Happiness

Q: “You want sex? Now??”

By
Q: “You want sex? Now??”

The more stressed I am, the more I want sex. Want it to the point where I can find repeated statements in my journal to the effect that I felt I needed sex. Not comfort, not conversation, not food, not sleep. Sex. Which many people I know consider rather strange. “How can you want sex at a time like this?” is a question I was asked recently, and not for the first time. I’ve noticed a correlation between my drive for sex and my exposure to stress, especially that very un-sexy form of stress relating to death and dying. Given that in the past three years there have been five cancer diagnoses, two non-cancer related catastrophic illnesses, two deaths, and one impending death in my family, as well as my tendency to write down my thoughts and experiences, I’ve got a wealth of anecdotal material chronicling my responses to this…

Read more »

Libidinous Celibacy

By
Libidinous Celibacy

Silken on Sex #66: Celibacy has been in the news lately, and I don’t just mean the pious form of celibacy. I’m talking grown women and men choosing celibacy as a form of their sexual self-expression. Yes, that’s right: Celibacy is a form of sexual self-expression — it is possible to be celibate without being chaste. (Can you say masturbation boys and girls?) I am an advocate of the practice of libidinous celibacy. At first the juxtaposition of those two words would appear to be paradoxical, but I know from personal experience that such is not the case. A libidinous person may be someone who has lustful thoughts or is otherwise preoccupied with the drives of the libido…without necessarily acting upon them with a partner. Few adults can abstain from sexual intercourse (ie, be celibate) and not experience rising frustration at the sublimation of such a primitive and instinctual biological…

Read more »

Is it wrong to want a mistress?

By
Is it wrong to want a mistress?

Q: Lately I’ve been struggling with monogomy. My partner is a good man and a considerate lover, but sometimes I want to be with a woman, to enjoy a relationship with a woman. Is it wrong to want a mistress? A: Not at all. One of the fallacies we are socialized to accept as truth is that one person can be all things to another. We find people attractive before we enter a committed relationship, and we will find people attractive afterward. It is unlikely that a single partner can meet all of one’s sexual desires all the time. But more than that, it is about energy. Dyad (monogamous) relationships are often closed systems. The couple gets wrapped up in each other during the NRE (new relationship energy) phase, usually to the exclusion of other people. Which can temporarily heighten that NRE high, but inevitably leads to an energy crash…

Read more »

Silken on Sex #30: Opening the Gate to the Land of Pleasure

By
Silken on Sex #30: Opening the Gate to the Land of Pleasure

In this episode, Silken gives voice to the ages old difficulty between the sexes: the different arousal rates for men and women and the duration of excitement. Women have a near-infinite capacity for pleasure, and yet this boundlessness is rarely tapped. In this first part of a two part segment on Opening the Gate to the Land of Pleasure, she goes into the reasons why women rarely make the journey. In the next episode, she will discuss what sexy things men and women, can do to build sexual tension and reach fulfillment.

Read more »

Love in the Old, Love in the New

By
Love in the Old, Love in the New

And so ends a year that was both the worst and the best in my life so far. Three cancer diagnoses, two deaths, surgeries, illnesses, and a near-death experience for me — in ways it felt as though we were the Children of Job, a family cursed. For the most part, we chose not to make it mean that. Life Happens, I reminded everyone, And while we often don’t get to choose what happens, we always get to choose what we make it mean. I miss my sister, but at least I am missing only one, and not three out of the four. The long nights sitting at Caro’s bedside whispering to her to get up, to get out of bed, to live the rest of her life, how ever long that was — those nights paid off. She got out of bed, she did her chemo, and she is…

Read more »

Jealousy, posessiveness, fear, change, LOVE

By
Jealousy, posessiveness, fear, change, LOVE

Possessiveness, territoriality, the hoarding mentality — those things have always been so difficult for me to handle in loving relationships. When I was a child, I learned that the harder I tried to hold onto something I feared losing, the more of a certainty that fear became. So I simultaneously arrived at two things: In recognizing that loss was inevitable, I stopped fearing it. And, perhaps fatalistically, I prepared for it. In my past three long term relationships, which ran from 1988 through 2004, I had the same conversations with each of them: That nothing lasts forever, that no one person can be all things to another, that attraction to others is inevitable, that if one of us meets someone else we will be happier with, we should give our blessings to them. The happiness and well-being of the ones I love is essential to my own. And so I…

Read more »

Explore Your Sexuality

From my lips to your ears

Here is the Music Player. You need to installl flash player to show this cool thing!