Come as You Are (38 page)

What to Do if You Find Yourself Spectatoring

Humans, unlike all other species, can be in control of their brains, rather than their brains being in control of them. We can notice what we’re thinking or feeling, and we can do something about it. That’s the key to managing any form of performance anxiety, including spectatoring: Notice what you’re paying attention to, and then shift your attention to the thing you want to pay attention to.

This is easier said than done at first, but with practice it becomes easier done than said! Here’s how:

Suppose you’re standing in line at the grocery store or sitting on the bus. Let yourself notice your breathing. In. Pause. Out. Pause. In. Pause. Out. Pause. Two breaths, just like that. Notice, and smile. Notice five to ten times a day.

And notice, above all, when your attention wanders during those two breaths—which it will, that’s normal. When you notice your mind wandering, smile at those other thoughts, let them go, and gently return your attention to where you want it to be. That skill right there? That’s mindfulness. Noticing when your attention wanders from the thing you’re trying to notice is the skill that will help you stop spectatoring, because you’ll learn to notice the spectatoring and to redirect your attention to the sensations in your body.

nonconcordance—now with orgasms!

The first thing orgasm
isn’t
is a genital response.

In chapter 2, I described Masters and Johnson’s research measuring the physiology of the sexual response cycle. There were certain cues that the research used to mark when orgasm happened, particularly contractions of the pelvic floor muscle at the entrance of the vagina.

Yeah. It’s not that simple.

Remember nonconcordance from chapter 6—what your genitals are doing doesn’t necessarily match what you’re experiencing? There’s evidence that this is true for orgasm as well—at least among women who are able to orgasm in a laboratory while their genital response is being measured.

For example, in one study, research participants were asked to masturbate to orgasm in the lab and then “grade” their orgasm on a scale of 1 (“weak or poor”) to 5 (“most powerful or excellent”).
²
Result? There was no relationship between the grades women gave their orgasms and the genital responses traditionally treated as “markers” of orgasm, such as number of contractions of the pelvic floor muscle.

Those rhythmic, involuntary contractions are perhaps the most nearly universal physiological marker of orgasm—but even that can’t be relied on all the time. In one study, two out of eleven women exhibited no vaginal muscle contractions at orgasm.
³
And in another study, some women exhibited the muscle contractions without orgasm.
⁴

In other words, genital physiological markers of orgasm are not always predictive of a woman’s subjective experience of orgasm. Which makes perfect sense if you recognize that orgasm—like arousal—isn’t about what happens in your genitals, it’s about what happens in your brain.
⁵

no two alike

Which brings us to the second thing orgasm isn’t: “a pinnacle of pleasure.”

Orgasm is a lot like being tickled. Sometimes it can be fun, other times it’s annoying, and sometimes it feels like almost nothing. Pleasure is a
perception
of a sensation, and perception is context dependent. That’s just as true for orgasm as it is for tickling. But no one ever asks me, “Why is it that a lot of the time when my partner tickles me it feels fun and pleasurable, but then other times it really doesn’t?” We all know intuitively that the perception of tickling sensations is context dependent. There’s a time and a place for tickling.

And yet people ask me all the time, “How come sometimes my orgasms are great and other times they’re really not?” It’s as if we believe that orgasms are somehow different from other sensations, that they should feel a certain way, no matter the context.

All orgasms are the sudden release of sexual tension. How that release
feels
depends on context. Which is why some orgasms feel amazing and others . . . really, really don’t. A handful of examples:

• A woman told me, red faced, that she had an orgasm during her exercise class—but she didn’t enjoy it—and was confused both by the orgasm and the lack of pleasure.
⁶

• A friend with major depression said she could have orgasms but she didn’t experience pleasure with them. I told her that was normal, that pleasure comes from context, and her context was gray and flat. Normal for a person with depression.

• An undergrad was turning paler and paler during my guest lecture about sexual assault. I had mentioned in passing that sometimes women have orgasms during rape and that that’s basically just a reflex, it doesn’t mean pleasure or consent.
⁷
She came up to me afterward and said I’d changed her life with that one sentence.

• A woman periodically orgasmed in her sleep and would wake up midorgasm, sometimes from a dream, sometimes not, but always puzzled by the warmth and pulsing that were not necessarily accompanied by any particular enjoyment.
⁸

Orgasms differ from each other because the context for those orgasms differs. The quality of an orgasm is a function not of orgasm itself but of the context in which it happens.

all the same parts . . .

The third thing orgasm isn’t: hierarchical. All orgasms are different, and there is no “right” kind or “better” kind of orgasm. It’s even hard to say that there are different kinds of orgasm—because they’re all made of the same basic parts (sudden release of sexual tension) organized in different ways.

Instead of thinking about “kinds” of orgasm, we can think about different
ways
to have an orgasm. Here’s a small sample of the highly pleasurable orgasms women have described to me:

• Orgasm from clitoral stimulation.

• Orgasm from vaginal stimulation.

• Orgasm just from breast stimulation.

• Orgasm from having her toes sucked.

• Orgasm when her partner penetrated her (well-lubricated) anus with a finger, while pinning her to the bed by her hair. The most erotic sensation, she specified, was his warm palm resting gently on her butt cheeks.

• Orgasm when her partner slowly and gently stroked fingertips upward along her outer labia . . . again . . . and again . . . and again. She said, “What started out as an appetizer turned into the main course.”

• Orgasm without any genital stimulation, while she was giving her partner oral sex. She was so closely tuned to his arousal that when he came, she did, too.

Are these clitoral orgasms, vaginal orgasms, breast orgasms, toe orgasms, butt cheek orgasms, labia orgasms, and oral orgasms?

Nope. Despite the painstaking efforts of women’s magazines and even researchers to identify and label the various kinds of orgasms we could be having—G-spot orgasms, blended orgasms, uterine orgasms, vulval, and all the rest
⁹
—there can be only one. (Like
The Highlander.
) There’s just the sudden release of sexual tension, generated in different ways. Anatomically, physiologically, even evolutionarily, it doesn’t make much sense to talk about kinds of orgasms based on what body parts are stimulated.
¹⁰

It’s true that orgasms generated through clitoral stimulation often
feel
different from orgasms generated through vaginal stimulation. But it’s also true that vaginally stimulated orgasms feel different from each other, and clitorally stimulated orgasms feel different from each other. Orgasms with a partner may feel different from orgasms without a partner, and orgasms with one particular partner may feel different from orgasms with a different partner, and orgasms with one partner may feel different from sexual encounter to sexual encounter. If we were going to categorize orgasms by how they feel, we’d need a new category for every orgasm a woman has.

Just as all vulvas are normal and healthy just as they are, so all orgasms are normal and healthy, regardless of what kind of stimulation generated them or how they feel. Their value comes not from how it came to be or whether it meets some arbitrary criteria but from whether you liked it and wanted it.

Orgasms were not Laurie’s problem. Once she got going, she found orgasm pretty reliable. No, Laurie’s problem was that the stress in her life built a stone wall between her and sexual pleasure of any kind. She and Johnny were learning how to break down that wall by changing the context . . . but following their “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” success, Johnny got cocky. He pushed his luck. He started asking and pressing and chasing, which made Laurie feel more and more pressured, and soon she started to resent that he was asking, especially since he knew—he
knew
—that when she felt pressured, her interest evaporated. It was like he was trying to ruin it.

A perfectly normal and very tempting way for Laurie to think about this situation would have been to say, “Look, my life is out of whack, therefore my sexual interest is out of whack. So be it. No sex for me.” Plenty of women think the same thing every day and are rightly satisfied to wait until their lives improve before they try to get their sex lives back into whack. It’s a matter of priorities. And in fact, the main reason Laurie kept trying to want sex more was not that she really wanted to want sex, but that Johnny wanted her to want it.

In frustration, she booted him out of the house for the day, sent him with Trevor to the library so that she could have the luxury of the house to herself, to do laundry, get some work done, and maybe, if she was really lucky, take a nap.

And once they were gone . . . she missed them.

Often the best part of her day was her son’s bath time—far from being an exhausting chore or a hassle, she loved to splash and play with him. And now she found herself looking forward to their return, because . . . bath time!

And then she compared her feeling about sexy-pleasure to her feeling about mommy-pleasure. She thought, “It’s not selfish of me to enjoy being with my kid—enjoying it makes me a better parent! So how come I can give myself permission to have that pleasure, but I can’t give myself permission to enjoy other kinds of pleasure?”

Something clicked. She had all kinds of insights about having been taught that being a mom was the best thing about being a woman but having sex wasn’t okay, that the pleasure of delicious food was blocked by guilt about her body . . . lots of things. But in the end, something just clicked, and she let go of a bunch of stuff. She started wondering if maybe sex could be for pleasure, rather than something “for Johnny.”

Laurie remembered Johnny saying, “Maybe it’s about what it feels like, not about where we are or what we’re doing.” Maybe she could try that, try paying attention to what it feels like, regardless of what’s going on.

your vagina’s okay, either way

I get asked a lot about orgasm during penile-vaginal intercourse, so let’s spend a little time with that. As we saw in chapter 1, the clitoris is Grand Central Station for erotic sensation. The dominance of the clitoris in women’s orgasms explains why 80–90 percent of women who masturbate typically do so with little or no vaginal penetration, including when they use vibrators.
¹¹

But ya know, there’s this old saying: “It ain’t the size of the boat, it’s the motion of the ocean.”

The wisdom this attempts to convey is that it’s not the size of the penis penetrating the vagina, it is the collaborative stimulation between partners (or possibly the skill of one or the other of the “sailors”) that creates pleasure and orgasm for a woman during intercourse.

The fact is, it’s not the size of the boat, and it’s not the motion of the ocean either. Women just vary. Despite what you’ve learned from movies, romance novels, or porn, in reality less than a third of women are reliably orgasmic with vaginal penetration alone, while the remaining two-thirds are sometimes, rarely, or never orgasmic with penetration alone.
¹²

Yet women ask me all the time, “Why can’t I have an orgasm during intercourse?” The reason they can’t is very likely the same reason most women can’t: Intercourse is not a very effective way to stimulate the clitoris, and clitoral stimulation is the most common way to make an orgasm happen. In fact, a likely reason why women vary in how reliably they orgasm with penetration is the distance between the clitoris and the urethra.
¹³
It’s essentially a matter of anatomical engineering.

So the question is not so much why some women aren’t orgasmic from vaginal penetration, as it is why
are
some women? There are several hypotheses, but probably the two best contenders are: (a) stimulation through the front wall of the vagina of the urethral sponge (the female homologue of the prostate and the original hypothesized source of the G-spot); or (b) the vestibular bulbs, extending down to the mouth of the
vagina from the head of the clitoris. But in the end, the answer is: People vary.
¹⁴
People vary in the layout of their genitals and the sensitivity of the tissue. My guess is that both of these hypotheses have merit, but you can imagine how challenging it is to get funding to do research on women’s orgasm, so it may be a while before we know for sure.