Protect Me From What I Want: Porn Just Got Dirty!

So, porn in the UK just got seriously dirty and we need your attention here people!

Yesterday, a new law was passed in the UK making a list of specific acts illegal in porn in this country. Now, this list has absolutely NO bearing whatsoever on anything that could be considered even remotely helpful, healthy or healing. In fact, the opposite would appear to be true in that upon closer scrutiny, it seems to serve to further marginalise people and groups already feeling the sting of this kind of irrational legislation or their place in the existing social pecking order, in particular women, the LGBT community and the fetish world.

Now, I'm an open minded sort of a woman; I've explored my sexuality in as many aspects as I can think of throughout my life, with some exceptions of course, I mean not everything is my tasse du thé after all. It would be fair to say however, that I felt that one of the safest places for exploration I've ever experienced was in fetish clubs where my boundaries were always well and truly navigated and respected, and the breaking of those is in fact seriously frowned upon within this community.  Diversity of sexual expression is also most welcome: Leave your shame at the door please. Not every place or person respects this of course but nothing in life is really like that is it, and as far as it goes, these places always felt extremely SAFE.

From my explorations of fetish and BDSM, I can also say that 1) I throughly enjoyed them, and 2) No children or animals were hurt in the process and 3) I was kinda proud of my flogger marks and pleasantly stinging buttocks! So what gives here? Surely this is quite an innocent sentiment below...

Haven't us Brits always found the delicate 'thwack' of leather on willow a pleasure (cricket), or the whistle of air as crop hits thigh (equestrian pursuits) an unparalleled delight? Hasn't the scrum down in rugby always resulted in more than 'light' bruising? But that's ok because it's sport? And what about boxing? Cage fighting? Wrestling? Judo? I could go on - all consenting sports that often require a willing acceptance of the risk of injury. Well aren't I entitled to be the arbiter of that in my own sexual expression? It would seem not, for when we add sex into the equation, suddenly there's a flurry of outrage and censorial judgment. If it's about valour and the honour of your team or your country that's ok, but if it's about pleasure it's not? This double standard has to stop and I don't mean just in relation to sport but in relation to gender. The new law makes face sitting an illegal activity on the grounds that is "potentially life-endagering"! And female ejaculation? Please educate me as to how this can be deemed worthy of a total ban? I think I must be doing something wrong here because I am genuinely perplexed!

But I don't think it's because we are getting anything wrong actually. I think what is at play has some strange undercurrent of a regressive and perhaps ulterior motive. Is this part of a strategy of some sort? These politicians aren't stupid, so how can anyone with any intelligence whatsoever deem that it's not okay to face sit, but it is ok to aggressively face f**k (where a man thrusts his wonderful pride with some degree of brute force into the open mouth of a woman). It's okay for a man/group of men to ejaculate all over a woman but not okay for a woman to ejaculate over a man? It's not okay for me to consent to you spanking me and leaving a mark or two but it is okay for a boxer to knock an opponent into unconsciousness? The way I see it is this, if I consent to you spanking me, well I'm an intelligent woman and if I want it I will have it, if I want to watch it, I want to watch it. The key words are here: 'consenting', and 'adult'. I don't need a nanny and I don't remember employing one. Funnily enough there's a whole genre of porn based around adult babies, where one adult plays a nannying role over another, in that instance it's clearly defined role play but with these state governed censorship laws it's simply offensive! 

No, what's at play here is far more sinister. When I was a student we saw the evolution of the "Off The Shelf" campaign to remove porn from all top shelf placement in shops. Now in our technological age it's the 'ban online porn' movement, only there is no consistency, no equality, no logic or reason and plenty of hypocrisy. I don't actually like a great deal of porn. I find it seriously lacking in imagination, tenderness, and eroticism and way too loaded in control, aggression and false representations of gender and intimacy. I prefer my sex connected, present and full of integrity. Whether a one off or a relationship, whether vanilla or wild and dirty; as long as it's full of that connection, presence and honesty, and not riddled with guilt, deceit and shame, then I'm ok with the variations on the theme. 

If you care about freedom of speech, and if you think that to educate your children, rather than conceal, ban or imagine rather foolishly that human beings aren't naturally curious about sex, and from an early age too then please sign the petition. If you think that surely it's better to communicate than to ban, then please sign the petition - and let our politicians know that frankly it's us who will show zero tolerance to ignorance rather than you to your people by demonstrating no more than your petty moralistic judgements. My crop is simply buzzing for a bottom to whoop over this one and I bet I'd find that bottom in the corridors of Westminster in full enjoyment of a bit of illicit sexual frisson. Mr Cameron, you have made a grave error with this one! As usual our sex has become a class, gender, and choice loaded gun and you're pointing it in all the wrong directions. So I have only this to say….

The Three Keys

Tantra; sexual pleasure and exquisite intimacy for grown ups or sex marathons for pop stars? What is it and what do you know about it?

