<\/p>\n
Questions at the Solstice<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s that holiday\/solstice\/new year time again.\u00a0 Each year, one way or another, the time of the dark of the sun seems to inevitably put me in some kind of philosophic mood, stepping back to look at some kind of \u201clarger picture.\u201d\u00a0 This is when I feel obliged to take stock of the lengthening trajectory of my life, to muse about what makes sense and what doesn\u2019t, what about my life feels rich and rewarding, what feels empty and unsatisfying.\u00a0 In the wee hours of the morning, when I\u2019m awake and staring at the ceiling, wondering whether I should brave the cold to get up and work, adolescent questions like \u201cWhat matters in the end anyway?\u201d and \u201cWho the hell am I, really?\u201d ricochet through cyclical ponderings of the recurring issues of being alive — basic things like family, intimacy, life, death, love, guilt.\u00a0 And (of course) sex.<\/p>\n It seems to be in the nature of my genes — or my chi, or my upbringing, or my personality structure — to always be attentive to what I see as the sexual nature of everything and everyone around me.\u00a0 Maybe I\u2019m just monomaniacal, but my curiosity and interest keep getting tweaked by the sexual dimension of, well, just about everything and everyone.\u00a0 Sometimes I think this tunes me in to sexual issues that other people just don\u2019t notice; other times it inevitably leads me down blind alleys.\u00a0 If nothing else, it keeps me amused.\u00a0 Watching the ongoing sexual nature of the universe, which most people seem to ignore or deny, is like looking at the world through a kaleidoscope, endlessly changing and fascinating.\u00a0 \u201cWhy do you have to sexualize everything?\u201d my mother would ask me over and over again, year after year.\u00a0 \u201cWhy does everyone else desexualize everything?\u201d was all I could ask in return.<\/p>\n I suppose it\u2019s a question of semantics.\u00a0 If \u201csex\u201d means putting Tab A in Slot B, then sex is a very narrowly circumscribed part of life to be sure.\u00a0 But if sex is a certain kind of feeling, acted on or not, directly expressed or not — a certain way of being on and alive, a certain way of engaging whoever and whatever is around us — then the territory that owes at least some fundamental allegiance to the sexual stars and stripes is very far-reaching indeed.<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Of Sex and Metasex<\/strong><\/p>\n It was the inveterate sexual voyager and philosopher Marco Vassi who coined the intriguing term \u201cmetasex.\u201d\u00a0 Vassi thought it was essential to separate sex undertaken for the purpose of procreation from all the other forms of sexual activity that had nothing at all to do with perpetuating the species.<\/p>\n In his 1975 essay, “The Metasexual Manifesto,” Vassi proposed restricting the term \u201csex\u201d to procreation, while designating all other things sexual by a different term entirely, \u201cmetasex.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cSex is,\u201d he wrote, \u201cas the traditionalists have it, a vehicle for making babies, and nothing else…. However, there is a vast realm of erotic behavior which falls outside this stricture.\u201d\u00a0 Metasex, according to Vassi, is all that we engage in \u201cfor pleasure, for expressing affection, for exchanging energy, for money, for communication and exploitation, for meditation.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe failure to distinguish between sex and metasex,\u201d Vassi asserts, is \u201cat the very core of all our erotic difficulties.\u00a0 The basic error in all erotic thinking lies in muddying the aesthetic of metasex with the moral contingencies of sex.\u201d\u00a0 Sex and metasex, he says, \u201chave different qualities of tone or texture.\u00a0 With sex, reverence and responsibility are the guiding attitudes.\u201d\u00a0 With metasex, on the other hand, \u201cthe necessary quality is compassion.\u00a0 Since the circumstances of metasex are so flexible and range over the full spectrum of human behavior, it is all the more essential that the participants do not lose sight of one another\u2019s humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n Remember that this was back in the 70\u2019s.\u00a0 Vassi was, with characteristic grandiosity, identifying the very shift in sexual paradigm that has been preoccupying our troubledly evolving sexual culture ever since that time.\u00a0 The mass availability of reliable, affordable birth control that swept the land in the late 60\u2019s and early 70\u2019s made it possible for the first time since the Mayans (who also seem to have had access to reliable contraception) for people to pretty effectively disconnect sex for pleasure (or power or adventure or self-discovery or recreation or pissing off one\u2019s parents) from what had previously been its inevitable consequence:\u00a0 babies.\u00a0 As a result, all the traditional cultural perspectives on what sex was all about, and therefore how it should be conducted and socially regulated, were essentially irrelevant, misguided, and obsolete.\u00a0 The basic sex-cultural divide we have been witnessing over the last thirty years or so — and the political and cultural battle for control of sexual values and attitudes that that divide has precipitated — is the division between those of us who relate to sex primarily as what Vassi calls metasex and the traditionalists whose sexual values and social codes address sex as if it were still basically and fundamentally an activity fundamentally concerned with procreation.<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Putting the Meta<\/em> Back in Metasex<\/strong><\/p>\n I have always liked Vassi\u2019s term, metasex, but not in the way that Vassi defined it.