The Red Hibiscus: The Big P Takes Over

I've just come from Susie Bright's blog, not sure how I reached her but recognized her name as someone who makes sex talk a sane thing, a fun thing and something that's not about darkness and disease and damnation.

Back in the good ole days when I was marching for the ERA and abortion rights, and weeding out my vocabulary and my collection of good ole boy records, striving for political exactitude (not just correctness) and empowerment, those days...I considered myself open-minded. Radical and revolutionary. But there's such truth in the "personal is political" cliche (I recall the day it wasn't a cliche!). And the truth of me was that my mind was stretched around the idea of parity, accepted and promoted this as a concept and a way of living. But in my personal life, I was a tight ass.

But there was my curiosity which saved me and that curiosity didn't just have a life of its own like a separated self, it was coexisting with all of me, and fueled by the thing in all of us (most?) that gets things done, writes books, tries something new, drives a different path, bites into raw garlic, chases that person who makes our molecules dance - Passion. Yeah, with a Big P.

There were alot of years when the Big P just sat in the bucket with the mop. Not a thing happening. Except those lousy relationships. Not that I'm calling foul or backstabbing some wonderful women. But sheesh! the Big P loses its edge when it's enclosed in a pen of domesticity. But it wasn't some outside thing, some lousy relationship that diverted the Big P. Yes, I'm trying to slide. It was my own trepidation. That rigid sphincter. But once I mixed the Big P with curiosity and freedom, then well by golly, things happened.

Still the subject of sex, as a mentionable in public, is usually vetoed and it takes a particular friend or circle of friends to be given the permission and encouragement to chat about the subject without the moral bicycle riding across the conversation. Perhaps that's why it's come up here.

Before I forget: a couple of my favorite shopping spots online - it's amazing how much stretching I've done since the Big P took over: