Great Sex Secret (8 page)

• “It brings a spiritual dimension to our relationship.”

• “It is a time when I have the man’s undivided attention.”

• “It is exciting and flattering to have my body give such pleasure to a man.”

• “It is wonderful giving myself to him and having him appreciate that.”

• “Intercourse makes me feel accepted, appreciated, affirmed, and loved.”

• “It makes me feel competent, attractive, vital, whole, alive, and fulfilled.”

Naomi, a woman quoted in
Our Bodies, Ourselves
, gave this thoughtful, nuanced description of her feelings about intercourse:

The times when I make love with Jonathan and I’m only a little turned on I enjoy hugging him. It feels good to be close with him. Do I feel maternal, sisterly, a friend?

Maybe a need to be mothered? It’s not sorted out, but I know I do feel good. It satisfies one of my needs—for joyous physical contact with another person—but it isn’t really the intense sexual one.

In a sense, these women were agreeing with the old
Fa k i n g I t a n d D e a l i n g w i t h I t
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saying, “When sex is good, it’s the most beautiful thing in the world, but when sex is bad, it’s still pretty good.”

What they are
not
saying is that intercourse gives them deep sexual gratification. Instead, they are thinking intimacy, spirituality, narcissism, and vicarious enjoyment of their partner’s pleasure.

But we have to wonder: are these women
really
happy with intercourse—or have they settled for what they believe is attainable given the realities of their lives and their relationships? Is their lovemaking truly fulfilling—or have they done a cost-benefit analysis and resigned themselves to getting certain benefits that come from intercourse without the full measure of sexual satisfaction? In her follow-up analysis, Hite concluded that these women had indeed made these compromises and that this was the explanation for the counterintuitive 87 percent finding.

So are women in this category sexually happy? Yes, they are enjoying their love relationships. Yes, there are many positive aspects to sexual intercourse for them.

And yes, it’s possible to enjoy making love without having an orgasm. But like their Victorian counter-parts, these women have lowered their expectations, given up on men as truly sensual lovers, and accepted that intercourse is not an arena for their own sexual fulfillment. For them, intercourse is a
portal
to other important aspects of life: security, intimacy, children, companionate love, and even domestic bliss.

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T h e G r e a t S e x S e c r e t
This is not an irrational strategy and given the realities most women confront every day, it’s nothing to sneer at.

But this
modus vivendi
systematically deprives women of a core life experience—an experience that their mates are enjoying almost every time they make love.

As sexually satisfied men slumber blissfully after intercourse, it should not surprise us that some of these women masturbate to quench their built-up sexual desire with an orgasm. Over the centuries some women have done this; even in Catholic nineteenth century France it was an acknowledged phenomenon.

Post-coital self-stimulation was specifically endorsed in an 1870 manual used by French priests hearing confessions: “If the husband should withdraw after ejaculation, before the wife has experienced orgasm, she may lawfully at once continue friction with her own hand, in order to attain relief.”

For these women, both past and present, masturbation may be the continuation of a private sex life that has existed since childhood or adolescence. At some point, they discovered that they could give themselves a secret, wonderfully pleasurable sensation at absolutely no cost and without asking for help from anyone else! Through an efficient feedback loop—

learning to touch themselves where it felt good and keeping going until it felt great—they found that having an orgasm was quite quick and easy—and felt
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amazing. At first, they may have believed they were the only person in the world who did this (I invented it!).

Masturbation is a less obvious discovery for girls than it is for boys, and first masturbation often takes longer for many girls to figure out. But once a girl (or woman) has given herself her first orgasm, the circuitry is connected for good, and subsequent orgasms become easier and increasingly pleasurable. Natalie Angier describes the process:

The clitoris must be wired up to the brain—the big brain—before it can sing. The brain must learn to ride its little rod the way it must learn to balance its body on a bicycle. And once learned, the skill will not be forgotten. Some women learn how to climax in childhood, while others do not make the connection until adulthood. It is not an engineering problem, though.

You can’t figure it out with the neocortex alone…that thickly ruffled top layer of fish-gray tissue that cogi-tates, hesitates, and second-guesses every impulse.

Instead you must tap into a more ancient neural locus, the hypothalamus, which sits on the floor of your brain…and reigns over appetite: for food, salt, power, sex.

As they get older, many girls who have discovered this private pleasure run into the widespread social 7 6

T h e G r e a t S e x S e c r e t
taboo against masturbation and stop doing it or, if they continue, wrestle with feelings of shame and guilt. One woman quoted in
The Hite Report
put it this way: When you’re young, you masturbate/touch yourself instinctually, then you stop when you hear it’s “wrong”

and “naughty,” and then you try the rest of your life to get other people to touch you the same way, only they hardly ever do it right!

No wonder masturbation is common among women who are not fulfilled by intercourse (and sometimes by those who are). Some women masturbate with their fingers, others rub up against a pillow or sheets, others squeeze their thighs together, others use vibrators, and others use the stream of water from Jacuzzis or hand showers (a use that, for some reason, their designers don’t advertise). For these women, masturbation is good clean fun without the

interpersonal complica-

Women who aren’t sexually

tions of making it hap-

satisfied by intercourse

pen during intercourse.

sometimes see it as a portal

What about women

to other sources of happiness,

who, for religious or

including security,

personal reasons, are

intimacy, children, and even

not comfortable with

domestic bliss.

masturbation and are

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“pre-orgasmic” (a term coined by Lonnie Barback in
For
Yourself
) when they have their first sexual relationship?

