The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex (4 page)

Imagine a friendly conversation between two lesbians helping a nervous husband decide which dildo to buy his wife. Or our sympathy when a self-described “sex-starving female from a forgotten land” wrote us from Iran asking if we could smuggle some lesbian magazines to her. “Here there is no explicity, and everything about sex is forbidden, especially for female creatures,” she confided. We consider ourselves honored to have access to the confidences and concerns of all the curious, courageous folks who come into our store or write to our mail-order department. Several years ago, a rural customer wrote to thank us for rushing her order and to say that she was going to dedicate her next vibrator orgasm to the staff of Good Vibrations. How could we help but feel a vicarious glow of sexual pleasure? We feel extremely privileged to have contributed in our own humble way to so many people’s pursuit of happiness.

How to Use This Book

In our fantasies, we dream of this book with its cracked spine and well-thumbed pages lying on your nightstand next to your vibrator, lube, massage oil, and condoms. In reality, we hope you’ll use this book to explore your own sexuality in whatever way you see fit. Whether you’re interested in one particular practice or searching for fresh ideas, we encourage you to read the entire book—you never know what might spark your imagination!

The other advantage to reading this book in its entirety is that you can increase your comfort level, not only with your own sexuality, but with that of others as well. Our book is about exposing yourself to and exploring a range of sexual activities. We certainly don’t expect you to like them all; we don’t even expect you to try them all. But if your sex life or your feelings about your sexuality improve even the slightest bit thanks to something you read here, we’ll have been successful.

The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex
is not a program or an exercise book. For example, we won’t promise you twenty-four hours of ecstasy in exchange for using six toys four times a day. This sort of goal-oriented approach only serves to make people more self-conscious about performance at the expense of enjoying themselves in the moment. We merely offer you a menu; it’s up to you to sample whatever you please.

We’ve chosen not to write about subjects we felt were out of our league. While we expect that individuals with sexual dysfunctions will benefit from much of the information in this book, we’re not qualified to explore medical or psychotherapeutic issues in depth, and we direct you to the resource listings for referrals. Whether you’re looking for the sex toy outlet nearest you, a good sex-information line, or a sex therapist, our resource listings should be helpful. We’ve also compiled a bibliography and videography with recommendations of self-help, informational, and fantasy material.

Most of the activities and toys we describe can be enjoyed at any age and whether you’re partnered or not. We hope that teenagers will be able to get their hands on this book, since we feel that information and encouragement are critical to becoming a sexually healthy, responsible adult. Similarly, while society tends to label older adults as sexless, we’ve tried to make this book equally relevant to both the old and the young. If you’re experiencing some physical constraints, sex toys and fantasies are among the many options at your disposal—all it takes is the time and desire.

More than anything, this book celebrates each person’s unique sexual nature. A healthy sex life is your birthright, and no one should be deprived of either the information or the tools to pursue it. By reading this book, you’re acknowledging and taking responsibility for your sexual self—welcome to the celebration! It is not only possible, it’s exciting to have great sex safely. We’ll offer our suggestions throughout the book—but it’s up to you to put them into practice.

PROFILES
in
PLEASURE:

Joani Blank

“There’s a great
deal more sexual
pleasure available
than most of us now
experience, and
getting it need not be
difficult, expensive,
or dangerous.”

Y
ou wouldn’t be holding this book in your hands if it weren’t for the pioneering work of Good Vibrations’ founder, Joani Blank. As a publisher, entrepreneur, and consultant, Joani epitomizes the Good Vibrations motto, “If you want something done right, do it yourself.” Whether publishing the first (and still the only)
Complete Guide to Vibrators
, launching the nation’s most successful women-run sex business, or supporting other sex-positive entrepreneurs, Joani puts her time, money, and considerable energy where her mouth is.

Joani worked as a public health educator when she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the early seventies—the heyday of women’s self-help clinics and consciousness-raising groups. She was trained by Lonnie Barbach to lead preorgasmic women’s groups, participated in the very first training group for SFSI (San Francisco Sex Information), the peer education hot line, and self-published her
Playbook for Women About Sex
and
Playbook for Men About Sex
. These experiences inspired Joani’s philosophy that “There’s a great deal more sexual pleasure available than most of us now experience, and getting it need not be difficult, expensive, or dangerous.” After hearing from numerous women who yearned for “a clean, well-lighted place” to shop for vibrators and books, Joani opened Good Vibrations in March of 1977; the first store was only two hundred square feet of retail space dominated by her collection of antique vibrators.

Joani always followed open business practices, putting principles before profits. She kept prices low, maintained open financial records, allowed customers to test-drive vibrators (through their clothing), and prioritized accurate information-sharing about sex. She encouraged a democratic business structure and initiated the sale of the company to her employees, who formed a worker-owned cooperative in 1992. It has always been her dream to see Good Vibration’s mission spread throughout the country, and she’s been unfailingly generous toward fellow entrepreneurs, offering advice, consultation, or business loans to numerous sex-positive companies over the past two decades.

As a sexuality publisher and entrepreneur, Joani has had plenty of first-hand experience with censorship and discrimination. She has had to battle printers to publish ground-breaking Down There Press books such as
Anal Pleasure and Health
and
Femalia,
negotiate with banks to obtain basic credit card services, and confront magazine publishers who refused to allow the words “vibrator” or “sex” to appear in ad copy. Despite these ongoing challenges, she remains positive about our overall progress toward “making sex a regular part of life.” She hopes that sexuality will come even further out of the closet over the next quarter century, noting: “We still have almost no good data about what people do in bed or how they feel about it.” Joani continues her grassroots work to obtain this kind of data, publishing what she calls “field notes”: collections of first-person narratives about subjects such as masturbation (
First Person Sexual
) or sex and aging (
Still Doing It
). Her video production projects include
Faces of Ecstasy,
close-up images of individual faces during orgasm.

