Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm (22 page)

And then we’re surprised when he is upset, or confused, or didn’t actually get the message. We did such a good job strategizing! We waited! We used 25 percent fewer words than we wanted to! Maybe we should have sent the third version of the e-mail, instead of the sixth…

It wouldn’t have mattered, of course. To decipher whatever message you sent him, in just the way you wanted it to land, would take a world-class psychic. Or a woman. I highly doubt your partner is the former, and if your partner is the latter, you probably have a whole different set of communication issues. (If my own past history is any indication.) Men are trained to relate to the world through
overt
communication, so they are reliably useless at understanding anything we don’t actually
say
. It doesn’t matter how loud we scream at them from inside our heads. We must communicate in s-i-m-p-l-e, p-l-a-i-n w-o-r-d-s, spoken out loud. The more specific, the better.

This doesn’t mean men aren’t sensitive beings. As discussed previously, they feel—a lot. Even when they didn’t quite understand what you were trying to say, they know if there was something in there that was meant as a dig. It’s like when you hold a tuning fork up to a guitar, and the string with the same note will start vibrating. On an unspoken level, he resonates to your frequency. And it hurts.

The secret? He can resonate to your frustration and your confusion and your pain. But he can also resonate to your
desire—and respond accordingly. So tell him. Use plain English. Don’t hold anything back. And watch him rise to the occasion. It’s what a man does best.

10. Approval turns him on.
Approval—yours—is all he is looking for. When a man can feel a woman’s genuine acceptance of who he is, her pleasure in what he’s doing for her, he lights up like the Eiffel Tower. He will immediately try to figure out what he did to deserve it, and he will do that thing again and again in hopes of a similar response. We women think it’s so much more complicated than that. But in truth, men love feeling wanted, needed, desired, and appreciated. It’s how you get a man to come out of his cave; it’s how you show him he “done good.” Approval is the fuel that gets the fire inside of him burning brightly.

The hard part is that growing up as a woman, you were probably taught that showing “too much” approval would bring you
unwanted
attention. It would work too well. Or you were taught not to add fuel to his fire of turn-on by showing him how turned on
you
got in his presence. So you learned not to give men a lot of praise, not to let them see the tender part of you that experiences pure, unbridled joy in their presence. You may even have been taught disdain for men who are “too needy,” who thrive on praise and compliments. You were not taught the subtle but important difference between false praise and genuine appreciation, a difference he can feel.

So we learned how to keep our own genuine turn-on hidden, all the while manufacturing false turn-on in order to get what we wanted from him. The problem is that in the process, men learned to distrust all of our turn-ons,
even the authentic kind. Help him trust you again. Give him the real thing, the stuff you were taught to keep hidden. That’s what he wants to feel. When you take the leap and share your turn-on with him, the result is the fire of intimacy you’re both secretly craving.

Chapter Eight

Slow Sex, Meet Regular Sex

L
et’s be honest. When they first find me, most of my students aren’t looking for a sexual meditation practice. What they’re looking for is better sex. More sex, for starters, but also more depth, more connection, and more orgasmic sensation in the sex they’re already having. As it turns out, they get just what they’re looking for—but not in the way they expected. Because what I hear over and over from these same students is that once they start to practice, it’s OM itself that keeps them practicing. OM is magical in that way; it’s impossible to sense, from the outside, what could be so special and amazing about it. But once you experience OM, the nourishment you feel speaks for itself.

The bonus is that this nourishment seeps in and enlivens the rest of your life as well—including and especially your “regular” sex life. It’s all connected, after all. Transform your relationship to sexuality in one area, every other area gets touched in the process. So it is that Slow Sex enters the field of “regular” sex: naturally and without any help from you. At the same time, there’s no harm in aiding and
abetting the process. You can attend to your regular sex life the same way you have learned to attend to sensation during OM. In this case, that means infusing every sexual interaction with the same three Slow Sex ingredients: stripping down, feeling sensation, and asking for what you desire.

It also means learning to savor an experience that we are used to pushing through. When we take climax as our goal—rather than simply feeling each stroke along the way—we tend to crash through sex, picking up speed as we go. It’s like we’re pushing through a windstorm, striving to reach the finish line. As a result, we miss out on everything that’s available to us right now. We don’t have time to absorb the sensation we are looking for, and as a result we end up even hungrier than when we started.

“Before we started OMing, sex was all about the climax. Now both of us have more of an appreciation for the pleasure that comes before. This may mean we mutually decide to end sex before one or both of us climax because we’ve gotten to a place where we feel really good and we want to carry that energy into the next thing we do. Now sex is less about getting rid of energy than getting it moving, so it becomes fuel for the day.”

