Great Sex Secret (18 page)

A Consumer Guide to Mutual Satisfaction
Taken together, these six barriers are a veritable
moat
between lovers and the enchanted castle of sexual happiness. It’s really difficult to level the male-female power balance, improve people’s comfort level talking about sex, help men overcome their cluelessness, liberalize attitudes about masturbation and “outercourse,” and 1 8 6

T h e G r e a t S e x S e c r e t
improve sex research and advice literature. A couple might be able to make progress on the first five—but good, impartial information about sex is something that has to come from the outside.

A worthwhile goal in the years ahead might be a
Consumer Reports
-type guide to making love. If such a guide made use of improved research and critically analyzed all the sexual approaches that have been discovered over the years, it could empower women, serve as a conversation-starter for sexually tongue-tied partners, help men
get it
, and put our society’s hang-ups about masturbation and “outercourse” in perspective.

What would it take to produce this kind of lovemaking guide? First, we would need to get better information on successful and unsuccessful sexual practices by asking couples a few pointed questions about how they have dealt with their bodies’ sexual asymmetries. It’s interesting that Alfred Kinsey’s famous questionnaire had 347 questions and never once used the word “clitoris.” Shere Hite’s questionnaire asked the right questions, but buried them in scores of others, obscuring her breakthrough findings in a mass of detail. So brevity and focus are key considerations. With any questionnaire, there would also have to be an ironclad guarantee of confidentiality to raise the chances that people would tell the whole
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truth. Answering questions online seems to be the best way to raise the

odds.

Here are ideas for a

Couples are flooded with huge

questionnaire that could

amounts of sex advice, erotica,

generate the data needed

and pornography, most of it

to draw more authorita-

profoundly unhelpful to

tive conclusions about

finding a good technique for

what works and doesn’t

having mutual orgasms.

work over time:

Questions for women only:

Do you have an orgasm when you make love?

If so,
when
does it happen: before penetration, while your partner’s penis is in your vagina, or after he withdraws?

If you do have an orgasm during any part of lovemaking (before, during, or after penetration),
how
do you reach orgasm?

Is this your ideal technique for having an orgasm during lovemaking? If not, what is?

Questions for men only:

At what point during lovemaking does your partner reach orgasm (if at all): before penetration, while your penis is in her vagina, or after you withdraw?

If your partner reaches orgasm during any part of 1 8 8

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lovemaking, what specifically brings it about?

Is this your ideal technique? If not, what is?

Questions for both men and women:
How happy or unhappy (sexually) are you with your partner now?

To what do you attribute your level of happiness or unhappiness?

How would you describe your level of sexual satisfaction after making love?

Your partner’s?

In roughly what percent of lovemaking sessions do both you and your partner have an orgasm (or more than one orgasm) at some point during the session?

Have you ever faked an orgasm? If so, what made this seem necessary?

If you use a particular technique to reach orgasm, how long have you been using it?

How did you and your partner discover this technique?

Is it effective, comfortable, and acceptable for both you and your partner?

Do both you and your partner find it easy to use?

Has it stood the test of time (i.e., continued to be mutually satisfying for five or more years)?

Have you used other techniques for reaching mutual orgasms? For how long?

How often do you make love? Which days of the
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week and what time of day?

How long does an average lovemaking session last?

How do you and your partner decide when to initiate sex?

Have you and your partner ever discussed a sexual problem or concern and resolved it?

If not, what do you feel are the barriers to good communication about sex?

Have you ever felt bored with your sex life? If so, what made you feel this way?

What is the role of masturbation in your life now?

What was it in earlier years?

Do you, in all candor, prefer masturbation to intercourse? Why or why not?

If you could be granted any wish, what would you change in your sex life?

Drawing on answers to these questions, the authors of a consumer guide on lovemaking could critically analyze
all
sexual practices and evaluate each mutual-orgasm technique based on four criteria:

• Does it give an orgasm to the man
and the woman
during lovemaking?

• Is it fairly easy to use?

• Is it pleasing and comfortable for both partners?

• Does it stand the test of time?

An authoritative consumer guide to lovemaking based on questions like these is years away, but it’s pos-

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sible to rough out a very preliminary draft from the fragmentary and anecdotal evidence that’s available now. Based on the four criteria, the basic approaches to intercourse that are available today could be grouped into three categories:

1. Unacceptable—the woman does not have an orgasm:

• Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am

• The woman fakes her orgasms

2.
Caveat emptor
—these “no-hands” techniques are effective for some couples but challenging for many others:

• Clitoral-hood technique

• Clitoral bumping technique

• Coital Alignment Technique (CAT)

• Hayden technique (the tip of the penis stimulating the clitoris)

• Riskins’ triggering techniques

• Clitoral stimulation using sexual attachments 3. Recommended—reliable and quite easy to use:

• Separate orgasms, with the woman’s climax before or after penetration from manual, oral, or other stimulation

• Simultaneous with the woman stimulating her clitoris during intercourse

• Simultaneous with the man stimulating the woman’s clitoris during intercourse
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It’s obvious why the first category deserves a negative rating. There is something deeply unfair about sex that is one-sided, and couples are going to be a lot happier if they move away from lovemaking approaches that leave the woman sexually frustrated. When a man and woman make love in a way that’s unfulfilling for one partner—virtually always the woman—their sex life tends to wane and become vulnerable to work/life stresses, exhaustion, or arguments. Sex that isn’t deliver-ing psychological rewards and a physical payoff to both partners tends to dry up and die.

