Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm (20 page)

Help her thaw out her energy, get it moving again, and she’ll start turning on more easily. Listen to her when she is talking so she feels the connection between you. Take a walk with her. Run her a bath. Then OM with her, making sure to ground her with love (and firm pressure) when you are through. OM is like a hot water bottle, getting things all melty and smooth again. Stroke by stroke, you can thaw out all the conditioning that tells her it is unsafe to be a sexual woman, so that her turn-on can flow through unobstructed.

“During and immediately after OMing, I have a sense of energetic movement in my limbs and the core of my body. I feel more relaxed and alert at the same time—more clearheaded.”

—Petra, 28

5. What she really wants is access to your attention.
Men receive lots of messages about what to give a woman to get sex and love in return. Jewelry, fancy dinners, a big house. This is the equivalent of stroking her with lots of speed and pressure. Thrilling and beautiful and appreciated, yes, but it doesn’t get to the heart of our desire. When we ask for these things, it’s because we’ve learned to accept them as a proxy for what we
really
want but have never had access to: the animating, enlivening experience of having your full attention placed on us whenever we desire it.

If you want to give her what she really wants, show her that she can have as much of you as she needs. Answer her phone calls, be present when you are having a conversation with her, and make good on your promises. When she realizes you are not a scarce resource, the yowl of her hunger will settle down to a pleasurable purr. Then, the gifts become a choice you make in order to delight her, rather than an obligation you fulfill in order to appease her.

6. Learn to navigate her desire.
Women want sex; we are starving for it. We
want
to be turned on. We
want
to follow our desire. We
want
to thaw out and get our energy moving so we can use it for sex and relationship and everything else.

Yet give us a hundred opportunities to have sex, and we’ll come up with a hundred good reasons not to.

I’m too tired. The kids aren’t asleep yet. I feel fat today. We just ate—aren’t we supposed to wait half an hour? I don’t have time. I’m on my period. I need my beauty sleep. I’m not in the mood. Didn’t I ask you to clean out the basement?

Here’s the secret: we have been programmed to keep our sex locked up and hidden. It’s not our fault—most of the time we don’t even realize we’re doing it. Our mothers (and our mother’s mother, and
her
mother before that, all the way back to the beginning of time) created us that way, to keep us safe. The script goes like this:
When sex is near, discover an impossibly large obstacle, drag it into the middle of the road, and then blame it for not allowing you to have sex.

But that’s not really what we want. What we really want is to let the sex enter us, liberate us. We
want
the energy and enjoyment and intimacy. We have the desire, we just don’t give ourselves permission to feel it.

So you must learn to navigate her desire. This cannot be done via force, bargaining, or guilt. It can be done only by careful, deliberate request. When she says no, ask again. And again. You’re not trying to look good here, you’re trying to make your woman
happy
. These are two very different results. When she says no, do not turn away in rejection. Instead, look her in the eyes and let her know you see her. You see the desire
and
the obstacles. And then help her clear the latter so the former can flow. Promise to help her do the laundry later in the day (this won’t work unless you do it, so
do
it). Make plans to exercise with her in the morning. Use humor and curiosity to penetrate her resistance. Then ask again if now is, in fact, the time to have sex.

You are making it safe for her desire to arise, proving
that you are in her corner. Help her taste her own desire in a way no man has ever taken the time to do before. Then let her desire take over, until she is throwing you down on the bed and you can harvest the rewards of her freedom for your own enjoyment.

7. Women have no idea how much men love them.
Whatever you place your attention on will reveal its secrets to you, and I’ve spent a lot of my life attending to men. The secret I’ve learned after so much time spent with you is this: we women completely, totally, and fatally underestimate your desire to please us.

Forgive us; our reception channel is sometimes full of static. After so long fighting to wrest our so-called power “back” from you, it seems like a cruel joke to discover that you have always loved us. What a surprise. All you can do here is be careful, deliberate, and tenacious about reminding your woman that you love her and you always have. Show her through kindness and humor and a willingness to please her even when she is pushing you away. Take her to dinner, or better yet—make dinner yourself. Rub her feet, go to the movie she wants to see, offer her a cup of tea. Consider yourself a key player in the game of male-female dynamics, and get curious about what your next play should be. And—this is the hardest part—leave behind any resentment you might have accumulated over being accused of a crime you did not commit. Someday, when she finally sees who you’ve been all this time, she will make it up to you.

8. Behind every woman’s complaint is a desire.
I’m afraid I might lose my card-carrying position as a woman for this
one, but here goes.
Women have been trained to get what we want by playing the role of victim.
We have been frozen in the role of withholding, of being sure we need to fight to get our needs met. Complaining is a prime tactic we use to this end.

But there is a secret, and it is this: behind every woman’s complaint is a desire. The complaint is like the perilous moat around the palace of her hunger. Her desire is so tender that she can’t reveal it to just anyone. She must know that you will be careful with it, that you really want it, and that you will treat it with dignity. So she’s going to make you work for it by presenting it to you as a complaint.

Think of the complaint as the steam rising from a delicious plate of food. The steam is ephemeral, but it still can burn. Pay attention to it, but don’t mistake it for something solid in and of itself. It is simply a signal.
There is a luscious, living desire here; come find it.
She will guard it with all her might, so you must disarm her with gentle humor and curiosity. Watch yourself; be vigilant not to turn your humor into barbs. When she complains, ask her gently what desire is behind that. Coax it out of her until she believes you are earnest. Keep the game going, rather than collapsing under the weight of any one complaint. Each complaint is an oyster, with the pearl of desire inside. Go in and find it.

9. Women are not just dishonorable men.
My choice of career sent my mother into therapy. She would ask her therapist, why was I trying to kill her? Why was I trying to destroy her life? Why was I turning my back on everything she had ever taught me? Luckily the therapist understood something my mother did not. She explained that it wasn’t that I had
the same values as my mother and was merely being defiant. It was that I operated by
an entirely different code
. In following my passion, I was being true to my own code.

The same holds for all women. We have not sworn allegiance to your code and then flagrantly disobeyed it. We are loyal to an entirely different code.

We don’t mind that you’re not like us; we like it when you are earth and we can be sky. We do want you to learn to be flexible, however, like a tree that can stay rooted but still bend in the wind.

If you are confused by something we say, don’t take it personally—simply ask us to rephrase. If we do something that goes against your rules and regulations, use it as an opportunity to expand your own range. Resist the temptation to ask the unanswerable question of “Why can’t they be like us?” And do not buy into the fantasy of finding a woman who is; she doesn’t exist. Consider the strength her tests help foster in you. If you can learn the delicate art of balancing that strength with flexibility, then true mastery will be yours.

10. She doesn’t want to win.
She doesn’t want “her” way, she wants “our” way. She wants to collaborate, to negotiate. They say that in Morocco the street vendors get offended if you accept their first price, because haggling is how you create a bond. It’s how you relate, how you create intimacy. Women operate the same way. We want both sides to get a little of what they want, because it is in between “you” and “me” that relationship is created.

We haven’t communicated this to you, however, and it does not follow your natural inclination. You are conditioned to be independent. In your world, you decide or
she decides. One or the other. So when she gets bent out of shape that you haven’t included her, didn’t even think to consult her, what you hear is that
she
wants to do it. And so you bow out, thinking that is the way to make her happy. But it does not make her happy. In the move from “ours” to “hers,” relationship gets lost. She is left feeling abandoned, and you are left feeling irrelevant.

Don’t settle for letting her get her way. Your acquiescence is not valuable to her; what she craves is your participation. She wants to come together with you and make a better decision than either of you would make on your own. There is a very easy way to make her happy here. Always present her with three options. Research three different restaurants you would like to take her to, and then give her a choice. Think of three different times when you might OM together, and let her pick which one. She will feel held by you because you took the time to narrow things down. She will feel respected by you because you let her decide. (Plus you’ll always get one of your top three picks, which is more than you could say when you were letting her have her way.)

Chapter Seven

What Women Should Know About Men

I
t can be tempting to generalize and say that women are demanding and men are at our mercy. But give a thoughtful group of men permission to express the desires that lie hidden in their often-guarded hearts, and what you discover may surprise you. Men are both more complex and easier to understand than most women realize. Here are the top ten things they want us to know—a list that doubles as the top ten ways to keep our beloved men at their absolute best.

1. Men experience acknowledgment through a woman’s happiness.
People often wonder how I convince men to practice Orgasmic Meditation—as if it would take something just shy of forced inscription to get a man to stroke a woman’s genitals for fifteen minutes. Even we women are amazed to discover how willing, even honored, he is to OM with us. We hardly believe it could be this easy. To feed our hunger and to get our needs met have always felt like such a struggle. So at first we are suspicious:
It must be because it’s sexual. He likes anything sexual. He’s still not going to take out the garbage when I ask him to.

And then they go home, and suddenly he’s perfectly willing to take out the garbage.

One of my male students explained it best. “If she’s happy, it makes me happier.” This is the life-giving secret:
He judges how well he is doing by the happiness of the woman he is with.
The measure of his manhood is how happy
you
are. The happier you are, the happier he will be. When you are turned on, there’s nothing he can’t do. So OM becomes the best friend he ever had. It is a foolproof way to make his woman orgasmic, and an orgasmic woman is a happy woman.

Lie back and let him draw your orgasm out. There is no need for guilt; this is something he has been waiting for. Allow him to stroke you, and watch him respond in ways you’d never imagined.

“At first, I would always rather have been having sex or giving him a blow job or doing something that would make
him
feel good, so he would like me more. It was very challenging for me to just lie back and feel. I had this fear that when we were practicing he would realize he didn’t love me. But the opposite happened. I have never been able to trust a relationship this much in my life, because now I don’t have to guess how he’s feeling. When we OM, I can
feel
how he’s feeling.”

—Sarah, 30

2. If you want him to treat you like an equal, then be his equal.
Something I hear often from women is that they withhold sex because sex is the only card they have. They
must play it wisely. If they give it away too quickly, or too frequently, they’ll have nothing left. He’ll have all the cards and what will they do then?

The problem with this strategy is simple. Men do not actually have all the cards. They are only acting as if they do because they think that’s what you want. They think you want them to be all-powerful. Guys think that’s the only way you’ll feel protected, and as far as they can tell, you need protection. If I had a dollar for every time I heard a man say, “I can’t tell her that—she couldn’t handle it!” I would use that money to buy a billboard over Times Square saying
She is not broken!
The problem is, you
appear
to be broken a lot of the time. If someone has to fill the “alpha” position, it’s going to have to be him.