Culture offers us frustrating, capitalistic, and unfulfilling sexual paths.

At some point, we need to find our own. Doing so is daring, exciting, and effervescent. Not doing so squanders your personal pleasure in the mass marketplace of porn and cookie-cutter relationships.

To find your own path, consider the loose path, the tight path, and the precise sexual path for yourself.

Loose Sexuality.

She could have a revolving door installed down there, and that would make more sense than the flaps of skin that regularly welcome as much riff raff as a well-placed piece of fly paper might. I’m not saying that she is indiscriminate, just that she feels quite comfortable when sharing her passively exercised hips with someone, whether she knows them or not.

It’s not crowds that she likes, but there is a long line of “before and afters” that would send a shiver through even a Dutch woman of the evening, a rabbit, or a child of the ’60s. To listen to her is to not be interested in her ever again, so she (rather wisely) lets parts of her anatomy other than her personality send out pheromone invitations, mass marketing her narrow pink charms.

She has never gotten pregnant—or at least, she has never given birth to a child with a nameless father. She can’t remember a time that she wasn’t numb from the waist down, so her wide-ranging troupe of fickle suitors undergo a very short trial period in which they fail to bring her genitals to life. But it isn’t for enjoyment that she offers herself up, it is for the company—not to be alone on a Saturday, Sunday, or weekday evening seems worth the only occasional company at the morning-after breakfast with slow learners.

Tight Sexuality.

“Old school” sexuality holds it that a woman has sexual gifts to bestow, and in return, she should receive room, board, and a guarantee of a monogamous future. In the absence of this sort of security, she should adopt a convent mentality, saving herself for the right—and only the right—man.

This sort of sexual ice age seems virtuous, but it is a short, unfun path to loneliness. “Get thee to a nunnery” makes for better literature than it does a life worth living. Odds are the “right” one will never appear since there are only so many dogs who can jump through a complex series of hoops, or bears that can learn to dance. So, the probable end result of a virtuous life is the desiccation of perfectly good genitals.

The single-pointed focus that celibacy requires doesn’t lead to a good, strong, or desirable man. It leads to someone else on a similar path, and the only benefit of that is that the two of you will only ruin one relationship.

You don’t have to stay home every night to keep your virtue in tact, and you don’t have to treat “down there” like your own personal Fort Knox, guarded by legions of pure thoughts and values. Part of what makes us our best is the rapid, vapid fall from grace—and then, the arduous climb instilled with wisdom earned from countless falls.

Nuns aren’t particularly interesting, which is why they tend to hang out together and hold out for God.

Precision Sexuality.

We once were spirits, and we will be again. Until then, we are supposed to make a mess. Not the mess that the free fall of “loose” offers. Our mess is our personal expression of self—and as such, it should be just a little more than we think we can clean up. There is a road that leads to the precise, personal sexual mess that is the road less traveled, because it is your path alone.

Precision sexuality is just enough to keep body and mind giggling, floating like a marshmallow on hot chocolate, and imbuing the entire cup with subtle sweetness.

Everybody’s appetite for sex is different. Even within a couple who seem perfectly matched, it is likely that one will need a little more sex than the other. With our tendency to go all Charlie Chaplin when it comes to sex—not talking about it—silent compromise rules the day. And silent compromises lead down the road of passive aggressiveness, to relationships that look okay on the surface, but are really just moral straightjackets of self compromise with unhappy partners.

For precision sexuality to triumph, we need to be open and honest about our needs. If we need to be taken hard, fast, and impersonally every few days, then we need to admit that to ourselves first—and then to our partner, and finally, to the world.

Censoring ourselves runs contrary to freedom of speech and undermines open and honest sexuality. Censorship at its best leads to plastic televangelists with their TV face and underlying sexual disgraces.

Talking about sex freely and openly isn’t something you do once, or at your therapists office. It can become a regular subject, like the weather, and a persistent invitation to offer ourselves more fully, openly, and freely.

If we are afraid that what we have to say will have our partner leave us, then perhaps we are pretending to protect them from the the very honesty that scares us into the shallows of both sexuality and relationship.

Getting out of the kiddie pool of lust and desire, into the deep, sexual end of the pool, is a never-ending adventure. It brings out the best in us. It fascinates us and our partners and leads to one’s personal sexual path.

Sexual precision doesn’t stop with open expression though. It leads to open living. Because when you discover your personal sexual path, self expression becomes the rule, rather than the exception. It reaches into our depths, where everything is as it should be, and life stops being a series of obstacles and problems we must overcome; it becomes a celebration of our unique affinity for personal pleasure.

We are accurate archers hitting the bull’s-eye every time, because it is us, with our judgements, who paints the bull’s-eye after we have already taken the shot. Any discrepancy between our arrow and the center of the target is intentional on our part, not a result of our lack of skill. We are all far more skillful than we are willing to admit, and when we don’t admit it, life appears to be an accidental.

There are no accidents. We can’t wander off of our personal pleasure path. So if we have been sexually loose or tight, then it is best to admit that is exactly what we needed to hone in on to discover our personal sexual path.

Once we admit that we are always on our personal sexual path, honesty comes naturally, we begin to distinguish responsibility from blame, and we discover that pleasure is never separate from pain.

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Author: Jerry Stocking
Image: Flickr/Rosália Toledo Toledo; Pixabay
Editor: Yoli Ramazzina