The Best You'll Ever Have (11 page)

As recently as a 1983, 80 percent of surveyed women said that they didn’t feel cheated if they didn’t have an orgasm during sex because it was more important that their partners were pleased. (I bet that if you polled the men being referred to here, they would say that it’s important that both they and their partners have an orgasm. If only the woman had one, I bet 100 percent of the men would feel cheated.)

This statistic is another indication that women aren’t comfortable talking about sex. Sure, we can talk about relationships until we’re blue in the face. But sex? We aren’t comfortable talking to our friends about it, and so we definitely aren’t comfortable talking to the men we’re involved with. The result of silence? Women decide to be selfless to avoid having to communicate. “I just want him to enjoy himself. I enjoy being with him. I don’t need to have an orgasm.” Noble? Admirable? I don’t think so. You’re not just cheating yourself, you’re lying to this guy you supposedly care about.

Let’s set the record straight here: your orgasm matters. It matters just as much or more than his because it’s yours. I’ve heard women say that it’s sometimes fun to have sex even if they didn’t have an orgasm during it. That’s nice. It happens, certainly. But it’s still a letdown, isn’t it? There is nothing selfless about not having an orgasm. You don’t get extra points for denying yourself, and chances are, your guy feels lousy for being the only one who got off. In the movie, Sally tells Harry some women must have faked with him at some point. He doesn’t believe it. Sally shows how well she can fake and wins the argument. But she’s losing out in life. Sexual frustration is not fun, no matter how well you fake it.

Performance Anxiety

Performance anxiety is something we think of as a male problem. After all, he has to get it up and then make sure it doesn’t go down before it should. Failure to stay hard is often joked about, a source of shame. Less so now, in the age of Viagra, but still, men have pressures we don’t.

Which isn’t to say we have none. Women have performance anxiety too. The pressure to have an orgasm inhibits the orgasm. He’s pumping away, saying, “Come on, go ahead, now, do it” and a whole slew of other things that mean, “You have my permission to hurry up” or “I’m waiting and ready.” Not to be a male apologist, but most men aren’t aware that this is pressuring you. If they remember saying anything, they think they were cheering you on. This is why communication is so important. If he knew his “cheering” was making you tense, he’d stop it.

Often this pressure is on top of the fact that women haven’t had enough solo flights to really know what works for them. If you don’t know what works, you can’t do it or tell him to do it, and all the while he’s making you feel like you’d better hurry up or you’ll miss the boat. It’s no wonder so many women practice their acting skills. In case I haven’t made my point by now, here it is one more time for posterity: faking is the worst kind of lying. It’s addictive. It becomes habit because you don’t know how to get yourself out of this predicament once you get yourself in. Once you’ve faked, you’ve programmed him to do whatever he was doing over and over again in the future. Like all bad habits, it’s best not to start. If you’ve already established the bad pattern, you can start over. It’s worth it.

Tell him you’re reading this great sex book.

To transition away from faking, or to instruct your guy on all you’ve learned during your solo flights (try at least ten before bringing up the following with your partner), introduce the subject of hot, new moves by blaming me. Say, “I’ve been reading a book by this sex expert, and I thought we’d try some new ideas.” He’ll be all over that. I guarantee it. Then take a step-by-step approach.

Tell him from the start that you want to do only new moves
tonight and not fall back on what you usually do.

If he forgets, and starts up with the old way, slowly disengage
and remind him that tonight is all about the new.

Be honest and say, “Well, that new move isn’t working for
me,” or, “Now that’s a discovery worth marking on a map.”

Sex is serious fun. Keep your mood light and your body will
feel it and be more relaxed.

Sex Is Like Shopping

You don’t look good in every piece of clothing you pick up, but does that make you give up and just go without? Lots of things you try won’t be to your liking, but that’s how you find out what you do like.

You try on a lot of clothes before you find the perfect outfit. Also, depending on the time of the month, something looks great on one day and looks terrible on another day. It’s the same with sex. Different days require different approaches. Experiment with moves, speeds, positions, and accessories.

Sometimes, shopping is goal oriented (“I need a new coat”), but you wind up buying something unexpected (“no good coats, but I got killer shoes”). Don’t go into a sexual encounter with a goal in mind. Just enjoy the expedition.

So What Is an Orgasm?

Let’s talk about what really happens physiologically from beginning to end with an orgasm. Since most of us have gotten a sparse education in our basic anatomy, it’s hard to know what our bodies are going through when we come. It’s not self-evident. Nothing about the body is. I’ve been eating all my life, and I’m still learning about how to do that better.

Unfortunately, science has a long way to go to pinning down the female orgasm. There hasn’t been a ton of research on it, and medical reasoning is slow to evolve from times past when women were the weaker sex and their frustrations were considered ailments Many researchers fear that their study in the area of female sexuality won’t garner them respect. There aren’t a lot of grants or funding available to them. They have to battle conventional wisdom, which is a tough sell. But then again, the subject of nutrition continues to baffle researchers. Ten years ago, we were told bacon was bad. Now bacon is good. Or is it?

