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Contents

Publication History
Cover Overview
Reviews and Previews
Chapter Overview
Word Cloud   [NEW]  
First Chapter Preview   [NEW]  
Cover Gallery (year)
Cover Gallery (edition)

Publication History

Imaginative Sex was first published by DAW Books, Inc., New York in December, 1974. In May, 1998, the book was republished by Masquerade Books, Inc., New York. Imaginative Sex was again republished, both in paperback and ebook format, by E-Reads, Ltd., New York, in June, 2009.

TopCover Overview

Here is an overview of the most important covers of Imaginative Sex. Click on any cover to see the book.

English Paperback Covers

Imaginative Sex - DAW Edition - First American Printing - 1974   Imaginative Sex - Masquerade Edition - First Printing - 1998   Imaginative Sex - E-Reads Edition - First Printing - 2009  

English eBook Covers

Imaginative Sex - Digital E-Reads Edition - First Version - 2009  

TopReviews and Previews

(See also: Reviews)

Chapter Overview

I Imaginative Sex: The New Sexual Revolution
II Love, Hunters and Evolution
III Marriage, Sex and Normality
IV Sex and the Brain
V Marriage and the Ventilation of Emotion
VI Privacy
VII Disease
VIII Requirements for Imaginative Sex
IX Imaginative Techniques
X Sensuous Fantasies: Recipes for Pleasure

1. The Capture-in-the-Dark Fantasy
2. The Aphrodisiac Fantasy
3. The Wife-as-Pickup Fantasy
4. The Wife-as-Whore Fantasy
5. The Wife-as-Stripper Fantasy
6. The Wife-as-Belly-Dancer Fantasy
7. The Earth-Females-as-Tribute Fantasy
8. The I-Am-Sold-in-a-Slave-Market Fantasy
9. The Rites-of-Submission Fantasy
10. The She-Is-Forced-to-Please-Him-as-a-Bound-Captive Fantasy
11. The Captured-by-Desert-Tribesmen Fantasy
12. The Captured-by-Indians Fantasy
13. The Captured-by-Pirates Fantasy
14. The Obnoxious-Woman-Shopper Fantasy
15. The Virginity-as-an-Offering-to-Rude-Gods Fantasy
16. The Male-Slave-of-the-Imperious-Queen Fantasy
17. The Two-Animal Fantasy
18. The Rape-in-the-Caves Fantasy
19. The Kidnap Fantasy
20. The 'Lady' Fantasy
21. The I-Am-Fucked-before-a-Female-I-Dislike Fantasy
22. The Publicly-Enslaved-Female-of-Noble-Blood Fantasy
23. The I-Need-a-Job-Desperately Fantasy
24. The I-Want-an-'A'-Professor Fantasy
25. The Helpless-Maid Fantasy
26. The I-Am-Raped-by-an-Alien Fantasy
27. The I-Am-Raped-by-a-Machine Fantasy
28. The I-Am-Raped-by-a-Monster Fantasy
29. The I-Am-Going-to-Have-an-Affair with-this-Strange-Woman Fantasy
30. The Bitch Fantasy
31. The I-Am-His-Slave-Girl Fantasy
32. The I-Am-a-Love-Prize-in-a-Barbaric-Lottery Fantasy
33. The I-Have-Been-Sold-to-Pay-My-FamilyÆs-Debts Fantasy
34. The I-Have-Played-a-Dangerous-Game-of-Chance-in-which-the-Loser-is-the-Prize Fantasy
35. The Outwitted-Female-Executive Fantasy
36. The Common-Chain Fantasy
37. The Blindfolded-Lovers Fantasy
38. The Unwilling-Mind-Moving-Body Fantasy
39. The Safari Fantasy
40. The Mating-Bag Fantasy
41. The Husband-as-Wife Fantasy
42. The I-Am-Raped-in-Public Fantasy
43. The Invisible-Rapist Fantasy
44. The Slave-Girl-Exchange Fantasy
45. The Woman-White-Collar-Criminal Fantasy
46. The Captured-Foreign-Agent Fantasy
47. The Aristocrat-to-Slave Fantasy
48. The Psychiatrist Fantasy
49. The Man-as-Female-Slave-of-the-Woman-as-Male-Master Fantasy
50. The What-Will-He-Do-with-Me? Fantasy
51. The Male-Livestock Fantasy
52. The Animal-Shop Fantasy
53. The Slave-Farm Fantasy
Epilogue

Appendices
1. Garments
2. Ties
3. Apparel in Fantasy
4. Notes on How to Buy a Slave Girl
5. Notes on Investments, Documents and Conception

TopWord Cloud

The image below shows the most often used words and terms within Imaginative Sex. The larger the size, the more often the word or term occurs in the text.

Imaginative Sex - Word Cloud

TopFirst Chapter Preview

Imaginative Sex

I. IMAGINATIVE SEX: The New Sexual Revolution

The imagination has not yet been sexually liberated. Its liberation is the object of this book.

There are large numbers of people, perhaps millions of them, who will not be able to understand this book. It will doubtless seem strange to them, peculiar, incomprehensible. These will be individuals who are defective in imagination. Whether this incapacity on their part is congenital or the result of an oppressive, crippling conditioning is arguable. These two explanations are not incompatible.

We know that many human beings are defective in their grasp of spatial configurations, others lack sharp aptitudes in symbolic manipulation, others cannot, with a pencil, transfer an object in front of them to a sheet of paper; to some music is a mystery, save for the simplest of bangs and bumps. Some human beings have poor balance; others are color blind; some have slow reflexes; others seem incapable of understanding the plainest need signals of those about them, even perhaps their lovers. All of us, compared to what a human being might be, are multiply flawed with deficiencies. The capacity to use the imagination, one of the highest forms of intelligence, that of creative as opposed to dissective intelligence, is not an endowment bestowed in great quantity on human beings.

In the unusual dimensions and worlds of the imagination most of us are foreigners, flatworms stupidly crawling among stars. On the other hand, in each human being there are, however small or undeveloped, imaginative capacities, as there are capacities for speech, for thought and love. There would seem to be no reason then why almost all human beings, qua human being, might not be able to come to a greater or a lesser understanding of what this book is about. Some would understand more; some less; but all would, to one extent or another, comprehend it. Yet we know this will not be the case. Many human beings, even those with normal or above-normal imaginative endowments, will fail to comprehend, at least emotionally, what this book is about. I suspect that in their case the explanation is cultural, not congenital. They, like most of us, have been the objects of a pervasive conditioning process, universal, subtle and pernicious, which restricts the inventiveness of the human mind, the applications of the imagination, to certain approved projects and modes of experience.

It is, for example, acceptable to use the imagination, provided you do not use it too much, in the decoration of one’s home; it is acceptable to use it, if not too wildly, in the naming of one’s children; it is acceptable to use it in the writing of certain forms of approved fiction, etc. On the other hand, daring to apply this remarkable human capacity to sex is likely, at least initially, to jangle an entire warning system of negativities that has been, largely without our awareness, planted in our brains. Imagination should not be applied to sexual relationships, to improve and enhance them. It sounds quite stupid, because it is quite stupid, to say it that way, but that, in effect, is the message.

The human brain, and its inventive power, may be appropriately applied to building bridges and designing guidance systems for missiles, but it may not be appropriately applied to the intimate sexual relations between man and woman. Indeed, at such a thought, the imagination of an otherwise bright, promising individual may tighten into a knot of fumbling, frozen thumbs. You don’t use intelligence in that business. Intelligence, inventiveness, creativity, imagination is for bridges and guidance systems, not people.

We have come a long way sexually in the last hundred years. Already we have discovered that a woman has a clitoris. There were many husbands a hundred years ago who were unaware of this. Already there is an open admission of the desirability of caressing a woman before penetrating her. One. even hears, in the more daringly avant circles, of fellatio-cunnilingus now recognized by even eminent psychiatrists, who have found out about it somewhere, as kind of nice. The fact that the very thought of this simple, pleasurable act still fills many people, men and women alike, with thrills of sexual horror, attractive and repulsive simultaneously, is an excellent indication that we are still in the bronze age of sex. It is probably still the case that most lovers, statistically, cannot bring themselves to practice fellatio-cunnilingus. Perhaps the bronze age is too advanced for us. Perhaps we are still wandering around looking at stones, wondering what they are for. At any rate, this book proposes a sexual revolution.

The expression “sexual revolution” is used already, but not too usefully. It seems generally to refer simply to the fact that young people are more public about what they are doing than we were. We bragged less. On the other hand, it may be that they are getting more sex than we did, and younger. That is quite possible, but it would be difficult to get reliable statistics on the matter.

Let us suppose that more people are getting more sex than used to be the case. Even so, that scarcely counts as a revolution. It counts rather as an increase in a certain form of activity. The agricultural revolution differs from the hunting phase of mankind in the sense that people started growing their food rather than chasing it. It was something different. The agricultural revolution is not constituted by the fact that there was an increase in the number of farms. If, on the other hand, “sexual revolution” means that the intellectuals began viewing sex as a natural, pleasurable function rather than a depravity or a disease, then that revolution took place in the generation before mine. On the other hand, I suppose “sexual revolution” might be applied to the phenomenon of large numbers of people catching on to what had been discovered in the generation before mine. In other words, sociologically, the modern sexual “revolution” would simply be the more widespread acceptance of the genuine intellectual revolution of two generations ago.

To me, the expression “revolution” is most felicitously applied to the revolutionary conception, the revolutionary act, the publication and defense of the transforming ideas, and their acceptance by the intellectual elite, rather than to the later derivative phenomenon, sociological changes brought about by the percolating downward of these sexual theses and commitments. Today’s young did not invent their sexual revolution. They are buying it. It was manufactured long ago. The drug revolution, I gather, is their’s. They are welcome to it. We hope, however, for more from them.

It is now time, incidentally, for a new sexual revolution, not in the sociological sense of mass acceptances of an idea, but in the intellectual sense of the creating of new conceptions of and modes of sex. In the intellectual sense of “revolution” it is now time for a new sexual revolution. The sociological sense will have to take its turn. The major sexual revolution, the honest understanding of sex as a biological phenomenon, and not as a legal, moral or theological problem, is now accomplished. Old stains linger, but each generation begins anew, less disfigured than the last.

The essence of the new sexual revolution, whatever its human implications, is as simple as that of the old. The essence of the old revolution was that sex was a natural biological phenomenon. The essence of the new sexual revolution, that which I propose, is as simple. It builds on the old. It accepts the thesis that sex is a natural biological phenomenon. It then builds on this thesis by taking note of the fact that this natural biological phenomenon takes place in a human being. This, in itself, makes human sex considerably different from animal sex.

Biology in an animal with an upper brain is not biology in an animal without an upper brain. In one sense the codfish is much better at sex than we are; in another sense he is an amateur. Sex, once the constrictions of obsolete conditioning processes are severed, is a dimension of human experience as open to, and as inviting of, human imagination as any other.

Why should human thought not be used to enhance sex?

Why should sex not become fun, mentally as well as physically?

Why should not elemental sexual pleasure become transformed into psychosexual pleasure, the sexual pleasure of a creature with a complex brain and imagination?

We are now, still, in the hydraulic stage of sex, in which the potentialities of this glorious human capacity are seen largely in terms of manipulations and pushes and pulls.

It is my proposal, a radical one, that we get the whole human being involved in sex as well as a pair of complementary genitals. This is the sort of thing that everyone might be tempted to agree with, initially, or superficially, but also the sort of thing which, in practice, and emotionally, can be difficult to accept. Similarly, the husband, two generations ago, might have recognized intellectually that he and his wife were animals, but if she had been so unwise as to have crept to him in the middle of the night, whimpering, begging to be fucked, as it is permissible for a wife to do now, he would have been scandalized. They were animals, of course, but, but, but not really! It is our thesis, of course, that we are indeed animals, really, really, but that we are also much more, we are animals with brains, animals with intelligence and imagination, animals with the capacity to fantastically diversify and enhance our sexual experiences. Ways in which this may take place will be discussed in detail later.

It is generally my thesis then to insist on the importance of imagination in sex, to insist that the practice of sex, as performed among human beings, be accorded the same deliberate and playful application of fancy, imagination and intelligence as any other significant human activity.

Imagination is almost totally neglected in the area of sex. Indeed, it is even suspect.

To the repair of that tragedy this book is addressed.

Much in this book is new, but much is not. For example, I am certainly not the first to suggest the application of imagination and intelligence to sexual relationships. I am not the first to sense the exciting role which fantasy can play in intensifying and increasing and multiplying the gratifications of sexual congress. Others have, too, seen the importance of intelligence, of imagination and fantasy. Generally, however, they have feared to speak out plainly. I am sure that many couples, in the secrecy of their love, have practiced the sweet dramatic arts of which I shall write. That these arts should now be made manifest, and their legitimacy explained and argued, defended and set in a total human context, a scientific, psychological and personal context, is perhaps the most revolutionary thing in this book. The revolutionary act is to speak with clearness and in detail, to enunciate and explain imaginative sex with force and fullness.

We must now proceed to do so.

(Republished with kind permission of E-Reads.)

TopCover Gallery (year)

Here is a cover gallery showing all the editions and printings of Imaginative Sex, sorted by year of publication. Click on any cover to see the book.

Imaginative Sex - DAW Edition - First Printing - 1974   Imaginative Sex - Masquerade Edition - First Printing - 1997   Imaginative Sex - E-Reads Edition - First Printing - 2009   Imaginative Sex - Digital E-Reads Edition - First Version - 2009   Imaginative Sex - Kindle Edition - First Version - 2010   Imaginative Sex - DAW Edition - Seventh Printing - year   Imaginative Sex - DAW Edition - Fifth Printing - year   Imaginative Sex - DAW Edition - Fourth Printing - year   Imaginative Sex - DAW Edition - Third Printing - year   Imaginative Sex - DAW Edition - Second Printing - year   Imaginative Sex - DAW Edition - Sixth Printing - year  

TopCover Gallery (edition)

Here is a cover gallery showing all the editions and printings of Imaginative Sex, sorted by edition. Click on any cover to see the book.

Imaginative Sex - DAW Edition - First Printing - 1974   Imaginative Sex - DAW Edition - Second Printing - year   Imaginative Sex - DAW Edition - Third Printing - year   Imaginative Sex - DAW Edition - Fourth Printing - year   Imaginative Sex - DAW Edition - Fifth Printing - year   Imaginative Sex - DAW Edition - Sixth Printing - year   Imaginative Sex - DAW Edition - Seventh Printing - year   Imaginative Sex - E-Reads Edition - First Printing - 2009   Imaginative Sex - Digital E-Reads Edition - First Version - 2009   Imaginative Sex - Kindle Edition - First Version - 2010   Imaginative Sex - Masquerade Edition - First Printing - 1997  
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