SexyPrime, a blog by Susan Crain Bakos

IS YOUR SEXUAL PASSION LOST, MISSING OR A DESERTER--AND CAN YOU "GET IT BACK?"

Painting by Bara Diokhane, a passionate artist whose work inspires my dreams.

What is sexual passion?

 

Gina Ogden in her beautiful book, The Return of Desire, comes close when she describes desire (passion's younger sister) as a "skin hunger--the longing for hot sexual touch."

 

Jack Morin in the elegant and erudite, The Erotic Mind, explains passion in part as an erotic equation: Attraction + Obstacles = Excitement.

 

A lover says, "It's heat and emotion" while a friend involved in the arts says, "Artistic creativity is the intellectual form of sexual passion."

 

A reader, who flirted with passion's dark side, writes:  "I confused the heat of rage, anger and hate with passion--and fell for bad boys who turned out to be misogynists and racists when my head cleared." 

 

Some people seem to have more passion others.  The most passionate men I've known are alpha men, not particularly forthcoming in conversation about their "feelings" but deeply emotional in bed and about their life's work.  Is it possible to have sexual passion if you don't have that intense feeling for what you do--or for something else in the world--a positive driving emotion not born of rage?

 

Passion and its sister desire are not easily defined--though everyone seems to know when they've gone missing. Increasingly I am getting The Classic Question of Midlife Marriage from women (and some men) in their 20s and 30s, including many who aren't even married to their partners in low desire:

 

We've lost the passion in our relationship--how can we get it back?

 

Teachers of spiritual sexuality and practitioners of white bread suburban neo-Tantra offer up their answers (involving chanting and terminal eye gazing) to aging couples looking for something more than a Viagra or Cialis fix.  But what about the rest of us? We can pick and choose among the Passion Plans in magazines and self-help books that typically offer such tips as schedule sex dates, buy sexy lingerie and light candles.  Ambiance is lovely, but I am skeptical about its ability to do anything more than set a mood.  (If you have turned boring sex into something hot by following those tips, please tell me about it.)  That is why I study and write about technique.  The New Tantra:  Simple and Sexy is my take on Tantra, fusing the best of Eastern sex skills with those Western sensibilities often disparaged as "goal-oriented."  Wanting to maximize orgasmic potential within a realistic time frame does not make you a bad person.  

 

The romance and spiritual sex writers often pay scant attention to technique.  They believe "the science of sex" is cold--and that passion, like love, conquers all.  I don't believe it overcomes bad technique (or bad breath or poor hygiene or whatever really turns you off.)  Erotic skills facilitate the flow of passion from one lover to another.  Being good in bed may not guarantee you will find true passion--but you will have pleasurable sex, with nobody going home unsatisfied.

 

A recent MSN story "The Two Kinds of Husbands" claims that people marry for passion or friendship.  Can you be best friends and hottest lovers too?  Maybe not, at least not in the same time period.  

 

Women (and sometimes men) desperately want to be told that you can "get passion back"--even if truthfully it never was there.  I don't think so--or at least not by "working on the relationship."  Improve your sexual skills.  Have good sex.  Discover your passion in something else.  Maybe it will happen then between the two of you.  Not the kind of advice that sells magazines or self-help relationship books, is it?

 

I was chatting on the phone with my guy pal/poet Rogwolf last weekend.  He told me the story of the end of his marriage.  "For the last two years we drifted apart until divorce was just a formality.  I remember asking, Is it possible to get the passion back?  Finally, I admitted to myself that we never had it.  We had good sex, but we never had passion for one another."

 

Painting by Bara Diokhane.  Go to his Mora Gallery website (linked), contact him and ask to see his other work, including the grape leaf paintings inspired by the Senegalese who cross the sea in fragile boats to find work picking grapes at subsistence wages.  

 

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime 

FINDING GOD IN A WOMAN'S VAGINA: A Book, A Poem, A Painting--and My Hindu Altar

I have a Hindu altar with brass statues of Kali, Lakshmi, and two of Ganesha, the remover of obstacles and the patron saint of Mumbai, a place I hold dear.  In one statue, actually two movable figures attached at the cock, Ganesha is having intercourse in the YabYum (sitting) position with a woman.  (I bought it years ago in Mumbai's tumultuous Crawford Market.)  That position seems right to me. When I am looking for god, I look to the cock.  