\u00a0 What I like is the idea of metasex that\u2019s analogous to meta<\/em>physics — that which goes beyond what we usually think of as sex, that goes beyond the territory that we usually think of as sexual turf.\u00a0 Twentysome years after Vassi\u2019s essay, separating sex from procreation doesn\u2019t seem very meta<\/em>.\u00a0 Most of us outside the fundamentalist fold know and feel that sex is not essentially about procreation, that sex is primarily an emotional, psychological, and sensual sort of thing, rather than something biological.<\/p>\n Like a lot of people, I am intrigued with sex that is meta<\/em> in the sense of being taboo, of crossing some socially defined limit of propriety, whether that be homosexuality, or bisexuality, or s\/m, or blood play, or fisting, or group sex, or all the issues around crossing and blurring gender lines and definitions.\u00a0 I think the intrigue for me in all these sorts of boundary-crossing sexualities is not essentially about being bad but rather a fascination with anything that expands the limits of what it is possible for people to do and experience.\u00a0 My instinctive reaction to all the metaproper sexualities isn\u2019t really \u201cOh my god, how naughty!\u201d but rather \u201cOh my god, how amazing that there are all these different ways people get to be and get to be sexual!\u201d<\/p>\n But there is something rolling around inside of me that\u2019s meta to even all this, that has to do with seeing sex everywhere, with feeling that there is a sexual component to much of life that most other people don\u2019t seem to think of in sexual terms.\u00a0 I think that most people, even those people who have separated sex from its biological roots and from its socially defined rules of propriety, still think of sex as a rather well-defined, literal activity.\u00a0 For me, there is something about what it means to be sexual that is more ubiquitous and less specific.\u00a0 For me, sex is also a state of mind or, better, a state of being, that affects not only what we do, but also how we think, how we feel, how we relate to just about every part of being alive.\u00a0 To wit:<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Passion According to St. Matthew<\/strong><\/p>\n I first sang in a choir when I was in college.\u00a0 I went to Oberlin College, a school known among other things for its excellent conservatory of music. The Oberlin College Choir was, and still is, known nationally as one of the finest collection of young choral singers around.\u00a0 Hearing them sing was a definite thrill, but of course to be a member of the College Choir meant you had to be one of those people with magical and well-trained voices, neither of which was me.<\/p>\n At the other end of the skill spectrum, however, Oberlin also had a choral group called the Musical Union, where untrained, inexperienced music lovers like myself could have the experience of rehearsing and performing major pieces of classical music.\u00a0 When I was at Oberlin, both the College Choir and the Musical Union were conducted by a man named Robert Fountain, an ecstatic mystic who totally devoted himself to the wonder of making beautiful music happen every time he took a baton in his hand.<\/p>\n There were 300 of us in the Musical Union, including many of the fine musicians from the conservatory.\u00a0 We sang some of the most transporting and transcendental choral music in the world:\u00a0 Brahms\u2019 Requiem<\/em>, Mozart\u2019s Mass in C Minor<\/em>, Honegger\u2019s Joan of Arc at the Stake<\/em>, Bach\u2019s St. Matthew\u2019s Passion<\/em>.\u00a0 We would work on a piece of music for an entire semester and then perform it in the college\u2019s immense chapel for all the other students, faculty, and townspeople.\u00a0 Week after week we would perfect phrases and passages, learn more and more how to deliver ourselves over to the music, let the music take us far beyond our normal states of existence to a state hard to put into words.\u00a0 The more familiar we became with the text, the more comfortable we became with the technical aspects of the music, the more we could just let go and soar.\u00a0 And Robert Fountain would demand that we do just that, always setting a personal example for us, facing us from his podium, sweat drenching his t-shirt and emotions washing over his face as he waved his arms and moved his body, and shouted and smiled at us to give him what he wanted to hear.<\/p>\n I was 17 years old (and then 18, 19, and 20).\u00a0 I was discovering sex with an intensity I had never imagined, let alone experienced, before.\u00a0 My girlfriend and I couldn\u2019t keep our hands off each other.\u00a0 Night after night after night we would drown in the wonder of each other\u2019s bodies.\u00a0 I was truly possessed.\u00a0 And there was no doubt about it:\u00a0 The feeling I had when I was being swept away by the texture of her skin or the taste of her mouth was the same kind of feeling I had when I was sailing on the passion of Brahms\u2019 musical homage to his dead mother.\u00a0 Every Monday night for four years I had group sex with 300 young men and women at a college that was too sexually conservative to allow males and females to so much as sit in each other\u2019s rooms, in a chapel named for Charles Finney, the notorious 19th-century, fire-and-brimstone Protestant evangelist.<\/p>\n Later I sang in other choirs, and although the experience was never the same as singing under Robert Fountain, the ecstasy was definitely there.\u00a0 Was it just me?\u00a0 After particularly moving rehearsals I would turn to other people in the choir, wanting to share the excitement of the moment, to not be alone in all that I was feeling.\u00a0 \u201cWas it as good for you as it was for me?\u201d I would want to know, though of course I would never ask anyone such a question directly.