by Betty Dodson
Traditional sex roles were barely affected by the women’s movement because most feminists didn’t want to abandon the universal dream of finding a prince or princess to love, marry, and live with happily ever after. Loving love masks women’s ignorance and stifles the ability to learn how to communicate, negotiate agreements, or learn any sexual skills. Intent upon rebelling against parental authority and getting out of the house, we unconsciously fall in love and marry someone who is a duplicate of one or both parents whom we were desperately trying to get away from.
Informed people approach the arts with the understanding that it will take at least ten years to master any art form. Yet when it comes to sexuality, it’s supposed to just happen magically. Unless they’re famous, most heterosexuals have limited access to prospective partners as they struggle through their sex lives with trial and error. It would be ideal if men and women could experience different kinds of sex with a variety of partners in order to explore a broader range of their sexuality before they made a commitment. Today, many of the twenty-something set have only been sexual with one or two partners before getting married. A similar analogy would be choosing your favorite food after eating in only two restaurants—McDonald’s and Taco Bell.
As a woman, I had to unravel sex from love, marriage, and security before I could understand how intrinsically they were bound together. In the seventies, when my career was going well enough to give me a modest income, I began enjoying sex with different men without angling for marriage and financial security. It soon became clear that what in the past I had called “falling in love” was really about “falling in lust.” When the sex was good, I suddenly got busy convincing myself it was because I was in love. When I was in love, I wanted to get married to secure, or “nail down,” the relationship. It wasn’t until I was able to separate love from sex that I began to fathom either one.
Eventually I was able to make a distinction between the different kinds of love I’d experienced. I know there are endless subtle shades to love, but this was my starting point to better understand this extremely powerful emotion that had for the most part ruled my entire life. Yet I had never defined the word or given it much thought. Love just was.
ROMANTIC LOVE
This is the love that’s about being in love with love and idealizing my beloved. This kind of love dominated the decade of my twenties and returned the moment I got divorced. I never really saw the man I claimed to love. Instead, I loved my fantasy of who I wanted him to be. Although sexual fulfillment or the promise of it was part of the early stages of each affair, the emotions of loving love dominated. We were always exclusive, two against the world. I demanded sexual fidelity as proof of his love and he promised to be faithful. Jealousy was a natural part of being in love. I was completely justified in throwing jealous fits of rage when I suspected that he might be attracted to another woman. The degree of my jealousy actually demonstrated the depth of my love; therefore, he could be manipulated through guilt while I withheld sex to punish him. Our emotional arguments and fights only fanned the flames of passionate sex when we made up.
Although my vision for our future was getting married and living happily ever after, these romantic affairs rarely lasted more than a few years because reality eventually eroded my illusions. These affairs were always sexually hottest during the first year. As our sexual exchange cooled down and the arguments heated up, I made every effort to change each lover back into my idealized image, but no matter how hard I tried, I failed. Reality would wake me from my romantic dream. The inevitable breakup had its own brand of sweet sorrow and painful suffering. Eventually I learned to move along to the next beloved without killing myself off with sorrow and regrets.
My marriage was a perfect example of loving love. Since our sexual exchange was never that good, both my husband and I took loving love to new heights. We dipped in and out of the presexual stages of romantic love with both of us being very affectionate and speaking of love while sleeping together without sex. Thanks to the promise my therapist made, I clung to the false hope that after we made our “marital adjustment,” our marriage would break out into longer sessions of passionate fucking so I could also have an orgasm, but love without sex continued to rule.
EROTIC LOVE
This kind of love is grounded in my body with physical and sensual pleasures at the center of the relationship. Erotic means the love of sex. Each partner appreciates the other while relishing the joy of mutual sexual gratification. Sexual love serves no other master than pleasure. My erotic lovers and I are inclusive. He or she can be married and either one of us can be sexually intimate with other people. Neither one of us expects the affair to last forever; it simply lasts for as long as it’s good. Erotic love can be a joyful part of life for an hour, a night, a week, a month, or for many years. It thrives in the present moment without projecting a future of togetherness. Don’t hold your breath waiting for puritanical Americans to ever accept loving sex for the sake of sex, because everyone will be desperately searching for love.
In the past, the French sustained erotic love by separating it from marriage. Mademoiselle married a man for security and children, while she had her lovers for sex. We are one of the few societies that expects sex and passion to be a natural part of marriage, although it rarely is. Today it’s acceptable for European married men to openly have mistresses and some wives still have their lovers. The French people knew all about and casually accepted President François Mitterrand’s mistress, who openly attended his funeral.
MARITAL LOVE
This kind of love has many faces. With day-to-day living, sexual passion inevitably fades to one degree or another. Some people continue loving love as they idealize the memories of those early romantic times. Other couples get divorced, fall into romantic love and marry again, and again like Liz Taylor and Larry King. However, it takes money to pull that one off. Some married men have sexual flings while others go for long-term extramarital affairs. These men get to have their cake and eat it, too—romantic flings with hot sex along with the respectable cover story of marriage that is required for the public image of politicians and corporate CEOs. A few liberated husbands and wives agree to have brief affairs with no intentions of ever ending their marriage.
