Sexual experimentation makes relationships more exciting

"Sex gets your endorphins flowing, the chemicals in your brain that make you feel good. Having sex makes you feel good, and increasing your erotic sophistication improves your self-esteem."

By Alex P. Vidal

LOS ANGELES, California – The Kerista Village is a commune in which members are not monogamous. They practice polyfidelity—they have sex with other members of their group, but not with outsiders. In the following viewpoint, Even Eve, a member of the commune since 1971, explains that such sexual experimentation increases creativity and happiness.

There was a period of time when an article in Psychology Today featuring Kerista as a rare unusual example of non-monogamous people who were jealously-free prompted TV talk show producers across the nation to contact them to appear on their shows. They did the Phil Donahue Show, the Today Show and a number of appearances on local (San Francisco Bay Area) programs.

By the eighth or ninth show, they were feeling sort of burned out on describing  their sleeping schedule to middle America and thought it would make a lot of sense to start focusing the discussions more on other elements of their lifestyle, like their plan to create a grassroots philanthropic movement that could solve serious world problems. No go. The dialogue always came back to what Phil Donahue called “the sex part” of the trip and stayed there, regardless of efforts to shoot off in other directions.

“I see this as a plus, really, At least there’s something that gets people’s attention. When I first came into contact with Kerista and Keristans—of whom, at the time, there were only a handful—one of the first things I heard was the maxim, ‘’It all boils down to penises and vaginas,’” Eve is quoted in Sexual Values. “Though I had been moving in hip circles, I was startled by such a blunt reduction of all life’s complicated mysteries. Yet it seemed on reflection, to be fairly accurate, even if hyperbolically stated.”

PREOCCUPATIONS

Eve explains: “My main preoccupations back then was certainly sex-related. What type of relationship, or relationships, did I want? How many? Sex with women and men or men only? And what about all those stereotypical sex roles? How should I get rid of them, and who could I meet that would agree with me about them? Was it true that the vaginal orgasm was a myth? Was there really such a thing as a happy couple? And on and on, ad nauseam at times.”

Like in Kerista clarified the significance of the boiling it all down to genitals homily. It wasn’t that other things weren’t important or wonderful. It was just, very simply, that until a person had sorted all those issues out and gotten her/his intimate life into a satisfactory place, everything else was to some degree put on hold. First things first.

“My guess about most people is that a lot of this sort-and-find stuff related to their sex lives goes on subliminally, without must consciousness, because it’s only very recently that sexual matters have begun coming up to the surface for open thought and discussion. This means that an awful lot of people are going around with a good portion of their total awareness potential buried, as it were, in underground vaults where they can’t do much with it,” Eve adds further. “Just imagine what the world could be like if that locked up potential was liberated for conscious, intelligent use! Despite periodic societal regressions, I think things are going that way.”

The idea of polyfidelity has immense erotic appeal to those of them who have opted for it for reasons beyond the sexual fact of sleeping with a number of wonderful partners. One of the biggest draws is the erotic relationship between the people of the same sex who (in hetero groups such as those existing in Kerista) share the experience of relating sexually to the same opposite sex people.

They call these people “starling” sisters or brothers, and these friendships are unique and delightful. There has been a lively debate going on within the commune for several years now connected to this, having to do with trust and closeness. According to those on one side of the debate, there are two “tiers” of relationships in a B-FIC (Best Friend Identify Cluster), with two different levels of closeness. In the closest tier or ring are the sexual relationships; in the second ring are the starlings. Both are precious, but (according to this perspective) sexual relations have innately more depth of feeling, trust and intimacy than platonics.

DIFFERENCE

On the other side of the debate, Eve emphasizes, is the view that there is no inherent difference in trust and closeness between sexual and platonic B-FIC relationships. “The two types of involvements are different but equal; the determinants of how intimate you are with any of your partners has to do with other factors, such as how long you’ve been together and what sorts of shared experiences you’ve logged in. According to this second theory, in fact, you might feel closer to a same-sex, platonic partner with whom you’ve had a stable friendship for many years than to a sexual partner who has only come into the group recently, and has had a history of being unstable in B-FICs due to unsettled psychological issues.”

According to eve, it’s the kind of dialectical debate that they find enjoyable, and pursue in a relaxed and leisurely fashion as they drift through life with each other, without the expectation that one side will ever convince the other to change their views. Conversations about themes like this presuppose a high degree of erotic sophistication.

