What a difference a decade and a half make when it comes to opportunities for exhibitionism! Do you know, boys and girls, that in the old days, people often had to actually go outside to find someone to admire them as they showed off? Now, of course, friendly strangers are a mouse-click away, teens are getting busted for “sexting” (who knew that kiddie porn laws applied to actual kids having supposedly-private communication? Who can pin down, today, what privacy actually is?), and ever more people seem to be, like me, formerly shy. But body image issues do not seem to have gone away, even with the advent of wonderful role models like Big Burlesque and its zaftig dancing girls. Where body tyranny rules, plenty of people still have reason to be shy... or think they do. My original Exhibitionism for the Shy interviewees are joined this time around by new experts in showoffery, and I cannot thank them enough for taking the time to share their thoughts and experiences. Especially big thanks to Margaret Cho – she’s exhibitionism’s biggest 21st century success story to date, if you ask me – and to the ever-inspiring Nina Hartley for contributing her thoughts to the new introduction.
This time around, instead of having a resource chapter whose contents will before long be out of date, I’m introducing a website – www.exhibitionismfortheshy.com ? where I can let you know about show-offy resources like places to do it and things to wear ? and you can let me (and other readers) know about resources you discover! Please, though, check to make sure the listed places remain in business before you make a trip to shop or stay.
Finally, more thanks are due: To Mary Branscombe and Simon Bisson, without whose astonishing post-millennial computer skills the previous edition would still be stuck on a little piece of plastic, unable to speak to my fancy Macintosh gizmo that I now use; to Nellie Wilson, who made sure the old manuscript was edited enough to be made new; to Kat Sunlove and Layne Winklebleck, who offered their house in the country as a crucial writing refuge; and always to Robert, who has given me so many opportunities to be a show-off in our twenty years together, and who puts up with how bat-shit I get when I’m working on a deadline.
Grazie too to Patrick Hughes, without whom the new edition would never have happened; his support and business inspiration were crucial to getting the book back into print. Speaking of which: without my wonderful new publishers Aaron Silverman and Molly Maguire, there would be no second edition either. And it would be less readable without the redoubtable layout skills of Janet Hardy and less beautiful without the fantastic new cover design by Johnny Ink.
Laurel Sharp took the back cover photo at the same time as the pic that appeared on the front of the first edition of Exhibitionism for the Shy; I always sort of regretted not appearing naked on that book, and I’m so pleased to be able to right that counter-intuitive situation this time! True, I don’t look exactly like this any more – but exhibitionism still gives me a one-of-a-kind thrill. I hope it does you, too – if not now, then very soon.
Finally, my deepest gratitude to all the readers of the first edition – not only for supporting the book, for which I’d owe thanks enough, but for telling me that it made a difference in your lives, your erotic comfort, and your willingness to take sexy (but one-step-at-a-time) risks. Thank you for trusting these ideas about erotic comfort... and your own desire to be a more erotically comfortable person. I hope you don’t mind if I imagine you (nearly naked, maybe?) cheering the book’s new readers on.