Good in Bed Guide to Female Orgasms (8 page)

The Good in Bed Guide to Female Orgasms 93

I can’t help thinking that penetrative orgasms are a benchmark set by men, for men. From Freud with his,

“Clitoral orgasms are immature, vaginal orgasms are mature” nonsense to mainstream media’s incessant

“50 Ways to Rock His Cock” headlines, male pleasure is the standard by which sexual excellence seems to be judged, and women’s pleasure is most palatable to us when it fits within that framework.

Well, sucks to that, say I. Your partner should go down on you. Your partner should use his hands. You partner should put his (and I mean his—see caveat above) penis to one side and make it all about you. Making you come with his mouth should be a thrill for him and if it’s not, what is the matter with him?

So. You CAN have an orgasm through penetration by adding clitoral stimulation and also possibly by g-spot stimulation, and that’s nice, but be sure to honor your sexuality as you find it. It’s one thing to be ABLE to have an orgasm a particular way; it’s another thing altogether —and in my opinion, a thing well worth paying a great deal of attention to—not to be able to HELP having an orgasm in a particular way.

My advice: spend more time finding out what your body can’t help responding to and less time trying to make it respond to something that culture told you it’s SUPPOSED to respond to.

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The Good in Bed Guide to Female Orgasms Chapter Twenty-Two: It’s Not What You Do, It’s the Way that You Do It

Imagine this:

You get a guy in a room and you sit him down in front of a television. Let him strap a Rigiscan to his penis (exactly what it sounds like) and give him a dial he can tune up and down (“I feel a little aroused, I feel a lot aroused,” etc.), put a tray over his lap, and then show him some porn.

With about 85% accuracy, the tumescence of his penis will match the level of arousal he dials in. It’s not a perfect correlation, but it’s really, really high. The more erect he is, the more aroused he is—or, as porn star extraordinaire Nina Hartley puts it, “Is his dick hard?

Then he’s liking it.”

Now let’s do the same thing with a woman. Put her in that room and that chair, and let her insert a vaginal photoplethysmograph (a little flashlight, essentially, that measures changes in blood flow), and give her the dial and the tray and the porn.

There will be, gosh, just no clear relationship between what her genitals are doing and what she dials in as her arousal. Even orgasm might be incongruent: A The Good in Bed Guide to Female Orgasms 95

woman’s physiology might say “orgasm” on the ma-chines, but she may still report not having an orgasm.

Ditto the reverse.

Further, women’s genitals will respond to ANYTHING

remotely sexually relevant (lesbian sex, gay sex, het sex, monkeys having sex…), while men’s genitals respond pretty exclusively to the thing that they’re oriented toward—women or men having sex with men, depending. For women, genital is not a measure of desire.

Just because she’s wet and/or swollen doesn’t mean she’s interested, it just means her body has prepared itself for a potential sexual situation.

Why? Who knows, really. It seems likely that women’s bodies respond to a wide array of sexually relevant stimuli because penetrative sex is high risk for females. We have double the risk of STI infection from penile–vaginal intercourse compared to males, and lubrication, etc., helps prevent tissue damage that can facilitate infection.

So that’s non-congruence.

The important thing to remember is that it’s not what a woman’s body is doing; it’s what her mind says that matters. Her body is a muddy, vague, organic heap that just wants to prevent infection and unwanted pregnancy and other not-so-good consequences. Her mind understands the social world and has opinions that go beyond biology.

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The Good in Bed Guide to Female Orgasms Chapter Twenty-Three: Do You Know

When You Want It?

Female sexual response is typically characterized by

“responsive desire,” while male sexual response is more likely characterized by “spontaneous desire.”

(I’m going for biological categories rather than social categories here because the research is based on male-and female-bodied people, without reference to social role.)

