Sexual Freedom League:

SEX-FREEDOM

What would a “sexually free” human being be like, and how might we imitate him and perhaps help people who ask our assistance in self-improvement? Let me try to fantasize a sexually free person, since I don't know any such creature:

1. He/she goes naked most of the time, except when there is some positive reason (not shame or modesty or fear) to dress up. “Clothes are bandages for sick bodies”, says Tuli Kupferberg. I believe nudism is fundamental and necessary prerequisite for sexual freedom. Clothes commonly build barriers of sexual fear and hostility. We learn “Don’t look” when we are still too young to comprehend “Don't fuck”. Each adult needs to spend several years living in a nude society, in order to overcome the bad effects of our shame-filled childhoods. And our children should be completely spared the morbid sickness of hiding their beautiful bodies like some sort of carrion deemed too foul for the light of day.

2. He/she enjoys sex relations intensely and often. I'm thinking of a tribe where everyone routinely expects to have five or six orgasms every night; if you have only one, your friends solicitously enquire about your health. If this seems excessive or hard to believe, then think about fucking behind marijuana (if you've done so). Compare that incredible high level of sensuality with the ordinary experience. It seems to me that our bodies and minds are naturally and potentially capable of anything we can do under drugs or hypnosis, and of anything a yogi can do. With sensual stimulation and consciousness expansion from early childhood, instead of the present repression and contraction, I think we could reach states of sensitivity and pleasure that would make our present orgasms look drab indeed. (Of course, this goes beyond sex per se to LSD, peak experiences, sensitivity training, Summerhill, Zen Buddhism, and so forth. But whoever said sex was really separate from the rest of life? ).

3. He/she is happy, healthy, and capable of loving fully and generously –the mature person described by Erich Fromm and Kahlil Gibran. As Eleanore Pagenstecher puts it, “The best sex education... is still the cultivation of a responsible, free, and loving character structure”.

4. He/she knows how to use his/her body to create physical pleasure, for self and others. There's a lot more to this than the current technique manuals indicate, which is hardly surprising; the Masters and Johnson experiments should have been conducted forty years ago. And besides sheer ignorance of coital physiology, the manuals overlook auxiliary arts, such as the skills of the professional masseur.

5. He/she approaches the whole world erotically and orgastically; will really be there, open and accepting, for every man, woman, child and animal.

6. He/she engages in sex and love affaires with persons of all races and creates and raises an interracial family.

7. He/she is a practicing bisexual, fucking freely with both sexes.

8. He/she is immune to feelings of jealousy and is capable of carrying on several sex relationships concurrently, as well as enjoying casual sexual encounters.

9.  However promiscuous, he/she maintains stable and lasting emotional and sexual relationships with an intimate group of lovers, probably living together as a “nest”.

10. He/she is not bound by societal definitions of proper “masculine” and “feminine” roles, doesn't conform to either one. If female, she no longer takes the second-rate role of someone who achieves only through “her” men, but instead develops her own capabilities fully and vigorously. If male, he no longer feels obliged to be hard, competitive, violent, authoritarian, draftable. He/she grows during childhood toward an optimum adult personality, with leeway for individual variation, not toward a rigid feminine or masculine stereotype. Like any list, the preceding description leaves out many important things. My speculation has not answered our questions. We cannot know what a sexually free person is like, not until we create a society in which he or she can be born and grown up.

But we can dream. And we must, if we are to move at all.


From: Jefferson Poland & Sam Sloan (Edit.) / The Sex Marchers (1968).