The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex (20 page)

I’ve met some great women who have been able to help me fulfill my deepest and darkest fantasies. By doing this, I’ve found there is really no end to my sexual desire, and I’ve started to realize just how much of sex is really in the mind. I’ve also been exposed to Tantra and find my views toward sex and intimacy have changed because of it. I’m much more into establishing a good “connection” instead of trying to be some porn star stud all the time.

I guess that since I first became active I have always enjoyed sex physically. The difference has been in maturing to enjoy the mind-fuck aspects of sex…of getting off in the head as well as the body—that I find makes orgasms and sex better and more completely fulfilling.

When I was younger I used to get wet by just the mere sight of certain lovers. As I’ve gotten older I notice that I want more mental stimulation from my partner. I want to wine and dine them or have them wine and dine me.

You value intimacy

I see sex as so much more complicated and complex than I used to. It’s so much less about hormones and bars and craziness. I used to cavort around, flirting and drawing people into bed with me. It was fun and short-lived. Now, I see myself as a partner in a quest. I really understood this when I was with a man who had problems with premature ejaculation. We worked together fixing the problem. In the end, I felt like I understood sex, his body and my body, so much more. I’m looking for sexual experiences that are less superficial and based more on trust.

This might seem corny but being involved in a long-term relationship with the same woman (twenty-two years) has made sex even more incredible. We know what turns each other on, we experiment with various sexual toys and products, and things keep getting better and better. I can’t imagine how having random sex with someone else could be nearly as good. This other person would have to be an incredible communicator to leave both people satisfied. I think with one-night-stands one person probably gets off more than the other. So getting older and monogamy seem pretty damn good.

You accept yourself and your desires

I think that women finally learn, somewhere in their late thirties or forties, that they can enjoy sex, too, and let go of their girlish fears and inhibitions to enjoy what’s between their legs. All in all, my sex life has never been better. It’s amazing and gets better all the time because we’re constantly expanding our horizons, trying new things.

After our second child, my ex-husband complained often that I was no longer “tight enough” for him, and began to pursue anal sex almost exclusively. He seemed unable to come without it. He also began to lose interest in me altogether (although this may have been a gradual drifting apart that sometimes happens in marriage) and I lost all sense of myself as a sexual being. Now, in my new marriage, my husband is very loving and passionate, very attracted to me, and our sexual relationship is amazing (to me, after having lived for so long without one).

I was a late bloomer in terms of acknowledging and enjoying my sexual feelings. I grew up with a feminist consciousness, and I had (and sometimes still have) a hard time sorting out strong sexual attraction to girls and women from sexist objectification. The result was a lot of shame around my use of pornography for self-arousal. As I grew older and became more self-confident, I realized that I could respect and love a woman and want to have sex with her, without necessarily objectifying her. From that realization (which came through a dream) I was able to develop, ever slowly, into integrating my sexual and emotional feelings about women.

You know how to assert yourself

As I get older, sex is much more enjoyable. It seems to me that experience is everything! I’m not nearly as shy about things as I was in my twenties, and I’m not afraid to take control or tell my partner exactly what I want and like! Sex in my forties is so much better for me that I hope it just keeps getting better.

As I’ve gotten older, I experience orgasm more often. I think a big part of it is because I’m not as nervous or overwhelmed by sex as I was when I was first learning. I’m more relaxed, and just let it happen. And sex is a great stress-reliever, if I can look past the initial “I’m too busy” to get there.

CHAPTER 5

Communication

The key to any successful sexual relationship is communication. We know you’ve heard it before, but if some of the activities described in this book tempt you to expand your sexual repertoire, we hope you’ll take the time to make sure your communication skills are in good shape. After all, you can acquire all the toys, lotions, and manuals in the world, but they’re useless in a relationship unless you can talk about what you want to do with them. You can study your anatomy, learn 101 different positions, and read about new techniques, but if you’re unable to describe where it feels good and why, you’re headed for disappointment and frustration.

And since communication is a two-way street, your years of sexual experience or open-mindedness won’t do you any good if you aren’t attuned to your partner’s needs. Discovering her or his needs, anxieties, and desires, as well as learning to share your own, will open doors to greater understanding, experimentation, and healing, ultimately leading to overall greater sexual intimacy.

Unfortunately, there are a million and one things that get in the way of effective communication. In this chapter we’ll examine some of these barriers and suggest ways to move beyond them.

Common Challenges

Our primary goal as sex-toy saleswomen is to get people to articulate their sexual needs. Without this information, we are unable to help a customer find something that will satisfy her or his particular need. However, this crucial first step is also the most difficult one, simply because so many of us are too embarrassed to talk about sex, with either lovers or total strangers.

Our discomfort with sex is ironic. Although we live in a society where we are bombarded daily by sexual images and references to sex, speaking intimately with someone about our own sexuality is extremely challenging. At Good Vibrations, we routinely discuss strangers’ sexual needs with them without ever raising an eyebrow, yet when it came to interviewing our friends about their sex lives for this book, we balked and procrastinated, imagining our mutual embarrassment.

We are all motivated by an intense curiosity about sex, but thwarted by our inability to discuss it. We seek information, elucidation, titillation—note the commercial success of the daily talk shows, sex manuals, advice columns, and the
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit edition—but our curiosity is far more restrained when it comes to discovering a partner’s needs or sharing our own.

You don’t have to look very hard to uncover reasons for this behavior. From the attitudes and morals instilled in us at a young age to the conflicting messages about sex that society imposes on us as adults, it’s no wonder we’re a tad repressed. Here are just a few examples of communication inhibitors:

Social Conditioning

Think about your intimate relationships. Is it true that one of you usually wants to talk about sex and “the relationship” more than the other? There’s an automatic imbalance when you begin a relationship, simply because you’ve each developed your own approach to communication. Many things influence individual communication patterns: gender differences, family dynamics, traumatic experiences—and figuring out which ones are relevant to you can be a starting point if you want to change something.

Inadequate Sex Education

No one teaches us about sex when we’re kids because we’re not supposed to have it, yet when we reach adulthood (at some arbitrary age), we’re expected to magically know how to expertly please ourselves and our partners. After a certain age, our curiosity and inquisitiveness become a liability—a sure sign that we’re inexperienced, poor lovers, or virgins (take your pick)—so we quit asking and start faking.

What we
do
learn about sex as kids comes sporadically from parents, school, friends, and the media. Depending on the accuracy or depth of the information, we may end up more confused, misinformed, or intimidated by our discoveries. Formal sex education in school usually deals with prevention of disease and pregnancy—downbeat lectures emphasizing danger and disaster. How do we learn sexual self-esteem and respect, let alone how to talk about sex, when we’re taught to fear the consequences of our own libidos?

Beliefs, Attitudes, Stereotypes

Each one of us was raised with a unique set of moral beliefs about sex, usually informed by myriad cultural stereotypes or religious doctrines, or both. How we incorporate these into our adult sex lives is directly related to how, what, and even whether we communicate. Guided by whatever we have come to view individually as “acceptable sexual behavior,” we’re bound to run into a few problems exploring or experimenting with someone who holds even slightly different views.

Consider these few examples:

• Perhaps you don’t want to tell your partner you masturbate because you think it’s wrong and you’re trying to quit—remember when the priest told you masturbation would lead to blindness?

• Maybe you’re really intrigued by anal sex, but you’ve always heard that anal sex is a gay practice and you don’t want anyone, including yourself, to think you might be homosexual, so you never explore this activity.

• You might be a gay man who feels that your erotic dreams about women are inconsistent with your practices, so you keep them a secret from your lover.

We deny ourselves and our lovers access to different facets of our sexual personalities when we practice this kind of self-censorship. Getting at the root of some of these attitudes can help you overcome the inhibiting ones or clarify those that are very important to you.

Fear

Fear of rejection or of the embarrassment that comes from revealing our ignorance or beliefs is an enormous deterrent to communication. Our fragile egos often prevent us from making a simple inquiry or confession, one that might lead to greater sexual self-awareness.

It’s not uncommon at Good Vibrations for a clerk to approach every individual in the store and offer to answer questions, yet be turned down by each one. But should she start explaining the differences in vibrators or dildos to just one customer in the store, those very same people will gather around to eavesdrop on the rest of the instruction. Remember your schoolteachers telling you that “there’s no such thing as a dumb question”? You still didn’t ask because you thought everyone else probably already knew, and you weren’t about to make a fool of yourself. The fear seems even greater when it comes to questions about sex.

Many customers confide in us because they’re afraid to tell their partners what they want, certain they’ll sound kinky or stupid or demanding. We act as a sounding board, reassuring them that their curiosity is natural and encouraging them to talk to their partners.

People also worry about deflating their partners’ egos by suggesting a change. Perfectly harmless suggestions can be misinterpreted as dissatisfaction with previous performance:

When I was married, my husband hated it when I masturbated—he couldn’t understand why I needed to do that when he was around.

This woman probably deprived herself (or masturbated on the sly) instead of attempting to disabuse her husband of the notion that her solitary enjoyment reflected poorly on their sex life. She could have explained why she enjoyed it, perhaps even suggesting they try it together.

Goal-Oriented Sex

Many of us have specific requirements for a satisfying sexual encounter. For some it might be a minimum of two orgasms each, for others it might be hour-long foreplay or a new position. How rigidly we adhere to these requirements can increase our own and our partner’s performance anxiety.

The more proscriptive and goal-oriented we make our sexual activity, the more we set ourselves up for anxiety and frustration. Talking with a partner about our expectations can help relieve the pressure, while allowing us to push back the boundaries we’ve set up around our sex lives:

I like to negotiate beforehand, clearly stating each person’s limits. My husband and I talk about what we feel we want to do on any given night. It doesn’t deter spontaneity, just keeps us in synch.

Language Considerations

The differences in our relative comfort or discomfort around sexual terminology can affect the way we communicate. While one person might say, “I’m dying for you to plunge two wet fingers in my juicy cunt and pump,” another might say, “Please put two fingers in my vagina” and hope for the best, while yet another may hate having to spell out what she wants, perhaps spreading her legs and raising her hips to encourage the activity. Finding a common, comfortable vocabulary to share, including clear nonverbal signals, can minimize this confusion and add an erotic edge to your sex play.

If you need a little assistance developing a sexual vocabulary, you have several options. Make a list of words you like or find particularly hot (flip through a sexual slang dictionary if you need help with terms). While you’re alone, practice saying them aloud and using them in sentences—after a while they won’t sound so foreign coming out of your mouth and you can start reciting them more dramatically. When you masturbate, try imagining the words you’d like to say to heighten arousal. You and your partner can create separate lists of preferred words or phrases and then compare them to see what turn-of-phrase works for each of you. You can also build a shared language by reading a variety of erotic stories out loud and discussing which turn you on most—some folks favor Victorian euphemisms, others prefer urban slang, while some employ flowery prose. Similarly, watching X-rated or educational sex videos can show you how others use sexual vocabulary. For more on talking dirty, refer to the Fantasies chapter or pick up a copy of
Talk Sexy to the One You Love
or
Exhibitionism for the Shy.