Last week in a New York Times Arts Beat article, I read that 94 year old M. F. Husain, known as India's Picasso, was excluded from the largest contemporary art show in India (which opened last week) because the organizers can't guarantee his safety or the security of his work.  Many of his paintings portray Hindu deities, sometimes in the nude and in sexually suggestive poses.  The most famous work, "Nude Mother India" particularly upsets conservative Hindus who apparently never wander the stalls in Crawford Market. Husain left the country in 2007 after his home was vandalized and art works attacked at galleries and now lives in exile in London and Dubai. How is it possible that the ancient civilization which gave us the Kama Sutra has come down to this?  Just as the artist who carved the erotic figures into temples thousands of years ago, Husain is merely looking for god in a woman's vagina.

"Nude Mother India" by M. F. Husain

Artists, poets and novelists do create beauty in this secular quest that enrages the fundamentalist and devout.

Inspired by reflections on the painting and my sexy Ganesha, I asked an old friend and poet to write an ode to female orgasm for me.  He graciously complied--and here it is:

 

 

 

a stain spreads across the sheet

wet against the moment 

movement against the grain 

the wet deepens  

the moment turns  

electric into rhythm  

rhythm into dark and free 

there is no world outside this bed 

there is no life but in my cunt

the moment turns

shatters

breaking truth into rhyme

there is no reason outside this time

this time

this torrent

this unrelenting wave

 

 --ROGWOLF

(all rights reserved)

 

 

R's poem led me to search for a passage in a wonderful novel I just finished:  Louise Dean's The Idea of Love (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, HMH).  Ex-pats living in Provence, the characters are beginning to recognize the realities of their marriages and affairs--the mundane and dismal truths of sexual desire that belie the idyllic setting.  Richard, the main protagonist, travels to Africa in his job as a pharmaceutical salesman.  Alone there, he senses that his domestic life is about to implode.  His idea of love "seems to be just an illusion."

But while having intercourse with a one night stand, he glimpses something briefly reflected in her eyes--god, love?--that will inform his later choices.

 

 From the novel:

“When he opened his eyes, he saw that she was staring at his face and her lips were all tragic and her eyes were wet, and he was taken aback.  It nearly made him stop.  He should have looked at the eyes before now.  What a waste!  Looking into her eyes now, he felt drawn to something holy—a fire, life—it was sensational, he strove deeper inside her and felt a surge of excitement.  ‘So you think you’ll find God through a woman’s vagina?’”

 

 It's as good a place to look as any, isn't it?

By the way, this isn't chick lit, despite the somewhat incongruous cover.  They were striving for irony?  Louise Dean looks unflinchingly at the human interactions we call "relationships".  Her insights are as brilliant as her writing.

 

 

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BETTY DODSON!

 

"Orgy" by Betty Dodson

 

That sex world icon, "godmother of masturbation", accomplished artist and national treasure, Betty Dodson recently turned 80 years old.  She could pass for 50.  No lie.  Betty has a radiant glow that is an advertisement for sexy living and regular orgasms.  

 

If you aren't familiar with Betty's work, visit her website, Dodson and Ross Online.  In partnership with Carlin Ross, she has rejuvenated her career, doing what she's always done best, teaching women about orgasm, and much more.  Their You Tube posts are priceless.  Through her books, workshops and DVDs, Betty is responsible for more female orgasms than any man or group of men including Hugh Hefner and a collection of NBA All-Stars.

 

I do not understand why some publisher hasn't snapped up her memoir.  She writes beautifully, has led and is still leading an interesting life.  But you can only read her story in installments on the website.  Read the latest installment on artful hedonism and then start at the beginning.

 

Cheers, Betty!  

 

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime 

THE G SPOT DIALOGUES: Read A Great Article In Playboy Magazine

Photo:  Erotic temple art, Khajuraho, India

 

Someone was surely looking for the G spot in that pile-up, yes?  Can you find yours?  Or do you swear the G spot is a hoax?

 

"The Case of the Missing G Spot" by Chip Rowe is well-written, interesting, informative, occasionally witty--and free of the orgasm ideology that infuses articles by sex experts with a position to defend. (Once again I have Steve Otero of Sexy Spirits to thank for bringing this one to my attention.)

