reviewed by Bill Noble
Susie Bright is a provocateur. She's opinionated, in-your-face, and uppity. She's heartful, erotic, and overflowing with something very much like love. From pitching sex toys at Good Vibrations, to blowing college audiences away with her fantasy copulation with Dan Quayle, to holding forth in the New York Times Book Review or Salon, Susie's been just about everywhere in the sexual revolution. In this book she survives feminism, bomb threats, electrocution, and passionate affairs with a kaleidoscopic array of men and women, and explores motherhood and the vast sexual silences we pull around ourselves.
We basically give our erotic identity all the consideration of a three-minute fuck; then we point our fingers at the person who spends a whopping five minutes on their own sexual expression, and we warn them that they're going to use it all up. How much is there to use, anyway? [...] This is going to take more than five minutes, and we have to have a sensuous faith that our creative well goes as deep as we need to drink.
Full Exposure tackles unexpected topics: our urge to privacy, our erotic creativity, the challenges of "talking about it," ugliness, sex and the marketplace, sexual politics, "over-indulgence," nurturing. It ends with a 16-point manifesto that's as chewy as any writing about sexuality I've stumbled across. And there's lots more along the way.
Susie is exuberantly human. There's wacky fun, outrage, and liberating wisdom in this book. Listen, for instance, to Susie rant about the "boxes" we put ourselves in:
People ask me, "Are you into SM?" as if we were talking about a line of cards -- my fetish as a consumer dish du jour. I don't buy it -- the ethos of "my sexual preference is my lifestyle is my politics is my record label." I feel embarrassed when I'm asked for my label, and it's not for shame about my erotic preferences; it's the stupidity of having my most intuitive and creative moments crammed into sound bites.
"When two people agree about everything, only one of 'em's thinking," Sam Rayburn said. Will you agree with everything Susie says? I hope not. There are places in the book where I fume at her posturing, or, with my biologist's hat on, despair at her ignorance of what the sciences are puzzling out about our sexual natures. Her discussions of privacy and display, of gender differences, and even of incest taboos could be hugely enriched with a biological or anthropological perspective.
But agreement isn't the point. If Susie Bright doesn't leave you bubbling over with ideas, with brand-new urges, with a vast tumescence of your notions of sex and its place in your life, either your brain or your gonads have failed you. About childbirth, she says, "If having someone make their entrance to the world through your cunt isn't the last word in sexuality, I don't know what is." About sexual liberation, "How can you accept the scope of your desires without accepting tolerance and empathy?" About enlightenment and celibacy, "I went to the mountaintop, too, and I fucked everyone all the way up the trail. The view is still the same at the peak." About masturbation, "Do we listen to musicians rehearsing their instrument and bemoan the fact that they're never going to want to play with anyone else again?"
Buy Full Exposure. Or convince your librarian to buy it, despite the fact that it's a "sex book." Or convince a friend, then borrow it, quickly.
Why? Because it goes straight to the core questions of your life -- and if that's not motivation enough, because it tangles with pressing issues about how we conduct ourselves as a society. Read this book whatever your gender, your age, your sexual proclivities or confusions, your political opinions. In an age of AIDS, gathering repression, and sex-as-a-marketing-gimmick, it's important.
Utne Reader declared Susie Bright a visionary. I think she's way too practical for such a high-flown label. Here's Article 1 of her Manifesto. It's a good way to end this review -- and not a bad mission statement for CleanSheets, now that I think of it:
ONE: TALK ABOUT SEX ANYWHERE. The most audacious act of public sex is talking about it. Sex is as delicious a conversation piece as food or music; it is as infinite as the weather, and twice as interesting. Sexual conversation puts an end to small talk and small minds... What could you say about sex today, to a friend or stranger, that would open doors, instead of shutting someone out?
