She Comes First (3 page)

As much as I will discuss general techniques for success, every woman is different, and cunnilingus is ultimately about individual acts of knowing and giving. That’s not to say you can’t have a lot of fun casually, but such exploits are ultimately the pursuit of technique without a greater sense of purpose—pyrotechnics rather than real fireworks. Giving great head requires trusting the rhythm of what happens and relaxing into a deeper, more instinctive zone of the self. It involves a mutual process of letting go and connecting to each other on every level. There’s no faking it. You need to be more than just a technician. You need to imbue technique with all of your senses and imagination. You need to be present, you need to be real; you need to be there in body, mind, and spirit.

As E. B. White wrote, “Style results more from what a person is than from what he knows. But there are a few hints that can be thrown out to advantage.”

With that in mind, let’s get going.

L
ADIES FIRST,
gentlemen. When it comes to satisfying a woman, a little old-fashioned chivalry goes a long way.

Lest you think the importance of such courtesy is overexaggerated, direct your attention to Lorena Bobbitt, who, when questioned by police as to why she cut off her husband’s penis, responded, “He always has an orgasm and doesn’t wait for me. It’s unfair.”

Need one say more?

Men are designed for efficiency. It doesn’t take much to get us aroused, it’s a rather uncomplicated process, and we tend to come only once before requiring a “refractory period” (also known as the part where we turn over and start snoring). And depending upon our age, this period could last anywhere from a couple of minutes to a couple of days.

The simple fact is that male orgasms come easy. Masters and
Johnson dubbed it “ejaculatory inevitability” and the late Dr. AlfredC. Kinsey, famous for interviewing thousands about their sex lives, declared that 75 percent of men ejaculate within two minutes.

But when it comes to the female orgasm, nothing’s inevitable. As Sally Tisdale wrote:

The female orgasm is a more complicated affair and often takes much longer to achieve during a session of sexual activity. In particular, her first orgasm is the most difficult to accomplish, requiring persistent stimulation, concentration, and relaxation. Is it any surprise, then, that researchers from the University of Chicago declared in the 1994
Sex in America Survey
that men reach orgasm during intercourse far more consistently than do women, and that three fourths of men, but less than a third of women, always have orgasms. Less than a third! That means more than two out of three women on average are consistently denied their climax—good reason to start hiding the cutlery.

Irony, bitter and cruel, seems to be embedded into our respective processes of arousal: that a woman, so unique in her sexuality, possessing both a clitoris—an organ designed solely for the production of pleasure—as well as the ability to experience multiple orgasms during a single session of sexual activity, should so often find this vast potential for blazing ecstasy smoldered—a magnificent conflagration left unlit—all for lack of a match that can hold its flame.

It’s not a problem with the match, say many men, but rather that a woman’s fuse is too long. Perhaps, but then this raises the question how long is too long? Studies, like those by Kinsey and Masters and Johnson, have concluded that among women whose partners spent twenty-one minutes or longer on foreplay, only 7.7 percent failed to reach orgasm consistently. That’s a shift of tectonic proportions—from two out of three women
not
being able to reach climax to nine out of ten achieving satisfaction—all because of a matter of minutes.

Few, if any, of the world’s problems can be solved with a mere twenty minutes of attention, and yet here, in the complex sociopolitical landscape of the bedroom, we have an opportunity to create bilateral satisfaction. When put that way, in the context of sexual peace and equality, is twenty minutes of focused attention,
applied appropriately,
really too much to ask, especially if it can save your sex life?

Take the path of the true gentleman: postpone your pleasure. As Sir Thomas Wyatt, father of the English sonnet wrote, “Patience shall be my song.”

Ushering a woman into orgasm is both exhilarating and liberating. When she comes first, anxiety and pressure are dispensed with; you are emboldened, empowered to pursue with gusto the gratification that awaits you—a climax that will be heightened all the more for having been postponed.

I
LLUSION:
The clitoris is “a tiny love button,” “a little pink pearl,” “small as a pea,” “a bud,” “a nub,” “a nib,” “a knob,” “a teeny-weeny cock.”

ALLUSION
: There’s more to the clitoris than meets the eye. Much more. Don’t mistake the hooded crown (the “glans” or “head”) for the entire clitoris. As we will discuss, the head is just the tip of the iceberg, a tantalizing allusion to unseen wells of pleasure.
^*

Like a Greek column, the clitoris has three components—a head,
a shaft, and a base—that extend throughout the pelvic area, with visible structures encompassing the entire area of the vulva, from the top of the pubic bone down to the anus, as well as unseen parts inside the vaginal area. In their landmark work,
A New View of a Woman’s Body: A Fully Illustrated Guide,
the Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers identified eighteen structures in the clitoral network, some visible, some hidden.

With more than eight thousand nerve fibers, the clitoris has more of these than any other part of the human body and interacts with the fifteen thousand nerve fibers that service the entire pelvic area. This vast erogenous landscape literally throbs with potential pleasure. As science writer Natalie Angier writes of the clitoral network, “Nerves are like wolves or birds: if one starts crying, there goes the neighborhood.” So stop thinking of the clitoris as a little bump, and start thinking of it as a complex network, a pleasure dome, the Xanadu at the heart of female sexuality.

Because it’s all that and more.
When engorged with blood during sexual arousal, the clitoris increases in size, just like a penis. In fact, the clitoris was created from the same embryonic tissue as the penis, and can be compared point by point with the male genitalia. And unlike the penis—burdened with the responsibilities of reproduction and the removal of waste—the clitoris is devoted solely to pleasure and confers upon the female “an infinitely greater capacity for sexual response than a man ever dreamed of.” (Masters and Johnson) According to Greek mythology, when Zeus and Hera went to the hermaphrodite Tiresias in order to determine who experiences more pleasure from sex, men or women, Tiresias responded, “If the sum of love’s pleasure adds up to ten—nine parts go to women, only one to men.”

Like Christopher Columbus sallying forth into the unknown, your exploration of the clitoral network will lead to the discovery of a whole new world. But knowing a little geography goes a long way. The earth isn’t flat; nor is the clitoris a love button. Know your maps, and know that every voyage is unique.

W
HEN DESCRIBING SEX
in the proverbial locker room, men tend to employ the language of penetration—adjectives like “hard” and “deep.” We go in, we extricate: “I fucked the——out of her”—as though pleasure was something buried deep inside her womb, a nugget to be rammed, jostled, and liberated with the powerful male tool.

Rare is the man who says, “I made love to her as subtly and lightly as a feather”; “I grazed her vulva as with the delicate wings of a butterfly”; “I barely touched her she came so hard!” And yet such language would be more appropriate, as the inner two thirds of the vagina are substantially less sensitive than the outer third. In a series of experiments, Dr. Kinsey asked five gynecologists to examine the genitals of almost nine hundred women in order to find out which areas were the most sensitive. “The deep interior walls of the vagina really have few nerve endings and are quite insensitive when stroked
or lightly pressed.” But when gently touched on their clitorises, 98 percent of women were aware of it.

The superiority of the clitoris to the vagina in stimulating the process of female sexual response is enough to throw many a guy into a tailspin and make him question the very meaning of life, or at least the meaning of his penis. But as difficult as it may be, it’s important to separate the concept of procreation from pleasure: the penis, by dint of its convenient fit into the vagina, may play an instrumental role in the former, but that doesn’t mean it’s ideally suited to the latter.

This sort of talk is none too popular, mainly because it challenges the very foundation upon which our society’s conception of sex has been forged, and throws into doubt the value of intercourse as the principal paradigm for constructing a model of mutual pleasure. From losing one’s virginity to the consummation of a relationship to the cherished simultaneous orgasm, our culture has enshrined the role of genital penetration as the be-all, end-all of heterosexual relationships. Where would the “third date” be without it?

The idea that genital penetration might be seriously overhyped is a bitter pill to swallow, especially for those men of the world who base much of their sexual self-esteem on the value of their penis in stimulating female pleasure. As we will soon see, there is a long history of “clitoral denial” in our culture that stems back to Freud—a way of thinking so deeply embedded into our collective consciousness that even a woman is more likely to question, or repress, the natural instincts, responses, and sensations of her own body—or just fake her way through it—than to challenge the conventional wisdom or risk bruising the male ego. Is it any wonder, then, that according to author Lou Paget the number one question sent in by female readers to the editors of
Cosmopolitan
magazine is: What can I do to have an orgasm during intercourse? Here’s a simple answer: Don’t have intercourse. Or at least make it part of a larger event and not the event itself.

The pill doesn’t have to be bitter, and once swallowed, it can be
incredibly liberating. When we know how to recognize and navigate the process of female sexual response, when we understand the role of the clitoris in stimulating that process, then sex becomes easier, simpler, and more rewarding, and we’re impelled to create pleasure not just with our penises, but with our hands and mouths, bodies and minds. In letting go of intercourse, we open ourselves up to new creative ways of experiencing pleasure, ways that may not strike us as inherently masculine, but ultimately allow us to be more of a man. Sex is no longer penis-dependent, and we can let go of the usual anxieties about size, stamina, and performance. We are free to love with more of ourselves, with our entire self.