Author and sex expert Diana Cage visits Charis Books & More in Atlanta on Friday, May 11, at 7:30 p.m. to read from and sign her new book, “Mind-Blowing Sex” A Woman’s Guide.” Cage’s other books include “Girl Meets Girl: A Dating Survival Guide,” “Box Lunch: The Layperson’s Guide to Cunnilingus,” “Bottoms Up: Writing About Sex,” and the groundbreaking “On Our Backs Guide to Lesbian Sex.”

She took a few minutes our of her busy schedule to talk to GA Voice about what exactly “mind-blowing” sex is, the research she put into it (her girlfriend didn’t mind) and the importance of supporting Charis, the Southeast’s oldest feminist bookstore.

How did you come up with the title of your book? How do you define “mind-blowing” sex?

The book is a mix of humor, feminist social commentary, and realistic, smart sex advice, which is a combo that for some reason doesn’t happen all that often! No one ever thinks to mix social critique in with the sexy stuff, but I think it works really well. Our sexuality
is a product of the culture we live in, we have to examine both at the same time if we want to get anywhere.

Honestly though, finding a name that made sense was really a chore! Part of the issue is that all sex book names sound the same after a while. The whole genre has been tainted by meaningless magazine cover copy, so it’s difficult to talk about sex without resorting to hyperbole. We finally landed on “Mind-Blowing Sex: A Woman’s Guide” because I think you need to have your mind blown a little to have great sex. “Mind-Blowing Sex” is sex that expands the way we see sex, ourselves, and our lovers. I like to think the title is a double entendre that you wont really get until you’ve read the book.

Read the rest at thegavoice.com

There’s a reason why Diana Cage’s new book isn’t called Mind-Blowing Lesbian Sex. With her name on the cover, however, you might think it should be. Since she’s a former editor of the legendary lesbian sex magazine On Our Backs, and the author of essential lesbian reads such as Girl Meets Girl: A Dating Survival Guide and Box Lunch: The Layperson’s Guide to Cunnilingus, it only makes sense that Cage’s latest book would be about sex for girl-loving girls. Instead, this famously one-step-ahead sexpert says that for all “female-bodied people” solving the problem of sexual desire begins by taking sexual and gender identity out of the equation altogether.

During the three years that The Diana Cage Show aired on Sirius XM, Cage, already well into her career as an expert on lesbian sexuality, came to a new realization. “Previously,” she says, “I had always traveled in an urban lesbian world—my dating pool was always urban and lesbian. Suddenly [on the radio show], I’m talking to all kinds of lesbians—those from the Midwest, truckers—all kinds of different people. And what I realized is that what we wanted from sex and didn’t know about sex was the same.”

Read the rest at Curvemag.com

So here are some dates:

May 2: Bluestockings, NYC

May 11: Charis Books, Atlanta

May 17: KGB Bar, NYC

July 10: Good Vibrations (Valencia location), San Francisco

July 17: Center for Sex and Culture, San Francisco

July 25: Powells Books, Portland

Details: Authors Diana Cage (Mind-Blowing Sex) and Lesley Kinzel (Two Whole Cakes) join us for a frank conversation about body politics and the expectations, challenges and unique pleasures of being a modern woman.

“Unique pleasures of being a modern woman.” I wonder who wrote that description? I don’t know Lesley in person but I’ve read her blog for ages and from what I can tell she’s a smart-ass rad fatty with an axe to grind. And I’m a smart-ass angry feminist sex hound with an axe to grind. Unique pleasures of being a modern woman, exactly.

The School of Journalism will sponsor a media panel on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender coverage at 6 p.m. April 10 in the Ernie Pyle Hall auditorium. “Equal Time: Gays, media and the myth of equality” will be free and open to the public.

Zak Szymanski is organizing the event, which will address LGBT portrayal in the media. Speakers include: me, obvs. Also, Amos Mac, founder/publisher of the transgender quarterly magazine, Original Plumbing; and Trevor Hoppe, Ph.D. candidate in the joint program in Sociology and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, whose writing on HIV/AIDS often is cited in publications. His new collection of essays is Beyond Masculinity: Queer Men on Gender and Politics, due this summer.

This is a book about sex. It’s also a book about women, our bodies, how we use them, how they work, and why sometimes they don’t work the way we’d like them to. It’s a book about sexuality, eroticism, pornography, desire, arousal, and satiation. Included in this book is only the tiniest bit of science, because I’m not a scientist. I’m a bit of a sexologist, if a sexologist is a person who studies sex. Truthfully, I’m more like a sexual adventurer, a sex writer, thinker, critic, and philosopher. Mostly I get called a sexpert, but I’m not sure anyone is ever an expert at sex.