All the approaches in the second category are attempts to bring the woman to orgasm during intercourse without directly touching the clitoris, and they reportedly work for some couples. But all these techniques are challenging in terms of body positions, timing, and pacing, and there are serious questions about how well they work for most couples over time. Only after much better research is conducted will we know if
any
of them deserve to be moved up to the recommended category.

The third category contains three approaches that are much more straightforward and can work reliably for almost all couples—provided they are willing to put aside the penetration-produces-female-orgasm myth and move beyond standard-issue intercourse. It’s impossible to rank-order these approaches because couples 1 9 2

T h e G r e a t S e x S e c r e t
tend to have a strong personal preference for one or the other. There is no one best way.

If couples had this kind of consumer guide, most could totally bypass the frustrating (but all too common) choices in the first category. Having access to a

It’s asking a lot of each new

comprehensive list of

generation of lovers to

techniques in the second

reinvent the wheel and find

and third categories

their way to sexual

would help couples avoid

happiness.

stumbling around in the

dark and wasting time

going up the same blind

alleys as their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents before them. It’s fun for lovers to be sexually spontaneous and inventive, but each generation shouldn’t have to reinvent the whole array of sexual choices.

Given a full menu of options, a couple could explore and find the approach or approaches they liked best.

This trial-and-error process is vital, because people don’t always know what they want, and an approach that does not tap into authentic personal preferences and doesn’t satisfy
both
partners will not stand the test of time. For example, if the woman likes the Hite approach and the man is intensely uncomfortable with it, they should keep looking until they find a better one—or face the fact that they are not sexually compatible, which is a
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conclusion best reached after six months of exploration rather than after six years of poor communication and avoidance. Of course, tastes and preferences can change, and variety is a good thing, so couples should be willing to keep going back to the menu and keep making new selections as time goes by.

A Design Error?

Let’s return to a question posed in Chapter 1: is the placement of the clitoris a design flaw, a slip-up in evolution that makes it far too difficult for humans to have intercourse in ways that please both partners?

There’s certainly no escaping the fact that the geography of men’s and women’s bodies makes mutually satisfying sex a challenge. If we could redesign the human body, would we want to move the clitoris somewhere else? One of the women quoted in
The Hite Report
thought so: “Sex in the best of all possible worlds? My clitoris would be in my vagina, for Christ’s sake, so I could come when I fuck!”

But would this work? Sure, the woman’s clitoris would be stimulated by her partner’s penis during intercourse, but there would still be a problem with pacing and timing. The man’s thrusting movements would stimulate the penis and clitoris at the same time and at the same pace, so for lovers to have orgasms together, their timetables would have to be exactly synchronized.

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If the man was ahead of his partner on the road to orgasm, he wouldn’t be able to slow down his own stimulation without slowing down his partner’s, so he would probably end up coming first and leave the woman hanging. An inside-the-vagina clitoris would also make it impossible for the woman to stimulate herself during intercourse. And of course this location for the clitoris would be highly vulnerable to damage during childbirth.

So the fact that the clitoris is a short distance away from the vagina may not be such a bad design after all.

It opens up the possibility of simultaneous orgasms for those who like them, since the man—or the woman—

can stimulate the clitoris during intercourse.

But taking advantage of this design is neither instinctual nor obvious—and Mother Nature has not provided an instruction manual. Evolution built into the female body the
potential
for orgasms, but not a simple, straightforward mechanism for making them happen during intercourse. Only couples who have excellent sexual rapport and a power-equal relationship can turn the location of the clitoris to their advantage.

Through most of human history, this potential has rarely been fulfilled; most of the time, our basic anatomy has skewed sexual intercourse toward male pleasure and female frustration, leaving countless couples without a deep sexual connection.

The question is whether that can change today. We
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have a much better understanding of how men’s and women’s bodies work; there’s an increasingly equal division of power between men and women; and sexual communication is improving. But can we reprogram the deeply engrained “Wham,

Bam, Thank-You,

Ma’am” default setting?

Great sex happens when

Can we make a virtue of

loving couples confront the

the seemingly random

built-in “geography”

way our bodies are

challenges of intercourse,

designed? Is sexual happi-

explore the full range of tech-

ness possible for more

niques, and communicate

than a few lucky couples?

honestly about what works

and doesn’t work.

Sex and Love

Answering these ques-

tions really matters. Sex, even though it takes up only a small fraction of our lives, is at the very center of a long-term love relationship—and of our self-esteem, confidence, health, and enjoyment of life. Mutually satisfying sex can bring a couple to new levels of pleasure and happiness. Sex in which both lovers have orgasms promotes monogamy because people who are deeply satisfied with intercourse keep coming back for more. This kind of sex helps people bond and get through the troubles of life. It is the fuel that keeps love burning through the years. It can’t save a bad relation-