 

"Women will always be a mystery," Rowe writes, "but it never hurts to gather clues"--in sex labs.

 

He posits all the theories--with the research behind them--including the theory that a woman's ability to orgasm during intercourse can be determined by measuring the distance between her urethral opening and her clitoris.  Less than an inch will do it.  More than two?  No way.

 

Read the article!  If you have questions about it, write to me and I will get them answered for us.

 

Meanwhile, here's my belief:  An orgasm is an orgasm no matter how you get it.  

 

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SEX, ART AND A GREAT QUOTE FROM STEVEN: They Help Explain How Desire Works

 

Steven Otero, my Sexy Spirits pal, interviewed me for his Mondo Eros radio show this past Thursday; and we continued our discussion of all things sexual via phone and email (as, frankly, we do quite often.)  In the interview, I advised women to separate the man from the cock and worship that cock.  Steven later reminded me that he gave me a great line inspiring a post on how to make love to his cock.

 

He was telling me about the late director Gerard Diamiano's film "None So Deep"--less well known than his classic "Deep Throat".

 

The line:  "She made love to my cock, not to me--to my cock."

 

Making love to a cock is a very liberating experience for a woman--and, according to Steven, equally so for the man.  Today he wrote in an email:

"Why does a man want to have his cock made love to?  Perhaps in that moment he becomes one with his cock. he lets go of ego, personality.

"His divided conscience becomes one, his whole body is now one big cock.  Most of his life he is told, Don't let the little head rule the big head, don't think with your dick.  Bullshit, maybe it's time to give the cock it's due."

Beautifully said, Steven.  (You see why i love talking sex with him :)

After I read his email, I picked up the beleaguered The New York Times and read about how a 35,000 year old full-figured statue, an earlier version of the iconic Venus of Willendorf, with even more huge breasts, buttocks and exaggerated labia, is "providing new clues to how art evolved."  The article speculates that this Venus, like the later one, was likely a fertility object and used in shamanistic rituals.

Art seems almost to begin with earthy depictions of the female body, in full sexual glory; and the art was surely a form of worship.  Isn't the worship of sexual body parts, hers or his, an expression of pure desire?  Strip away everything else and focus on the erotic energy of the clit, the pussy, the cock.  Feel the intensity.  Early artists did that. 

Restless, I tossed the paper aside.  Now I was thinking about the work of an artist, not overtly sexual, but powerfully erotic.  I regret not having bought his paintings when I could have/should have done.  Sometimes I still dream them.  Here is one:

The artist is Bara Diokhane.  You can see more of his work on his website, Mora Gallery.

Some of his pieces that are not on the website are quite astonishing, done with grape leaves mixed into the paint and applied to canvas.  A New Yorker, he is a native of Senegal and, though he is descended from a family well-connected in politics and arts, he identifies with the poor Senegalese who boarded rickety ships to cross the sea and pick grape leaves in Greece.  Many of them didn't survive their journeys.

Bara's art reflects his passions, political and artistic.  And what awakens desire in a woman like deeply held passion in a man?

Sometimes I can only connect to such a man if I make love to his cock before I get to know him.  When I kneel before a magnificent cock and take it into my hands and my mouth, I do feel (as Steven says) that the man is one with his cock and I am experiencing the very best of him.

 

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Your Inner Vagina Could Be An Object d' Art!

Back in the wild and crazy days of rock'n'roll, some girls became a little bit famous for making penis casts--of their one-night-stand rock star lovers.  (In our time, my pal Cheryl Means, inventor of Talking Head is a partner in Clone-a-Willie, kits that can turn any penis into a piece of chocolate.)  Yet the penis has been less objectified in art than the breast or vagina.

What is even less objectified in art than the mighty dick?

Your inner pussy.

Sculpture, "The Spice of Life" by Jamie McCartney

Inspired by a doctor who makes vaginal molds as part of her research into ethnic differences, the Brit artist Jamie McCarthy is offering an "internal pussy casting service."  (FYI:  I read about this on sexblo.gs, a fun and informative on-line sex newsletter that is one of my daily necessities.)   How does that work?

He prefers the model feel "relaxed and sexy."  Then he inserts "goo which sets into rubber in a few minutes."  The results, he says, are "amazing"--with one cast looking like a "weird sea creature."

