Full Exposure - Opening Up To Your Sexual Creativity & Erotic Expression

“There is no such thing as a person without an erotic story.” – Susie Bright

I have a confession to make. Susie Bright is one of my heroes, and I don’t say that lightly. We live in a time when sex is used for constant titillation (mostly to sell us something), with the media constantly pushing the envelope over how much flesh to expose for maximum marketing value, yet very few of us are willing and able to talk about the subject head on in an open and honest manner as it pertains to our actual day to day lives.

Is this a book that’s going to spell out for you in an easy step by step guide how to open up to your sexual creativity and erotic expression? No, there’s no A+B=C in this book. Instead the reader is invited on a journey of self-discovery by sharing in Bright’s own sexual and erotic discoveries through a series of essays with such curiosity invoking titles as Alone at Last, The Price of Titillation, and Souled-Out Sex. Rather than being spoon fed answers Bright instead shares honestly and openly from her own sexual and erotic experiences (as well as from ordinary day-to-day epiphanies) and asks the reader to question just what one knows of one’s own sexual and erotic nature.

Though small, all one hundred and sixty-three pages pack a wallop. This is a book to contemplate and ponder rather than breeze through. I’ve re-read it now just about every six months since finding it at Barnes & Noble about four years ago (when I was still reeling both from being single again after a decade of couple hood – including eight years of marriage – and still perplexed, scorched and embarrassed over a short but intense affair with a younger man that had me questioning absolutely everything I knew about myself sexually) and even so I dog eared almost every page of just the first essay when making notes for this review.

It’s difficult, however, to capture why this book is so special and thought provoking without sharing with you Bright’s own words. Following is one of my favorite passages from the first essay What is Sexual Creativity:

“Even though so much of our ignorance is in the past and our physical bodies are more revealed and understood every day, the odd thing is that the scientific revolution has not entirely made a sexual revolution. A true sexual revolution would bring about a change of consciousness, increasing our scientific knowledge a hundredfold. Nowadays, there’s probably not a single American woman my age who doesn’t understand what menstruation means – but are there women who nevertheless are utterly mystified about every other aspect of their genitals? Yes, I know hundreds. They know all about tampons, but they have no clue about their sexual nature. Men are hardly better off. Do most men feel like they understand the connection between their erotic mind and their body’s response? Hardly. When we do get a clue about what makes us tick, we’re more than likely to get a shaming lecture from someone who claims we shouldn’t have been thinking about it in the first place.”

If you’ve ever felt guilty over your sexual thoughts (and who hasn’t?) then this book is for you. If you’ve ever chafed at the sexual roll it seemed you were handed at birth than this book is for you. And if you’ve ever felt that you were somehow missing the crucial information needed in order to be complete and whole sexually than this book is for you – the good news is that most of the rest of the world feels the same way we’re just too proud or ashamed to admit it in public.

The author and editor of more than a dozen books (including the Best American Erotica series), her own blog (Susie Bright), and her own talk show In Bed With Susie (made available through Audible.com) Bright fearlessly opens Pandora’s box of sexual taboos and delves into them with great curiosity and grace. She points out (with her own self as an example) that personal sexuality and erotic interest isn’t as black and white as those interested in upholding the old guard would like us to believe. This means that Bright can be as open and compassionate about the challenges men face as she can women. Here’s another of my favorite passages, this one from Women and Children Worst:

“But men and women don’t have to settle for being prisoners in their little gender dormitory. Girls can be women with real adult sexual appetites; men can be love bunnies and still have raging hard-ons. It’s true. I’ve seen them, I’ve petted them behind the ears, I’ve shared their contradictions, and I’ve even swapped a few doll parts. The point isn’t to disown the masculine or feminine characters of our erotic identity, but rather to realize we’re hardly all of one piece, and we can’t claim our whole sexual selves if we insist on male and female segregation of our own feelings.

In winding up this review (which I hope has inspired you to zip over to Amazon and buy the book) I leave you with the sixteen points from the last essay of the book Roll Your Own Erotic Manifesto:

1. Talk about sex anywhere.

Take inspiration from everyone and instruction from no one.
Appreciate the simplest erotic gesture.
Accept no guru’s ego – accountability is more cosmic than charisma.
Give your erotic identity the benefit of your admiration.
Defy the quick description.
Kill envy with erotic kindness.
Claim your own fantasy life. Write it all down, every bit of it.
Make a recipe for fantasy revelation.
Describe a sexual experience you’ve never had.
Decloak right in the middle of sex.
Make your own pornography, accept no imitation.