Getting the Sex You Want: A Woman's Guide to Becoming Proud, Passionate and Pleased in Bed - Sandra Leiblum - Hardcover - 1ST

"My grandma was never naked," laughed Evangeline, a 68-year-old retired schoolteacher. "She raised me on the homestead that's been in my family since the Civil War, and she was a proper Southern lady. My sister and I slept in the loft over her bedroom. When it was time to go to sleep, she'd throw her flannel nightgown over her head like a tent, and I'd watch her busy under there, taking things off, until she had a pile of clothes and underthings on the floor. In the morning, she'd reverse the process. She bathed in the kitchen bathtub in her underwear. She told me that Grandpa and her had never seen each other undressed--that it wasn't proper. Can you imagine! That woman had six babies, and lived with her husband for fifty-three years, and she was never naked!" Evangeline had a knowing look on her face as she went on. "There was no way I could escape that kind of indoctrination. In my first marriage, I was so ashamed of my body and sex. I remember being thankful for the steam fogging up the bathroom mirror so I didn't have to look when I got out of the shower and could just throw a towel around myself. I'd jump into bed before my husband every night and turn the lights off. We always made love in the dark. And I was very, very quiet. I didn't make a peep, even when I climaxed. It was 'nice' sex, you know, familiar, like a worn pair of pajamas. "So after my husband died, it really didn't occur to me that I would ever be intimate with another man. Then, after I'd been alone for about eight years, a friend introduced me to Joe, and over our courtship, I felt like I woke up. Joe was the most physical person, never aggressive, never pushy, but he touched my hand or my shoulder, and it would send me reeling! I started seeing myself through his eyes. He thinks I'm just the greatest thing, and he loves to look at me. And so I took off my clothes and made love when it was light out. I'd been brought up to believe that only 'bad girls' showed off, or made a spectacle of themselves, but I didn't feel 'bad' at all. I felt entitled to open up something that had been walled off inside me for so long. I guess what I felt about sex had been right for me at one time, but now it was different. It wasn't that sex was bad or good, or that I was good or bad. It was like thinking I would fall off the edge of the world and finding out that it was round." Being naked is being vulnerable, exposed. It means revealing yourself, leaving yourself open for judgment, open to experience. You have to like yourself to bare your breasts and your soul, and this process can take years. The truth is, most of us grew up with Evangeline's dichotomy: Sex was either clean or dirty, right or wrong, sacred or profane, too much or too little. This dualism has kept us from feeling comfortable with the fact that we are not one thing or another, but in fact, a broad range of sexual possibility. We may start out our sexual life in a kind of figurative missionary position (I may be boring, but at least I'm probably normal) and end up as a sexual pioneer, daring to be dominant, in charge of our feelings and behavior, and realize that that's normal, too. The old convention, that sex is split between the two poles of romance and lust, may be relevant at one stage of development, but as we boomerang back and forth from one to the other, we get glimpses of the huge range of choices in between. And they begin to look more and more appealing as we give ourselves permission to think differently about sex. Just as women experience menstrual and reproductive cycles, so we also experience cycles of new romance and breakup, birth and motherhood, grief and losLeiblum, Sandra Risa is the author of 'Getting the Sex You Want: A Woman's Guide to Becoming Proud, Passionate and Pleased in Bed - Sandra Leiblum - Hardcover - 1ST' with ISBN 9780812932843 and ISBN 0812932846.