Alfred Charles Kinsey (June 23, 1894 – August 25, 1956)

I just glanced at my “Trends of Twitter” Google widget and noticed something new. Maybe I just never paid attention, but that seems hard to imagine. Nonetheless, today the top of the Twitterverse is dominated by the following sexual timeline hash tags: #beforesex, #duringsex and #aftersex.

In 1948 and 1953 the Kinsey Reports on male and female sexual behavior shocked the nation by talking frankly and for the first time about a subject that had been taboo up until they broke the ice. The greatest controversy surrounded the creation of the Kinsey Scale, that categorized sexual behavior from 0 to 6, with 0 being completely heterosexual and 6 completely homosexual.

Kinsey said, “Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories… The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects.”

The findings revealed, “11.6% of white males aged 20–35 were given a rating of 3 (Equally heterosexual and homosexual – bisexual) for this period of their lives. 7% of single females aged 20–35 and 4% of previously married females aged 20–35 were given a rating of 3 for this period of their lives.”

Kinsey further inflamed debate with his findings that an estimated 50% of all married males had some extramarital experience at some time during their married lives and 26% of females had extramarital sex by their forties.

Despite the efforts by many different conservative family-values and religious groups to discredit the Reports, together they have sold more than three-quarters of a million copies and have been translated into thirteen languages. Many people consider them to be among the most successful and influential scientific books of the 20th century. Au contraire, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male has been on two conservative lists of the worst books of modern times. It was #3 on the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s 50 Worst Books of the Twentieth Century.

Much of the criticism has to do with the sampling methods and the groups that Kinsey utilized for his studies. If only he could see the sampling data available on Twitter…

Twitter on Viagra...

Katie Custer is a Minister, internet radio host, massage therapist, Reiki Master, and teacher. As a teenager, she found it odd when others reminisced about childhood. She, herself, had only a couple of vivid memories before age 12. She dismissed it as a result of having a “bad memory” and joked that “something bad must have happened to me and I blocked it all out”.

As an adult in her 20s, she felt stuck in thought and behavior patterns that sustained mild depression, growing debt, and a string of broken relationships. It never occurred to her that her “bad memory” could be directly related to her dysfunctional life.

After pursuing a graduate degree in Education (M.S. Education and Social Policy), still feeling unfulfilled, a friend suggested she pursue massage therapy for a career she could turn to during breaks from teaching. Massage therapy ultimately helped her completely change direction. Shortly after she started her massage practice, she was introduced to the idea that humans are made of energy.

First, she learned how energy worked in the outside world and how everything she encountered (saw, heard, felt, etc) was a reflection of her own energy. Next, she learned more specifically about the energy inside her own body, her Chakra system. For her, that step was the most profound. After a few months focusing on self-healing, flashes of childhood memory suddenly surfaced. She was recovering previously ‘forgotten’ memories from early childhood, specifically incidents of abuse. Before she could even respond to them, however, ideas poured in about why she was suddenly remembering and how her memory or body (or something) was able to store it all for so long. Overwhelmed, she began journaling to try to manage it all.

Though progress was slow, as she made changes the outside world responded. She was learning to see how her world was simply reflecting herown energy field – her attitude, her intentions. Over time, she started making significant progress. When she began working with energy, she could not have predicted how dramatically her life would change.

Katie Custer

In 2008, Katie created an alter-ego called “Chakra Girl,” and works from this platform to inspire people to study their own energy fields so that they can heal and discover the deepest roots of who they are, engaging and celebrating their life’s purpose. She can be found blogging about how everything is energy at www.Chakra-Girl.com. She also hosts Chakra Girl Radio (CGR), a weekly talk show dedicated to studying the human energy body and how energy is reflected back to us in our daily lives.

Chakra Girl on BlogTalkRadio
Bringing the idea of energy down to Earth. Learn how energy works in your daily life, how decisions you make affect the energy in your world, and how you can use this knowledge to change anything that does not serve your highest good. The anatomy of energy: Seven major Chakras, aligned along the spine – from below the tailbone to above the skull – and endless minor Chakras. All of them function as spirals, spinning and distributing energy through your physical body (all the way to the cellular level!). Explore the current state of your energy field and identify emotions, behaviors and issues in your physical health that no longer serve you. Change your energy, change your life!