"It's a real eye-opener to see how  large a vagina can expand," he says.  "I tell you, boys, it makes your cock seem ridiculous!"

The molds are transformed into a polished acrylic or glass bust  One of the pieces is on permanent display at The Kinsey Institute for Sex Research.   Jamie  studied in the U. S. and his work has been shown here.  Visit the website.  He is doing some amazing erotic art, including sculptures.

And take a moment to appreciate your inner pussy.

 

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Art Dreams

Sometimes I dream in paintings.  For many years Van Gogh's "Starry Night," part of the permanent collection at MOMA, was my favorite painting.  Whenever I was in midtown, I would pop in the museum, head for "Starry Night" and stand in front of it for several minutes--and later dream that scene of night sky with the stars that seem to be in motion.  (I still do that occasionally; and on the right night, I feel the stars swirling inside me.)

Now I am dreaming of paintings with more erotic passion beneath the surface.  The work of one artist in particular is enlivening my dreams.  I've mentioned him on the blog:  Bara Diokhane.

When I look at some of his work now, I think:  This could be an arousal image for the first step in The Orgasm Loop.  I have told women to choose a simple image, like a color or a flower, a photograph of the sunset.  But maybe more complex and complicated images will work as well or better for some women.  Let's try it!

Women often have difficulty sustaining arousal.  We let concerns about our bodies, the work that isn't done or anger at our lovers short-circuit arousal.  That's why having an arousal image in mind is so important.  When you feel desire slipping away, you focus your mind solely on that image which you associate with arousal.  I write st less length about O Loop in several of my books for Quiver, but The Orgasm Loop is a do-it-yourself complete course in orgasm.

Look at Bara's work online.  Take every opportunity to stop and appreciate art--in galleries, museums, in books and magazines, in public spaces.  Do you feel a sensual, even erotic, connection to some pieces?

I want to hear about that.

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The Sexual Power Of The Creative Man

I remember the first time I heard Makane, a drummer from Mali, play the djembe drum.  He is one of the best djembe drummers in the world; and you don't need to read his press clips to know that.  The power of his drumming is so great that it opens your soul. It is sexual 

Musicians and artists, actors and a few writers exert a primal force that some women feel immediately and intensely in our genitals.  We are aroused by their creativity, especially if they are very good at what they do.  (Do other women feel the same way about titans of industry?  Yes, I suppose they must.)  Personally, I have vowed not to let that happen to me again.  The muse thing--no.  And these creative men keep impregnating young women into their senile years.  I thank the goddess I'm beyond childbearing.  So, really, I'm immune now--right?

But I have been pondering the power of art, erotic and otherwise, the past few daysafter meeting a wonderful artist, Bara Diokhane who deserves greater public accliam.

 

I was thinking about art when I went uptown to Minton's Playhouse on 118th Street to hear my pal Michael Karr and his group play.  They were so good--hot and sexy, perfect for a sultry summer night.  I sat at the end of the bar and chatted with the musicians as they took breaks. 

The legendary drummer Dennis Davis (who played with Stevie Wonder and so many others) sat in for Victor Jones at one point; and Victor and I reminisced about sexual escapades (not with one another) at the Gramercy Park Hotel back in the pre-renovation days when it was deliciously shabby.  (Who has stories of sex in the old lobby bar, that big, winding space filled with overstuffed sofas and chairs?  I gave some great blow jobs there!)

Ron Afif, the guitarist--catch him with his own group at Zinc Bar on Monday nights--said this to me and Gina, Michael's girlfriend:

"The way we play is directly related to sex.  When I was in my twenties, I knew I played especially good if I got laid that night.  Now [at 40] I'm happy if anyone gets laid.  We all celebrate for him."

Gina and I laughed. 

But I realized:  He's right; he's got it down.  Some women are erotically charged by creative men.  Art and music (and literature) touch our minds and souls but also our pussies.

That seems like a revelation in America where obviously erotic art is almost missing from our museums and galleries.   Even most sex books are artless, relying on stock photos that emphasize the difficulty of positions as if sex were an Olympic event. I am proud to say that Quiver books stand out from the others because they are beautifully photographed and designed--and because the people who make them understand the art of sex.   

I get a charge out of good art and music; and I want my sex charged with art. 

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime