O (6 page)

Hand-to-face and face-to-face contact ups the ante, while kissing, in the cultures where it exists and is not regarded as disgusting (as it is by the Thonga people in Mozambique and some Finnish Laplanders) or verging on cannibalistic (as the Chinese once believed it to be), raises the temperature several notches further. Hands and fingers, or alternatively feet and toes, may venture towards the genital area, the inner thighs and the woman's breasts, teasingly at first, a little more earnestly as affirmative signals flash back and forth between the putative lovers. The voice, encouraging, cajoling, affectionately teasing, also plays an important part in this ‘fore-play' stage.

Facial expressions, too, are key to building and maintaining the heavy sexual atmosphere required for intercourse to occur. Talking can be a double-edged sword in sex, however, for it can bring about a premature end to lovemaking before it has even started. Both parties pre-sex are in a delicate state of high sensitivity and excitement – two rather incompatible conditions. A careless word or form of words by either – but more usually by the male, who tends to be mentally and physically further along the track towards orgasm than the female at this stage, and hence abandoning subtlety by the minute -can ruin things, especially for the female, for whom delicate mental scene-setting is often more important than for the male.

Backstage, you might say, major bodily changes are taking place during this often protracted time of sexual arousal, as it typically segues from a flirtatious incline that might take
several hours to develop, into a brief but steeper ascent to intercourse itself. There will also classically be a change of location now, from a standing area such as the street or dance floor, or an upright seat, to something more horizontal – a sofa, a floor, a bed. For reasons we will look at later, Nature appears to have gone to some pains to coax upright, bipedal human beings into adopting a horizontal position when they finally mate.

The first major bodily modification in this new phase concerns the distribution of blood supply, which begins to be diverted from the organs and muscles to the skin surface. The body accordingly feels hotter to the touch – the pre-sexual radiance that makes lovers appear flushed. Blushing of the face and neck is what appears to the eye, since the participants' clothes are normally still on at this point, but there is more widespread reddening of the skin, especially in the female. It spreads, not unlike a measles rash, from the stomach and upper abdomen, to the upper part of the breasts (which are already starting to swell perceptibly with the onrush of blood), and then to the upper chest, the underside of the breasts, the shoulders and the elbows. Men's skin reddens with the sexual flush in similar areas, plus the forearms and thighs.

The swelling of the breasts in women as intercourse approaches is caused by vaso-congestion – the effect of arteries pumping blood into the area faster than the veins can drain it. Similar swelling and hardening also starts to occur in the man's penis, which may well be fully erect under his clothing by this time, although his erect organ serves more as a sexual signal of intent for the moment than as a sexual tool.

Less noticeable is the swelling of soft parts of the nose and expansion of the nostrils; the sensation of breathing heated air as orgasm later approaches is far from illusory. Additionally, the nose should not be disregarded as a sexual instrument. It has long been an evolutionary puzzle why human beings have developed such extraordinarily outsize noses compared to the neater, snub-shaped breathing apparatus of apes. Perhaps there is a correlation here with the outsize penis noted previously.

And more is now known of the enhanced role of smell in both the pre-copulatory and coital phases of human sexual intercourse. Along with the heavy two-way traffic in tactile, facial and verbal communication during pre-sex and sex, there is also a busy chatter of olfactory signals in the form of pheromones, for which the nose is the receptor. The nose, indeed, is something very close to the radar of sexual engagement.

The earlobes are another seemingly peripheral outcrop with a role in the build-up to orgasmic release. When the earlobes become swollen and engorged, they develop an unexpected hyper-sensitive, erotic capacity. Earlobes were formerly considered an uninteresting relic of a time when we had bigger ears, but are now known as a place so sensitive that large numbers of men and women are capable of achieving orgasm purely through earlobe manipulation – especially by mouth, tongue and teeth. The nipples are another only peripherally sexual area which come into play as erogenous playthings in pre-sex; in both genders, but more so in the female, nipples become swollen and erect, increasing in length in women by as much as a centimetre. Tumescence darkens and emphasises the pigmented skin around female nipples, which turn a deeper red.

What, then, of the principal players in this drama, the penis and the vagina? Early on, in the more social stage of copulation, the dinner and a movie stage, if you will, the human penis undergoes one of the most dramatic changes seen in Nature. From a short flaccid organ in its normal state, it expands within a few seconds to as much as double its quiescent length and girth. The scrotum simultaneously contracts, applying constricting pressure to the testicles, which are drawn into the body.

The erection is the site of the greatest volume of vaso-congestion in the human body. Within the quite confined space of the penile tissues, the volume of blood in the erect penis increases approximately eleven-fold. This explains the quite remarkable change in the organ's size and rigidity.

At this stage the erect penis presents quite an aggressive and determined sexual statement. But, as the feminist writer Naomi Wolf has pointed out, the erection is also lost very easily. Slight distractions such as a sudden noise, especially by children who might be about to threaten privacy, can rapidly subdue a male erection. (Women's response to distraction, surprisingly in the light of their greater susceptibility earlier in pre-coitus to ‘losing the mood', is less sensitive now, according to Wolf; women will tend to be the more resolute in trying circumstances to see an orgasm through to fruition.)

Erection unrelated to orgasm is common in men; a variety of Internet sources (‘Jenn Even', an American e-zine sex advisor on
www.sagazette.com
is just one) suggest that the average Western man has eleven imagination-stimulated erections a day, and it would be reasonable to suppose that something like that applied to early man. But blood engorgement pre-intercourse also starts to affect less obvious, but equally indicative, extremities of erectile or semi-erectile tissue in the body. The facial lips of both men and women also become swollen and red; lipstick, along with rouge, is a socially acceptable mimicking of these pre-sexual changes.

The walls of the vagina also become engorged with blood, often at an early, flirtatious stage of a sexual encounter. This onrush of blood quickly – as with the penis, within seconds sometimes – stimulates lubrication of the vaginal tube. There is an accompanying lengthening and expansion by up to four inches of the inner parts of the vagina as the female enters the phase of high sexual excitement. Her blood, too, is now pouring into the vessels of the pelvic and genital area and expanding the nerve bundles throughout. Muscles around the clitoris, the opening of the vagina and the anus swell.

The clitoris also becomes enlarged, sensitive and protuberant, although its distension is obscured from view by more general swelling of the labial hood. The clitoris will not, when penetrative intercourse finally proceeds, be directly stimulated by the penis. In some women (but not all) it will retract entirely
as orgasm approaches. But, so long as the penis has a reasonably broad diameter, it will in theory stretch the outer third of the vagina and tug down on the labial hood with the rhythmic pressure of the male's thrusting movements, thus providing, albeit by a far less than mechanically satisfactory means, the friction for easier orgasm, or for the beginnings of easier orgasm. Spongy sacs inside the external female genitals also swell noticeably in preparation for penetration, the outer labia reaching two to three times their normal size. The inner labia, while turning a bright red, expand to a similar degree, by as much as a hundred per cent, to the point where they sometimes extend beyond the outer labia.

Blood pressure, pulse rate and respiration all increase dramatically as copulation approaches. Glands have continued to secrete in even greater amounts the mucoid fluids flowing from the walls of the vulva and facilitating entry of the penis. (These are the same lubricants necessary in childbirth to ease the passage of the baby through the vaginal canal.) The female's breasts have also by now swollen by anything up to 25 per cent of their normal dimensions, becoming firmer and more rounded as they grow, while the testicles have, in some men, nearly doubled in size to try to keep in proportion with the shaft of the penis.

Even with all the ingredients of this sexual banquet nicely simmering and ready to be served, copulation proper may still be delayed by another tempting course – of oral stimulation. Oral sex, even if it is still technically illegal in some US States and taboo in many other cultures and subcultures, is apparently more widely acceptable and practised than it has ever been in the recorded past. Both homosexual and heterosexual lovers like to use it as a means of expressing deep, intimate feelings.

Oral sex need not be considered a decadent indulgence. It has been used very successfully over the generations as a method of sexual interaction when a male has difficulty attaining an erection, or when intercourse is painful for either partner.
Oral sex has also been an emotional and physical lifeline for people with disabilities such as spinal cord injuries. Heterosexual couples, additionally, have found it an unexpected delight in cases where conception must be avoided, or in late pregnancy, or after childbirth when intercourse proper might be dangerous or painful.

Starting with kissing on the mouth, which is both oral and sexual, use of the lips and tongue for sexual purposes soon extends, predominally for the male, to the breasts and nipples of the female. (From there, it is only a navigational matter of inches to the more contentious business of each sex using the mouth to fellate the genitals of the other.)

Cunnilingus, the stimulation of female genitals by lips and tongue (from the Latin
cunnus
[vulva],
lingere
[to lick]), is performed by either a man or another woman. The partner gently separates the outer and inner labia with the fingers or tongue, then licks, sucks and teases the clitoris, sometimes rapidly flicking the sides of the clitoris shaft. Some women enjoy a slow, steady rhythm, moving backward and forward to the vaginal opening, sometimes with deep insertion of the tongue just before orgasm. Manual stimulation may be employed simultaneously. Very light biting, sucking or nibbling actions usually occur. Some women enjoy having their partner blow a little air into the vagina, but too much can be dangerous, causing infection or even embolism.

Even the sexually neglected nose may come into play in oral sex. As a partner's tongue plays with the vagina's inner and outer labia, the nose is perfectly placed to be simultaneously stimulating the clitoris. It may only be modesty that prevents male fashion from highlighting nose size in men to match the blatant display of sexuality seen in women's lipstick. There again, it cannot be entirely his singing and personality that make Barry Manilow the sex symbol that he is; could it be that,
inter alia
, his millions of adoring female fans dream idly of what Manilow might be able to achieve with that outsize proboscis?

Men can have mixed feelings about cunnilingus. With visual stimulation so important for them, most become sexually excited by the intimate view of the genitals and the intriguing sight of the vagina opening like a flower. The taste of the vaginal secretions may also be extremely stimulating. Other men feel slightly obligated to perform cunnilingus, with hygiene, religious, intimacy and other reasons holding them back from actually enjoying it. Research by US sexologists Drs Jennifer and Laura Berman suggests that men who perform cunnilingus are more goal-oriented and do it primarily as ‘warming up' pre-intercourse tactic rather than as an end in itself. In Thailand, many men believe they can suffer
choak suay
– bad luck – by engaging in cunnilingus. This might seem a rather novel excuse, but squeamishness does not explain why Thai men also feel it is unlucky to walk under laundry containing women's skirts or underwear. Other cultures have dressed cunnilingus up as a near art-form; on Ponape, in South Pacific Micronesia, some men like to place a fish in a lover's vulva and slowly lick it out.

Cunnilingus is also, it should be remembered, a primary method for reaching orgasm for most lesbians. Women who perform cunnilingus tend to be more effective in giving pleasure to another woman, knowing as they are bound to what feels good. They are inclined to approach the activity less hastily than men do, and to prolong it for its own sake.

Fellatio (from the Latin
fellatus
, past participle of
fellare
, to suck) is the oral stimulation of the male genitals, primarily the penis, by a woman or another man. The penis may be inserted into the mouth to a depth of a few centimetres, or practically to the base of the shaft. The sensitive corona, or tip, of the penis is the most common focus of fellatio, although the shaft, frenulum, perineum, scrotum, and sometimes the anus or immediate surrounds can also be involved. All these areas are sucked, licked or tenderly nibbled. The term ‘blow-job' appears singularly inappropriate because no ‘blowing' is performed, but it most probably derives from the more understandable term ‘below' job.

Until AIDS, at least, fellatio was the most common sexual activity practised by homosexual men. It is certainly the most requested act by prostitutes' ‘punters' – as well as being their own preferred method since it is easy, quick and portable, requiring as it does neither premises nor preamble. As in the case of empathetic women performing cunnilingus, men are often better at it than members of the opposite sex. Some men who consider themselves heterosexual are happy to be fellated by another man because they do not feel as if they are performing a homosexual act, as they would with anal intercourse.