The Edge of the Bed : How Dirty Pictures Changed My Life

Amazon.com
In the early '90s, after a stint as a senior editor at the groundbreaking lesbian sex journal On Our Backs, Lisa Palac took charge of a new magazine called Future Sex. Tapping into the "cyber" ethos that permeated the Bay Area scene--Mondo 2000 was in its ascendancy, while Wired was still a full year away--the magazine achieved a quick burst of mainstream notoriety and became a longterm underground icon. But you won't need to don a full-body cybersex interface to appreciate Palac's The Edge of the Bed.

With disarming honesty and self-deprecating humor, Palac writes about how she began to gain control of her sexuality. When she found a boyfriend's stash of pornography, her kneejerk reaction was to tell him that if it didn't go, she would. He managed to convince her to watch a video with her; that led to another, and another...soon, Palac was renting her own tapes and started writing her own erotic stories.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Lisa Palac charts her dizzying course from midwestern Catholic schoolgirl to anti-smut crusader to sex-positive feminist and cutting-edge pornographer. Along the way, she explores the liberating effects of pornography, the eroticism of religion, the unprecedented sexual honesty created by cyberspace and the persistent myths about masculinity and femininity. She asks the questions so many women - and men - have asked themselves, such as: Why do sexual desires and sexual politics rarely agree? What makes danger so appealing? And is there too much sex in pop culture or just too much sexual hypocrisy?

SYNOPSIS

Next-wave pornographer, cybersex pioneer, and hopeful romantic Lisa Palac takes a frank, funny, and fearless look at the evolution of her sexual persona.

FROM THE CRITICS

Felicia Feaster - Playboy.com

Lisa Palac, in her sexual autobiography, The Edge of the Bed: How Dirty Pictures Changed My Life, Palac demonstrates that she can embrace the traditionalism of marriage and enjoy a good spanking.

Like her gal-pal and fellow sex-sociologist Susie Bright, Palac is one of a growing contingent of Women Who Run With Pornographers. The Nineties version of a red-hot jazz baby, Palac's sexual liberation is as symbolic of our times as the flapper ethos of Zelda Fitzgerald and Clara Bow were of the Twenties.

BUST Magazine

[Palac's] ultimate goal is to talk about taking charge of your life and living with honesty and integrity, which comes with its share of unmet expectations and failed relationships. Palac addresses these, however, with the same strong humor she shows towards her successes, and she proves that sexual satisfaction isn't out of anyone's reach, as long as she's willing to try for it.

Esquire

"The changing times are embodied in the sexual pilgrimage of Lisa Palac..."

Kirkus Reviews

A clear-headed look at some of the most explosive sexual issues of our dayþpornography, cybersex, freedom of sexual expression, marriageþthrough an autobiographical lens. Palac, like her close friend and mentor Susie Bright, has been one of the foremost pop critics of the American sexual landscapeþand of repressive tendencies in feminism. This book, part autobiography, part cultural analysis, shows off her lively writing and wacky sensibility. She describes her introduction to vibrators (she was cleaning out a closet, and one fell on her head; later she used it to masturbate to orgasm for the first time); her sexually repressive childhood (Catholic, though she's careful not to make too much of this too-worn theme); the boyfriend who introduced her to the joys of pornography (despite her hard-core feminist opposition); her quest to create erotic material that reflects women's desiresþas a fiction writer, editor of the lesbian sex magazine On Our Backs, and founding editor of Future Sex magazine, a weirdly technologically oriented porn magazine; and her own adventures in S/M, E-mail and phone sex, love, and weddings (first as minister, then as bride). The author's story concludes with her marrying the man she loves, and she unfortunately ends up by too easily brushing off issues she's courageously raised (notably, how does someone raised to believe in sin, and in salvation through suffering come to grips with eros) simply because she herself has resolved them. And though the book is engaging throughout, it isn't focused enough to be a memoir, and, at only 34, Palac hasn't lived long enough to write a really satisfying autobiography. It would have made more sense toorganize her material by topic rather than by the chronology of her life Still, Palac's approach to sexual politics and to her own life is infectiously spirited. (8 pages photos, not seen)

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