Vagina (38 page)

When I left Lousada’s studio, I was on what I now knew to be a dopamine high. Colors looked brighter, the world seemed full of joy and sensuality, and the friend who in fact met me afterward said—if grumpily—that I looked flushed and beaming.

I went back to Lousada by phone to try to tease out how his method actually worked—I especially wanted to understand what he saw as the link between a woman’s healing from vaginal massage, and her emergence in areas of her life beyond the sexual.

“When a woman feels safe, she allows herself
to
herself—not to me—and to her orgasmic pleasure. A man takes four minutes to reach orgasm on average,” Lousada noted again, “a woman, sixteen minutes. Unless he is patient, he is going to come more quickly than she will. So when we talk about ‘normal sex,’ the man ejaculates just when the woman’s body is just beginning to soften, open, relax into that beautiful . . . it’s over. A lot of women have given up on that kind of sex. Women are withdrawing from that kind of sex and concluding it’s not satisfying.

“Many men are not spending the time with their lovers that is necessary. Women experience that kind of sex and think that is ‘sex.’ It is partly due to a lack of knowledge, for both men and women. Women’s true sexuality is suppressed in society. Our culture doesn’t allow the same kinds of response to women that it does to men. Studies show that twenty-nine percent of women never have orgasm in intercourse. Fifteen percent of women do so only rarely. Compared to point six percent of men. Tests on women have shown that there is no physiological reason why all women can’t have orgasms. That tells me that preorgasmia is a psychological condition.

“We [men] need to make women feel safe if we want them to respond orgasmically. We need some rudimentary knowledge of where to touch and how—simple anatomy, and sensitivity. Actually one of the most important things for men to remember is that we all take actions based on our own sexual experiences, so men are doing to their wives and lovers what they think feels good based on their own sexual makeup, and women are not telling them that there is another way. So when a woman comes to me and says, ‘My lovers aren’t giving me orgasms’—she has often not been taking responsibility. Very few of my clients express their own sexual desires. I’ve had clients say to me, ‘I wish I could have an orgasm, it would be a beautiful gift for him,’ or ‘Damned if I’m giving him my orgasm.’ So yes, there are things men can do, but it is women who need to be healed. Women get in touch with their sexual selves and become more creative; spiritual; artistic. They get different jobs! It’s about releasing their life force.”

Well, that was a strong assertion, and I needed independent corroboration. So I asked him to connect me to a client of his who would confirm this far-reaching claim.

He put me in touch with an articulate, thoughtful woman in her thirties, whom I will call “Angela.”

“I read your article in the
Sunday Times
and made an appointment,” said Angela. “I had felt completely disconnected from men, and experienced a long period of celibacy. My romantic relationships were not positive; I had a problem with sexual harassment as well. I had a boyfriend, but it wasn’t a deep relationship; I couldn’t open up to him physically. I wasn’t ready to open up sexually. It had been a while.

“Seeing Mike affected my creativity completely. I needed healing from a man. I had five sessions around that time, and still have sessions with him every few months. The first two sessions were mainly talking—quite therapeutic. Since the third session I have had yoni work. The first session was talking, holding, and me weeping. Acknowledging how I felt. The second session was profound—acknowledging how angry I was. Mike had me shouting, “FUCK OFF!” at him to release my rage. It was big for me to bring this up in front of a man. . . . I was sure that if I was angry in relationship to a man I would be sent away.

“After that experience, I started to write short stories—I was being more myself. The third session was yoni work: I had ejaculated when I was younger—it was very moving to have that occur again. It was about me, he was interested in me, my pleasure—that was a big thing. I had enough time. In my previous sexual experiences, I had often felt rushed—and often felt quite nervous about what men want. I found it very difficult to relax during sex, though I was able to have orgasms, and had experienced multiple orgasms. Previously, though, I’d often sort of disappeared when I’d had an orgasm—not in a good way, for sure. To stay in my body when I had an orgasm was a big thing. A lot of emotion came up: past trauma. It felt safe: because of the emotional safety I was able to relax more: he knew what to do.

“I’d never had a vaginal orgasm before—they had all been from my clitoris—but I did with him. He found some sort of spot that totally worked. I was able to get into my sexuality very deeply, flow very intensely—I was angry, crying. . . . He’s an example of what a respectful man is. I wanted respect but didn’t know what that looked like, felt like. This helps me to feel more confident in my ability to judge a man’s integrity.

“I have had multiple orgasms before—about two or three in a row . . . with Mike, I had a dozen: I was able to be passionate. I’d had an ‘energy blockage’ previously—here I’d be able to have a good scream. In previous relationships, men didn’t allow me to be emotional. In my family you couldn’t express feelings. To be allowed to be emotional with a man . . . I am now much more able to speak up for myself.

I stood up to my manager. I argue my point more in general—I would not have done that before. I started realizing that I’d always assumed that others were right and I was wrong—I started realizing I didn’t need to parrot people. I could be myself more. I felt more self-confidence. I was feeling better when I looked in the mirror. I had been told I was ugly. [After working with Lousada] I liked my face a lot more. I am accepting that I am a volatile and passionate person. It comes out a lot more. During masturbation, I was able to give myself better orgasms. My sexual fantasies changed. . . . I was always being dominated [in my fantasies previously]. There had always been a warped vision of a father figure. Now I could give myself orgasms without even thinking of a man—now my whole body is having an orgasm. So physical changes are simultaneous with psychological changes for me.

“Another thing—I had always wanted to go into opinion-based writing; but I had moved back in with my parents and was working in an office. After working with Lousada, I got a more creative job. I knew the whole time I would get it.

“Creativity? This time, creatively, it was like I had melted into everything. I was there. My brain wasn’t chattering—I trusted my body to take over; I felt free, with a feeling of integrity. My goals are more physical. I have a sense of being held and knowing I won’t be dropped. Mike talks a lot about women being Goddesses; I definitely feel like a Goddess. I have been writing stories about the Goddess Persephone. Her husband brings her underground but it’s a good thing. . . . She chooses it. It’s all about connecting with the darkness. I’m seeing the Goddess in myself; seeing the Goddess in other people—seeing the God in Mike—I am more compassionate. I can see myself in others.

“After these sessions with Mike, all this was unblocked. It’s like a rocket going off. I’m attracting much more positive men in my life. I feel capable of having a romantic relationship. I have a safe sexual space.”

“Do you feel your emergent sexuality equals emergent aspects of your self?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied. Then she added: “Some wounds women have can only be healed by a man.”

Lousada’s description of the vagina “reaching out” when it was ready, so odd to me at first, made more and more sense as I did further research into Tantric tradition and its Taoist counterpart. The Eastern traditions see the vagina as alive—that is, as expressing its own kind of will, preferences, influence, and agency—a way of seeing that is fundamentally alien to us, and that is so very different from the passive, receptive, personality-less, and effectively
voiceless
way the vagina is portrayed in our own culture.

The very definition of what it means for a vagina to “open,” though it is the same word, has two completely different interpretations in Eastern and Western cultures. In the Eastern traditions such as the Tantra and the Tao, the man addresses, with caresses and care, the “gatekeeper,” the outer vagina and labia, and awaits permission for further entry, whether by hand, tongue, or penis; and the subsequent opening of the vagina is itself a complex, gradual, and graduated process, which develops over time and under the influence of various attentions and entreaties. In the West, the “opening” of the vagina is understood to be subject simply to a woman parting her legs, or a man’s penetration of it with his penis; the vagina opens, in the West, like a mechanism, or like a door, a curtain, or a box. The Eastern model of vaginal opening, in contrast, is more akin to an “unfolding” or an “unfurling,” a “coming alive” or an “expansion”—more like a time-lapse photograph, like a lotus expanding in the sun.

And I took away from my Tantric explorations a wonderful phrase. As my friends and I now sometimes joke—or half joke—to one another, when narrating a romantic adventure, “But what did the
yoni
have to say?”

14

Radical Pleasure, Radical Awakening: The Vagina as Liberator

Today I want to paint nakedness . . . I wish you . . . would take me out into the night—way out there into the dark blueness—and that the day would never come . . .

—Georgia O’Keeffe

T
he more I learned about both the latest brain science around female arousal, and about the ancient practice of Tantra, the more it seemed that a group of Hindu spiritual seekers centuries ago had figured out pretty fully a set of insights about the mind-body connection in sexuality with which Western science was only now beginning to catch up.

Indeed, these two traditions, the Western medical/sexological and the Eastern Tantric, are starting to inform each other. Since I first met with Lousada, he has further developed a prominent practice consulting with, and presenting methodological papers to, mainstream physicians’ groups focused on sexual health and dysfunction in women.

When Lousada was gazing deeply into a client’s eyes, he was stimulating the neurobiological response prepared in women by eye gazing as they instinctively seek, as both genders do, to gauge from dilated pupils a possible partner’s health and arousal levels.
¹
When he said, “Welcome, Goddess,” he was destressing her, reassuring her on the level of her autonomic nervous system (ANS) that she was sexually safe—respected and valued, and seen as uniquely lovely by a potential partner. This allowed her system to become ready: her nipples to engorge, her skin to flush, and her vagina to lubricate. Because of the stronger connections between the hemispheres in the female brain than in the male’s, when Lousada verbalized positive imagery about her vagina, her mind and body were both better prepared to start processing sexual images and thoughts.
²
Because women react with a far more pronounced relaxation response to being stroked, Lousada’s non-goal-oriented, nonpressured stroking boosts the positive female cycle of heightened relaxation to heightened arousal. Tantra, seen in this light, is really not something so mysterious at all, but rather a form of applied neuroscience, intentionally activating the brain’s connection to the sex organs.

The mysticism-inducing ANS in women—along with all of a woman’s sexual and other body systems working together in ways that go far beyond what we in the West identify as “sex” but that are nonetheless vital to women’s sexual and emotional happiness—I will call “the Goddess Network.” The things that men need to do to women to engage the Goddess Network—what sex educator Liz Topp called “the things women need that men don’t need,” and for which we, revealingly, don’t have a single name—I call “the Goddess Array.” I am especially likely to identify as part of the Goddess Array an act or gesture or caress that is confirmed by the intersection of both basic Tantric practice and recent or established scientific research, though there are no doubt countless additions and variations to this brief summary of the Goddess Array.

The data from both the Eastern and the Western traditions reveal that any man or woman can give the kind of attention the Goddess Array requires to all those areas in women that should, ideally, be reached and caressed. As Lousada put it, “patience and compassion” from men in particular, in attending to women’s sexual responses are much more important in bringing women to a high state of physical ecstasy and emotional release than is any more superficial measure of physical endowment.

Before we go through “the Goddess Array,” though, I just want to note a caveat: women are often encouraged to see public discussion of their sexuality as setting some new goal, or as being proscriptive or prescriptive. This is not my intention at all. I cannot stress enough: every woman is different. I wish to make clear that I offer these only as information—based on what works in Tantric practice, and specifically on what works in that practice that turns out to have a basis in recent science.

Some women may like all aspects of “the Goddess Array” all the time. Some will want a little of what follows, some may want a great deal; or what the same woman wants will vary at different times (including, neurobiologically, at different times of the month). Other women will never respond to this set of gestures and approaches. Still others may like these gestures and approaches often but, at other times, will prefer fast anonymous sex in dark alleyways. These gestures and approaches are points of exploration, and my discussion of them is to elucidate the mind-body connection in female sexual response.

FIRST, VALUE HER AND HELP HER

Dr. Helen Fisher pointed out, in
The Anatomy of Love,
that women’s evolutionary need to have a partner to help her during the vulnerable first two years of a child’s life predisposes women to value behavior from men that indicates that they are cherished and being committed to. I call this “investment behavior.” This is different, as Dr. Fisher herself points out, from the old canard of evolutionary biologists who insist that fertile young women will respond sexually to older men with money and power.
³