Chakra Girl Radio is found online at www.BlogTalkRadio.com/chakra-girl, airing live on Wednesdays, 9-10:30 a.m. PST, with archives available anytime. Downloadable podcasts are available at the same location.

Kendra felt as if she would topple off the face of the planet, fall into oblivion without any other person giving her a second glance. Stress, discord, the novelty of each day, wore and bit, clawed at her and she imagined that she was alone on the planet, at least in her own unique state, facing an onslaught of adversity. Things had gotten so bad that sometimes Kendra found she could not even write anymore and even her love life suffered as she ached to reach climax that would surge through to purify her, only to find that each little tremor stopped nearly as soon as it started as if a door had been shut. Emotionally, Kendra was drained. Sensually, she was shut down. Mentally, she wasn’t even certain that she had the foggiest notion what love was.

In the grey light of this rainy afternoon, Kendra thought of boys she had known, men who had taught her about love and lust, women she had imagined kissing her, though she never would have admitted that to anyone. She wondered if she could conjure them through the magic of pencil to paper, discard the MacBook Pro for the day and weave the old spells she had learned so long ago, the sloping Palmer method across the misty backdrop of recycled papers, ancient texts renovated and restored, the flesh of sacrificial trees that would give and give until every last drop of essence, of life, had been sucked from them, pulp drained of purpose until their bodies eventually dry and are discarded.

It had been weeks since she had succumbed to the insistence of her physical body, taken anyone up on an offer to find bliss in another and these days, she knew that the lust she sought required greater fulfillment. In each union since the dissolution of her marriage, she had found herself coming only at the surface. Her moans sounded like empty peals, lies even as they echoed within her. But stories had taught her to explore her sensuality in new ways, to remember what first had seduced her and what she had at first sought. That memory spread through her like a kinetic explosion, then settled like a blissful smile over her nubile body, the blush of sex and lust and love and deliverance, finding pleasure in another, bestowing love and heat, finding that such pleasure rests within you, coiled like a snake ready to awaken and slither upward, wet, and fresh, and strong.

Kundalini. The word rested in her lap, and she contemplated stroking it even as she began to type. At her lips, the word took life, crawled through her cavern mouth, slipped out like a pretty pink tongue, became a whisper of seductive power. She envisioned herself now in the fetal position, new and curious, postured to open herself to life, her mind to that visual seduction – imagination.

Muladhara

Red lust, trimmed in black, the petals of the lotus were like a beacon to Kendra. Four ladies in a ring, dancing angels, curled into and out of one another. They beckoned to her, pleaded that she play, but Kendra stood back, watching from the edges of a dream, each of them becoming pencil sketches on her tablet, one a bending cedar, another a span of water and the last two fallen branches, a bridge. Kendra longed to cross it, found herself taking tiny steps, her nude feet trailing against their soft backs, along thighs and shoulders, her toes twisted in the curls of their cascading hair. Need burned at her hollow core with every rushing sensation, hopes for their lips at her piqued nipples, her tongue passing through their petaled crevices, the stewing brew of their juices percolating beneath blood warmed flesh.

She could be obsessed with these, stop to play and chat, learn about their histories and their futures, dress them like characters in a story and make them into sexual playthings who would be loved or cheated or abused – always her characters ran from pleasure to pain, always they lost their path, always they returned grateful but weary from the journey, but these she protected, fought her desire to ravish them, corrupt them.

Kendra made these ladies only pretty stops along the path, scenery, landscape, backdrop to a greater story to tell. Sensually they spoke volumes to her, but for the audience they would be as incoherent as the wind through a cedar grove. Their only whispers, “Lam” to say “I have.” Kendra felt without, ached to know what they knew, laid herself across the floor, stretched her hands and then her feet, imagined herself a bridge of sorts and hoped those ladies would step across her to see the world as she does. Companionship would ease the pain.

