What is sex power? It’s no trivial fact that almost every human being you meet longs for sexual joy, and those who understand that fact have power. Unfortunately, shame, possessive-ness, questionable beliefs and the tendency to use people as a means place sex power in the hands of advertisers, religion, and people who are willing to take advantage or deceive. Our instinctive joy gets repeatedly associated with products like food or deodorant. To take back the usurped sex power requires more than talk, it requires risking an innovation, an invitation that some will reject at first. Moreover, when others accept the invitation, the relationship must exist outside our expectations born of imagination, advertising, religion, movies and love songs. We will be adapting to the situation itself instead of trying to get the situation to coincide with our inherited or preconceived ideas.
Sex is an event in nature a bit like a flowering fruit tree. A frost may rob it of blossoms. Still, through the light of kindness, love, adventure and understanding, we can create the environment for the blossoms to again emerge. The life in a tree does not exist to serve our ideas or demands. It exists for it’s own sake. In some ways sex is quite unlike a tree and more like a sunset. It’s ever-changing, sometimes it’s pale other times it lights up the sky like it’s on fire.
The more sexual joy becomes broadly available and harmless, the less we will be vulnerable to others manipulating our instinctive desire.
It’s hard to sell people something they already have. Why live our sexuality vicariously when some people around us would share with pleasure? I suggest that the sexy video below for deodorant offers us something we can’t get from their product. But lot’s of people want that something that’s why the ad works.
To create a more free and open environment for adventurous and intimate sexual love, we need more openness to discovery both our own and especially for other people. Let’s be truthful and understand that many good things are different from our concepts about them. We need an open mind and a willingness to walk through fears inserted into us by social forces. These fears exist in our minds today. The monsters of our imagination; those daydreams that play and induce fear, those narratives often destroy good things today.
Sex power is usurped by those who manipulate and seek power through it.
“one of my lovers shared with some of her friends that her relationship is open with her husband… Her friends listened to her and fretfully voiced their concerns, and the biggest question on their minds was, “how many men have you been with since the relationship has been open?” The answer (at that time) was two and these women felt shocked. They simply imagined that if this woman was outside of the tradition then she must have had many, many lovers… this idea was to scare themselves because here was a woman that they respected saying that it is okay to have more than one lover… this… is perceived as a threat, particularly if the listeners are suppressing sensual longing… they imagine something terrifying so they emotionally recoil from the reality… Perhaps they had visions of a woman willing to give head to any stranger who asks in public bathrooms, gang bangs or someone dying of AIDS as a result of their irresponsible sexual encounters. Whatever they thought they were not expecting the answer to be two partners other than her husband in thirteen years, and that these people were having safe sex with mutual respect, appreciation and honesty with all those involved. My lover spoke to these women and confirmed my speculation…
There is a very strong idea that if an expression is not supported by the “popular wisdom of the day,” meaning the known, then it must be unloving, harmful, or at best very risky because that is how the unknown is usually perceived. Even one of this country’s most cherished political documents, “The Declaration of Independence” gives voice to the tendency for people to accept the suffering of the known rather than enter into the unknown. Part of the document says:
…“all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
Excerpt: Todd Vickers, Truth Like Fire
Assume for a moment we’re willing to intelligently avoid real harm like coercion, recklessness, deceit and violence. Now let’s also free ourselves of the undue influence of others, we need to adapt our minds and our words to the truth of our bodies and circumstances.
I’m talking about the end of hypocrisy.
We may wish the fictional ideas we cling to about our self to be reinforced by both our circumstances and relationships. But no circumstance can stabilize any concept of self. When this becomes more clear, then regardless of the social conditioning we’ve endured, nothing forces us to believe or obey that conditioning or prejudice in our mind. This is a whole new kind of responsibility that takes us away from sex power because we don’t want to destroy possibilities by manipulating with sex. This may take us far off the map in the realms of the unknown and our past becomes less useful as a reference. This new responsibility (ability to respond) reveals possibilities for good things that are hidden in plain sight. Good things many others, like ourselves are hoping to enjoy before they die.
Why not let our sexuality be a pulsing, highly charged, celebration of life rendered reasonably harmless through intelligence. Let’s delight with others in joy while we can, because like any event in nature, this too shall pass.
By Todd Vickers