I read something serious about sex in yesterday’s New York Times Style section.
For context, let me tell you–on the chance that you don’t know already– about “rainbowing.”
Rainbowing is when each teenage girl at a party puts on a thick coating of lipstick–each one wearing a different color. And then, each teenage girl performs fellatio on one teenage boy–ridding herself of her lipstick by depositing it on his organ.
And then there are bracelets. Bracelets in different colors and widths are worn by teenage girls to alert boys as to what they will and will not do, sexually.
The mystery, here, is not what girls and boys are dreaming up. It’s not even the question, What’s Love Got to Do with it? The mystery is why, now that young girls are permitted to have sex, they are still in the role of pleasing. Why they’re opting for the role of pleasure-giving. The way I see it is that girls get to service a boy and then see their artwork, their smudges of blue and green and hot pink, on his organ! Wow. What fun.
Is this, then, the upshot of the sexual revolution? Is this free love? Is this freedom? Is this feminism?
I don’t think so. Granted, “rainbowing” is a way of avoiding penetration, so some people will breathe a sigh of relief. But that’s not my point here today. This cool new “sexy” world where teens (and ‘tweens, too, I’m afraid) are learning, in effect, how to be prostitutes, is as pleasureless and one-sided for girls as was the old, repressed one. (And please, for the moment, don’t talk to me about sexual abstinence. I’m talking about reality here, not wishful thinking.) These girls are telling me that, with their blue lipstick and group sex and pink bracelets, they’re doing the same old same old-thinking about pleasing boys. And that the “rainbow” is satisfying for no one but the rainbowee.
So when I read in The New York Times style section yesterday morning about One Taste Urban Retreat Center in San Francisco, where women’s pleasure is the focus, I thought, Yes.
Here, in a carefully supervised environment, residents experience a meditation in which the men, who remain clothed and are not touched, learn about women’s bodies as do the women themselves. We can pick this idea apart in two seconds if we’re inclined to do so-Does this encourage true intimacy? Is this just more California craziness?-but I’m not. What strikes me as genius, and as deeply serious, is owner Nicole Daedone’s absolute focus on women’s pleasure. Here, the point of view changes. Women don’t learn how to please. The men residents do, though. Both learn about women’s bodies and the feelings in those bodies and, clinical though the terms of the discovery may be, they begin to understand what women and men have so long been mystified by. As Nicole Daedone, who started One Taste, puts it: “In our culture women have been conditioned to have closed sexuality and open feelings, and men to have open sexuality and closed feelings. There’s this whole area of resistance and shame.”
Bravo, Ms. Daedone. By changing the point of view– for encouraging women of all ages to understand not how to please, but the pleasure that lies within them for teaching them that their joy lies not just in their ability to love, and to give pleasure–but to experience it as something that is being given to them. Just as they give that experience to men. And by offering them a safe place in which to experience pleasure, you are doing an important and brave service–to women.