—Stefan, 37

The antidote to this finishing-line mentality is learning how to hold. Holding means breaking the habit of leaning forward all the time. It means savoring the sensation of the wind against our skin, rather than trying to escape it. Dropping the goal orientation and feeling our orgasm for where it wants to go. Maybe it wants to move toward climax; maybe it doesn’t. Either way, we follow its direction.
We let it wind its way, meandering through sensation after sensation, until it’s reached its fill. This choice to savor our experience is what puts the “slow” in Slow Sex. We slow down, and all of a sudden we can feel what we weren’t able to feel before: we can feel our own desire. Its longing for climax and resolution. Its texture and motion. Everything it is, which
is us
.

Slow Sex vs. Regular Sex

A new kind of climax becomes the natural next step—it rolls through you, rather than happening
to
you. With this kind of climax you are present for every stroke as it rises up
and through. You’re no longer tensed up, contracted, hopeful of getting something. You are relaxed, alert, and connected to your partner as sensation builds, peaks, and goes over. There is an ease to it, like ice gradually melting into water. Gratification becomes available in every moment.

The process of transforming “regular” sex into Slow Sex is, of course, an art rather than a science. It must happen naturally; there is no step-by-step instruction, no technique I can offer. The best I can hope to do is to inspire you, to point you in the right direction. The three exercises that follow are meant to do just that. They illustrate one person’s experience—my own—with the “slow” versions of oral sex and intercourse. My hope is that they might ignite within your body that intuition that brought you to Slow Sex in the first place. I invite you to read them, perhaps aloud to your partner. Pay attention to the sensations they create in your body as you go, and take from them any ideas that resonate with you.

Then put this book down. Feel your desire. And let your own unique recipe for Slow Sex reveal itself to you, stroke by stroke.

Slow Sex for Women

Slow Sex, I tell my students, was built for women. Women naturally desire sex that is connected, earthy, sensual, and artistic. We want the permission to be turned on. We want our men to help us reach that goal. The rules for us are only these three:

Go slow.
Slower than you could ever imagine. So slow you can feel her, smell her, taste her every cell.

Be unpredictable.
Her orgasm responds to the element of surprise. Don’t think too hard—just let yourself feel. Follow your own sensation wherever it wants to take you; desire co-arises, so whatever feels best to you will be the path of most sensation for her, too.

Learn to hold.
Once you’ve gotten her to a place of intense sensation, don’t move. Hold there as long as you can so she can absorb all the pleasure that’s available to her.

Make these guidelines your only moves, your only technique. It may feel like you’re sailing into open water without a map, but that’s okay. Let your desire be your compass. Connect to your senses and let them guide you. You’ve honed your skills through OM; there’s nothing to do now except trust. The orgasm is there. It wants to come through. Feel your way, and everything she always knew should be available from sex will suddenly be within reach. In front of your eyes, she will bloom into the turned-on woman you have always desired.

Here’s a little inspiration to help you get started.

Exercise. Slow Oral for Her

Slow Sex always begins in the same place: with desire. Feel your body, your sensations, your desire. As simply as you can, tell your partner what you want to do. Do not do anything that does not come from a true place of desire. If you want to suck her pussy, you need say nothing more than that. The truth of your desire will plant a seed within her, which will quickly grow into desire of her own.

Part One: Preparation

Consider OMing first. A woman who’s been stroked will be heavy and filled with blood. She will be like a velvet cave, expanded with orgasm, surface area engorged and shimmering. Every pore, every nerve ending will be exposed, open, pulsing, and ready for your touch.

If you choose to begin this way, tell her in advance. Make her feel taken care of by safeporting her every step of the way, from the very beginning. Tell her that you intend to stroke her, but you will not give her grounding strokes at the end like you usually do. Instead, you will leave her high and full and ready. You will carefully put away all the OMing supplies while she awaits the next course.

Make every move a move of drawing her out, rather than going in and finding her. Draw her out physically and with your words: for women, there is nothing more erotic than intimate communication. Talk to her; ask her to tell you what she is feeling. And remember that there is no goal in Slow Sex; you are simply pulling the orgasm out of her one strand at a time. Let your only desire be to extend her desire; to get it to reach for you. In the process you are giving her the rare opportunity to feel the depth, weight, and power of her very own hunger. Help her welcome the experience of high sensation, so she can start to go toward it instead of pulling away. You are giving her that gift when you go slow.

Part Two: Coaxing Her Orgasm into Bloom

Speak to her. Tell her that tonight you will use your body like a magnet. You’ll extract every last drop of ache and desire from her. Every part of her body will come alive; every last soft inch of tissue will be reaching and stretching toward you. Everything she normally keeps compressed and drawn in will move to the surface. You will surprise her with the enormity of what you are able to pull forth from her. It is so rare for a woman’s sex to be extracted from her that most of us have never felt it. As you draw out her desire, she will get to see her sex stretch out for what may be the very first time.

If she is not already naked, help your woman take off her clothes. Go slowly; remember, for her you can never go too slowly. Linger. Show her that you care about every button, every hook, every zipper. Sit her down on the edge of the bed and kneel down in front of her. Remove her socks one at a time; help her slide her pants off. Then help her down on the bed, making sure she is comfortable and supported. While she watches you, take off your own clothes. Feel your own body warming up.