I Love Female Orgasm: An Extraordinary Orgasm Guide (3 page)

One section worried me, though: the part about masturbation. On this subject, Abby said, “This will be the shortest chapter in the booklet. Why? It is normal. Every healthy, normal person masturbates.”

My adult self applauds Dear Abby for sending such an unambiguously positive message about masturbation. But sitting on my bed in my pink-flowered bedroom, the teenage me read and reread that sentence, “Every healthy, normal person masturbates.” I knew that Abby’s advice track record was stellar. If she said that every healthy,
normal
person masturbates, and I never did, I could come to only one conclusion: There must be something very, very wrong with me.

Even with this new concern, I didn’t try masturbating; my sexual urges and impulses didn’t truly blossom for a few more years. Since my late-blooming self wasn’t touching herself, and my high school romantic life was close to nonexistent, I certainly wasn’t having orgasms.

A few years later, I went away to college. At Brown University, where Marshall and I met, there was a dean who gave an annual presentation on masturbation; it was something of a tradition. My sophomore year, I saw a poster on a bulletin
board about the upcoming program and thought to myself, “I think I need to go to that.” The dean’s talk fascinated me, and at the end, I left with the resource sheet she had distributed.

Afterward, I walked right to the campus bookstore and plunked down $5.99 to buy the only one of the books on the dean’s resource list that was on the shelf that day. Over the next few months I began to do the exercises in the book, and later that semester, I had my first orgasm. It was the best $5.99 I’ve ever spent!

As you might imagine, I was thrilled. Ecstatic! And amazed that I was twenty years old before I discovered that my body could do this incredible thing. I couldn’t believe it had been so easy to learn. Intrigued, I set out to learn everything I could about female orgasm, whiling away hours in the university library reading every journal article on the subject that I could locate. I started writing about what I was learning—first papers for classes, then articles for a wider audience. I pursued training as a sex educator while I was a student, and when I started dating Marshall, who was also studying sexuality academically, it seemed only natural that we’d continue the learning process together. Soon we began teaching sexuality workshops.

I’ve since learned that my experience wasn’t particularly unusual. (I’ve even written to Dear Abby to suggest a revision of her booklet, but the most recent edition still contains the paragraph that so worried me as a teenager.) Although most boys figure out how to bring themselves to orgasm by age thirteen, half of girls don’t have their first orgasms until their late teens, twenties, or beyond. Teenage girls widely agree that they get the message loud and clear that masturbation is something boys do, but girls don’t, can’t, or shouldn’t. The cultural focus on intercourse tells young women to expect they’ll begin to experience sexual pleasure once they have sex with a man (whether or not they’re even interested in sex with men). Nearly all teen boys, on the other hand, experience sexual pleasure long before they get their hands—or other body parts—into a partner’s pants.

Despite the massive advances in women’s equality, young women’s sexuality is stuck in a surprising paradox. Young women are sold provocative clothes but aren’t taught where to find their own clitoris. Many girls give their boyfriends oral sex, but are too uncomfortable with their own bodies to allow the guys to return the favor. It’s still a radical act to say that women need and deserve access to information about their
own sexual pleasure
—not just about the risks and negative consequences of sex.

marshall’s story

WE LEARNED ABOUT female sexuality in my junior high and high school sex education classes. What did we learn about? Fallopian tubes! I suspect that like me, nearly every American can visualize the diagram of fallopian tubes, two symmetrical little egg tubes curving downward. But you know, if we never learned about fallopian tubes—if we never knew they existed—we’d be fine. Nothing bad would happen.

Yet the clitoris, an organ far more important to most people’s future lives, was always mysteriously missing from those sex ed diagrams. I can only imagine how life might be different if the image burned into our brains forevermore were not the fallopian tubes, but the location of the clitoris. Now
that
would be useful! The problems with the way sex ed is taught in most high schools really hit home for me when I saw my friends taking driver’s ed. Driver’s ed is an eminently practical class, complete with those cars with DANGER: STUDENT DRIVER signs on the roof. In driver’s ed, they teach you how to drive.

Sometimes I’d think about what it would be like if driver’s ed were taught the way sex ed is. You would show up in the classroom (there would definitely
not
be a student driver car), and the teacher would say, “Welcome to driver’s ed. You need to know that driving is very,
very
dangerous. You could die! So don’t drive. Just don’t do it—until you’re married. If you absolutely
insist
on driving, wear a seat-belt.” After this, class would be dismissed and your driver’s education would be considered complete. But you’d never actually learn how to drive a car: where to find the gas pedal, how to turn on the headlights, or even how to back it out of a driveway.

Even as a teenager, it was glaringly obvious to me that I wasn’t the only one hungry for accurate information about sex. As a writer for my college newspaper, I volunteered to cover any event on campus relating to sexuality: workshops on body image; rallies against sexual assault; panels on gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender (GLBT) issues. Halfway through college, the university announced a new interdisciplinary major, Sexuality and Society, and I signed right up. Soon I was hired to write an online sex column for a website run by Barnes & Noble. The more I studied and wrote about sex, the more people shared stories of their own
experiences with me and asked me questions. I was blown away by the incredible diversity of people’s sexual thoughts, feelings, and experiences.

When Dorian and I started dating, learning became a joint project since she, too, had training as a sex educator. We’d attend sexuality conferences together and buy each other books to discuss. Little by little, we started writing articles together, facilitating support groups, and giving workshops at conferences and adult education centers about relationships, sex, and GLBT issues. For six years after college I managed HIV prevention programs at a busy community health center in Boston, where I founded a safer sex educator team, training volunteers to talk to people in the city’s bars and clubs about reducing their sexual risks.

Before long, Dorian and I started fielding requests from college students who’d heard us at conferences and wanted to bring us to speak at their universities, both together and separately. Dorian offered an educational program on female orgasm for the first time at Vassar College in 1999. It was an instant success: a big crowd of students laughing and sharing their questions and stories, with rave reviews afterward. Wanting the program to be a safe and comfortable space for women to talk about sex, Dorian and the student organizers at Vassar advertised the event as women only. Guys were not allowed in the door. I was not invited.

That’s not to say male students didn’t show up. Several asked respectfully, “Would it be okay if I just sat in the back and listened?” One, Dorian reported, knocked on the door partway through the program to request special permission to come in. “You don’t understand,” he said to Dorian quietly. “I
really
need this information.” The men were politely turned away. After the program, the Vassar women hung out to chat with Dorian. One group said it had been so great that they wished their boyfriends had been in the room. “They really need this information,” one woman mused thoughtfully, not knowing that earlier, a male student had said exactly the same words.

Dorian presented the program alone a few more times with similar experiences. She’d come home afterward and fill me on what had happened, including what the female attendees and male would-be attendees had said about wanting guys to be included. Dorian was concerned about losing the warm, all-female vibe, but increasingly it didn’t feel right to us to exclude the guys. We decided that as an experiment, next time we’d try teaching men and women about female orgasm together. We taught all our other sex education programs together, so why should
this be any different? The co-ed program was a success from the very first: The guys were eager to learn and honored to be there, and many women were happy to see that men cared. At a typical female orgasm speaking engagement these days, whether at a conference, an adult education seminar, or a college, our audiences are at least one-third male.

My role as copilot of our female orgasm programs has evolved over the past eight years. At first, I approached the subject as if men’s sexuality were simple and women’s complex. My role was to help men understand the mysteries of female sexuality. Over time, as I had conversations with and answered the questions of thousands of guys who attended our programs, I developed a renewed respect for the fact that men face equally complex sexuality issues. Like women, surprising numbers of men talked about their challenges having an orgasm or coming too soon, their concerns about body image, their worries that they weren’t doing a good enough job in bed. Although orgasms may come more easily to most men than to most women, guys have their challenges, too. In the chapters ahead, Dorian and I share what we’ve learned about what men need and want to understand about women’s orgasms—and how male sexuality can fit into the picture.

this book is for you (yes, you)

WE’VE WRITTEN THIS book for female orgasm connoisseurs, beginners, and everyone in between. It’s for people of diverse genders and sexual orientations—anyone with an interest in women’s sexuality. We’ll give tips on oral sex, anal sex, and intercourse, and you’ll also get to hear from the nearly 2,000 people who answered our survey (more on that below). We’ve tried to cover everything women might want to know about their own orgasms, from G-spots to vibrators to learning how to have an orgasm. We’ve devoted a chapter to the experiences of lesbian and bisexual women, and another to the issues guys face. We give the skinny on everything from faking it to what women really think about penis size to advanced troubleshooting for when your body isn’t responding the way you want it to.

These pages are relevant for readers choosing abstinence and those who haven’t yet had partnered sex. Plenty of virgins and people who are abstinent still have
orgasms, or want to. Learning about sex doesn’t mean you’ll rush right out to practice. But being well-informed means you’re more likely to make safe, healthy choices, and be comfortable enough to communicate what you want and don’t want, whenever the time is right for you.

Some people who hear us mention female orgasm ask, “How do you define female?” As allies to the transgender, genderqueer, and intersex communities, we understand that gender is more complex than a simple male-female dichotomy. We also know that most people are raised within this system, and that a combination of biology and socialization powerfully affects how people experience their own sexuality. Because the English language doesn’t yet have widely understood words to make it easy to discuss gender diversity, this book uses words like “women” and “she.” If your body or your life doesn’t fit neatly into the language we use, we ask you to bear with us and make the substitutions needed so our words make sense for you.

These days, we speak about female orgasm primarily to audiences of college students, but also to twentysomethings, thirtysomethings, and above (we’ve even had a few audience members in their eighties). We’ve written this book with the same diverse audience of adults in mind. The book occasionally uses the words “girls” and “boys,” since that’s the language many college students and young adults use to describe themselves.

We’ve written a book about female sexual pleasure, not an encyclopedia of sexuality. As a result, there are plenty of sex topics we don’t address: no techniques for how to give great blowjobs, no detailed discussion of male masturbation or prostate massage. When we use the word “men” in this book, we’re generally referring to heterosexual and bisexual men interested in pleasing a current or future female partner. (We don’t expect too many gay male readers, though we’ve certainly had more than a few in our audiences who wanted to learn about the subject without getting “up close and personal.”) A few topics that are important to female orgasm for a small percentage of people, like tantric sex and sadomasochism, we touch on only briefly. We’ve chosen not to tackle academic topics like the possible evolutionary basis for female orgasm. Luckily for those of you interested in exploring these paths, there are dozens of excellent, comprehensive books on all these subjects.

where we get our information

THE FOLLOWING PAGES contain the wisdom distilled from eight years of teaching about this subject, plus many more years of learning from the sexuality trainings, workshops, conferences, and academic classes we’ve both attended. Our bookshelves and file cabinets are crammed with books and academic journal articles on the subject.

We didn’t stop there, because we believe individual experiences are as relevant as what the “experts” say. Many times we’ve stood at the front of some room and taught some fact out of a book, “What happens is
X,
followed by Y,” only to have one audience member say, “For me, it’s always Y before
X,”
while another volunteers, “Really? I love
X
, but it usually just ends there for me,” and a third adds, “My experience is that
Y
only comes after
ABC.”
We’ve learned an enormous amount from our audiences, and from the many informal, sometimes very personal, conversations we’ve had with others about this topic. It’s humbling to be reminded of the sheer diversity of sexual experiences, and in turn to describe the range of possibilities to others.