Married couples that remain monogamous and stay together after romance fades can either have an intimate friendship with comfortable sex, a warm friendship with affection and minimal sex, or a distant, cool truce with no sex. Those couples that maintain a conflict-habituated marriage by fighting can stir up enough emotion to have hot sex in the process of making up occasionally. When couples say their partner sex keeps getting better after fifty years of marriage, they are either the exception that proves the rule or they have always had very modest sex.
Contrary to popular belief, falling in love doesn’t automatically beget good sex. Lovers have to make an effort to learn about each other’s bodies, minds, histories, and how they want to share their lives. They need to discover how they each create their own orgasms with self-loving, as well as share a few fantasies to learn about the other’s deepest erotic desires. Without this intimate knowledge, partner sex is a superficial process that is about posing, pleasing, or proving, never about enjoying sexual pleasure.
Still, there is no guarantee that even the most skilled of lovers having the best sex imaginable will stay together for a lifetime. In spite of wedding vows and commitment ceremonies, the truth remains that a partnership lasts for as long as it’s good. Couples can stay together for the sake of the children or for their careers. They can live together without sharing sex—some masturbate, others have affairs, and many abandon an erotic life altogether. There is no law that says couples must continue to enjoy their sexuality together, alone, or with others.
After several decades of listening to people tell me the intimate details of their sex lives, I can safely say the idea of two people living under the same roof and sharing everything is daunting. It’s asking too much of most human
s; yet the romantic myth of a lifetime of togetherness with endless hot sex continues to rule the American imagination. There is far less sexual pleasure going on in relationships and marriages than people care to admit. It’s as though we are a nation of sexually immature adults who refuse to give up believing in Santa Claus. The Disney Studios will see to it that our dreams of romantic love stay intact as each generation starts their conditioning with a re-release of Sleeping Beauty or Snow White.
The song may say that love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage, but smart people know sex and money make the world go round. And what about love? As much as we worship the idea of it, love more often hurts than heals. Love causes emotional distress. Love leads to unwanted pregnancies. Love consistently turns into its opposite—hate. There is a lot of violence going down in the name of love: jealous rages between lovers, spouse battering, parents abusing children, and friends fighting with each other. People not only live for love, they die for love, and they also kill for love. Men go to war for love of country and religious wars are waged for love of God.
Just as the Eskimos have different words for snow, we could use different words for the various kinds of love: parental love, marital love, sisterly love, brotherly love, friendship love, erotic love, and, of course, romantic love.
Instead of assuming all forms of love are the romantic variety, it would clear up a lot of confusion if a person said “I lust for you,” which would be erotic love. Or if someone said “I want to live with you for my lifetime,” which would be marital love. When a mother says “I love you” to a child, it is unconditional love, not the possessive romantic kind. Unrequited love would be seen as “safe love” since it never becomes sexual. And what about love that turned out to be friendship with sex? That would certainly put a dent in our desperate need to have exclusive romantic affairs that feed off possessiveness, jealousy, and insecurity. Love between friends might climb to the top of the charts as the most cherished kind of love once we stopped searching for our other halves in the so-called effort to be whole or to feel complete.
I’m reminded of Plato’s allegory: The gods created humans who were both male and female combined with four arms, four legs, and both sex organs. But when they saw that their creations had become so powerful that they were losing control, the gods cut them in half. That’s why to this day people are doomed to constantly search for their “other halves.” The idea that there is no such thing as a whole person makes this a depressing tale. However, it does clearly show how our romantic notions of love and being paired off make us helplessly codependent.
Are we a nation of unconscious “romantic love junkies” who, like Plato’s allegory, feel insecure unless our other half is constantly reassuring us that we are lovable? Regardless of the fact that therapists everywhere tell their clients they have to love themselves before they can ever love another, people continue to struggle with the idea. Is self-love so difficult? Could it be that we all have such low self-esteem that the prospect of loving ourselves is unthinkable? Do we need to be loved by someone in order to feel validated?
The Bible admonishes us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. Assuming all people are capable of loving themselves is like a bad joke, given that religion is most often the source of human shame, guilt, and self-loathing. According to most organized religions, we’re all repeat sinners when it comes to sexuality. On top of all that, we have to cope with the religious cult of romantic love.
In “Love,” an article I admired, Michael Crichton wrote:
Most of the people I know confuse love with possession. It’s easy to understand why; it’s built into the fundamental assumptions of our culture. “You’re mine,” says the popular song, “and we belong together.” Hardly anyone stops to question the sentiment.
As soon as we feel love, we immediately attempt to possess. We speak confidently of my boyfriend, my wife, my child, my parent. We feel justified in holding expectations about those people. We consider that perfectly reasonable.
