Do you experience sexual problems? Do you have trouble getting aroused, or having sex that is fulfilling, or simply meeting the right partners to share that aspect of your life? Chances are you do — just have a look at the magazine rack in any grocery store, and it’s clear from all the advice columns and feature articles just how sexually lost and frustrated modern men and women are. Unfortunately, these magazines only offer symptomatic treatment (otherwise, they wouldn’t have to run the same articles over and over every month!), no real, radical solutions. And to date, few people have really dared to be open about their troubles, thanks to the social pressures to be “successful” in all affairs. So, in keeping with our general program of providing aid wherever it is needed, we offer some tips:

• Stop trying to make your sexuality serve in your efforts to be a good citizen (responsive lover, macho man, etc.) — it won’t, it will just go on strike. Better to serve it, if serving must be done.

• Stop trying to make your sex life (or romance, or anything else, for that matter), by itself, provide you with qualities that should be intrinsic to every moment of your life. It is not the role of your sexuality to be your sole source of excitement, or intimacy, or pleasure — it is the role of sex to be just that, to be sex. If you feel trapped or insecure or bored everywhere else, you will probably have a hard time shaking off those feelings in bed.

• If your idea of seventh heaven is having perfect sex with a beautiful partner, dispel it. Heaven cannot be an isolated moment of life; it has to be a complete way of living, or else it will be just another barren myth to denigrate and impoverish the moments of our real experience. Better that we find ways to make every moment of life as exciting as great sex can be (and believe me, it can be done!), considering that we can’t have sex all the time — such a thing would get boring, anyway, since living has so many facets we must not neglect! You can feel and share passion as deeply while building puppets for street demonstrations together, sneaking onto rooftops for late night conversations, or stowing away on ferryboats. Most people just haven’t had the chance to be free and wild together anywhere outside the bedroom yet — and consequently, it hardly comes naturally between the sheets.

• Rescue your sexuality from the definitions and delineations slipped around it like a noose by external forces: the leering billboards and romantic comedies, the expectations of your friends and parents and paramours, the television programs and other social programming devices that would dictate desire and limit the erotic to the strictly sexual. The powers that be have everything at stake in keeping your sexuality emaciated and confined to the specific act of physical intercourse, to one routine and one partner and one ghettoized category, so you won’t discover in it the freedom that you could be living around the clock, outside their control, beyond their target markets. But one step outside the lines, and the world is yours.

• And that means throwing out your pornography. Pornography isn’t obscene because it’s sexual, but because it’s not — replace the representation with the real, in every instance, for maximum possibility. Masturbation is a beautiful thing, but don’t let the pornography industry buy out your libido. A two-dimensional woman, no matter how trangressively posed, will do exactly what you command her and no more: that means she can never challenge you with her own needs or perspectives, never open new doors to you, never assert her selfhood. That refusal to be challenged is a rejection of the vast expanses of freedom that can only be reached with others. We should be wary of giving our fantasies such slaves to rule over, lest we learn to fetishize the violence of domination implied by such one-sided sex — and end up living in the sterile, determinist world of control mania. Do you want to explore, to reach unimaginable climaxes, to try out things you’ve never seen in movies? Do it with other people — they are out there. Let them know you’re ready.

Sexuality as art — now there’s a start. But more art “about” sexuality? It’s doubtful that the world of images will ever belong to us again… that’s just another diversion of our attention to that domain from this world, where we should be practicing doing, being, feeling with one another, not with the dangerous safety of an object. Make love and speak about your best kept secrets, your blackest needs, the demands the culture of fear places on your sexuality, held hostage as it is (never fear, you’re not the only one who thinks you have things to hide — your secret’s safe with all of us!)… We can get out of here, together, but first we have to be honest to figure out where the fuck we are!

To find indulgences that simultaneously satisfy and subvert our programmed, poisonous desires, and thus remake ourselves — that is the key.