Sometimes you need someone to ask all the right questions to coax all the right answers out of you. Sometimes you need someone to ask the embarrassing questions you would not want to answer or the questions you are uncomfortable knowing are out there. Sometimes you need someone to lead the conversation to keep you on track. Sometimes you need to be tempted and the right questions can push you over the edge.
Susie Bright's guided sex journal "Love and Lust" asks some of those questions. She puts those questions out there to help you to dig down into your big box of sexual secrets (or not-so-secrets) and write about it.
Some of the questions, like "Have you ever had sex with a person you didn't know at all - a stranger?" are so personal that you may not want to know the answer yourself or you might relish in each time you had a steamy romp with someone you whose name you remember as "feathered hair guy" and would never see again.
Others, like "What was your first sexual experience with another person?" might cause fuzzy, dreamy somewhat awkward memories of a first love or memories you might prefer not to remember and have remained hidden.
But that is what a journal is for! A journal is for those secrets that you want to tell yourself and either celebrate those secrets or simply get them off of your chest. A journal is to hide your deepest innermost dirty secret thoughts in. It is to let loose and to write all those thoughts, ideas and fantasies you have been aching to get out of your mind, through your fingers onto the pages for your own personal fulfillment.
Or to "accidentally" leave for a lover/potential lover/in-law/law-student roommate to find and ogle and sigh over.
And for the latter this is a most tempting journal... The lovely red and black cover and binding draw your eyes directly to it and the tiny lock and key is pure temptation to those who might need a little tempting. The pages are lovely and thick, creamy of texture and ink sinks into it like a warm finger sinks into butter. Your fingers are drawn to the journal because it looks like something tempting. It looks like a piece of chocolate sitting on a pillow in a fancy hotel. It looks like a vintage Porsche sitting unattended with the keys in the ignition... And, if you have somewhat of a perverse, exhibitionistic personality like I have, you may want to leave it out on the coffee table for all to see.
For those that need a little help with getting your thoughts straight in order to write them down, Ms. Bright's thoughtful, insightful and sometimes silly questions will help provide some of the guidance that you may need in order to just happily write in your journal and get a better idea of who you are sexually or to open your smut writing floodgates and become the next Pat Califia or Earl de Rochester or Jerry Stahl or D.H. Lawrence or maybe even Susie Bright.
My only worries it that there is not enough room at the end where the journal leaves blank pages for you, the writer, to fill in with your own thoughts. I am not sure there is quite enough pages...