This book is also about love, to a certain degree, in that love of oneself is a necessary component of sexual ecstasy.

Together we’re going to take a tour of our bodies and our sexuality. Sexual shame often prevents us from really getting a good look at ourselves. There is plenty of talk about the wrongs of sex, the bad parts of sex, and very little information about empowering sex. Constant negative feedback about female sexuality affects our ability to explore our desire. Our sexuality is demeaned, trivialized, controlled. We’re divided into MILFs, Cougars, and Lolitas, when we aren’t kittens, Barbies and porn queens. So much meaning is attached to us and our bodies by everyone else; there’s barely any room left for our own opinions. The female body is public domain. Our own bodies are used to sell us things so often, that sometimes we forget we own them.

Something I know to be true, without a doubt, is that the more you understand yourself, the happier you are. This same concept applies to sex—the more you understand sex the better it is. Sex needs more attention from those of us who are seen more often as sex objects than sexual beings. We need sex as much as we need food, water, shelter, and love. Great sex can be rejuvenating, healing, rewarding, and fulfill our deepest needs for intimacy and connection. Our desire to have sex with someone is how we know that person is more than a friend. Great sex can make you fall in love.

When we feel confident, healthy, and sexy our lives are happier places. Feeling sexy is like feeling invincible. But that feeling doesn’t come easily in a society with a very narrow definition of sexy. Every outlet through which information can be disseminated will tell you what is and isn’t sexy, but it’s all misguided. Sex is personal; sexy is subjective. We can get turned on by anything and everything. Having fantastic sex is about rejecting the messages you receive about your sexuality that don’t ring true to you. Feeling sexy and finding great sex is more about shutting out that erroneous information than listening to it. Once you’ve learned to navigate the perils of societal expectations and messages that keep you from being fully yourself, sex will become the most amazing, fulfilling empowering experience you can have. It will be a source of power for you, a source of ecstasy.

You may come across a new thing or two in these pages, especially once we get out of our heads and into our bodies. If you come across something unfamiliar, read about it. If it doesn’t appeal to you, you don’t have to do it. Don’t be afraid of new ideas. Consider new paths to pleasure and don’t judge paths chosen by others. At the very least you’ll have some new topics with which to wow guests at your next dinner party.

I love sex. I especially love writing, talking, and reading about sex. I love kinky sex and vanilla sex, married sex and casual sex. Rough sex, embarrassing sex, probably-shouldn’t–have sex, funny sex, awkward sex, intimate sex, anonymous sex. The only bad sex is sex that makes you feel bad. Sex is liberating as long as we’re liberated.

I’ve divided this book into three parts. Part one is really the foundation you need to get the sex life you want. Part one is about changing your attitudes, unlearning obsessive and self-harming behaviors, and letting go of the hang-ups that do nothing but hold you back.

Part two will teach you how to do all sorts of things better, introduce you to new techniques, and give you a greater understanding of just how smoothly the physical side of sex can work once you’ve mastered the skills.

Part three is for sexual adventurers. It’s for the single folks that want to remain forever memorable to their lovers and the married couples that want to take their sex lives to a whole new realm of sexual experimentation. Part three is full of advice about the little extras and the kinky fun. Part three offers advice for a lifetime of fulfilling sex.

For the next 300 or so pages, forget sexual orientation, and sexual identity; we don’t need them right now. If you are female, by biology or identity, this book is for you. Straight, gay, bisexual, lesbian, transgendered, bisexual, queer, mainstream, alternative, urban, suburban, polyamorous, married—we have similar sexual needs. Our specific tastes and preferred techniques might vary but our sexual response and basic physical and psychological requirements are pretty much the same.

With that in mind, I’ve done my best to be inclusive. Sometimes I address women with male partners, sometimes it’s about women with female partners, and within the categories of male and female I address a whole array of genders. Femaleness comes in many forms, not all of them feminine. My own sexuality has manifested in so many different ways that while I call myself a lesbian, I have been at different times in my life straight and married, straight, married and bicurious, polyamorous, nonmonogamous, in an open marriage, bisexual and single, the straight partner of a transgendered man, and for the past ten years a lesbian in relationships with women. Regardless of the sex or gender of my partner, my body always worked exactly the same way. My sexuality was never about who I was having sex with, it was about who I was when I was having sex.

Gender gets a lot of attention in this book as well. Talking and thinking about gender is important to every type of couple. It’s easy to get hung up on masculinity and femininity in bed. We’ve burdened all sorts of fun sexual acts with gender hang ups. And that’s got to go. Gender and gender roles can make sex exciting; there’s a sexual tension that stems from our differences. But there’s a way to enjoy gender differences without being imprisoned by them.