“We do not deal with any jealousy whatsoever and never have within the Keristan life-style. But there are things that have taken some working out,” Eve points out. “I can remember the time, about none or ten years ago, that Lee and Judd decided to go out to see a live sex show at one of the adult theaters in San Franciso. This was shortly after we had all decided to let go of most of our former erotic restrictions. They came in late that night, having had a good time, and some of us asked them to describe the show. After hearing a brief description, I made a face and said something like, ‘I don’t know how you could find watching women masturbate entertaining,’ in my snottiest tone of voice. Lee looked at me and said, ‘Well, how long have you been beating your wife?’ At that point I backed out down from my implied superiority position and began to realize that the amount of emotionality I was feeling probably had very little to do with the immediate situation and was something I’d really have to take a good look at.”

RESTRUCTURING

The process of self-examination and sexual attitude restructuring took me and everyone else years—in fact, we’re still in it today. It may seem surprising that people who had already progressed so far from their cultural roots and embraced the ideal of social tolerance so sincerely would be uncovering layers of erotic prejudice in themselves. On the other hand, it only underscores the fact that faulty conditioning and education can and do have a big impact on people’s minds.

Resisting change, Eve confesses: “I used to be very puzzled by my own and others’ initial emotional response to the introduction of new ideas for pushing out our boundaries of erotic exploration. Really, none of the things we’ve examined or tried have been all that far out, compared to other things I’m aware of. According to friends and acquaintances, Keristans are still into what’s known as ‘vanilla sex.’ But we have explored such ideas as setting up a very select club called the ‘Perfect Partners Co-op Cabaret’ which would be a place where exhibitionists within our social circle could perform before a sympathetic audience, and we’ve dabbled in consensual, intellectual erotic games wherein different will take on dominant or submissive roles, and the submissive will carry out instructions given by the dominants.

NON-SEXUAL

“The instructions have actually been non-sexual for the most part, and are designed to help the person playing the submissive role develop her/himself in areas that can use improvement. But back to the puzzlement, I’ve had the sense that there was something more to the nervous of fearful response than simply the echo of juvenile conditioning. What I’ve finally concluded is that it’s basic mental inertia; the resistance of change. This is one of the funnier aspects of human nature, but a real one we have to contend with. I’ve noticed something very interesting about people when they have some kind of new sexual or erotic experience. Almost without exception, it seems to step up their self-confidence by at least a tiny bit, and sometimes by a lot. And sometimes, along with that, there seems to be a little more looseness, a little more creativity.

“I’m not just talking about the fact that getting laid cheers people up. That is something I’ve observed so often that I don’t even question it anymore. To whatever degree I might have doubted it my doubts were finally eradicated when I was in a period of recovering from a long and serious depression. I wasn’t totally depressed anymore, but I still had attacks of it that would sometimes last for days. One time when I was feeling pretty bad I came into the front room of one of our houses, where Jaz and Ram, two men in my B-FIC, were hanging out. Ram, who was filling out his work slips for the day, saw that I was in a low mood…’Why don’t you two go into the Pink Room and have yourselves a freebie! At least one of you’ll enjoy it anyway,’ (he said). So Jaz and I followed his advice. When we started fooling around I was still feeling so bad I was crying a little. Midway through the cunnilingus, before I even came, my mood switched. By the time we finished I was feeling 100% better. This wasn’t the one-time phenomenon—I tested it numerous other times (purely in the interest of scientific research, of course) and found it worked repeatedly. Sex gets your endorphins flowing, the chemicals in your brain that make you feel good.

FEELS GOOD

“Having sex makes you feel good, and increasing your erotic sophistication improves your self-esteem. These aren’t absolutes—sex in a relationship that’s already burned out might not do much for you (although many a burned out relationship will hang together for years based on the sex alone)—but I think these are generalizations that will hold up. Erotic self-development increases self-esteem because it involves the use of the mind; it expands the imagination; it makes you feel modern, up-to-date, gives you a glamorous self-image.

“Because it involves and intellectual workout, you may run into a wall of inertia that wants you to stay put as you are, the same way you may suddenly feel very sedentary when someone invites you to go for a jog. But just as habitual joggers know that on the other side of the inertia are a number of personal rewards, people who choose to see themselves as erotically sophisticated and are willing to look for an engage those new ideas will reap benefits of their own: the benefit of sexual liberation. The two (sexual liberation and erotic sophistication) come together, if you will; they’re a package deal…”