Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/106392
Thank you—I like that word, mindful. Casual sex for me has been extraordinary. As extraordinary as the unbelievably exquisite moments of intimacy that I've had in relationships, irst with women and more recently with men. In a long-term relationship, while there can be a tremendous amount of depth in sexual experiences over time, in casual sex it's very collapsed and condensed; you're transmitting an entire history of who you are. And there's a total freedom from any future, which has allowed me and allows other people to open up without the fear or shame of the consequences that such profound honesty may have in a long-term relationship. It's not casual sex that you meet someone on the street and you just go fuck your brains out. It's deeper, it's more guided. For me there's conversation before, there's some sort of investigation about what is the possibility that we could create something that could be both satisfying and healing for both of us. you also edit an online magazine, Psychology Tomorrow, which takes a nontraditional approach to psychology. How did that come about? After Psychology Today "retired" my column, a reader said, "You should start your own magazine and call it Psychology Tomorrow." I wanted it to be about the art of psychology, not the false science of psychology, because psychology started as an art in the minds of people like Freud—it was all invention. Now we have psychology that's ruled by insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies. The idea of the magazine was based on the creativity of how the human mind works, the creativity of sex, how creativity is an invention of healing, and I was also interested in the psychology of art, so I combined all of that. Around valentine's day our sex lives get a lot of attention. But what priority do you think sex should have the rest of the year? Sex has a really powerful and meaningful purpose, one which I think we have to give a lot of priority to. It is probably our most complex human drive. Things like food and hunger are direct and simple, but sex is not what we conventionally think of in terms of a drive. We express all kinds of emotions through sex, from affection to rage. We use it far more as a means of relating to one another than what we commonly or even scientiically think that the purpose of it is—survival of the ittest genes. And I think that's the greatest gift we have as human beings: that sex for us is intelligent. n Diana Rico is wondering if the intelligent lust principles can be applied to chocolate and shopping. IntelligentLust.indd 27 February/March201327 1/25/13 6:05 PM