Come as You Are (40 page)

ecstatic orgasm: you’re a flock!

Orgasms can certainly happen in subideal or even adverse contexts—but the brain-melting, toe-curling, turn-the-stars-into-rainbows type of orgasm happens only in a spectacularly good context.

And what exactly is that context?

The answer to that question is the same as the answer to this question: Why would wearing socks make it easier to have an orgasm?

Some students asked me this while I was eating lunch and chatting with them. Brittany and Tiffany and I were talking about sex science, as usual.

“Huh?” I said through a mouthful of salad.

“I read about it on the Internet. Socks make it easier to orgasm,” Brittany said.

“Oh! Well, if you read it on the Internet, it must be true,” I joked.

“No, I read it, too!” said Tiffany. “I think it was a real thing. I’ll find it and send you the link.”

She did, and it was true . . . kind of. It turns out putting on socks made it easier for research participants to orgasm while masturbating in a brain imaging machine.
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You have to wonder why. Are all brain imaging sex research participants secret foot fetishists? Does it have something to do with blood flow to the genitals?

Nothing so arcane. Gert Holstege, the researcher leading the study, said the research participants “were uncomfortable and had cold feet.”
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Put on socks, have warmer feet, and have easier orgasms. Even in the unerotic setting of a research laboratory, such a small shift can make a difference.

And that type of shift is the key to moving from very nice orgasms to award-winning orgasms. Here’s the science that tells you how.

All your internal states—your physical comfort, hunger, thirst, sleepiness, loneliness, frustration, etc.—interact deep in the emotional One Ring of your brain, and they influence each other in a process called
“integration.”
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When one state—like cold feet—interferes with another state—like sexual arousal—that’s “subtractive integration.”

And when one state actively reinforces another state, that’s “additive integration.” That’s what Laurie and Johnny experienced when they were trying not to have sex and Johnny also told her the reasons he loved making love with her. The proximity seeking of their attachment mechanism mixed with their sexual motivation, and both were intensified.

Additive integration can be an unmitigated good in your sexual experience . . . and sometimes additive integration can draw you into unhealthy dynamics, too. Olivia’s tendency to feel “driven” toward orgasm when she’s stressed is one example. The stress adds to her sexual motivation in an unhealthful way. And the women in John Gottman’s research who experienced intense sex after their partners were physically abusive were experiencing additive integration: The threat to their attachment made it important that they bond with their partner. Sex is a crucial attachment behavior for human adults, so the two states—separation anxiety plus sexual stimulation—reinforced each other, to give rise to a sexual experience that was intense but ultimately unsafe and unhealthy.

You can visualize the effect of integration if you think of your brain as a flock of birds.

Do you know how a flock works? There is no leader, no individual who controls the group and says, “Hey, everybody, let’s fly this way!” Instead, each bird is individually following a set of rules, along the lines of, “Avoid predators, fly toward the magnetic pole, and also stay by your neighbors.” When all the birds are following these rules, flocking emerges without anyone having to be in charge.

If you think of your brain as a flock, then each “bird” is a different drive or incentive motivation system—stress, attachment and social belonging, food appetite, curiosity and exploration, thirst, sleep, plans for the future, emotional baggage from the past—all your competing roles and identities in life are there in the flock. You can think of your sexual accelerator and brakes as birds in the flock, too.

Ultimately, the “you” that is consciously aware of being a “self,” an
individual distinct from other individuals, is a composite self, a hologram built of these multiple motivational and cognitive processes all engaging with the environment and with each other, in a noisy, messy, multidirectional tug-of-war. As a person capable of desiring multiple things at once—food, sleep, sex, warmth, to be left alone, etc.—you are a
collective of desires.
A flock.

Complex things can happen in a flock because there’s no specific leader. If one bird notices a predator, it will fly away (following the “avoid predators” rule), and then all the birds around it will follow, pulled as if by a magnetic force, not because of the predator but because they’re following the “stay by your neighbors” rule.

And if your brain is a flock, then orgasm is a destination the flock can fly toward—a magnetic pole—and sexual pleasure is
the flock itself.
Sexual pleasure emerges, like flocking behavior, from the interaction of all these different birds.

The more birds you have flying toward orgasm, the greater the pleasure you experience. If some of the birds are flying toward orgasm but others are trying to accomplish some other goal—as in, you’re trying to masturbate to orgasm, but your feet are cold—the “flock” that is your brain will not move simultaneously in the same direction. Some of the birds may arrive at orgasm, but the experience won’t be the same as if
all
the birds got there.

“Subtractive integration” happens when the birds flying toward foot warmth actively tug at the birds who would otherwise fly toward orgasm. Put on socks, and those birds are freed up and can move toward orgasm. “Additive integration” happens when the birds flying toward an attachment object (your sex partner) tug their neighbors to fly faster and more enthusiastically. Fall desperately in love, and your flock may rush to orgasm at the littlest prompting.

The technical language for what I’m describing here is that sexual pleasure is an emergent property of a complex dynamical system. But all you need to remember is that peak sexual pleasure happens when the whole collective works together, when all the birds are flying in the same
direction, when all of your motivation systems are coordinated and attuned to the environment in a way that gives rise to every system moving collectively toward orgasm. Turn on all the ons and turn off all the offs. Get rid of all the predators and pile on different kinds of incentives at the magnetic pole: attachment, stress relief, curiosity, expansive pleasure—all the motivations orgasm can fulfill. The more the whole system is moving in the same direction, the more the orgasm takes over your whole awareness, with every cell of your body focused on the same thing: pleasure. Peak sexual pleasure requires
all of you.

The most pleasurable orgasms happen when every part of you is present and collaborating in pursuit of one shared goal: ecstasy.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, Olivia—the marathon runner, the intense, driven, sensitive accelerator woman—is a perfectionist. So here’s what she said when she learned about the little monitor:

“Well that explains . . . you know, my whole life.”

Perfectionists set goals that are impossible—and if they somehow manage to achieve a goal, they assume that goal must be worthless and they set another, even more impossible goal. Which puts them in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction.

“And then I’m my own lion, like, all the time,” Olivia said. “And when you add the cultural brainwashing, that puts me in that out-of-control place with sex.

“Jesus,” she added.

Her experience moving at Patrick’s slower pace showed her the potential in slowing down and allowing more of herself to align with the goal of experiencing sexual pleasure—to take control of the little monitor, so that it didn’t take control of her.

As an experiment one Saturday afternoon, Olivia tried meditating while she gave Patrick an erotic massage. She practiced keeping her mind quiet and focused on the present. Any time a stray thought entered her mind, she acknowledged it fleetingly and then let it go, returning her attention to the sensation of her partner’s skin under her hands. She found herself becoming aroused, and she noticed that her thoughts were increasingly turning toward orgasm, as her little internal monitor got impatient to reach her goal. But each time she felt pulled toward orgasm, she took a deep slow breath and returned her attention to Patrick.

She didn’t hit the brakes, she just took her foot off the accelerator.

After Patrick’s orgasm, they switched, and Olivia kept her attention tuned to the sensations of her body. As her arousal grew, she continued to breathe deeply and slowly, not allowing her abdominal muscles to tense too much.

The result was an orgasm that lasted several minutes as her body shuddered and rolled, and Patrick stayed with her, holding and kissing her, fingers pressed against her vulva. It ended with joyful tears and a kind of bubbly chattiness quite unlike Olivia’s usual postorgasmic self. She felt open and raw and tender.

She told me later, “It was like being way out in the center of the ocean, when I usually just surf on the shore. Bigger and slower . . . and scarier, too, in some ways. I was all the way open. I had to let go of all control. I had thought I was an erotic powerhouse because I could have a lot of orgasms and because I wanted sex often. But it turns out my greatest erotic power only emerged when I stopped pushing toward orgasm and just allowed pleasure to be still inside me.”

Not every woman wants to experience this kind of radical vulnerability with her sexuality. Not every woman trusts her partner enough to allow herself to let go so thoroughly. Not every woman has a life that allows the time—an hour, generally, for most people—and relaxation necessary to get there.

But given the right context, I believe every woman is capable of it, and, in my opinion, every woman deserves the opportunity to try it. Even if you don’t experience minutes of oceanic ecstasy, it will still be an hour well spent!

how do you medicate a flock?

The kitchy 1968 cult movie
Barbarella
imagines a forty-first century in which people take “exaltation transference pellets” to have orgasms, to save on the mess and bother of having sex. You take the pill, sit palm to palm with your partner, and within a minute your body pulses and your hair curls. Boom. Done.

You can see the appeal. I want ecstasy to be easy and instantaneous, too, like taking a pill. Many of us live lives of constant tension, doubt, obligation, and effort. Couldn’t pleasure, of all things, just happen, without our having to work at it?

The closest we can come to that in the twenty-first century is a vibrator. In fact, even though there are no drug treatments for “female sexual dysfunction” approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, there is an FDA-approved $200 vibrator!
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The right vibrator provides an intensity of stimulation for your gas pedal that you just can’t replicate with any nonmechanical stimulation. Even if your brakes are still on—you’re stressed out, anxious, sad, or frustrated—a vibrator is often intense enough to generate an orgasm much faster than manual stimulation.

A vibrator won’t necessarily persuade all the birds to fly in the same direction. It provides high-intensity stimulation for the parts of your brain that respond to sexually relevant stimuli; it can turn on the ons like nobody’s business, but it doesn’t turn off the offs.

This idea of pleasure as an emergent property of the interactions of a collective of desires (aka a flock) is what makes medicating pleasure, arousal, desire, and/or orgasm so difficult. A drug would have to twiddle not just the SIS or SES but also the stress and the love and the body image and trauma history and the relationship trust and the other things that are known to impact women’s sexual wellbeing. Tugging one bird toward orgasm won’t help you if the rest of the birds are busy avoiding predators.

Pleasure is an emergent property of the interaction of multiple systems—it’s a
process
, not a state, an
interaction
, not a specific area of the brain or the body. Pleasure is the whole flock. Pleasure is all of you.

Vibrators

About half of women in the United States have used a vibrator, and these women are more likely to report better arousal, desire and orgasm.
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Eighty to ninety percent of those women report experiencing no side effects, and of those who did report side effects like numbness or irritation, nearly all of them said it lasted for less than a day.

A small study of women using vibrators as part of sex therapy found that women varied a great deal in their response to the vibrator and had a wide range of feelings about the experience.
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Initial resistance—“I should be able to orgasm without having to use a ‘tool’ ”—and concerns about whether vibrator use somehow disrupts sexual connection with a partner—“Am I cheating on him with it?”—often gave way to a sense of freedom and exploration. While there was a great deal of variety, even in a sample of only seventeen women, the overall experience was a new kind of pleasure and opening up their perspective on the idea of sexual autonomy.

You’ll recognize the worry that it’s not “natural” as the “sanctity” moral foundation that I described in chapter 5. The idea that there’s a pure, good, natural way to have an orgasm and a wrong, bad, unnatural way to have an orgasm is a cultural pigeonholing of experience shaped by those three messages—Moral, Medical, and Media.