Introduction

This was the year that the U.S. Attorney General’s office declared war on porn once again. In an action that reminds one of the Meese Commission of the 1980s, we have the current AG tilting at the windmills of human desire. The new federal mandate calls for clamping down on Internet porn, and they are targeting hard-core BDSM and fetish sites, specifically the sites least likely to raise the sympathy of most Americans.

Will the campaign against depictions of fantasy sadism and depravity at home make us forget the images of real-life sadism and depravity at Abu Ghraib? The irony would be comic if it weren’t so tragic.

Representations of sexuality are ubiquitous, as anyone who has ever clicked a mouse can attest. Yet even in the relative democracy of the Internet, personal revelations about sex are often cheesy, or coated with a layer of false sophistication.

Despite our overexposed culture (or perhaps because of it), we forget how courageous it is to write authentically about sex. We aren’t used to honest depictions of sex. What we’ve been given is airbrushed, or if not airbrushed, then at least contrived in its imitation of the raw physical expression of emotion. So idealized is the sexuality we’ve been taught to live up to that the real experience may leave us feeling embarrassed or shameful. Real sex is not necessarily pretty. Cataclysmically erotic experiences don’t necessarily leave you feeling Downy Fresh. Even in the realm of Hearts and Flowers, all is not hearts and flowers.

Thankfully, sexual inventiveness has not been worn down by excessive disclosure. Innocent beginnings, with all their implied freedom and spontaneity, are still possible. True love is real, generosity of spirit abounds, and good politics win out. Integrity, self-knowledge, and the ecstasy of transcending the self to touch the Universal—all are to be found within these pages.

Taken together, the essays in Best Sex Writing 2006 comprise a detailed, direct survey of the contemporary American sexual landscape, one that we at Cleis Press have helped to shape over the past quarter century.

The authors in Best Sex Writing 2006 write movingly—and authentically—about sexual politics, sexual culture, and sexual expression. They offer an in-depth look at sex the way it actually happens in America today. Their work is humorous, informative, challenging, sexy, serious, deeply disturbing, both thoughtful and thought-provoking.

Here then is the fruit of their labors, both in the reporting and in the reality.

 

Felice Newman
March 2006
San Francisco