Understanding gender and our expectations around it is an essential part of accepting ourselves and our partners. Women are expected to fall naturally into a more passive role in bed. It’s something we’re taught as children, women should wait around for someone to want them, for the man to ask them out and initiate sex. You might have desires that fall outside of traditional femininity but repress them thinking your partner wont find you attractive. Sometimes those of us who fall along the feminine side of the gender spectrum worry that our partners wont find us attractive if we aren’t dressed up all the time. Or maybe we worry that the things that get us hot in bed will make us seem slutty or make us feel guilty. We sometimes hold ourselves back from real pleasure by worrying that embracing what we want will make us seem less attractive.

These same insecurities affect our partners. Men, for instance, are often stuck in what they think is masculine behavior. And their fear of not being masculine enough prevents them from having all sorts of pleasure in bed that they could have if they let down their gender guard a bit. But it’s not just men that are roped into this limited interpretation of masculinity, anyone who identifies with masculinity can struggle with this. It’s not uncommon for butch lesbians, trans men, or even women with masculine partners to quantify and qualify masculinity, policing it for transgressiveness and preventing themselves or their partners from experimenting sexually and socially.

If you are a man reading this book or someone who identifies with a more masculine role, let me assure you that becoming a sexually realized, happy sex partner is about keeping yourself and your lovers from thinking too hard about right and wrong ways to express ourselves in bed. Anything, and I mean absolutely anything fun that feels good to both of you is perfectly OK. Experiment with and enjoy the vessel you’re in. There are so many ways to find pleasure in the body and you are only hurting yourself if you decide some are off limits.

I hope that regardless of who you are and who you sleep with you’ll come away from reading this book with a new perspective, understanding, and acceptance of all the women around you.

I’ve written this book for women because I am one. I know what it’s like to move through this world as a woman. I know what it’s like to not only have sex as a woman but with a woman. And I know that our sexuality is still enigmatic, even to ourselves.

Chaucer wondered what we wanted all the way back in the 14th century. Freud wondered in the 19th century and today so many researchers are still asking that question you could swing your handbag and hit one. Frankly, the question is dated and the answer is so obvious; there is no answer. We all want different things.

Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex in 1949. The “second sex” was us, she explained. The entire world was defined by men, and women were simply defined as “not men.” All these years later this idea still shapes the way we see ourselves sexually. We’re still struggling with what we want because female sexuality is simply defined as “not male.” This is true whether you have male lovers or not. Lesbian sex is particularly mysterious for anyone who doesn’t have it. “Which one is the boy?” everyone wonders. Or if it is understood that there is no boy, the assumption is that it must not be “real sex.”

Think of this book as a place where your sexuality exists outside of a partner. And if you can’t picture what your sexuality looks like outside of a partner then that’s going to be your first exercise: figuring out what it means for you to be sexual in a way that pleases no one but yourself. Together we’re going to find new ways to be sexual and enjoy thrilling, liberating, mind-blowing, life-affirming sex.

The title is a reference to Sappho, who called eros bitter sweet. Despite a long career in lesbian letters, I’d neglected to read Sappho or even learn anything about her at all until Em first read her aloud to me during one of our early dates at the Brooklyn library. As luck (or the Dewey Decimal System) would have it, the Russians (my fave) and Greeks (hers) were in the same aisle on opposing shelves. It was perfect, we spent the afternoon trying to seduce the other through our favorite authors.

I read Daniil Kharms to her, specifically the one where Gogol and Pushkin keep tripping over each other. I think it’s delightful, though admittedly not traditionally romantic.

Em, being Em, meaning practically a troubadour, picked the love poems of Sappho. Specifically Fragment 31, which I now understand to be her most famous love poem. I have to confess I didn’t really get the allure at the time. I hate to sound plebian, but the fragments thing was lost on me. What’s the use of reading half a poem? Don’t worry, I’ve since come around about Sappho and classical poetry in general even though Em still turns her nose up at Russian absurdism.

Anyway, Anne Carson got me thinking about the pleasure/pain principle and the erotic. We’re used to discussing pleasure/pain as a physiological response, there are plenty of discourses on sadomasochistic desire, the transcendent experience of physical pain/ecstasy, altered states, etc. But if you ask me, eroticizing emotional pain is way more hardcore.

In 31, Sappho looks at her love object from afar, the girl is talking to a man and Sappho is in some sort of erotic agony. She feels “almost dead.” It’s seriously painful to read.

Here’s Carson’s translation, which for the record is more beautiful than any translation I’d previously read:

He seems to me equal to the gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking

and lovely laughing — oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in me

no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead — or almost
I seem to me.

But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty…

OK, so poor Sappho, I mean, ouch. Greener than grass? Almost dead? Sounds awful. She is sick with love, dying of ecstasy. She certainly doesn’t seem jealous, though Carson says that’s a common misinterpretation. Forget it, that’s not jealousy. It’s more like she is in some kind of religious fervor. It seems pretty obvious to me that she’s getting off on it.

We get the concept of eroticism from the Greek myth of Eros. Eros was the god of love and sexual desire. Typically depicted as wreaking havoc with his pointed arrows–shooting them willy-nilly into unsuspecting bystanders–Eros was apparently a mischievous little prick. He wounded everyone unscrupulously–the catch being that some arrows caused their target to feel desire and some caused indifference. Thanks to Eros, everyone was always running around in some painful yet delicious state of unrequited love.

Hence Sappho calling him bitter sweet.

Eros as a concept is most easily explained as the drive for sexual and romantic love. The Greeks had a thought or two about it. The Symposium, has the meaning and purpose of eros as it’s central subject. Freud conflated eros with libido, and Bataille described it as a psychological quest–a higher pursuit than simple sex.  Then again, Bataille was so freaky he got kicked out of the Surrealists. Imagine being too weird for the Surrealists. Bataille got especially hot for the idea of beheading. He even volunteered to be beheaded but he couldn’t find anyone willing to do it. It’s probably a good thing he didn’t have the internets.

My girlfriend and everyone I know is in New York today, marching down 5th avenue with a couple thousand other lesbians. I’m at home in Philly working on the book. It’s 88 degrees in our apartment, the a/c has been tripping the breaker so I’ve foregone it in favor of the fan. I’m wearing my working-at-home attire, a thrifted black slip and stringy hair, the attire of work-at-home femmes everywhere.

The maintenance guy came by to see if he could figure out the circuit issue. He was gracious, hardly commenting on the small research library on female orgasm that’s spread across our living room floor. He brought his daughter–she was maybe 10 or 12, sporting a cast on her arm, presumably a sports injury? She had an air of masculinity that said budding lesbian. Oh I know, I know! I shouldn’t speculate about the sexuality of adolescents! Her voice, though, it was deeper than his. What else is it though, that makes a twelve-year-old girl sports curious? Her walk, the way she carried herself, a little budding butch. At twelve I carried a purse, wore eyeshadow, wielded a curling iron. Where the hell does gender come from, anyway?

It has taken a few weeks to get back into a rhythm but today I finished a 6,000 word treatise on genitalia. Em is sending me pics from the dyke march. My favorite so far, a woman I don’t know holding a sign in memory of Cheryl Burke-a poet, a badass, a femme dyke–who we lost a week ago to complications from her cancer treatment. I love Cheryl very, very much. We all do. I miss her. I love her. I wish she was still here. I love the sign, like she’s a fallen sister who marches on.

I was teaching and commuting between Philly and Brooklyn too much last semester to finish writing it when I should have. Now I’m stuck in the house all summer writing when everyone else is out playing in the sun. Remind me to never have a book due at the end of the summer again.

Anyway, currently I’m writing about orgasms. Here’s the thing. For women, sexual arousal is complex and just as tied to our mental state as a physical one. One reason pharmaceutical companies have yet to come up with a satisfying female-centric substitute for Viagra has much to do with the way we experience the state of being “turned on.” In men, unless something is wrong, arousal leads to erection. Popular pharmaceutical treatments for erectile dysfunction work by relaxing the smooth muscle tissue that surrounds major arteries in the penis. This in turn allows more blood to flow to the penis, creating a firm erection. Erections provide visual feedback, a man looks down, sees that he has a hard on, and thinks “I want to have sex.”

For women it’s a more circuitous process. Even when our bodies exhibit signs of what would presumably be arousal: vasocongestion, engorged labia and clitoris, and vaginal lubrication, we may not actually be in the mood for sex. We need more than ready genitals to desire and go through with masturbation or intercourse.

Interestingly, Viagra and similar drugs has been show to have a similar effect on women as in men, namely increasing blood flow to the genitals. However, increased blood flow did not correlate with female test subjects reporting that they wanted sex. In fact, in some cases women didn’t register any sort of recognizable “turned on” feeling.

Reading the medical literature and studying abstracts from clinical trials, it’s easy to see how little doctors and researchers understand about our sexual response. In one study I read, a doctor was quoted as saying, “Women who are not aroused can still perform.” Perform? Yikes! Rapey, much?