in my class had a crush on me. When she flirted it made me uncomfortable, so I mostly avoided her. Still I was curious, so one night my girlfriend Cindy took me to my first gay club. The Purple Stem had one floor for men and another for women. After dancing and drinking a lot with many different women, I ended up back at my place with a big breasted lesbian and we had very drunken sex. The memory is still terribly vague, but I do recall her boobs were like soft pillows. I had enough problems without being a lesbian so I put that experience in the "forget" file.

By 1966, my primary lover Grant and I begin talking about having a threesome. I felt more comfortable doing it with a girlfriend I knew and liked. Revealing my interest in three way sex to my friend, Ginger O'Keefe, came easily.

In 1966 I was having the best orgasmic partner sex of my life with a brilliant English professor who had recently quit academia over politics. He was forty-two. I was thirty-six and had been separated six months from a sexless seven year marriage. He'd been divorced a year from a seventeen year marriage and had recently gone cold turkey off uppers and downers prescribed by his psychiatrist. He was an emotional mess going through withdrawal while I was convinced great sex would bring him back to mental health.

On Christmas Day, I noticed Grant staring off into empty space, a sign he was about to sink into one of his morbid depressions. To alter his mood, I asked if he'd like to make love before dinner. Instead of responding to my offer, he began talking about how my gift presented a problem. I'd given him my first vulva self portrait that appeared to be of some ripe red fruit. When he said he could never hang my painting, I was momentarily crushed. He claimed he had to think of his maid's feelings as well as friends who visit.

After my first successful exhibition of heterosexual lovers in 1968, I found myself on a popularity skyrocket. Having a show of erotic art was like displaying a big advertisement that I'd be fun in bed. Many interesting Prince Charmings were available to me as I waltzed into the glittering world of the rich and famous. Artists have always been able to break out of the rigid class structure that we all pretend doesn't exist in America. I'd already dated a big name politician, a movie star, a well known author and lots of wealthy jet setters who lived here and abroad. My girlfriends were telling me now was the perfect time to score a rich husband. But with all the social invitations pouring in, I had the luxury of being a sexually liberated woman who could say "yes" to men who intrigued me and "no thank you" to one's that didn't. I was going to be a famous artist and make my own million. Although the money never happened, I had a million dollar sexlife.

I'd been having orgasms with a fantasy about being a sex teacher for several years. One of my favorite versions was having all my students masturbating in a circle while I showed them advanced techniques. At the end of the class, the group would have a simultaneous orgasm that would get everyone in my apartment building sexually aroused. The sexual vibes would permeate all fifteen floors affecting tenants, doormen, the maintenance staff and any delivery boys that happened to be on the premises. It was a great fantasy because I could throw in all kinds of kinky activity happening in the elevators, laundry room and stairwells.

After my involvement with the women's movement in the early seventies, I began to think about teaching sex to women in more practical terms. As I lay in bed one night, the words "Sexual Consciousness Raising" started to percolate in my mind.

During the month of February in 1973, I was running the next round of sexual CR groups when I got a call from Dell Williams. She insisted I get involved in the planning committee for the NOW Sexuality Conference. Dell would later open the first women's sex shop in New York City. Like me, she too was a Wilhelm Reich enthusiast and we both agreed about the importance of women's sexual liberation.

At the third planning session, with twenty other women present, Dell asked what I wanted to do at the big gathering on Sunday to end the three day conference. When I said, "I'd like to do a slide show of split beaver for feminists," there were blank expressions on every woman's face in the room. No one knew what I was talking about, so I explained that "Split Beaver" was porno slang for a photo of a woman holding her pussy lips open. Two women thought it was a derogatory male term, and one suggested "Open Otter" might be more feminine.

I just ran over to Fifth Avenue to see if I could catch my old, old friend Gretchen who helped me type up the first orders that came in from Ms. Magazine requesting my booklet, Liberating Masturbation. She has been the grand martial for Gay Pride many years now. Although I missed her again, I did catch the NYPD queer cops marching behind the NYPD Marching Band. Wow! That took guts, NYC finest and gay?

People standing on my corner broke out in loud applause as we hollered our approval. Of course it made me think of gays in the military. What is it about a uniform and being queer that freaks people out? The Gay cops contingent stopped right on my corner to space the parade. A young woman ran up to a guy who turned out to be a gal and kissed her. Talk about androgynous, my absolute favorite thing. There it was in all its glory, a tall thin lesbian cop who was beyond handsome being openly kissed by her lovely lesbian lover. Gives an old masturbating feminist like me hope!

As we celebrate Gay Pride this year, think about this for a moment: If you have ever masturbated, you've had gay sex. Come on, it's a same-sex activity no matter what you are fantasizing. So get a grip on your clit or your cock and enjoy being as queer as a three dollar bill.

I have just started another round of follow-up tests, so it's been an anxiety-provoking week. I got a positive (i.e. negative) report on Thursday that the "area of concern" for 6 months is "reactive inflammation, with no sign of dysplasia," which means the scab up my ass is not a precancerous or cancerous lesion (recurrence) like the one that killed Farrah Fawcett.

To say this wreaks havoc with one's sex life is an understatement. I hate my dilators and all the sex toys in the box. I hate using the wonderful vitamin E (for oral use only) and saliva for lubrication (which work like a charm, I'm very lucky). I have always wanted sex, lots of it, and good sex, and had plenty.

I got HPV from it, which was treated successfully in 1987. The medical profession did not yet know how to test for anal HPV ...which I must have had, DESPITE the fact that I was not into anal sex.

The number one assumption about the negative aspect of porn is that many women worry if their lovers or husbands look at too much, it will make them unhappy with the bodies regular women have. If that were the case, we would also have to be concerned about men looking at beautiful women in movies, magazines and on television. Starlets, fashion models and porn stars are in the entertainment business and have a lot of work done, even as young as eighteen. They get nose jobs, breast and facial implants, blow-job lips, lasers for removal of blemishes and unwanted hair, liposuction to smooth out bulges, labia plastic surgery to reduce inner lips of the vulva, anuses bleached and died pink, and so on.

They called him Frank- a big handsome man with lots of charisma. Mother always said she married him for his good looks and artistic talent, but when I got older, she admitted their compatible sexlife was the glue that kept them together. He was not only a fine calligrapher but he could sing on key as well as harmonize. In his youth, he was in a traveling Minstrel Show where they all performed in black face. After he returned home at the end of the First World War, he married Mother; or rather she roped him in.

My father was an easy going quiet man while Mother was the talker in the family. Her ambition was to have a large family, own a nice big home in a neighborhood that had good schools. She gave birth to five children and four survived. Owning a home didn't happen until my oldest Brother came back from WW2 and she bought a small track house with his GI loan. I had to count six blocks from the corner to pull into the right driveway during those early years. Eventually the houses began to look different as time passed.