What Color is Your Orgasm? Sex-Positive Advice in Black and White

by Guest Contributor AJ Plaid, also known as The Cruel Secretary

Latoya’s Note: After the jump, AJ (The Cruel Secretary) takes us on an interesting and illuminating journey through the world of sex-positive advice. However, this post includes explicit language and graphic depictions of sexual acts. Reader discretion is advised.

To all the women—young, middle-aged, and elderly—who still believe that we were placed on this earth to “service” men. May this book liberate your pussies, free your minds from the chain of sexual oppression, and make you realize that you are entitled to fuck your way.

…

This book is about fucking. This book is about love. This is a book about what love has to do with fucking and fucking has to do with love…I have never been one to sugarcoat anything, so why start now? Dear G-Spot is an in-your-face, straight up with no chaser book about fucking. How to fuck, how not to fuck, and knowing whether or not you have any business fucking in the first place. While there have been countless books written about sex, in the tradition of my short story collections, I seriously doubt you will ever red another one quite like this bitch here. I am “coming hard” so you can “cum hard” later. Some of the parts of this book are very graphic, and they were meant to be.”

~~Zane, from the dedication and introduction to her book, Dear G-Spot

Usually, I don’t read Zane, an Essence best-selling African American erotica writer, because I find her literary style clichéd. However, when I read this, I thought to myself, She did it! This Black woman wrote a raunchy-fun sex manual for us. Thank Sappho and the Song of Solomon lovers! But why isn’t her sex-advice column in Essence or Jet or Vibe—or an “alternative media” like the Village Voice or Nerve.com? And, if she’s gonna get down like that, then where are the pictures?

If I had to place Zane in context, she’s belongs to the Sex-Positive Advice Club. A brief definition the sex-positivism, from Wikipedia:

The sex-positive movement does not in general make moral or ethical distinctions between heterosexual or homosexual sex, or indeed masturbation for people who are otherwise celibate, regarding these choices as matters of personal preference. Some sex-positive positions include acceptance of BDSM, asexuality, polyamory, transsexuality, transgenderism, and other forms of gender transgression in general.

Most elements of the sex-positive movement advocate comprehensive and accurate sex education as part of its campaign.

I’d also put Zane in the tradition of sex-positive feminists. A brief history of that movement, again from Wikipedia:

Sex-positive feminism, sometimes known as pro-sex feminism, sex-radical feminism, or sexually liberal feminism, is a movement that was formed in the early 1980s. Some became involved in the sex-positive feminist movement in response to efforts by anti-pornography feminists, such as Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, Robin Morgan and Dorchen Leidholdt, to put pornography at the center of a feminist explanation of women’s oppression (McElroy, 1995). This period of intense debate and acrimony between sex-positive and anti-pornography feminists during the early 1980s is often referred to as the “Feminist Sex Wars”. Other, less academic, sex-positive feminists became involved not in opposition to other feminists, but in direct response to what they saw as patriarchal control of sexuality. Authors who have advocated sex-positive feminism include Ellen Willis, Susie Bright, Patrick Califia, Gayle Rubin, Avedon Carol, Tristan Taormino and Betty Dodson.

In this zeitgeist, authors wrote books and columns: Susie Bright, Tristan Taormino, and Patrick Califia helped usher in a new era of erotic literature aimed at all genders as well as proclivities. Entrepreneurs opened women-friendly sex stores, like Good Vibrations and Toys in Babeland (changed later to Babeland), complete with classes about different sexual practices. Filmmakers like Candida Royalle created women-centered porn.

One sex-positive educator, Charlie Glickman, linked the movement to struggles to end other forms of bigotry:

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