The Betty Pages sprung out of some conversations Betty Desire a local drag queen and I were having in a gay bar. These editorials may be out of context now and were written for a local audience in the Bellingham area. but I am sure readers everywhere can make some sense of parts of them.

Testing Your Limits

July 2004

I was thinking the other day about all the time I spend dealing with other peoples limits around sex. The lists of things they will and will not do. I probably spend more time on this issue directly because I am always negotiating in sexual arenas. Sometimes it is with models who are posing sans clothing for me, sometimes it is with my own partners, and often it is just of a general sexual nature when I teach workshops on kinky topics to groups of people. As a rule, limits come up a minimum of once a day for me. That is probably more than most of you and with good reason.

However, a good portion of my time regarding limits is spent cleaning up messes when folks make a mistake around their limits. It causes me to wonder if everyone should spend more time learning how to understand and express their own sexual limits. What will you do and what will you not do. A lot of times when a problem comes up in someone's sex life or relationship it has to do with limits. Either limits that are being broken, not understood, or not explored. Some of the big problems our communities have faced are also caused by poorly defined limits.

Your limits should be flexible. I think the more flexible they are the healthier they are. In flexible I mean that what you would do with someone you were in love with and thought of as a partner for life should be very different from what you would do with someone you are in lust with. You should do things for your partners that may not be exactly your cup of tea if it rocks their boat. And quite possibly something you might do with that lustful one night stand might very well be something you do not want in a long term relationship. There are experiences we fantasize about happening only once.

Your fantasies are a good place to start in deciding your limits. If you want an analogy your fantasies are like the gas pedal of your sexuality. Your limits are like the brakes. Your fantasies make you go forward and do things. I was a person who had fantasies that did not even come close to what I did sexually and it took a lot of growth experiences before I had fantasies and habits that were in line. I do not mean exactly inline but in line within my limits. I recommend spending some honest time with your fantasies, confronting how many of them are fulfilled by what you do now, in or out of the bedroom.

After you have your fantasies all revved up and going full tilt towards Sodom and Gomorrah its time to grab some limits. Your limits are the things that keep you safe like brakes, seat belts and speed limits. In these times a first check on your limits should be that type of safety. Define and research what safe sex means to you. Do it on a rational day when you are not panting after that new thing next door. Do your own research, use resources like Evergreen Aids Foundation and Planned Parenthood. Do Google searches on the internet. Read, about how you catch things, what happens when you do and the ramifications of catching them. Know what you are risking. And then know the odds of catching them with a particular behavior.

Weighing the odds versus the risk. If you have sex with multiple partners the odds are too high that you will catch a bug or two if you use no barriers at all. But at the same time some folks out there would like to scare you into not having any sex at all until you are in a monogamous life long relationship, with a recently tested partner who you know will never cheat. I'm not sure about you, but I like test drives. While I knew both of my present partners for a long time beforehand, there was a test drive before we started making commitments to each other. Personally I also like the occasional one night stand. And if you read the research most of us do wander in some way sooner or later, even (or especially) the Republicans. I know this about Republicans because I talk to sex workers in my day job. So decide what safer sex means to you. Is it barriers only with everyone for every activity. Barriers, with most people or barriers for most activities. Assess your own risks and make your own decisions.

So thats the big limit out of the way now on to the trickier ones. The rest start to read like the Dr. Seuss book Green Eggs and Ham. Would you do it in a box? would you do it with a fox? For BDSM folks we are used to these questions. So much of our sex is wrapped up in technical fantasies with equipment and props that we need to express these issues well. But still I see people in and out of the kink worlds failing to express limits around sex well. Or even analyze their own. A good one to start out with for everyone is monogamy, vs non-monogamy and if so defining what that means. Does monogamy mean kissing only one person, hugging, flirting? Or does it mean only genital to genital contact, or does that limit extend to oral sex? Does it mean only loving one person but having sex with anyone you might lust after. I knew one couple who considered themselves monogamous but when they both travelled for business all bets were off as long as it stayed on the road. Some bisexuals have a definition of monogamy that means a relationship with only one person of their dominant gender preference and fooling around with the other gender is OK as long as you dont fall in too deep.

Now there is another limit. Gender. A lot of what limits peoples gender preferences is peer pressure. What is everyone going to think. It keeps gay people in the closet. It keep bisexual people heterosexual and it keeps heterosexual people from every experiencing anything else. Sometimes it keeps bisexual people in homosexual relationships only. The reality is that a lot of people are more fluid than society likes to think. The rare ones who are at an extreme end of the Kinsey scale may disagree, but most folks are not a Kinsey 1 or 6. The Kinsey scale measures how gay you are or how het you are, a 1 being exclusively heterosexual and a 6 being exclusively homosexual. For those of you in the middle of the Kinsey scale somewhere, there are a whole lot of limits and rules you need to make for yourself about what you will and will not do. You can be as creative as society and your partners will allow. The shame is in letting peer pressure influence you away from what you desire.

You will notice that we haven't even begun to really talk about any particular sex act or practice. That I leave as an exercise for the reader. Think through the things you want and do now. Check them against the limits of your safety and your relationships and come up with some rules for yourself regarding the sex acts you will and will not do. This will help you again when you are asked to do something you never imagined by a partner someday.

The last thing to do with your new list of limits is learn how to express them. They do no good to protect you physically or emotionally if you cant say them out loud. If you can't trust someone enough to express your limits to them why are you having sex with them? So be able to communicate your limits. In fact that is now one of my limits. I will not play with someone who can't tell me their safer sex limits. I assume they have none, and that is a risk I will not expose myself or my life partners to.