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(the following are actual quotes )
Q: Dear E. Jean: I love oral sex but I hear semen is very high in calories. Please advise.
A: Every reader is a peeping Tom. This fact has spawned many a successful industry, and one of the most ubiquitous in recent years has been the publication of syndicated sex columns. For the most part, sex columns pimp those who write in. They covertly celebrate the absurdities of the human psyche. Their method is titillation, their objective is selling copy. Some are sandwiched between the personals or the horoscope and crossword puzzle, others are plugged on the cover. All of them feed our vicarious interest in other people's sex lives and our obscene delight in the public display of our peers' private failings.
Q: Dear Ann Landers: I'm an attractive 23-year-old woman with a great job and a wonderful fiance. When I get stressed out, I put on adult-size diapers or rubber panties, feed myself milk from a bottle and fall asleep with a pacifier and blankie. Help me explain to my fiance.
A: We all crave discipline. Living in the land of options, deep down we want to be free of making choices. Having seen a few thousand commercials each, we're used to being told what to do. Authority absolves us of inner doubts. Readers too are passive. Sex columnists disseminate reliable information on anything from natural penis enlargement methods and sex reassignment surgery to obtaining bottled female high-schoolers' saliva from Japan. That is their main service. In addition, they disperse advice on the mechanics of plumbing; urge readers to come out to themselves or their kin; describe adult etiquette; and indirectly provide inspirations for sex adventures. They provide readers with harmless sublimation for their own frustrated drives, relieve the banality of their everyday sex lives.
Q: Dear Isadora Alman: All my life, my fantasies involve women with hairless scalps; how do I de-program those desires?
A: Sex columnists treat sex as a pathology and pathology as entertainment. They must regard sex as a disturbance to justify their existence. That is why many are labeled doctors. They work at appearing sanitary, trustworthy, and sexless. Their titles lend them an aura of legitimacy and distinguish them from crude exploiters, and at the same time imply that sex is a problem, a dis-ease the fine points of whose treatment must be left to experts.
Q: Dear Dan Savage: I'm amp-neutral, but I've let horny guys feel my stump. I have a fantasy of fucking a woman with my stump and I've met some women who are interested, but my wife wouldn't approve. What do you suggest?
A: It's unclear what makes a sexpert. Sex columnists are spunky know-it-alls imperiously dishing out common sense and wit. Some are prickly control freaks ("I'll fly out there and give you a flogging the likes of which you'll never forget"). Others are super-efficient cheerleaders, spirited personal sex trainers ("Romance, dearest luv, can be made using elements no more elaborate than two pairs of beaming eyes"). They are chatty, patronizing and female, or gay. Of course, all sex columnists are by definition conservative: their job is to spread the norm, reinforce cultural values, perpetuate socially needed manners and phobias. They must affect the claustrophobic conviction that anything can be answered ("Spend quality time with the dog in some other way...") It's the difference between being a priest and a prophet: priests preach, organize and absolve, but they don't invent.
Q: Dear Joy Davidson, Ph.D.: Please explain digital anal stimulation.
A: Our culture brims with muted questions. Protected by pseudonyms, adults can be avenged in sex columns: we can ask anything we've wanted to know since childhood, in print, before a national audience. For some it can be therapy or, at least, a diagnosis. In a world so closeted that it needs the Frankensteinian Dr. Ruth to author Sex for Dummies (her pointers include "cleaning the bathroom naked together" and "cleaning out each other's belly button") to enlighten the masses, sex columns are the only public forum for millions of readers. Even though they are necessarily superficial, for those who don't discuss sex openly, they may be the only source of information.
Q: Dear Janet Lever, Ph.D. and Pepper Schwartz, Ph.D.: Should I be moaning during sex?
A: No one knows what's good or bad for others. Outside a few specific truisms ("wear condoms with strangers"), quick-fix advice can be harmful (Ann Landers tells a man complaining of prison rape, "Get over it.") Life is based on accident. Language is a logical system invented to add sense to the world, and is not equipped to express the fundamental irrationality of desire. We have no vocabulary for sex; we rely on metaphors, euphemisms, dysphemisms and the sanctity of "scientific" terms. Clinical language sterilizes sex. Salacious literature dilutes unbridled sexuality. The thought of sex is not sex. The word sex is not sex. When "elusive little flames play over the skin and smolder it" (I quote Sappho), it's not sex, it's poetic patter, intangible, indirect.
Q: Dear Blanche Varnor: My vaginal juices taste a bit bitter. Why? Diet or genetics?
A: Sex columns are a symptom of our neurotic relationship to sex: our pathetic need to intellectualize and analyze lust. Sex is an unrefined overwhelming heart-gut-genital instinct. Being verbally comfortable with sex is no guarantee of being physically confident with it; in fact, the more people expect from sex, the more trouble they may have finding pleasure. The sexual revolution made it imperative to discuss sex, but it didn't unrepress people. As a result, too many people feel insecure and inadequate, or compelled to follow sexual trends. Sex columns attest to our fear of sex—although columnists would claim the opposite: that all this talk is proof of freedom.
Q: Dear Dr. Joyce Brothers: I'm a 26, having an affair with my 34-year-old aunt. We'll declare our love to family and friends and face their wrath, but is our relationship punishable by law?
A: Sex has and needs no answers. You and I know that sex is unknowable and unspeakable. It is a visceral revolution of consciousness. Whether sex is psychologically formative or aerobically healthful, whether it leads to murder or peace, is beside the point. We don't need it explained, but experienced. Personally, I find the tangible meaninglessness of sex comforting. I prefer hungers to sedatives. I like to stay surprised, spread the Desire (not the Word), leave all initiative to the flesh and let the senses do the talking. If the text explodes in the process, it's only a matter of words.
These days we tend to assume confession—whether driven by self-pity, revenge, ambition, competitiveness or loneliness—is a virtue, and that the exposed life is equivalent to the examined or well-lived one. In our contemporary ethic of self-revelation, we even use holocaust-style terms like 'victims' and 'survivors' to describe people who have been lied to by lovers or groped in offices by colleagues they fancied. We consume the rants of rancorous talk-radio hosts and boasting talk-show guests and numerous trivial tell-all memoirs. Madonna's S&M, Rodman's crossdressing, Anne Rice's vampirism, Ellen's sitcom lesbianism, have unburdened consensual depravity of stigma, but also of meaningful individual resonance. Words and signs are displacing our genitals.
At the same time, confronted by too many hyped sexual options and transitions, we long for clarity and stability. Because every choice we make carries avoidable risks, risk-assessment now dictates our sex lives. What used to be the prison of modesty has become the brig of accountability. We live in fear, not of God, but of ourselves. This makes us prone to self-blame or passivity, and to sloganeering. To find some coherence, we increasingly define ourselves by our sexual orientation. We code it in our clothes, our speech, our posture. It confers our community, our status.
But by proclaiming ourselves a 'lipstick bottom' or 'leather top,' we restrict our experience to the roles we invest our identities in. A bald butch dyke is as much a cliché today as a housewife. Even people who fetishize amputees or nail their penises on planks have ready theories for their proclivities that sound eerily theological and unsexy. Support groups reinforce this sexual isolation, as do the doctors who medically alter the body to 'match' our mental concept of our sex, and sexperts who suggest that sex can be treated and solved, like a disease. The end result of this is that we still don't depend on our distinct psyches to define our sex lives, but on the ideology of a society that divides human sexuality into rigid categories in order to control it, and dresses it up as a cornucopia. In all these ways, sex is deeroticized. Emancipation has brought us neither better orgasms nor peace. Long talking carefully conditions dry-ass blues, I say.
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