The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex (11 page)

Being pregnant allowed me to realize just how much hormones do play a part in my body, and how strongly they affected me…. It helped both me and my husband in later years when I had to take pain meds after I was in a car accident. We could realize what the drugs were doing to me, and that it was not anything personal going on when my libido went on strike!

Gender versus Anatomy

Sexual identity involves so much more than anatomy, and sexual expression is not controlled by biology alone—after all, we aren’t uniformly hard-wired to insert tab A in slot B and call that satisfying sex. Each individual’s sexuality is shaped and mediated by cultural values and expectations. And the social construct that has the greatest influence on our experience of sex is gender. Gender identity becomes the prism through which we perceive and relate to our anatomy.

We all have experience with our culture’s rigid gender categories, the arbitrary rules that dictate appropriate “masculine” or “feminine” ways of moving, dressing, and speaking, as well as appropriate professions and pastimes. According to these rules, each biological sex has its own accompanying gender, and no swapping is allowed! Sure, we’re making progress in overturning certain gender stereotypes, but as any boy ballet-dancer or girl football-player can testify, we’ve got a very long way to go.

The truth is that our binary view of gender is not only absurdly restrictive, it’s woefully inadequate to represent reality. Gender is a human construct, and as such, it exists on a continuum that reflects the variety of human experience. For one thing, gender identity doesn’t necessarily “match” biological sex: A butch woman can assert a masculine identity and appearance without having the slightest interest in adopting a male body. For some people, gender is a toy; for others it’s an integral, immutable part of their identity; and for still others it’s a nonissue.

Think about the influence of gender in your own sex life: Are you attracted by certain feminine or masculine styles? Or does gender ambiguity makes your pulse race? Do you feel sexually confident when you slip into spiked heels, biker boots, or both? Are there ways in which gender stereotypes are restricting your sexual pleasure? Perhaps you’re ashamed of your own lust because you were raised to believe that “women prefer cuddling to sex.” Perhaps you’re not sure how to express your desire for anal penetration because you’re convinced that “only gay men take it up the ass.” Self-awareness is the first step toward cultivating your gender identity in ways that enhance your sexuality rather than repress it.

The good news is that the increased visibility of transgendered people and gender-bending trends in popular culture seem to be bringing about a greater acceptance of gender playfulness in bedrooms around the country. There’s no question that feminine and masculine role-playing are loaded with erotic possibilities, especially if you approach your gender play with a spirit of generosity. Too often, people allow gender roles to limit, rather than expand, their sexual horizons. We encourage you to experiment with gender play as a way of adding options, not subtracting them—whether you slip into some silk, strap on a dildo, or try out a new way of walking and talking. Gender isn’t static, and you can expect your relationship to your own gender identity to evolve in new and unexpected ways throughout your life.

I’ve gone from very femme to genderqueer and almost androgynous to being comfortable having a number of different gender identities that live in a thoroughly female body.

Transsexuals

Transsexuals are people who are assigned a gender at birth that doesn’t fit their sense of self. Most transsexuals alter their bodies in some way, through either hormone treatment or sex-reassignment surgery or both, to bring their physical self into better alignment with their gender identity. Others simply live as the gender that feels right to them, without making any physical changes.

Hormone treatment—in which male-to-female transsexuals (MTFs) take estrogen and antiandrogens and female-to-male transsexuals (FTMs) take testosterone—is more common than surgery. Hormones alter secondary sex characteristics such as fat-to-muscle ratio, body hair, facial hair, and vocal pitch—all of which are among the primary cues we use in reading gender. Naturally, these hormones also affect sexual anatomy and responsiveness: MTFs taking estrogen often report that their penises can no longer become erect and that they must explore other paths to arousal and orgasm, while FTMs taking testosterone often report clitoral enlargement and an increased libido.

Genital surgery is more common for MTFs than FTMs. It’s been argued that the medical establishment finds it less threatening to surgically create a vagina than a penis, and this may well be true—it’s also true that constructing a vagina is less difficult. In penile-inversion surgery, the penis is turned inside out, so that the skin of the former penis shaft becomes the walls of the new vagina, and part of the corpus spongiosum is used to create a clitoris.

Intersexuality

While most of us take for granted that there are two, and only two, biological sexes, anatomical sex actually exists on a continuum. In fact, there are a wide range of intersex conditions, in which individuals are born with sex chromosomes, hormonal patterns, genitals, or reproductive organs that don’t fit into tidy categories of male or female.

Intersex conditions have many causes—including genetic abnormalities or prenatal exposure to hormones—and manifest in a variety of ways. In some cases, intersexed individuals are clearly male or female in appearance, and their condition is not identified until puberty or adulthood. Some men with Klinefelter’s syndrome, a genetic variation in which men are born with an extra X chromosome in addition to the standard XY, may not become aware of the syndrome until they discover their infertility in adulthood. Individuals with androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS) are genetically male (they have XY chromosomes and testes), but their androgen receptors are not responsive to male hormones, and they develop female bodies. Sometimes AIS isn’t identified until a young women reaches the age of puberty without menstruating. Women with MRKH syndrome are genetically female (they have XX chromosomes), but are born without a vagina, uterus, and fallopian tubes, a fact they may not discover until becoming sexually active.