Regarding sex research, we’ll start shortly after the start of modern thinking (Alfred Kinsey’s post World War II surveys of real sex behavior in America vs. cultural ideals kicked this era off). In 1966, Doctors William Masters and Virginia Johnson divided sexual response into four distinct phases, charting the first detailed study of the orgasm (male and female). Since then, we’ve learned that the four stages aren’t quite as distinct. Furthermore, the research only examines muscle contractions and the flow of blood (toward and away from the genitals). That said, the stages do hold up. They are excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution.

What the stages model doesn’t take into account is everything else that goes on during sex. The mental (self-esteem, body image, religious issues, shifts in consciousness) and emotional factors (love, connection, the whole range of feeling) that go beyond the purely physical. And on the physical front, an orgasm affects more of your body than your genital area. A whopper could potentially clear up your sinuses, make you less depressed, release muscle tension, and help you sleep. But we’ll get to that. First, the stage-by-stage breakdown:

I’M SO EXCITED AND I JUST CAN’T HIDE IT.
The excitement phase is a blur of fantasies, urges, and sensation.

It starts in your mind and then it takes hold in your body. Your breathing changes, the vagina starts lubricating itself, and at least twelve distinct hormones and natural chemicals are released into your blood and brain. Blood flow rushes to your vulva and causes erectile tissue to swell. The clitoris becomes erect. It literally pokes out from its foreskin hood; its roots stiffen and elongate. In baboons, the female genital area becomes so swollen and wet that part of her body becomes, literally, a puffy red flag, waving the male of the species to come on over and get some action. If human males could be like baboons and take a moment to look for physiological changes in their partners’ bodies, they’d see clearly why foreplay is crucial for a woman’s enjoyment of sex. As we all know, readiness is everything.

ON A SHELF OF EXCITEMENT.

The plateau phase is a deepening of excitement and sexual tension.

It could be called excitement part 2. Nipples stiffen and breasts swell (they can increase in size by up to 25 percent for women who haven’t had children; mothers show less of an increase, if at all). Blood continues to rush to the genitals. All that extra fluid causes the vaginal opening to tighten by about 30 percent; the labia puff up and spread out and go from pink to dark red. Masters and Johnson noticed that if the color change doesn’t happen, a woman won’t have an orgasm. The vagina elongates, and the deepest two-thirds of the vaginal alley balloons to nearly twice its normal width. Vaginal lubrication decreases at this point, and the clitoris, still erect, sneaks back under its hood and is often too sensitive to touch directly. Just touching the vulva near the clitoris at this point can be plenty. Also, 50–70 percent of women experience a “sex flush” on their chests and face as a result of blood moving to the surface of the skin (that’s why so many romance novels talk about skin feeling like it’s on fire, scorched, scalding, etc.). Heart rate increases and breathing quickens. This phase gets the body completely ready for intercourse and is necessary for any kind of orgasm.

OOOORGASM.

Whether or not an orgasm is a predictable crescendo once it
starts, it often comes out of nowhere.

Sometimes quickly, sometimes not as quickly as you’d like. All women describe their orgasms differently, and like snowflakes, no two are exactly the same. They may feel centrally located, or diffuse throughout the body. They can start in your head, and shoot down to your toes. No matter how or where you feel it, any orgasm is right on the money. There is no such thing as a bad one.

Orgasms require a bizarre blend of concentration and relaxation. Or maybe you could call that absolute focus—pinpoint mental acuity on physical sensation. Orgasms are outside the realm of control. Trying to look composed when you have one is a sure-fire way not to get there. Orgasms can embarrass us. They are almost too primitive, reminding us that we are animals.

The low down: physiologically speaking, an orgasm is a spasm of the vagina’s muscle floor, which runs through your clitoris as well as your anus (from pubic bone to tail bone). Waves of spasms flow through the entire uterus as well. I’ve heard pregnant women talk about ninth-month orgasms as being especially intense because their uteruses are so huge. A number of feel-good hormones flood the brain as well, notably oxytocin, which is known as the “love hormone,” and endorphins, the chemicals that are associated with “runner’s high.”

According to a study of women in the United Kingdom, the average orgasm lasts twenty seconds. Try counting to twenty. Takes a while, no? Other studies say six to ten seconds. Again, like clitoral size and vaginal shape, there is a range of length and intensity from woman to woman, orgasm to orgasm. I’ve had orgasms that were as brief as a sneeze, others that seemed to last all day, and into the evening (but were probably just fifteen seconds). The number of spasms for an average orgasm tends to be between three and seven rhythmic spasms, but I have a friend who says she’s counted well into the twenties (how she could count and still be having one is amazing to me). The spasms come at a rate of about one per second. Muscles throughout the body can spasm and tense to rigidity during orgasm; brain wave monitoring shows how an orgasm plays out in a woman’s head as well.

On average, women need eight minutes of
direct
clitoral stimulation to reach orgasm. That is only an average. Many women need much more time to come, depending on the state of arousal and lots of other factors. Some women don’t need direct contact; others don’t need any clitoral contact (there really are some women who orgasm just from nipple play). Women are also able to have brain-only orgasms, climaxing in their sleep, the female equivalent of a man’s wet dream. Alfred Kinsey found that 37 percent of the women he studied had experienced sex dreams with orgasm by the age of 45 and the frequency stayed constant from adolescence through 50 years old. The highest instance and frequency of male orgasms during sleep occurred during their teens (70 percent) and then dropped off significantly from their 30s onward.