Svadhisthana

Perhaps her ladies felt the plea that ran through her long, conjuring fingers because soon Kendra felt the crawl of life along her spine, the rise from loneliness to new found sensuality, the hope that came as tingle first then heated insistence at the pink lotus between her thighs, the emerging dew of some new spring there, as she hummed softly, “Vam” for “I feel.”

Orange sunset burst from the grey clouds that had hung above her all day, pushed itself between the thick drapes that hid Kendra from the rest of the world and she felt herself a part of something larger, a participant in an ancient unity, one of many. As the fourth lady stepped from the circle, leaving her sisters to join hands, each of these became a petal on the vibrant lotus.

“You… should be at the center,” the woman purred, her long, glossy, black locks radiating warmth and energy as she pulled gently at Kendra’s fingertips to guide her to the center of the women, elegant ladies now, she saw, each lovelier than those beside her, each more seductive than any man Kendra had ever met, and each more nurturing than her own mother had ever been. Guilt and shame and then, surprisingly, purest sensual desire rushed through her, as Kendra felt the Cobra in her lap begin to rise and sway, charmed by the pulsing rhythm of the sisters’ dance, poised to seduce and the hissing whisper through her lips was, “Come to me.”

But Kendra hid herself away from the seduction of the snake and found herself immersed in the affections of her family. Soft hands caressing softer curves, the subtle rise of body heat, manifesting in the must and musk of life, but Kendra held back, her tongue at the cusp, the gateway of one pretty red mouth, and folded her blooming lotus to cloister her taboo desires.

Manipura

“Fear hinders you, My Love,” one lady whose eyes gleamed in variegating hues of amber gold spoke softly across the sepaled center of their budding lotus. A bow on her back reminded Kendra of Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, yet with an aura of peace emitting from her core.

Kendra was surprised to find herself so discovered, so exposed. She felt as nude as Eve in the Garden, a woman so blacklisted for her earliest experiential understandings of femininity. Imagining herself uncloaked, an epiphany of shame, Kendra ducked deep into the dewy center of the lotus, ached to disappear, retreat from the dreamy evolution of her own story, but a hand reached to her, took her into it, soft and sweet and fragrant.

“You must find yourself in the cycle, the lotus. Stretch your hands out, open your thighs, allow the world to come through you. Create and live and be.”

Taking her place, moving from focal point to truest unity, a sense of belonging, Kendra felt power course through her arms and legs, up her spine, at her navel. And her arms became vibrant petals as she and her sisters danced in the singing breeze, as “Ram” became a virile hum to insist “We can,” and lust and sensual affection became manifestations of love.

Anahata

Belonging is a precarious state – a danger to those willing to lose themselves to another. Some place in the back of Kendra’s mind this warning loomed, but she felt no danger as the chant grew to an insistent cry of “Yam.” Instinctively, Kendra knew this cry to declare “I love,” and the sentiment became a declaration of how she hoped to live. Her love for these women grew, boundless, unwavering, without condition, and she felt peace grow within her, too, imagined herself pregnant with life as if another grew in her, a product of conception of Self, as if she could recreate and renew strictly through the force of love that flowed like a river through her.

Orange sunset melting like a moist twilight of greens and pinks, Kendra detected a new fragrance on the air – wafts of sultry lavender and jasmine fell on her. She arched her back, imagined herself a dromedary for the thirsting earth. The power of the New Moon welled, swelled in her, and she felt herself overwhelmed, pleased, subdued with compassion that spilled out of her, each tear a drop of life for the evolving lotus, each dewdrop sustenance to increase the petals, unfold the bloom, beckon and increase life, release desire, heighten knowledge.

Spinning as if to dance, Kendra found herself and her sisters multiplied, increase of heart begetting new life and the lotus bloomed to reveal twelve petals, each strong and lusty, each tender and new, each like the pink flesh of a young girl, ready to give herself to life, to allow love to pass through her.