For me, the discovery of tantra was like coming home; it answered in me a deep calling that I'd been longing for and never before found. It made perfect sense. It saw the marriage of my beliefs around spirituality, sexuality and sensuality come crashing at me like one of those full body orgasms I'd only ever heard about but never quite experienced, and then there it was.

The practice of tantric sex is actually not really about 'practising tantric sex', more that you just allow the possibility of becoming much more conscious and present in your body and in your connection to either your partner/s or your self in your sexual explorations. That's to say you don't get a "to do" manual but you do get lots of really useful and important tips on deepening your ability to really feel your sexual energy, to raise it and to use it to benefit your health, well being, your sense of self and your vitality on every level. I guess it's like anything else that you commit to studying, only probably quite a lot more fun whilst you're in the learning stages than say...learning about car mechanics (unless you happen to be a little kinky about cars that is!)

Basically, we've been having sex for a very long time. Somewhere along the way, many of us got loaded with messages driven by guilt, fear and shame about that, and we began to hide parts of ourselves that we may have felt more freely able to express before we decided that these negative messages we'd been given must have been 'true'. At the same time, our own sexual expression became distorted through our own investment in keeping other parts of ourselves hidden, riddled with false notions that we are not okay, that we are somehow 'less than' due to the constant barrage of media representations of love, lust and romance; in fact of just being human within a complex western culture. Here is what we aspire to right? (see below)

But most of us don't look like the photo above, don't want what the photo represents, don't live like that, or have that kid of lifestyle/body/money/skin color etc etc....but it is what we should want according to the popular press. Hell when my brother got married one well dressed guest sidled over to me asking the classic "is it you next then?" and when I answered that on the contrary, it was not what I wanted at all, he took one look at my tattoos and henna dyed hair and replied "no, I shouldn't think it is dear" and I was royally snubbed for not wanting what everyone is supposed to want!

So, for me, tantra and the liberated exploration of intimacy and sexuality has been a bloody goddess-send! I love men! I adore women and I love sex! I love peeling back layer upon layer of my own sexual expression and the possibility of it and I know that there is so much more to learn. It's taken me half my life to get to this point and damn fine that I did before I got lost in dry humping, headache city or porno-rama fakeness! Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking porn per se but it cannot be the only outlet for sexual fantasies or we'd be well out of balance!

In tantra, the 3 keys to great sex are really very simple: breath, movement and voice but you'd be surprised how many of us are not even getting that simple formula 'right'. It's true that any kind of sex will most likely mean you're breathing and moving at the very least (don't get me started!!) only here we're talking about conscious breathing and conscious movement. As for voice, well I shriek like a banshee (Mr Bellocq recently said I would concern the parking warden on the National Trust car park if I didn't tone it down a bit and I can honestly say it was a first to be mid cum and have parking regulations brought into the equation!)...so yes, I shriek and I speak and I moan and groan and I cannot actually find my sexual self without my voice for the most part. So yes, I want the dirty, filthy, tender, loving, sassy, noisy, connected, sweaty, soft, hard, pounding, gentle sex that is all of our birthrights should we wish to take up that mantle. Tantra is offering me that full range of expression. Check out some schools and discover for yourself...you could do worse for yourself than open your heart and your mind (and your legs will certainly follow!)

more on tantra to come....meantime, have fun, respect and stay smutty!

Fuck Me Harder....

...a.k.a, the porn sex myth.

So, your divine Hostess Claudia finds the cogs and machinery of her inner mind kicking into action once more. It's been a long break, much to ponder and many changes. I've given up tantra working as I fell in love and for me personally, I find it too hard to manage both love and sexuality work at the same time. God knows that relationships can be challenging enough without throwing client relationships into the mix and add into that full time day job and 3 kids...well you get the picture; even Superwoman would falter!

My default setting is to overDO rather than overBE, and when I'm in full swing acting this out, I admit to a tendency to burnout. Sound familiar? well, my medicine for burnout can be sex. I love sex and to be frank, I find that it relaxes me in ways that little else can, so imagine my delight upon completion of a recent tantra for women course, discovering that there are exercises I can consciously use to raise and channel sexual energy whilst meditating!! Now that's my kinda meditation, something that has never come easily to me before, so I've been exploring this a while now (more posts on tantra to follow) and I find it is leading me to consider some interesting reflections upon the nature of sex, fucking, love, intimacy and the like.

Until now, as a self confessed orgasm junkie, sexual pleasure has most definitely been achieved with the golden carrot of the thought of the deliciously divine orgasmic end result dangling omnipresent. Sex without orgasm felt like a major disappointment and often, in order to get that if I'm being completely honest,  fantasy would be activated to greater and greater degree. Fucking harder, talking dirtier, experimenting by going out on ever daring limbs, and with many of those I sure had no map 'home'. Don't get me wrong, I'm not averse to the odd bit of porn, the odd bit of fantasy, or the odd bit of sexual adventure at all, however, I do think that a great deal of mainstream porn is de-sensitising us to real intimacy and that intimacy has almost become a dirty word! 

