Sexwise, by Susie Bright
Your libido and your mind will both thank you for it
(Review posted 3 May 1996 12:12:12)

(Copied from an old review originally posted elsewhere.)

I like to see sex mainstreamed, homosexual and heterosexual and whathaveyou, because it means there are that many fewer neuroses, that many fewer people hating themselves, that many fewer suicides, and for that matter that many more orgasms. On the other hand, I hate to see sex mainstreamed, because I hate to see anything interesting mainstreamed. While I like John Fowles, I'll probably never read "A French Lieutenant's Woman", because they made a Major Motion Picture out of it, so it can't be very good, right?

Susie Bright is a warm and funny (and angry and vigorous) reassurance that even a writer who's been mainstreamed, or close to it, can still be good, still be individual, still be kinky.

It's easy to compare Susie Bright with Camille Paglia: they're both pro-sex feminists, sometimes mordant and sometimes brilliant essayists, non-heterosexual intelligent women willing and eager to exercise their intelligences on popular culture, the politics of desire, and whatever else catches their cruising eyes. But Paglia is at root an academic, while Bright worked her way up from the sex-toy counter at Good Vibrations. Paglia makes of herself a fictional character, a larger-than-life big-antlered screamer from the rooftops; Bright is a more realistic and a gentler person. (See this very book, in fact, for a wry description of Bright's own encounter with Paglia.) I'd like to have breakfast with Bright while watching "the Adventures of Camille" on the Saturday morning cartoons.

"Sexwise" is twenty-one essays by Susie Bright, reprinted from various sources (from the New York Times Book Review and Playboy to Out! magazine), from 1992 to 1994. The topics are wide-ranging, but mostly sex-related in one way or another (sort of like life). The essays are short and sweet, well-crafted, friendly and wise. Bright is sometimes angry, at injustice and stupidity in various forms, but (again unlike Paglia) she doesn't seem to be angry at the reader; rather, she seduces the reader to her side, inviting us to share her anger and Join the Club. She also understands the greynesses of the world, and does not presume to speak for lesbians in general, women in general, or anything else unlkely.

Bright writes about sex and motherhood, romance and celebrity, Dan Quayle and Madonna. She interviews Erica Jong, the erotic-film director Andrew Blake, the former Black Panther Elaine Brown. She does lots of other stuff; if you like the general idea so far, you'll like the book. If you're uncomfortable with people talking about sex, or using Naughty Words, I'm afraid you'll be very uncomfortable here.

Bright's target audience is not heterosexual males in particular, not most of the time, but even they (even we) will find interesting and useful, not to mention funny and thought-provoking, stuff here. One telling title, upon which I will not elaborate for fear of losing my G rating: "How to Make Love to a Woman: Hands-on Advice from a Woman Who Does". No, the whole book is not advice on sex and romance: the whole book is not any one thing. Read it anyway. Your libido and your mind will both thank you for it.

%A Bright, Susie
%T Sexwise
%I Cleis Press
%C Pittsburgh
%D 1995
%G ISBN 1-57344-002-7
%P 127 pp.
%O trade ppb, US$10.95