“Responsive desire” is when motivation to have sex begins AFTER sexual behavior has started. As in, you’re doing something else when your partner comes over and starts kissing you, and you think, “Oh yeah! That’s a good idea!” Or you and your partner set aside Friday night as Sex Night, and then Sex Night gets here and you’re like, “Oh, Sex Night. But I’m so tired…” But you made a deal, so you get started… and before long you’ve forgotten you were tired.

This is contrasted with “spontaneous” desire, more typical of male sexuality, which works like this: You’re walking down the street and for no immediately obvious reason you think, “Hmm. I’d like to have sex!” Or you’re taking a shower getting ready for bed and you think, “Hmm. I’d like to have sex!”

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Regardless of what body or identity you have, if you’re more of a “responsive” desire person you might have worried that your interest in sex was abnormally low.

Worrying about how much we do or don’t want sex is something we’ve been well trained to do. Indeed, so many people have asked me how often they’re

“supposed to want sex,” I’ve started looking for a memorable, funny stock answer that gently illustrates the absurdity of the question:

Every 5 minutes.

At least twice a decade.

Sundays.

(Suggestions warmly welcomed.)

The idea that functional sexual desire requires wanting sex out of the blue is nonsense—pervasive and intractable nonsense, but nonsense nonetheless. When you use male standards to assess ALL sexuality, everything falls apart. In this instance, when spontaneous, “Hey, I think I’d like to have sex!” desire is the normative standard, anyone whose style that isn’t suddenly becomes

“abnormal.” Which is nonsense, however pervasive and intractable.

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The Good in Bed Guide to Female Orgasms It’s different for girls. Have we got that yet?

Problematic dynamics emerge when one or both partners in a relationship are responsive desire types. In a differential desire scenario, the spontaneous desire type partner may feel rejected and undesirable because they always have to initiate, and then the responsive person may start to feel pushed and will resist more.

In a dual responsive desire relationship, you might end up hardly ever having sex because neither one of you wants to start. (This is a really good theory to explain the putative “lesbian bed death.”)

Suppose you’re a responsive desire person. You now know that that’s totally normal, you’re not broken, and it’s really okay that it doesn’t often occur to you to have sex. Excellent. But what do you do about the potential issues that may emerge? How do you untangle these knots?

Feminist lesbian sex therapist Susan Iasenza suggests reframing the issue from “desire” for sex to “willingness” to have sex. We’re a highly social species, females in particular, and it’s totally legitimate to start sex because your partner is interested, even if you’re not particularly horny. So first communicate with your partner that this is a characteristic of your sexuality, to The Good in Bed Guide to Female Orgasms 99

help reassure him or her that you find them attractive.

And then try setting a standard for yourself, like once a week you’ll initiate at a time when you’re willing to have sex, even if your body isn’t longing for it.

Another possibility is organizing nights when you’re not allowed to have sex; you’re only allowed to touch non-genitally, for mutual pleasure. This wakes up your sensations without creating undue pressure to want sex. (Pressure to want sex makes you not want sex, FYI.)

Finally, you can increase the amount of non-initiating physical affection in your relationship. If you have more physical affection, more trust, more caring, less worry and stress, and less performance pressure, you’ll actually start to respond more readily and have more instances of spontaneous desire.

Untangling the knots of sexual dynamics in a relationship takes time, patience, and practice, but consistently using these strategies will put you on the right track.

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The Good in Bed Guide to Female Orgasms Chapter Twenty-Four: Three Differences Between Men and Women

I’ve mentioned that men and women differ, globally speaking, in terms of spontaneous versus responsive desire (e.g. men are more likely to be walking down the street and think, “Hmm, I’d like sex!” while women are more likely to feel their partner kissing them and go, “Hmm, I’d like sex!”)

There are other differences, all of them population-level and therefore none of them are explanations for why YOUR sexuality is the way it is. But they might go some way in helping us understand cultural stereo-types and myths.