The problem lies, as far as I can see it, in that' same ole same ole' split that sees the (often religiously based) chastity advocates owning the INTIMACY word whilst the rest of us speak in carnal tongues about the pleasures of fucking, however some of my most pleasurable sexual experiences of recent months have come from moving away from porno style fucking into sensual sexual intimacy. This I have managed to do without sacrificing my filthy whore nature to the lamb of love, and I'm wondering if this is in fact part of the same tendency to separate 'good' and 'clean' sex from 'bad' and 'dirty' sex.....yup...just like we do with women.

There are good girls and bad girls right? Those who are marriage material and those who are playthings. Those you want to fuck and those you want to treasure. Virgins and wives versus whores? But for those of us who court both real passionate intimacy and real dirty unashamed sexual pleasure, what offers you/us the best sex ever? What makes your sex great and your intimacy profoundly touching? Do you enjoy porn? Do you use porn to get you off? Do you see intimacy as a 'dirty' word and is it in fact the last taboo in these days of increasingly available sexual imagery?

Just askin'........do come in and chat....x

Sex: What makes it great?

Having spent the last few evenings firmly entrenched in Anna Span DVDs, I've come to thinking about what makes sex great for women. I felt strangely empowered (or was it aroused?!) after watching Anna's productions, and given that I'm generally not at all shy about exploring sex and sexuality, empowerment on top of existing confidence can only be a good thing (though men may wish to run very fast in the opposite direction as my pussy demands more action!)

Having been fortunate enough to have had relationships that have allowed me to fully explore the 'darker' sides of my sexual expression,  has given me the opportunity to be much clearer about what I like and dislike in bed and find the voice to say so. It was most certainly the communication without shame that made these explorations possible from a starting point of fun, openness and courage; the courage to talk out our deepest, darkest fantasies free from shame. Initially of course there's always the fear of embarrassment or discomfort - what if I reveal too much? what if that confession is one step too far? what if judgment enters the playground and leaves me feeling the bittersweet aftertaste of the confessional? So many people are told that what they desire and feel isn't 'normal' but who gets to decide upon this? I know that when I first discovered a partner who could talk dirty and match my own levels of filth, my sigh of relief was probably audible in the next street!

Communication is key for sure but is that enough? As with any aspect of a relationship, getting to know one another's intimate secrets and thoughts takes trust and time, though obviously if the sex you are looking for is a one-off hit, then lust and instinctive attraction take over. Starting from the premise of a general question, e.g., 'what makes sex great for women', I wondered what the answers would be, so I asked about 30 of my girlfriends and their responses were as varied as the number of body types there are in the world. Here are the abridged versions of some of their/our replies, many of which were duplicated:

"women love oral - simple"

"being able to get really pervy and feel utterly loved no matter what"

"raw sex appeal and the feeling of control/lack of control depending on the person"

"ribbed condoms and a man who will stay down for as long as it takes...oh and a nice cock"

"the right drugs and a good imagination"

"double penetration!....and to be able to feel totally at ease so that I can go wild and lose all inhibitions with an unselfish lover"

"love, security and lots of squirting (female ejaculation)"

"talking about what they are going to do whilst doing it"

"teasing"

"start with a massage, free the mind and the body follows"

"communcation"

I have two teenage girls - what do we teach our young girls about sex, sexuality and their bodies? How do we counter mainstream values if those values are limiting at best or repressive at worst? My daughter has already experienced labeling as a slut just because she enjoys sex and is not afraid to get the sex she wants. To me, that sucks BIG time and makes me both sad and angry. Has nothing changed? False images of what it is to be a woman surround us daily, most often in the media and those magazines supposedly aimed at women and young girls, and this can so easily perpetuate a sense of lack, so how do we change their thinking and bring confident, sexually comfortable young women into the world? We keep talking.

Some of my most inspiring mentors have been sexually open, confident women; writers, porn stars, sex workers, dancers, strippers, campaigners and the like. Women I met at the International Conference on Prostitution in LA many years back now, women who first provided a platform for me to express the full range of my sexual experiences. Women like Annie Sprinkle, Carol Queen, Nina Hartley, Scarlot Harlot, Tracy Quan, Cheryl Overs; all inspirational fabulous women who have shaped who I am in some way or another, and here's to the many more I've yet to meet!

For me, what makes sex great changes depending on where I am and what I need in my life at any given time, however it remains true that many of us are afraid to talk about sex in the same way we may talk about any other aspect of our lives and relationships. Why is that?

On that note; what makes sex great for you? please come in and get some good juicy chat going ~ you know it makes sense!