\u00a0 People who sing in choirs tend to be good churchgoers; it\u2019s not what you\u2019d call the most sexually open of subcultures.<\/p>\n Usually, although I would swear I could hear the ecstasy in other people\u2019s voices and see the ecstasy in their faces while they were singing, their faces would be positively sedate afterwards, their bodies composed, their eyes unshining.\u00a0 When I would say something like \u201cWasn\u2019t that wonderful?\u201d they would answer with something like \u201cYes, I thought we sounded really good tonight.\u201d\u00a0 I would be confused and to some extent embarrassed, feeling suddenly very exposed, very vulnerable, and very alone.\u00a0 Maybe it was just me who experienced choral singing in a sexual way.\u00a0 Or maybe other people\u2019s experience was similar to mine but they didn\u2019t see it or acknowledge it as sexual.\u00a0 Either way, I learned to keep the sexual nature of my experience to myself.\u00a0 But in the privacy of my inner self I knew that, at least for me, sex was precisely what was going on.<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n A Gastronomic Tale<\/strong><\/p>\n Olav Andr\u00e9 Manum and Hanne Grasmo of the Norwegian erotic magazine Cupido<\/em> are in San Francisco, and Helen and I are showing them around.\u00a0 They have brought ten pounds of smoked Norwegian salmon and two bottles of trans-equatorial Aquavit liqueur as presents, and we are having a wonderful time sharing perspectives and getting to know each other.\u00a0 We make our way to Manora\u2019s, that wonderful Thai restaurant south of Market.\u00a0 The mood is festive and we are famished.\u00a0 Olav, it turns out, is a grand lover of good food.\u00a0 He pours over the menu with excited eyes, having the hardest time choosing between one appealing dish and another.\u00a0 I don\u2019t remember what he orders, only that both he and Helen order the same thing.<\/p>\n The food comes and we all dig in.\u00a0 Olav and Helen raise their forks to their mouths at the same moment.\u00a0 Whatever it is they are having, it is exceptional.\u00a0 Both their faces go blissful, their eyes close, and in unison they moan their delight.\u00a0 Hearing each other, they open their eyes and exchange an electric look of deep intimate understanding.\u00a0 Then all four of us burst out laughing.<\/p>\n There is no question about it:\u00a0 Helen and Olav have just come simultaneously, with Hanne and me appreciatively watching.\u00a0 The four of us, happily, have learned our way beyond whatever church training and restraining we may have experienced somewhere in our lives.\u00a0 We do not have to keep our ecstasy private.\u00a0 We do not have to desexualize it or be embarrassed by it in the least.\u00a0 We are free to acknowledge and share the sexual nature of what has happened.\u00a0 We laugh, I think, both for the beauty of the moment and for the freedom to experience that moment in a frankly sexual way.\u00a0 We take a quick step closer together in becoming friends.<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Toward an Omnisexual Perspective<\/strong><\/p>\n Maybe it just confuses things to talk about things like singing and eating dinner as sexual experiences.\u00a0 But I think it is helpful to notice that many of the most powerful and meaningful feelings we have when we are doing the things we think of as sexual also show up when we are doing things we think of as non-sexual.\u00a0 Indeed, I think those feelings and that transcendental way of being also show up at times when we\u2019re not necessarily doing<\/em> anything specific at all.<\/p>\n I think there is something sexual about singing, about eating, about swimming, about dancing, about walking, about lying still, about breathing.\u00a0 I think there is something sexual about talking, about touching, about looking at another person.\u00a0 I think there is something sexual about simply being in our bodies, being in our imaginations, being in our thoughts, being in our dreams.\u00a0 I think sexuality exists in us continuously, at least from birth and probably before, separate from what we do and don\u2019t do with it, separate from how we express it or try not to express it.\u00a0 I think that sex is, in the end, the primary life force, that sex simply is.<\/p>\n If we see sex as an omnipresent continuity, then we can stop being so dismayed when its presence makes itself known at unexpected and seemingly incongruous times.\u00a0 It is certainly my experience that paying attention to the ongoing sexual aspects of who we are and how we interact with others helps explain why things happen the ways they do.\u00a0 And we can acknowledge the continuity of sexual existence without being afraid that this sexuality will therefore somehow take us over and distort our lives.\u00a0 We can see that sex is everywhere and still get to determine what kind of overt and covert sexual expression is appropriate in different circumstances and with different people.\u00a0 Indeed, attending to the ongoing sexual subtext of our lives can help us to be better able to shape and manage our sexual natures so that they better serve both ourselves and the people around us.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n January 9, 1998<\/p>\n Copyright \u00a9 1998 David Steinberg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" <\/p>\n Questions at the Solstice<\/p>\n It\u2019s that holiday\/solstice\/new year time again. Each year, one way or another, the time of the dark of the sun seems to inevitably put me in some kind of philosophic mood, stepping back to look at some kind of \u201clarger picture.\u201d This is when I feel obliged to take stock […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comes-naturally","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}