Village holds sexual experimentation

By Alex P. Vidal

 

“Sex gets your endorphins flowing, the chemicals in your brain that make you feel good. Having sex makes you feel good, and increasing your erotic sophistication improves your self-esteem.”

 

THE Kerista Village is a commune in which members are not monogamous.

They practice polyfidelity—they have sex with other members of their group, but not with outsiders.

In the following viewpoint, Even Eve, a member of the commune since 1971, explains that such sexual experimentation increases creativity and happiness.

There was a period of time when an article in Psychology Today featuring Kerista as a rare unusual example of non-monogamous people who were jealously-free prompted TV talk show producers across the nation to contact them to appear on their shows.

They did the Phil Donahue Show, the Today Show and a number of appearances on local (San Francisco Bay Area) programs.

By the eighth or ninth show, they were feeling sort of burned out on describing their sleeping schedule to middle America and thought it would make a lot of sense to start focusing the discussions more on other elements of their lifestyle, like their plan to create a grassroots philanthropic movement that could solve serious world problems. No go.

The dialogue always came back to what Phil Donahue called “the sex part” of the trip and stayed there, regardless of efforts to shoot off in other directions.

“I see this as a plus, really, At least there’s something that gets people’s attention. When I first came into contact with Kerista and Keristans—of whom, at the time, there were only a handful—one of the first things I heard was the maxim, ‘’It all boils down to penises and vaginas,’” Eve is quoted in Sexual Values. “Though I had been moving in hip circles, I was startled by such a blunt reduction of all life’s complicated mysteries. Yet it seemed on reflection, to be fairly accurate, even if hyperbolically stated.”

 

PREOCCUPATIONS

Eve explains: “My main preoccupations back then was certainly sex-related. What type of relationship, or relationships, did I want? How many? Sex with women and men or men only? And what about all those stereotypical sex roles? How should I get rid of them, and who could I meet that would agree with me about them? Was it true that vaginal orgasm was a myth? Was there really such a thing as a happy couple? And on and on, ad nauseam at times.”

Like in Kerista clarified the significance of the boiling it all down to genitals homily. It wasn’t that other things weren’t important or wonderful. It was just, very simply, that until a person had sorted all those issues out and gotten her/his intimate life into a satisfactory place, everything else was to some degree put on hold. First things first.

“My guess about most people is that a lot of this sort-and-find stuff related to their sex lives goes on subliminally, without must consciousness, because it’s only very recently that sexual matters have begun coming up to the surface for open thought and discussion. This means that an awful lot of people are going around with a good portion of their total awareness potential buried, as it were, in underground vaults where they can’t do much with it,” Eve adds further.

“Just imagine what the world could be like if that locked up potential was liberated for conscious, intelligent use! Despite periodic societal regressions, I think things are going that way.”

The idea of polyfidelity has immense erotic appeal to those of them who have opted for it for reasons beyond the sexual fact of sleeping with a number of wonderful partners.

One of the biggest draws is the erotic relationship between the people of the same sex who (in hetero groups such as those existing in Kerista) share the experience of relating sexually to the same opposite-sex people.

They call these people “starling” sisters or brothers, and these friendships are unique and delightful.

There has been a lively debate going on within the commune for several years now connected to this, having to do with trust and closeness.

According to those on one side of the debate, there are two “tiers” of relationships in a B-FIC (Best Friend Identify Cluster), with two different levels of closeness. In the closest tier or ring are the sexual relationships; in the second ring are the starlings.

Both are precious, but (according to this perspective) sexual relations have innately more depth of feeling, trust and intimacy than platonic.

 

DIFFERENCE

On the other side of the debate, Eve emphasizes, is the view that there is no inherent difference in trust and closeness between sexual and platonic B-FIC relationships.

“The two types of involvements are different but equal; the determinants of how intimate you are with any of your partners has to do with other factors, such as how long you’ve been together and what sorts of shared experiences you’ve logged in. According to this second theory, in fact, you might feel closer to a same-sex, platonic partner with whom you’ve had a stable friendship for many years than to a sexual partner who has only come into the group recently, and has had a history of being unstable in B-FICs due to unsettled psychological issues.”

According to eve, it’s the kind of dialectical debate that they find enjoyable, and pursue in a relaxed and leisurely fashion as they drift through life with each other, without the expectation that one side will ever convince the other to change their views. Conversations about themes like this presuppose a high degree of erotic sophistication.

“We do not deal with any jealousy whatsoever and never have within the Keristan life-style. But there are things that have taken some working out,” Eve points out. “I can remember the time, about none or ten years ago, that Lee and Judd decided to go out to see a live sex show at one of the adult theaters in San Franciso. This was shortly after we had all decided to let go of most of our former erotic restrictions. They came in late that night, having had a good time, and some of us asked them to describe the show. After hearing a brief description, I made a face and said something like, ‘I don’t know how you could find watching women masturbate entertaining,’ in my snottiest tone of voice. Lee looked at me and said, ‘Well, how long have you been beating your wife?’ At that point, I backed out down from my implied superiority position and began to realize that the amount of emotionality I was feeling probably had very little to do with the immediate situation and was something I’d really have to take a good look at.”

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two local dailies in Iloilo)