Excitation and inhibition. As I described earlier, the Sexual Excitation System (SES) is the system that notices sexually relevant stimuli in the environment (an attractive person, an erotic touch, a sexy smell, etc.) and “turns on.” The Sexual Inhibition System (SIS) is the system that responds to all kinds of threats and

“turns off.” This is the “shut-off ” switch responsible for the male refractory period, among other things.

If you’re in the middle of a passionate interlude with your partner, and your brother walks in the room, it’s SIS that slams on the brakes.

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Overall, men are more sensitive to erotic stimuli than are women; that is, they have higher SES than women.

And overall, women are more sensitive to threats that reduce sexual responsiveness; they have higher SIS than men. Of course, there is wide variability, particularly among women, but on average, women have higher SIS and lower SES than men. As always, there is great variability in populations, particularly among women.

It might be easy to hear this and think, “Aha! Women want sex less than men! This proves it!” It’s easy to think this reinforces the standard line about men being sluts and women being choosy. But that’s not what this tells us. What it tells us is only that women are easier to turn off (globally speaking) and more difficult to turn on. Because, as I’m about to describe, for women in particular there’s not a clear-cut relationship between desire, arousal, and physiology.

Arousal concordance. As I’ve mentioned before, women exhibit a lower correlation between physiological arousal and perceived arousal than do men.

That means that if a man has an erection, the odds are high that he’ll tell you he’s
feeling
aroused. But a woman might be lubricating, her genitals swollen, and her vagina lengthened, and she might still tell you 102

The Good in Bed Guide to Female Orgasms she doesn’t feel at all turned on. By the same token, a woman might be dry as a bone and her erectile tissue flaccid, and she still might tell you she’s feeling ready to go. Other times, women have higher concordance, where what their genitals are doing more or less matches up with what their minds are experiencing.

Interestingly, arousal-concordant women are more likely to be orgasmic from penetration. No one knows for sure what the implications are of this arousal non-concordance, or why it might exist.

Sexual orientation. This is a complex and socially sensitive one. More women than men identify as bisexual, and more men than women identify as gay.

Again, no one knows why this is or what it might mean for male and female human sexuality. It’s also the case that women will respond (genitally) to a much wider array of sexual stimuli—images of non-human apes having intercourse, for example. Men respond to a relatively limited set of stimuli, depending on their sexual orientation.

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Chapter Twenty-Five: How to Tell When She’s Faking It

A coupla things:

Breath

As a person grows increasingly aroused, first their breath will deepen and their respiration rate will increase, like they’ve been running, then they’ll begin to hold their breath as their muscles clench rhythmically. This is a necessary and universal predecessor to orgasm. You’ll hear rhythmic gaspy-chuffy noises and see their bellies rise and fall sharply with the sounds.

Don’t mistake
noisy
for intense. Many people are nearly silent at orgasm. When a person goes all quiet and still but
tense,
that’s a sign of a high level of arousal. Which brings me to…

Muscle Tension

The reason people hold their breath as they approach orgasm is because their thoracic diaphragm is clenching rhythmically along with their abdominal, buttock, thigh, and pelvic muscles. Orgasm, being the explosive release of sexual tension, is preceded by a build-up of tension that comes over your partner like the tide 104

The Good in Bed Guide to Female Orgasms coming in. You’ll be able to see and feel the tension move through your partner’s body in waves, hear it in their breath. If their abdomen isn’t taut and their feet aren’t tense, that’s something to wonder about.

Caution: it’s really not about individual body parts

– the feet alone or the abdomen alone can’t tell you anything clear about your partner’s arousal level. Be skeptical about any advice that tells you there’s a “foolproof ” sign or that any single sign will tell you what you want to know.

(Sadly, I’m assuming here that ASKING your partner if they had an orgasm isn’t foolproof either. However, for lots of people, asking WILL get you a truthful answer!!) Instead, it’s a holistic thing; pay attention to the way their body’s movements and breath interrelate, how they change over time. What’s hard to fake is the coor-dinated whole of escalating arousal.