by Lisa Palac, review by Melissa Balmer
Copyright © 2006, Seduction Insider, www.seductioninsider.com.
Published by:
Little, Brown & Co.
New York
Available at:
Amazon.com
“I’d always assumed my sex-positive activism was just a phase that would end when I got a real job – or wrote my million-dollar screenplay and landed a director’s chair with my name on it. Then I got fifty bucks for my first erotic short story and began rethinking my options.” – Lisa Palac (The Edge of the Bed)
Quite simply this little book (first published in 1998) is a must for any woman who’s decided to venture forth on the challenging yet oh-so-rewarding path to discovering her true sexual nature. Palac, who shot to national attention as the female editor of the magazine “Future Sex” in the early ‘90’s (just as the Internet was first capturing the media’s imagination and attention) has written a very funny, honest account of her adventures from Catholic school girl to a woman on the forefront of sex positive thinking.
Palac’s own journey to sexual self discovery begins in college when a vibrator falls out of a closet in her new apartment and hits her on the head. She didn’t know what it was, just as she didn’t know what a clitoris was until high school when her gym teacher explained that the clitoris had only one purpose: to provide sexual pleasure. Like many women, however, Palac did absolutely nothing with this information for years, “The thought that I could touch it never even occurred to me. Hard to believe that a girl as curious about sex as I was would sit there thinking, Clitoris…the pleasure button…hmmm, I guess I’ll file that tidbit of physiology away right next to the purpose of the mendulla oblongata. But I did.”
What Palac does with humor, grace, and tremendous candor is spell out, through her own adventures (and misadventures some might say), the conflicted, confusing, rich and fascinating world of female sexuality. Through her adventures she shows us that as much as we might like to believe it, we can’t be nicely tucked into a prefabricated description such as “straight” or “gay” or “sexy” or “good”. We are all a vast mix of desires and personality traits that make us both proud and cringe – but we ignore the dark sides of our personalities at peril of missing out on some of our richness and humanity.
Even the world of BDSM is far more complex and intriguing than those of us whose knowledge of it is not much more than knowing the participants wear sexy pvc and leather apparel. When Palac was featured in an article in Esquire magazine, as one of the new generation of feminists-who-actually-enjoy-sex, and she admitted to a proclivity for being “dominated” friends and strangers couldn’t understand how one could be both a “feminist” and a “submissive”, to which Palac wrote a very fascinating and enlightening reply:
“Because everyone is fighting to be on the bottom! In the S/M community submissives outnumber dominants 100 to 1, with men wanting to be sexually dominated just as much as – if not more than – women do. Yet even outside the scene, most people in their own secret way like to give up erotic control, to be swept away and be the center of attention.”
Palac goes on to point that feminism doesn’t have to mean a particular narrow mind set, “First, the idea that feminist are supposed to have egalitarian sexual fantasies or sex lives is ridiculous. Do the sexual lives of Democrats or Republicans jibe with their politics? Let’s be serious. Fantasy is what our imagination does because it can. Fantasy takes the mind where the body cannot or will not go, and the human imagination travels from the sublime to the contemptible whether we like it or not. Second, outside the context of an orchestrated sexual scene, who wants to be forced to do anything? But in context, the rules change.”
Still, Palac doesn’t for a second act as if she’s got the answers for everyone else, or claim that once a woman decides to partake of the journey of sexual self discovery that her sex life will be seen through rose colored glasses . She admits, “Well into adulthood, I still clung to the belief that once I crawled out from under the wet blanket of guilt and shame and political correctness, I would feel completely at ease with, and self-affirmed by, every fantasy that popped into my head and everything I did in bed. Once I understood the pleasure, the emotional truths and specially the divine benefits of sex, sex would never be troubling again. Was I wrong. I’ve worked hard to reconcile my politics with my sexuality but they rarely fit together, all nice and neat.”
In between stories of her own life growing up in the 70’s (only a couple of months younger than Palac I got a big kick out her flashbacks), and her adventures as an adult, Palac shares with the reader her thoughts on everything from religion, to Snuff films and our need for sexual monsters, to Internet porn. While you might not agree with her assessment of different situations you cannot fault the reasoning behind her logic. This is an intelligent woman who’s spent time and effort working through her views, weighing the pros and cons from other intelligent sources, like any good judge. Frankly I’ll take this form of informed discussion over Dr. Laura’s commandments any day.
What I like most about Palac’s writing is that even while sharing with such great honesty she questions herself about “what would her mother think?” as we all do when we venture forth into a new territory that hasn’t been blessed in advance by our friends and family. She shows us that trailblazers have fear, doubt, dread and yet something inside of them keeps them moving, searching, learning – and we should all be grateful for it. Without women like Palac I doubt the Internet would have ended up such an interesting space for both sexes to seek out sexual information and knowledge.