Vishuddha

Pressure at her throat, momentary uncertainty, forced Kendra to make a choice for love and lust. Slipping fingers to the snake coiled in her lap, she stretched each one across skin of silky scales, slid each along that curving spine, whispered with wet seduction all her own,

“Ham, I speak, and for this you exist, to rise through me, to be my strength, my defense, my nimble spirit, my charming comrade.” And the snake moved up through her, made his body rigid, thrusting, slid within to find passage along his mistress’s welcome subtle body, each stop as prana to a weary traveler.

And Kendra imagined herself a fish, swallowing, accepting the snake into herself, diving and swimming, seeking satisfaction through life, finding life and renewal in the consumption of flesh and then rebirth. In his force through her, the Cobra delivered life, and her body became a sea prime for creative force, brimming with thoughts to share, each cell of her being as potential for new growth, understanding.

Ajna

The awakening at Kendra’s heart and core, her sensual center, grew to an illuminating light that transcended all the states of understanding she had yet known. It was if the bright moon above shown only for her, found her third eye once blind and forced it open and she felt herself ready, open to love, to feel again that which she had lost, to know it better, more deeply, to make of life what love had taught her, what she had found within herself. A voice rose within Kendra, like the cry of a new baby and she discerned it like the roar of the waves of consciousness, “Om. Omm. Ommm.” No hollow peals this rising moan, and Kendra cried ecstatically to know, to see. “I see,” she proclaimed to the ladies of her lotus, and it felt significant, synonymous with “I come,” but now there were only two, Kendra rising to new found revelation looking back at another so familiar, yet so distant, one she had been who had stood in the dark, alone, before she had recognized her place in the world, her power to ascend, to be something more.

Seated, peaceful, as calm as a lotus itself, Kendra raised two petal arms to the skies in jubilation of arrival.

Sahasrara

And the hush she felt rather than heard, became a hymn of peace as her subtle being grew to a subtler understanding and her mind became a field of awareness and information, as if the world had dawned on her with the rise of the star anise. “I know” her pulsing heart poured forth.

The crowning of her lotus heart and soul and mind brimmed with colorful petals. At their center a violet sepal rose like a scepter. In peace and enlightenment, Kendra rested her head, and bliss grew in her soul. Peace from the journey, ecstasy in the arrival, coming to consciousness far surpassing the coming of her body.

Nola Erus, reared in a deeply sensual family which taught her to observe the evolving world around her in its most minute glory, comes to her love of language and communication naturally. An education in International/Intercultural studies, diverse languages and English composition and literature informs her insatiable quest for better understanding of her universe and her fellow humans> her desire is to
convey that understanding via storytelling. Through her stories she hopes to discover more about herself and to share a reverence for the erotic with the world community.
She blogs at sexysecrets.eroticachallenge.com.

Susie Bright’s Journal is the title of her blog where you can find a ton of information about her, subscribe to her audio shows and find links to her other videos.

Susie Bright, also known as Susie Sexpert, is an author, editor, activist, performer, lecturer, sex guru, teacher, and mom. She has a weekly program entitled “In Bed with Susie Bright” distributed through audible.com, where she discusses a variety of social, freedom of speech and sex-related topics. Bright co-founded and edited the first women’s sex magazine, On Our Backs, “entertainment for the adventurous lesbian,” from 1984 to 1991. She founded the first women’s erotica book series, “Herotica” and edited the first three volumes. She started “The Best American Erotica” series in 1993-2008. Bright taught the first university class on the subject of the aesthetics and politics of pornography at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California in 1986. She became well-known for her scholarship in sexual representation through her courses on the subject at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She currently resides in Santa Cruz, California.

During her career, Muhlhahn has delivered more than 700 babies and has practiced midwifery in New York, Texas, and Oregon. She is the midwife featured in Ricki Lake’s controversial documentary, “The Business of Being Born,” which provides an insider’s look at natural childbirth in the home setting, and her expert opinion has been included in articles in The New York Times, Vogue, and Parents Magazine.

Muhlhahn’s debut memoir, “Labor of Love” hit bookshelves in December 30, 2008 and includes tales of the homebirth of Muhlhahn’s son, recounts the formative experiences of her adolescence, and offers readers engaging stories culled from her practice of midwifery. This powerful book chronicles the unconventional decisions she has made to find, then honor her profession.