Because they have never touched their genitals in a sexual way, they have only a vague sense of what produces pleasure, and this puts them at a disadvantage when they first have intercourse. This lack of self-knowledge means that they are less likely to communicate well with their partner (the same inhibitions that keep them from masturbating prevent them from speaking up), and they are unlikely to have orgasms during intercourse. A truly unfortunate lovemaking scenario is when a woman who has not learned how to give herself an orgasm goes to bed with a sexually inexperienced man. It’s a case of the blind leading the blind, and the woman is almost certain to wind up sexually frustrated.

Nowadays, sexually unsatisfied women who don’t masturbate can’t set up a weekly appointment with a doctor for “vulvular massage” or take trips to a spa for

“hydrotherapy.” With no other outlet, they live without sexual gratification. Maybe they won’t have symptoms of “hysteria,” but there are likely to be other conse-quences within their intimate relationships. The frequency of intercourse with their partners might drop (“I’m too tired”), or sex might completely disappear from the relationship (the “sexless marriage”).

Alternatively, women who are unsatisfied by intercourse might try increasingly exotic practices (anal sex, 7 8

T h e G r e a t S e x S e c r e t
fisting, bondage, and sado-masochism, etc.); watch pornography (which is easier than ever to get on cable TV and the Internet, at video stores, and in hotel rooms—and don’t worry, the movie title won’t appear on your bill!); have an affair with another man (introducing novelty, the excitement of new love, and an element of danger); or have sex with another woman (from a realization of genuine lesbian or bisexual orientation—

or frustration with the available guys).

But while these avenues might be helpful some of the time, they do not address the real problem—the basic anatomical difficulty of a woman getting deep sexual satisfaction from intercourse. The next two chapters return to this challenge.

Chapter Five

Simultaneous Orgasms:

Are They Possible?

So far we have focused on sexual encounters where the woman does not have an orgasm while she is with her partner. What about women who
do
climax during intercourse? According to most surveys, as many as 35

percent of women are in this category. How are they and their partners managing to include female satisfaction in their lovemaking? What triggers these women’s climaxes? And do they come simultaneously with their partners?

Freud’s Wrong Turn

These questions lead us straight to the doorstep of Sigmund Freud, who had strong views on the subject.

Beginning around 1905, Freud asserted that the clitoral orgasm, usually the result of masturbation, was an

“infantile” precursor to the deeper, more satisfying vaginal orgasm, which was produced by the man’s penis during intercourse. In his
New Introductory Lectures on
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T h e G r e a t S e x S e c r e t
Psychoanalysis
, Freud wrote: In the phallic phase of the girl, the clitoris is the dominant erotogenic zone. But it is not destined to remain so; with the change to femininity, the clitoris must give up to the vagina its sensitivity, and, with it, its importance, either wholly or in part.

Note that Freud said that the clitoris
must
give up its sensitivity. He wasn’t reporting on research, and he wasn’t describing something he’d learned from his patients; he was telling women what
needed
to happen. What about women for whom this transition did not take place?

Freud believed that something was wrong with them. In 1935, he wrote, “In those women who are sexually anaes-thetic, as it is called, the clitoris has stubbornly retained this sensitivity.” Freud even referred one colleague to the practice of genital mutilation practiced by the Nandi tribe in Africa, suggesting that when this tribe cut off girls’ clitorises, they were not suppressing female pleasure but merely redirecting it to the vagina, its appropriate adult location.

Freud’s theory, bolstered by his medical and psycho-analytic reputation, reinforced many people’s gut-level belief in the penetration-produces-female-orgasm paradigm. If the vagina was the source of “mature” female pleasure, then the natural order of the universe was for
S i m u l t a n e o u s O r g a s m s : A r e T h e y Po s s i b l e ?

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couples to have orgasms
together
during penis-in-vagina intercourse with no clitoral stimulation. Freud’s theory sent generations of scientists and laypeople off in exactly the wrong direction.

It wasn’t until 1953

that Alfred Kinsey’s book

From the 1920s through the

Sexual Behavior of the

1950s, sexologists

Human Female
debunked

aggressively pushed the idea

Freud’s notion of the vagi-

that having simultaneous

nal orgasm. A decade later,

orgasms during intercourse

researchers William Mas-

was a virtual duty—but gave

ters and Virginia Johnson

couples no help on how to

solidified Kinsey’s findings

make them happen.

and restored the clitoris to

its rightful place at the

center of female sexual response. The painstaking Masters and Johnson research (which included putting a tiny cam-era inside a transparent plastic penis to get the inside story on intercourse) proved beyond a shadow of doubt that virtually all female orgasms are
caused
by clitoral stimulation (direct or indirect) and
felt
in muscular contractions in the vagina (and more generally). Masters and Johnson also found that orgasms from direct clitoral stimulation were the most intense, producing stronger contraction spasms and more rapid heartbeats. Many of the women they interviewed reported that their best orgasms came from masturbation.

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T h e G r e a t S e x S e c r e t
What about other female-orgasm-producing areas?

Masters and Johnson found that a small number of women were capable of having orgasms from breast stimulation. In recent years, theories have been advanced about other parts of a woman’s body—the area around the urethra, the cervix, the G-Spot, and the A-Spot. Are these competitors for the clitoris’s top spot?

Probably not. One explanation for the seeming prolifer-ation of erogenous zones in the genital area is that the visible clitoris is just the tip of the iceberg: once aroused, its roots are activated and can be stimulated through contact with nearby areas. Natalie Angier describes this phenomenon with her usual panache: The clitoris overspills its anatomical borders and tran-scends its anatomy. Other pathways feed into it and are fed by it. The fifteen thousand pudendal nerve fibers that service the entire pelvis interact with the nerve bundles of the clitoris. That’s why the anus is an erogenous zone. Nerves are like wolves and birds: if one starts crying, there goes the neighborhood.