Why? Because all our concepts of love ultimately derive from romantic love—and romantic love is furiously, frantically possessive. We want to be with our lover, to have him or her to ourselves, to possess. So strongly do we equate love with possession that we may even feel that if someone doesn’t want to possess us, he or she doesn’t really love us. Yet I would argue that what we call romantic love isn’t love at all. It’s a kind of emotional storm, an overpowering, thrilling attraction—but it isn’t love.
Real love isn’t possessive. It can’t be. Love involves giving, not taking.
We would all benefit from spending some quality time thinking about how we define and use the word “love,” especially since we are avoiding it at all costs, pursuing the dream of it, or deluding ourselves that we have it. Don’t get me wrong; I’m still a romantic love junkie. However, I now have periods of clarity when I am able to be in the moment and not to project my expectations of romance onto my partner. Those periods allow me to see love as some form of action—affection, consideration, appreciation, generosity, and, most important, understanding. Whether it’s romantic, erotic, familial, or friendship, the idea of love becomes more real when I remember it’s a collection of momentary acts rather than a constant state of grace.
4
THE BRIDAL SHOWER
We Haven’t Come a Long Way, Baby
The e-mail asked if I would be available to give a sex lecture to a group of women at a bridal shower who were all in their twenties. Immediately I thought, “What a great idea.” Kitty, the young woman who contacted me, said they considered having a male stripper at first, but that had been done so often. She and her girlfriend Brenda wanted something different. They both decided that having me would be fun as well as informative. Their offer came through my website, so neither one knew anything about me except the opening statement that ended with the sentence: “Join me for an honest, intelligent, and fun-loving exchange of ideas and images about my favorite subject, SEX.”
As we talked, I proposed bringing a few sex toys that would enhance women’s orgasms alone and with partner sex. I’d also bring some drawings of the female genitals with diagrams of the inner structure, and a dildo to demonstrate how to give a good blowjob. Kitty was thrilled with my proposal. We agreed on an hourly fee and I said the chances were pretty good it would last for three hours.
On Saturday, June 1, 2001, at eight p.m., I showed up at an East Side apartment with my bag of goodies. The room was filled with about twenty or so women who were all young, well-dressed, attractive New York professionals. There is nothing I like better than interacting with younger men and women to find out what they are thinking about in the new millennium. My first assumption was that these generation-Xers would be fairly sexually sophisticated, especially living in New York City.
My opening remark—“Your oversexed grandmother has arrived”—elicited only a few smiles. The rest of them weren’t sure how to respond. After all, older women with white hair weren’t supposed to be having sex. Kitty, the bright-eyed hostess, bubbled with enthusiasm as she welcomed me and introduced me to the other women. She showed me to a comfortable chair with a small end table in front of it.
As I placed the Magic Wand vibrator, a small battery-operated vibrator, and my Vaginal Barbell on the table, I began, by asking if they were all proficient masturbators. There was an outburst of hysterical laughter and no show of hands. Maybe they were laughing at the size of the electric vibrator, so I quickly explained it was meant to vibrate our sweet little clits. More laughter, but I didn’t stop. The best way to use a vibrator for masturbation was with a folded washcloth. When they used it with a partner, I recommended putting a washcloth over the top and holding it in place with a rubber band from a bunch of broccoli. They screamed with laughter.
Looking around the room, I realized only a few women were able to make eye contact with me. The future bride kept her gaze intently on the floor. Others were whispering in private conversations with th
e woman sitting next to them.
Finally Kitty asked why guys always wanted to watch their girlfriends masturbate? Why would she want to do herself when she had a boyfriend? After all, getting her off was his job, not hers. After lightheartedly accusing her of being a “do me, do me” girl, I said maybe men wanted to see how their girlfriends handled their clits so they’d learn something. The same was true for men. A woman could ask her boyfriend to do himself so she would know what he liked. Sharing masturbation was a great way to learn about each other’s sexual response. Besides, it’s very hot for a couple to watch each other!
Again the room filled with more howls of laughter. At that point I knew it was going to take awhile to break through the embarrassment, so I became a bawdy comedian, letting them laugh themselves silly. I dived into the pond of heterosexual romantic love, acutely aware of the absence of sexual knowledge that fills it.
Moving ever upward and onward, I passed out Betty’s Barbell, a resistance device that I’d designed and manufactured to work the vaginal muscles. It was made of stainless steel and doubled as a fabulous dildo. After a few women felt the weight of it, someone finally asked why it was so heavy. That’s when I explained that the weight kept it from shooting out of the vagina while a woman tightens her PC muscle. After talking about how to locate the muscle, I said that all women would benefit from doing the exercise with the Barbell in place while using some form of stimulation on the clitoris.
Looking at the two pregnant women in the room, I told them their doctors would tell them to do Kegel exercises after giving birth. Actually, a well-toned pelvic floor muscle makes having a baby easier as well as improves a woman’s orgasm. One expectant mother said she was already doing her Kegels.