Steven P. Link

No wind exists today
In the dimly lit room
With curtains smelling of smoke
And the room smelling of our sex
You’re sleeping but
You’re watching me
You’re raw and passionate
You’re clinging to a belief
That it can work between us
Even in dreams
It does

Sitting by the window
Wishing for a way
To reconnect you to the reality
Of the disconnect
My favorite dress
Bought with my last twenty dollars
Three years ago in that Chicago thrift
Worn intentionally
Lays on the floor
Looking up at me
Reminding me
We fucked in the changing room
And were told to leave-
Symbolically destructive

I dress and step out onto the street
Seeking out something to drink
And the air of the city
Hits me like a cool breath
Passing by people on the street
Who know by looking at me
That’s its only sex
Any love
Left no forwarding address

I buy a newspaper
Knowing full well I won’t read it
And coffee for ourselves
Even though I don’t want to wake you

You have a scar
Just above your left breast
Where you were struck
I know because I kissed the wound
And tried to make it go away
But it’s an unfortunate truth
And exists in the way
The disconnect exists-
Perpetual

He will be back soon
Its nearing three in the afternoon
And the wind hasn’t yet made
An appearance
And I say I have to go
And I feel sick with ourselves
We fuck one last time
Symbolically destructive
I feel stuck in a metaphor
And a slight cough
As you collapse

I am weak for you
Like a drug without limits
It must be the curves of your flesh
Or the complexities of your mind
I kneel before your alter
I drink from you chalice
I consume the eucharist
And consummate the bond
Taking it all in
And leaving no stone unturned
But our sex is the weapon
That ultimately destroys us

And I leave
The scene of the accident
Putting the wreck behind me
For a while

Steven P. Link and Kat

Sex with you is
the Moonlight Sonata
on endless loop
a twenty dollar bill
discovered in a coat pocket
a thief in the night
who takes the things
you really didn’t want anyway
a first kiss
and the requisite nausea of joy that follows
an exquisite feast among friends
a real, genuine laugh
the high of some overused pharmaceutical
but
this is not really describing sex
this more describes the anticipation of sex
the building up of something great
trudging slowly and beautifully
towards the cataclysmic release
the climax that inevitably occurs
when two people feel
as we do for each other.

photo: Sara Barrett

Rafael Campo was born in Dover, New Jersey, in 1964. He is the author of several books of poetry, including the forthcoming collection, What the Body Told, which received a Lambda Literary Award… more

to tell her she is a female
and their flesh knows it,

are they a sort of tune,
an ugly enough song, sung
by a bird with a slit tongue

but meant for music?

Or are they the muffled roaring
of deafmutes trapped in a building that is
slowly filling with smoke?

Perhaps both.

Such men most often
look as if groan were all they could do,
yet a woman, in spite of herself,

knows it’s a tribute:
if she were lacking all grace
they’d pass her in silence:

so it’s not only to say she’s
a warm hole. It’s a word

in grief-language, nothing to do with
primitive, not an ur-language;
language stricken, sickened, cast down

in decrepitude. She wants to
throw the tribute away, dis-
gusted, and can’t,

it goes on buzzing in her ear,
it changes the pace of her walk,
the torn posters in echoing corridors

spell it out, it
quakes and gnashes as the train comes in.
Her pulse sullenly

had picked up speed,
but the cars slow down and
jar to a stop while her understanding

keeps on translating:
‘Life after life after life goes by

without poetry,
without seemliness,
without love.’

photo: © David Geier Photography

Denise Levertov was born in Ilford, Essex, England, on October 24, 1923. She went on to publish more than twenty volumes of poetry, four books of prose, and translated three volumes of poetry… more

In the half darkness we look at each other
and smile
and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body—
this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,
sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,
this blessing love gives again into our arms.

Photo by Sara Barrett

Galway Kinnell
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1927, Galway Kinnell is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Selected Poems, for which he received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award…
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