The Best You'll Ever Have (22 page)

Chapter 8

“I’ve never told anyone this before, but . . .”

Sarah is a 32-year-old writer who’s had the same boyfriend for five years. She attended a Safina Salon in New York City. When I got to the G-spot part, she said, “So it can feel like you’re going to pee when someone finds it?” You should have seen her expression. It was like a lightbulb went off over her head. She said, “If only I knew then what I know now.”

I asked her to elaborate. She said, “I’ve never told anyone about this before. It was a year ago. My boyfriend and I were having a great night. We were having the best sex of our lives. I don’t know if it was the mood or the foreplay. But it all came together that night. I was lying on my stomach, and he was behind me. It was a strange angle. Different for us. After a while, I felt a big orgasm starting to build. The feeling was overwhelming, like I didn’t know what was happening to me. Just as I was about to come, I felt like I had to pee. I seized up and lost the feeling completely. It was there, I panicked about peeing, and then it was gone. I’ve been chasing that feeling every time we’ve had sex for another year, but the fear of peeing always keeps me from getting there.”

She never told anyone about this experience because she was embarrassed. She thought she was going to be incontinent in bed when what was really happening was the building up of a powerful G-spot orgasm. Now that she’s learned about the G-spot, its connection to the urethral sponge, and its “about to pee” sensation, Sarah couldn’t stop smiling. And she was one of the first women to leave the Salon that night. I’m quite certain where she was rushing off to.

“Sex is something you do, not something you talk about.”

Shortly after I got Safina off the ground, I met Jane, a successful businesswoman in her 60s, at a conference. At a lunch with several other women, Jane looked extremely disapproving when I explained the mission of Safina. The other women at the table asked me a litany of enthusiastic questions. Jane kept her eyes down and ate her salad quietly. Later, on the way out of the restaurant, I asked if she was offended by the discussion about sex. She said indignantly, “I wasn’t offended. I just don’t know what all the fuss is about. Sex is something you do, not something you talk about.” I knew then that she’d been raised in the old tradition of shame and silence about sex as most women of her generation were. The conference continued, but I couldn’t shake what I could have said to Jane to put her more at ease. The subject of sex is simply too huge to relegate to the category of “not something you talk about.”

I ran into Jane later that day in the hotel lobby. She must have been thinking about our lunch too. She said, “I wasn’t raised in this culture of openness. I grew up in a very strict Catholic family, and we didn’t talk about anything.”

“The last thing I meant to do was make you uncomfortable,” I said.

“You didn’t. I just didn’t know how to participate in the conversation.” She paused (I’ve come to notice that there is always a pause before a woman makes a big confession) and said, “I can’t believe I’m going to tell you this, but I have a problem right now, and I don’t know what to do or whom to talk to.”

Conversations like this make me love my job. I said, “You can talk to me.” I shut up and listened, having figured out that listening is often the best way to help.

“I have fallen in love with a man who is much older than me—and I’m not so young myself,” she said. “He’s the most interesting, fantastic person I’ve ever met, and he feels the same way about me.” She was suddenly glowing and her previously pursed lips were now framing a huge, enthusiastic grin.

Her smile was contagious, and I beamed back at her. “That’s wonderful! Congratulations!” I said.

“Well, there’s one problem.” She looked around to see if anyone was within earshot before leaning in and saying, “He doesn’t know how to satisfy me in bed. He’s old and quite delicate. Maybe you can suggest something for us to take the pressure off of him. I may seem uptight and conservative, but I do think about sex a lot, and I’m not willing to live the rest of my life without it. I love him but I can’t stay in this relationship unless I can still have sex.”

I didn’t know what to say for a minute. I wanted her late-in-life love to succeed, and I agreed with her that sex was an important factor in any relationship’s success. She added, “We’re going away this weekend, and if we can’t make sex work somehow, I’m going to have to break up with him. Do you have anything I can try?”

I said, “I’ve got a lot of things for you. Why don’t we look at them together? But I am concerned about his fragility. You need to speak to his doctor before you use anything on him.”

“I’ve been asking his doctor questions about this,” Jane said. “I’ll call him and check on anything before we go away. I really want to make this work. I want him to be able to make me happy in bed. He feels as bad about it as I do.”

We went to my room. I spread out my vibrator samples on the bed and showed her my catalog. We talked about different lubricants, the clitoris, the G-spot, and how to bring Sexories into a relationship without being intimidating. I put batteries in everything, and we talked about the different designs.

“I can’t believe I’m shopping for sex toys,” said Jane at one point. “I just can’t believe this.” She picked two vibrators and some lubricant. I delivered them to her personally the next day (I didn’t have a warehouse with shipping capacity back then).

On Monday, the first day back from their weekend, Jane called me. “You saved our relationship!” she said as soon as I picked up the phone. She went on to tell me that her beau was thrilled she brought something fun along on the trip. As we’d discussed that day, she’d presented the Sexories as exciting surprises, and that’s just how they were received. They laughed, played, had a great, repeatedly satisfying time with them. They were both thrilled, she said. “I was going to call you anyway to let you know what happened, but you know, he asked me if I’d call and thank you for him.”

Nothing could be more gratifying. Making sex information and products accessible does change people’s lives. If I had any doubts about Safina, they were squashed. I’d found my calling.

“I have a WHAT ???“

Kim read about Safina Salons in her local paper,
The Salt Lake City Tribune.
She looked me up on the Internet and said she wanted to join the Safina team. Kim is happily married and passionately agrees with Safina’s mission—to make sex a normal topic of conversation. Kim lives in a part of the country that is particularly silent about sex and yet values happy marriage as a central goal. As far as she can see, the lack of sex information and discussion is antithetical to having a happy marriage.

Kim’s Salon-goers are frequently religious Mormons. The majority of these women got married in their early 20s and have received little or no sex education. Kim, a mid-30s mother of two, grew up a Mormon as well, so she knew exactly what she would be dealing with.

Lisa, a 38-year-old mother of two, is a typical attendee at Kim’s Salons. She’d been married for sixteen years when she came to a Salon with her mother and sister-in-law. Kim was taking them through some of the information covered in this book, smiling and laughing as she told her own stories.

“The whole group was hanging onto my every word,” Kim told me at the time. “They didn’t eat, they didn’t drink. They were spellbound. I could see that things were flashing through their minds as I talked about the clitoris, where it is, how it’s structured like a penis but has more nerve endings. Lisa and the other women were concentrating hard on what I was saying. Clearly, they hadn’t heard anything about this before.

“I’m used to the intense silence, which is so different from the Safina Salons I have been to outside of this area,” continued Kim. “The Utah women need to be encouraged to ask questions. They don’t shout them out spontaneously. So when I finished talking about the clitoris, I asked them if they have any questions. Lisa, who’d been stunned motionless and silent for my whole talk, jumped out of her chair and started shouting, ‘How is it that no one ever told me that I had a clitoris? I’m 38 years old with two kids, and I have no idea what’s going on down there. Did anyone else here know this stuff? How could I be this old and not know anything?”

Those were bigger questions than, “How many nerve endings did you say?” Kim never got a chance to attempt to answer Lisa, since her outburst immediately set everyone else off. The women present started sharing their stories, telling each other about their confusion and what little they had figured out up until now.

“We were strangers when we met, but when we said goodbye at the end of the Salon, we hugged and some women teared up with emotion,” said Kim. “I hope that they are each having a great time getting to know the parts of themselves they literally didn’t know existed. I know they all have Safina Sexories now to explore with. And I hope that the next sixteen years of Lisa’s marital bliss includes lots of clitoral bliss too.”

“I didn’t know that wasn’t normal.”

Usually, Safina Salons are fun and cheerful. But every now and then, upon hearing friends talk about their husbands and boyfriends, a woman realizes that she hasn’t been treated well by her partner. Jeanine, 25, was such a woman.

We were on the subject of tush sex. Jeanine listened to her friends talking about their experiences, and she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “How can any of you say you like it?” she asked. “Anal sex hurts! It’s horrible. Every time my boyfriend does it, I’m in pain for a week.”

The room went silent for a second. Jeanine’s friend Carrie asked, “What does he do exactly?”

Jeanine recounted how her boyfriend gets excited and shoves his penis into her butt. No lubricant, no foreplay, and no discussion with her along the way. “He doesn’t go slow, wait for the tush to open up. None of the stuff you’re talking about here, and I don’t think there’s any way he ever would. I can’t believe that any man would. He likes it the way he does it.”

Jeanine’s friends sent e-mails after the Salon thanking me for opening up that discussion. In post-Salon conversations with Jeanine, they all came to realize that she was in an abusive relationship. Jeanine told them that she always thought everyone was dealing with those same issues in relationships that she was. It never crossed her mind to talk to her friends about her extremely rough and insensitive boyfriend because she just assumed that he was normal and she wasn’t. This group of women had been friends for more than ten years, but they never knew what Jeanine was going through. Women often decide that when they feel they aren’t being treated right that they somehow brought it on themselves or deserve it. Women provide each other with important support. Friends will take care of you, especially when a partner does not. Jeanine’s Salon lesson may have changed her attitude about sex. It may have changed the course of her life.