When asked about her own contribution to America’s sexual evolution, Joani says, “It comes easily and naturally to me to be open around sexuality, and people who hear me talk or who read my books realize that they can probably do it too without all that much difficulty. I’m still saying the same things I said twenty-five years ago. And I still would love to see a store like Good Vibrations in every major metropolitan area in this country. Hey, why not all over the world!”

To read more about Joani Blank’s latest projects, visit her website at
www.joaniblank.com
.

CHAPTER 2

Sexual Self-Image

A healthy sense of self-esteem can improve your sex life, just as a healthy sex life can improve your self-esteem. Allow us to illustrate this maxim with a few examples. If you feel good enough about your body and your sexual desires to masturbate, the act of masturbating will make you feel even better about your body and your desires. Or try this one on for size: Asserting your chosen approach to safer sex will contribute to an erotic, safe sexual encounter with a new partner, resulting in increased self-confidence.

Clearly, self-esteem is an integral part of your sexuality. Self-acceptance is a prerequisite for any intimate relationship—especially the one with yourself. Whether you’re gathering the nerve to try a new sex toy or preparing to negotiate a sexual scene with a partner, the more confidence you bring to a sexual encounter the more likely you are to meet with success. At Good Vibrations, we’ve been able to witness first-hand how access to basic sex information and tools can benefit self-esteem:

I was nonorgasmic for years, but with a little advice/assistance from your store and a vibrator, I am now orgasmic. I can’t tell you how happy this has made me. Tapping into this sexual energy has vitalized me and improved my life in every way!

This book describes a myriad of sexual activities you can try alone or with others. We recognize, however, that nothing is ever as easy as it sounds on paper. Experimentation requires that you assert yourself and take a few risks. Above all, it requires that you feel entitled to sexual pleasure.

In this chapter, we invite you to explore some common challenges to claiming pleasure. The more familiar you are with your own sexual profile (including past and current attitudes, roadblocks, battles won and those being waged), the more confident you’ll be in your approach to sex. Everyone suffers from poor sexual self-esteem occasionally—there are times when we simply don’t feel attractive, loved, or satisfied with ourselves. It’s normal! But being in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction might indicate some more-ingrained problems. We hope what you read here will help you identify any problem areas, uncover many reasons to love yourself, and ultimately emerge with a happier, healthier self-image.

Body Image

Physical Appearance

You’re probably familiar with the statistics revealing that only a very small number of people in the United States are satisfied with their bodies. While most of us continue to have sex despite wishing we had better hair or thinner thighs, the extent to which these anxieties about appearance erode our sexual self-esteem is painfully disproportionate and can be enough to sabotage a sexual encounter:

My biggest fear is that I will take my clothes off and he will not be aroused anymore. Now this has never happened, but it doesn’t mean that the first time I am with someone I am not still thinking about it. Fear gets in the way of my being relaxed, and so it takes me longer to actually achieve an orgasm. Then I am worried about how my partner might feel if I don’t have one.

Almost everyone has experienced, in some form, the effects that a negative body image can have on one’s sex life, whether you’re feeling unattractive and plan to put more energy into your sex life after you’ve lost ten pounds or you’re having trouble enjoying sex because you’re embarrassed by a specific physical attribute.

Even though we may know better, it’s not easy to steel ourselves against the (often sexualized) media images of perfect body-types that bombard us daily. Whether you’re a woman trying not to envy the curves on the latest
Cosmopolitan
models or a man who notices he doesn’t fill out his briefs like the athletes do in the underwear ads, the images can be depressing at best and damaging at worst (as when taken to extremes in the case of eating disorders).

You can’t very well close your eyes to the media, but you
can
keep a few things in perspective. Remember, these images reflect a small segment of the population, the young and thin; there are folks of all ages, sizes, physical abilities, ethnicities, and proclivities enjoying sex. Real diversity is visible right outside your door—take a walk or ride the bus; what you see is far more representative of America’s sexual jigsaw puzzle than what’s plastered up on a billboard. All kinds of bodies enjoy all kinds of sex with all kinds of other bodies. Maybe you prefer burying your nose in soft flesh to bouncing off hard muscle. Maybe that bald head heats you up at night whereas those golden locks leave you cold. Maybe you’re the only one who even cares about the size of your feet. The point is, trying to live up to a glorified ideal in hopes that it will bring you better sex is a waste of time and energy because sexual chemistry is not that formulaic. What’s more, society’s definition of beauty changes with the wind—by the time you’ve lost twenty pounds, thin might be out and Rubenesque in. We encourage you to scoff at the societal ideal and celebrate your body’s uniqueness.

I’ve been a chunky female my entire life, and while society may not celebrate it, finding hot men who worship chubby women was amazing for my ego.

When I realized that I was attracted to other women, I became less concerned about my own imperfections. I realized that the girls I found most attractive were not super-skinny, huge-boob types, but a variety of body types: real-looking girls with small boobs and large stomachs and stretch marks and the whole shebang—sexy girls!

While we wish we could tell you to “accept your body unconditionally,” and you’d do it, we know that’s not very realistic. Some of us have been harboring visions of self-transformation for our entire lives and can’t just wish them away. But questioning whether your vision is necessary, productive, and realistic might alleviate the pressure. Here are a few suggestions for improving your self-esteem: