Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm

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The truth is: Most women do not have satisfying sex lives. SLOW SEX can change that.

For more than a decade, Nicole Daedone has been leading the “slow sex movement,” which is devoted to the art and craft of the female orgasm. OM is the act of slowing down, tuning in, and experiencing a deeper spiritual and physical connection during sex. SLOW SEX reveals the philosophy and techniques of Orgasmic Meditation and includes a step-by-step, ten-day OM starter program, as well as OM secrets for achieving ultimate satisfaction. It also includes exercises to help enhance readers’ “regular” sex lives, such as Slow Oral for Her, Slow Oral for Him, and Slow Intercourse.

This book is the argument for daily intimacy, and for paying attention as the foundation of pleasure, all with a focus on the female experience.

“Daedone makes her arguments persuasively, with clear instructions and a knack for the just-right analogy or phrase. This is not another tantra book… OM practice should give many people a fresh and satisfying conduit to deeper sexual intimacy. Recommended.”

—
Library Journal

“SLOW SEX is the real deal on pleasuring a woman. For any guy who wants his fifteen minutes of sexual fame, Daedone offers practical and inspired guide to the orgasmic big leagues.”

—Ian Kerner, sexuality counselor and
New York Times
bestselling author of
She Comes First

This book is dedicated to the orgasm.

May each of us find ours now.

Introduction

W
hen I first tell people I make my living teaching the art of Slow Sex, I get to watch as an entire weather system crosses their faces in a matter of about five seconds. First I see surprise, then curiosity, then embarrassment about their curiosity, then fear that I can see their embarrassment, then—finally—the courage to proceed.

“What… exactly… do you mean by Slow Sex?” they venture, so carefully you’d think they were carrying a piece of fine china across a tightrope.

Ah, sex. As soon as you say the word, we all get a little wobbly. We’re just so used to keeping it in private that when I come along and start talking about it publicly, everyone is caught a little off guard.

“I teach a practice called Orgasmic Meditation,” I say as calmly as possible. “It’s a way that any man can bring out the orgasm in any woman, in just fifteen minutes.”

You can imagine the response: surprise, then curiosity, then embarrassment… you know the drill. It’s not like I’m lying—even though it’s called Slow Sex, Orgasmic Meditation or OM does show men how to make any woman orgasmic in just fifteen minutes—but it’s not as big a deal as it sounds. Yes, it can be life changing. Yes, it turns everything we’ve ever learned about sex on its head. But what I
teach people when I teach them OM is really no different from what my Uncle Bob taught me one summer afternoon when I was twelve years old. That was the day he taught me how to really, truly taste a tomato.

Uncle Bob and the Tomato

I grew up in suburban Los Gatos, California, hardly a hub of modern agriculture. But it was the 1970s, and because all of the old structures seemed to be crumbling—and probably in part because everyone wanted to start growing their own marijuana—lots of suburbanites convinced themselves they were farmers. Mrs. Calder put a “Love Your Mother” bumper sticker on her Lincoln Town Car. My friend Shea’s family made plans to buy a dome house in Grass Valley. And in the backyards of our cul-de-sac, Mrs. Farrier grew corn, Mr. Slocum grew strawberries, and my uncle Bob—who always set an example because he worked for
Rolling Stone
magazine and had the longest beard—grew potatoes, beans, snap peas, and sweet, glorious tomatoes.

I remember the first basket of heirloom tomatoes that my overall-wearing uncle presented to my mother in our gold-and-avocado-colored kitchen.

“Jesus, Bob, they look deformed. Are we really supposed to eat them?”

Bob, not to be insulted, picked up one of the deformed tomatoes and took a bite out of it, as if it were an apple. This I had never seen in my decade-plus on this planet. Tomatoes were to be sliced and carefully arranged on a plate, not bitten into haphazardly in the middle of the kitchen so that the juices dripped down your chin and into your very long beard.

Bob smiled broadly and offered the tomato to my mother.

My mother, not yet having succumbed to the seventies back-to-the-earth ethos, still using hair spray with fluorocarbons, wasn’t sure what to make of it. She leaned hesitantly over the sink to protect her minidress, and took a delicate bite. When she looked up at my uncle, the expression on her face was pure bliss. In slow motion, she turned and handed me the tomato. I looked up at the two of them, a bit nervous. I felt the way I would later feel when someone handed me my first joint. What would happen to me if I ate this tomato?

But I bit in and I understood. Rich, earthy, dense. The taste of minerals. Where previous tomatoes had been porous, spongy, common—this tomato was pure saturation. It was as if the tomato itself had a built-in speed limit; it was not possible to eat it quickly and forget about it. There was a there there. This tomato took command. There was no mistaking it: this was a tomato!

My uncle asked me what I tasted.

I couldn’t speak. I didn’t want to break the spell.

“What do you taste?” he prodded, as if he were a blind man asking me what I saw. I wanted to sound very smart, to impress him. A difficult task when what you’re describing is a tomato.

“It tastes… warm? And a little sour.”

“Yes! Yes!” He gestured for more.

“It’s kind of like when you lick a penny. It tastes like metal and you feel a sort of jolt.”

“Yes!”

“But at the end, it makes your mouth water. It’s sweet, but not candy sweet. Sweet the way skin smells. Soft.”

My uncle was pleased. He put his hands on my shoulders and looked in my eyes as if this were it—as if at that very moment I was heading out on the vision quest of life, and he was offering me just one last piece of advice.

“Nic,” he said, “the most important thing you will ever do in this life is to really taste a tomato.”

I often think back about that day in the kitchen when I’m getting ready to teach Slow Sex to a new group of students. Students who are coming to my class because their sex lives seem mealy, unflavorful, and common. They have never tasted anything like an heirloom; they aren’t even sure sex that is saturating, nourishing, and delicious beyond expectation actually exists. They think of sex the way I thought about tomatoes. I had been living a vacuum-sealed suburban life where everyone bought their tomatoes from the Shop ’n Save and nobody talked about the fact that they weren’t delicious. Nobody really talked about the tomatoes at all. What was there to talk about? Tomatoes were tomatoes.

Then came Uncle Bob, and the revelation that there were tomatoes on this planet that were worth your time. Tomatoes that begged to be really
tasted—
that asked you to plug into them with all of your attention and all of your senses. Tomatoes that offered the richness of the earth and sky in return. My students are wary at first, just like I was. They have hesitation; they aren’t sure whether to trust that better sex is available. So all I can do is give them a taste and let them see for themselves.

It’s my job to help them make contact with the heirloom variety of sex, the best that sex has to offer. And then, to teach them how to taste every rich, nourishing moment. To show them how they, too, can be saturated by the nutrients
available in their very own soil, how they can taste and be tasted. And how the kind of sex we’ve been settling for, just because it’s what’s available at the Shop ’n Save, is not the only option. Like my uncle’s tomato, an heirloom variety is available—you just have to know where to go looking for it.

Several years after I first tasted the tomato, I had forgotten the lesson Uncle Bob taught me that day. I was twenty years old and thought I knew everything there was to know about everything. In truth, of course, I knew nothing about anything. But I did know that something wasn’t going right in my life.

Outwardly all was well: I’d graduated magna cum laude and was already doing my master’s work in a field I loved. I had the first paid teaching assistant position in my department and had been taken in by a prestigious mentor. I was living in one of the most sophisticated and interesting cities in the country—San Francisco—and I was in a “great relationship.”

Like a good girl, I had built this perfect-looking life, and now I was supposed to—what? Enjoy it? If someone could have told me how to do that, I would have been in better shape. But as it was, I was bored as hell. I felt like I was withering on the vine. It’s like I was eating and eating and eating, but I never felt full; this whole fantastic life I’d set up for myself was giving me nothing but an empty stomach. I knew something more had to be available—I could hear it calling me at night while I lay staring at the ceiling, wondering how my life could be over before it had even begun—but I didn’t know where to find more vitality, more engagement, more of the everything I wanted.

Then a friend told me she was taking a course in
sexuality. I was momentarily scandalized. Sexuality was something good girls like me didn’t talk about!

Then I was curious. Then embarrassed at my curiosity. Then a little bit afraid, and then, a little bit courageous.

I signed up for the class with her, and that was the beginning of the rest of my life. If Uncle Bob had been there, he would have been smiling.

More Is Possible

As it turned out, the “me” who knew nothing about anything actually sensed something very important. Just one little thing. She sensed that, somehow, the place to look for help in relearning how to be touched by her own life was sex. You, too, know that intuitively. Otherwise you wouldn’t be holding this book. Instead you’d have given up on sex, abandoned all hope of relationship satisfaction, and/or joined a monastery. But no: you’re making the radical choice to move toward your sexuality rather than away from it. Because you know that it’s in sex where all the real nourishment lies, and you’re sick of empty calories.

It’s been more than two decades since I took that first class. Now I make my living teaching sexuality to others—to men and women, younger and older, gay and straight, who are in the same boat I was in when I first took the leap into my sexuality and, as it turned out, my life. People who have that same intuition, that little voice that whispers something more has to be possible here. What I want to say to my twenty-year-old self—and to each of the students I see in class—is this: You are right! More is possible.

At the time, I wouldn’t have imagined how much impact sex would have on my sense of fulfillment and happiness. Like lots of people, I saw sex as sort of a side dish to the main meal of my life. Though I’d always been a sexual person, I still considered my sexuality to be extracurricular. It was something I used for stress reduction, pleasure, escape, or at the best of times to feel close to someone. But if you’d told me then that sex would end up being the center of my life—that here, a couple of decades later, I’d be spending my time teaching people Slow Sex, that I would have founded OneTaste, a national organization devoted to the art and craft of the female orgasm—I would have thought you were nuts. I was there on a lark—to break the monotony of my life and to maybe learn how to have better orgasms in the process. I certainly didn’t think I was going to discover the key to sustainable happiness.