Other intersexed individuals are identified at birth. An estimated one in two thousand babies is born with ambiguous genitals—estimates are imprecise in part because most of these infants are surgically altered at birth to be “assigned” one sex (usually female). An even higher number of babies are born with unambiguous genitals that doctors nonetheless consider medically “unacceptable,” for example girls with large clitorises or boys with hypospadias, a condition in which the urethral opening is not located at the tip of the penis. The sad truth is that an infant girl born with a clitoris deemed “too long” (longer than three-eighths of an inch) will probably be subjected to clitoral reduction surgery—regardless of the resulting damage to her genital nerve endings. Boys born with penises that are deemed “too short” (shorter than one inch) may be subjected to surgical and hormonal sex reassignment. These horrific procedures take place in modern hospitals every day, with genital surgery performed on an estimated two thousand American infants a year, often resulting in irreparable harm to sexual responsiveness and/or fertility.

The treatment intersexed people have received at the hands of the medical establishment reflects our profound cultural unease with ambiguity of any kind, particularly gender ambiguity. For decades, doctors operated under the assumption that intersexed individuals couldn’t possibly grow up to be healthy adults unless they received immediate sex assignment; many withheld accurate medical information from intersexed children and their parents with the justification that the truth would be too psychologically traumatic. Since the fifties, the prevailing treatment model has been to “normalize” intersexed people with mutilating surgery and then to deceive them about their own medical histories.

Recent years have seen the rise of activism by and for intersexuals. The Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) was founded in 1993 as a peer support, education, and advocacy organization dedicated to ending “shame, secrecy, and unwanted genital surgeries for people born with atypical sex anatomies.” ISNA’s goal is to reform the treatment of intersexed children, specifically to establish a model in which doctors defer all nonessential surgeries until the individual is old enough to give informed consent. A growing number of pediatric endocrinologists and other medical professionals are embracing reform, but until ISNA’s model is universally accepted, it will be up to the parents of intersexed children to defend their children’s rights to self-determination. We encourage all readers, especially prospective parents, to visit ISNA’s website at
www.isna.org
for up-to-date information and resources.

The hardest thing for me was telling partners that I had MRKH. People would try to penetrate me with their fingers and I wouldn’t tell them not to even though it caused me a lot of pain. I was embarrassed, I was afraid people would think I was a freak, etc. Now I choose partners that I know will not judge me.

Some FTMs opt for upper-body surgery—a double mastectomy—but not lower-body surgery. Some choose to retain their vagina and reproductive organs, while others choose their surgical removal. Those seeking genital reconstruction can choose between phalloplasty—in which a penis is surgically constructed from skin grafts—and metoidioplasty—which involves releasing the testosterone-enlarged clitoris from its hood and creating a scrotum out of the labia majora. The resulting penis is smaller than one “built” through phalloplasty and can’t necessarily be used for penetration, but it has full sensitivity, unlike a penis created through skin grafts. In phalloplasty, the clitoris is left at the base of the newly constructed penis, above the scrotum, to allow for sexual sensation.

A thorough discussion of the varieties of preoperative and surgical approaches available to transsexuals is beyond the scope of this book. At this time, sex-reassignment surgery is far from perfect. Postop transsexuals may suffer genital nerve damage, have limited ability to reach orgasm, or have reduced sex drives. Of course, there are a rich variety of sensations available from erogenous zones other than the penis and vagina.

Some transsexuals identify exclusively as their post-transition sex and embrace traditional gender roles. Others identify as
transgendered,
a general term for anyone who challenges binary definitions of sex and gender. The transgendered movement includes transsexuals, cross-dressers, intersexed people (see sidebar), and all those who feel the categories
male
and
female
are inadequate to describe their experience of gender identity.

Despite increasing awareness of transgender issues, our society remains repressively phobic of any blurring of gender lines, and transgendered people face bias, hostility, and even violence simply for being who they are. A grassroots civil rights movement has taken shape, aided by the networking possibilities of the Web. Check out our resource listings for referrals to transgender organizations—ending discrimination based on gender identity will liberate every one of us.

Orgasm

There are many reasons to enjoy sex: It’s a celebration of the human body; it’s relaxing; it’s entertaining; it promotes intimacy; you can do it alone, with a friend, or in a crowd. And you can have orgasms as a result. Orgasms are a simple pleasure, which we’d all benefit from taking less seriously. Orgasm generates more anxiety than any other single topic in our line of work. Men worry that they’re coming “too quickly”; women worry that they’re taking “too long” to come; and everyone worries that they’re not having good enough, strong enough, or simply enough orgasms. We live in a competitive society, and we need encouragement before we can appreciate our own unique responses, without looking over our shoulders to see if somebody else out there is having an even better—or more “normal”—time. If you had never heard another person describe an orgasm, never read a bodice-ripping novel, or never seen a romantic movie, how would you describe your own experience of orgasm?

Some are just a quick hard rush that shoots through my body like a bolt of lightning. Others feel like a slow burn, they build up over time, they tease me, floating up and down my body—spreading out like concentric circles, and then there will be a burst of release.

Orgasms at different times involve different parts of my body—back, buttocks, different parts of my legs down to the calves, feet, shoulders, neck. I must be moving my legs in order to come.

Orgasm feels like water shooting up through the top of a fountain, tickling all the way, then shooting out of the top in electric vibrations through my body.

Orgasm is often for me this very still point; there’s lots of movement as I’m getting increasingly excited, but when I come everything is tight and intense and still.

Orgasm feels good. Sometimes it’s very concentrated, and sometimes it’s totally diffuse throughout my body. Sometimes, if I’m very stressed out, it just feels like a release. When I’m relaxed, I feel like I’m floating in a place where there is no time or space.

Orgasm for me feels like a release of a spring of love emotions toward my wife. It is mysteriously wonderful, and words are just insufficient to describe it.

Expectations

Orgasm, in the most pragmatic sense of the word, is an involuntary muscular contraction that signifies the release of sexual tension. Yet, as the plum in the pudding of sex, this simple physiological reflex inspires a wide range of emotional, psychological, and even spiritual responses: