Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm (8 page)

Asking for What You Desire

Looking back, it’s kind of surprising that I listened to that voice, since at the time I could have rattled off a hundred
different things I enjoyed doing more than I enjoyed having sex. Eating cookies, for one. Going to the movies, for another. Watching paint dry…

As much sex as I was having—and objectively, I was having quite a lot—I was very rarely getting joy out of it. I was hardly even
there
for it. I spent a whole lot of time pretending to be absorbed in orgasmic connection, while in reality I was doing all sorts of other things in my head. Making to-do lists. Thinking about what I was going to cook for dinner. Wondering how much longer he was going to take…

In other words, sex—the most sensational, exciting, spectacular experience we can have in the human body—was not sensational, exciting, or spectacular enough to hold my attention.

It took my finding Orgasmic Meditation to really understand what was going on. Sure, it had to do with the fact that I hadn’t yet learned to
cultivate
my attention, much less to place it on the sensation in my body and then keep it there. (I’ve since discovered that if you can do that, even watching paint dry turns out to be a completely engrossing activity.) But it also had to do with something I was not willing to do. Something that happens to be the third key ingredient for Slow Sex but takes the prize as the number one hardest thing to actually
do
during sex, especially for women:

To ask for what we truly desire.

I don’t know if it’s some massive conspiracy or what, but somehow over the growing-up process women receive little positive reinforcement for speaking our desires. We’re cautioned every step of the way to not voice our sexual desires, for fear of looking like a “bad woman,” appearing too needy, stumbling down the supposedly slippery slope toward promiscuity, or—this is a big one—permanently
damaging the supposedly fragile male ego. Whatever the reason, the result is that we women fall into patterns of pleasing others, especially during sex. By the time we’re adults, and we actually
want
sexual satisfaction enough to ask for it, we find that a sort of desire paralysis has set in. We’ve kept our desires so well hidden that we don’t even remember where we put them. I see this every time I teach a Slow Sex workshop and I ask women to talk about their desires.

“What desires?” one woman asks, and the rest nod in agreement. Lots of the women I meet don’t think they even
have
desires anymore. It’s like they tucked them away for safekeeping and now they can’t remember where they put them. They locked them up in the “good girl” drawer, the mothering drawer, the sexual trauma drawer, the menopause drawer—and now they can’t find the key.

At first. That’s the good news. As most women discover over the course of their first few OMing sessions, their desires are closer than they think. All that time they were sure desire was dead and buried, it was actually hiding just beneath the surface, waiting for permission to take a few tentative steps out into the sunlight, to walk around and feel the grass under its feet. I can’t wait to give desire that permission! I often go around the room in my workshop and ask each student to toss out just one thing that they want—just one little desire. The first student is hesitant, embarrassed, not sure if she’s
really
allowed to reveal what she
really
wants. But as soon as she summons the courage to tell me something, one little thing, desires start poking their heads out all over the place. The class starts getting giddy, like a bunch of kids, shouting out their desires for more sex, more connection, more enjoyment, or for
a triple-shot half-caff vanilla latte (it’s usually a Saturday morning, after all). It’s the sweetest thing to see my room full of mostly savvy, mostly urban, mostly “together” Slow Sex students regress back to younger, more carefree, more desirous versions of themselves. Sweet, but also poignant—since who they become during this exercise is usually the kid they were around about the time they learned to shove their desires in a drawer.

I first got that message myself when I was five or six. Whenever I saw a woman wearing a miniskirt—and it was the seventies, so I saw a lot of women wearing miniskirts—I would feel a driving desire to tiptoe up behind them, lean in, and sink my teeth deep into the backs of their knees. Needless to say, this did not go over so well with the ladies. My auntie Doris found it increasingly difficult to explain my odd little fetish to her friends at church, so one day when I went in for my signature move, she swatted me away. “Nicole,” she said with seriousness. “You don’t want to do that. You want to be a good girl.”

I was pretty sure she was wrong; I was pretty sure I’d rather be biting women on the backs of their knees than being a good girl. But the shame I felt at being reprimanded burned hot on my cheeks and stayed with me for days. I never wanted to feel
that
again. So without further ado, I threw my knee-biting resources toward being a good girl.

In time, I was throwing nearly all of my resources there. So were you. So were we all. This is what happens when we’re growing up: we’re taught which desires are appropriate and which are not, and we become ashamed of anything in the latter category. In time all the shameful experiences grow into a big, heavy patchwork quilt. What we don’t realize is that the quilt is still with us, lo these many years
hence. We may think we threw it out a long time ago, but in truth all those memories of shame are still there, scaring the crap out of our desire. So the next exercise I give the students is designed to let their desire—their sexual desire in particular—enjoy some fresh air for a change.

Exercise. Taking Dictation from Your Sex

In the world of Slow Sex, there may be no lesson as mind-blowing as learning how to ask our partner for what we want. But first, we have to figure out what it
is
we want. That’s where this exercise comes in. As I said previously, most of us have been keeping our desire, especially our sexual desire, on lockdown. In this exercise, you’re going to reverse that trend. You’re going to hand your desire the microphone—and then you’re going to sit back and take dictation.

This is a writing exercise, so you’ll need a quiet spot, a journal, a timer, and about fifteen minutes.

First, sit down and get comfortable. Feel your feet on the floor, your own weight as you sit quietly. Pay attention to which sensations you can feel in your body. If you notice any pain or tension, be aware of it for a few moments and then move on. Now identify three separate sensations, and speak or whisper them out loud. “My feet feel cool on the floor.” “I can feel a sort of sparkly light sensation in the front of my chest.” “My insides feel dark and wet and mossy green.” Speaking your sensations is a great way to return to what’s happening right now. Once you’re finished, and you feel like you’ve really landed in your body, you’re ready to begin.

Set your timer for eight minutes and get ready to write. You are going to answer the question “What does my sex want, right now?” When the timer starts, put your pen down on the page and don’t pick it up again until the timer chimes. Start off with, “What my sex wants right now is…” And let your desire do the talking from there.

Try not to censor yourself—if your sex wants to get fucked, if it wants to be naughty, if it wants to do things your conscious mind would never have thought to do, let it have its say. You’re not responsible for anything it says or does; your only job is to give it space to roam—and to take notes. If your desire takes you to a place that doesn’t feel comfortable to you, never fear. You’re not agreeing to actually
act on
this list—all you’re agreeing to do is write it down.

If you become stuck at any point, just go back to “What my sex wants right now is…” Keep writing, even if you don’t know what to write. Keep writing, even if you write, “What my sex wants right now is…
to know what my sex wants right now
!” That’s actually a pretty interesting discovery in itself.

When the timer goes off, finish up the sentence you’re on, then put down the pen. Re-read the essay on desire that you just wrote. Do you approve of what your sex wrote, or not? Did anything surprise you? Do you feel like you really let your sex have its say, or did you hold something back out of fear? What do the sensations in your body feel like after having let your desire run free for eight minutes? Did the exercise expand you, or do you feel more contracted? Are you feeling freer, or did you get embarrassed or anxious? There are no right answers here; it’s all research, after all.

Advanced Practice

Ask your partner to do the above exercise along with you. When you are both finished writing, sit across from one another. Ask her to pay attention to the sensation in her body as you read your essay to her. Once you are finished reading, have her share one sensation she felt while you read. Once she has shared her sensation, invite her to read her essay to you while you pay attention to the sensation in your body. When she is finished reading, share one sensation you felt while listening to her desire speak.

Sometimes I think that if I had only one thing in the world I could teach, it would be the ability to identify our sexual desires and then learn how to ask for them. Especially for women, who have been shamed into hiding and repressing our hunger—sexual and otherwise—it can feel risky and dangerous to admit that we want something more or different from whatever it is we’re currently getting. I once had a couple come to a coaching session and neither was happy with their collective sex life. He knew on some level he wasn’t pleasing her, but she wouldn’t tell him what to do differently. We discovered during the session that she didn’t want to tell him what to do, because she was too afraid of hurting his feelings. So, she told me, she “just let it go.”

“I kind of gave up on the idea of getting satisfied sexually, because he couldn’t push my buttons and I just couldn’t bring myself to tell him how,” she said. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I felt like it would be better to let our sex life die than to risk asking for what I wanted.”

I hear this all the time, in many different ways. And although men definitely do experience some level of fear around asking for what they want, I find that this is much more of a problem for women. Both because—as previously discussed—women’s bodies are more complicated, and also because women’s
psyches
are more complicated. In this area, Orgasmic Meditation can have a huge impact. It makes asking for what we want a part of the practice
itself. Nobody’s feelings have to get hurt, because it’s part of the script, so to speak.

“Through OM, my relationship to sex has changed. I have more approval for what I desire, or things I want to try. Just because I want to try something doesn’t mean I have to do it, it doesn’t mean I’m a certain person—whatever judgment I have about people who do this kind of thing—it just means some part of me might want to have this experience once. Putting a desire out there doesn’t make it a request. It doesn’t even mean that you’ll do anything about it. It’s just feeling free enough to say ‘I want this.’ ”

—Hillary, 32

The best part is that once you build the muscle of asking for what you desire during sex, you can flex it in the rest of your life as well. A new student of mine was telling me how the most amazing moment of her first OM was asking her partner to move his finger a little bit to the left. “I realized at that moment that I had
never
told him what I wanted during sex before, and we’d been together for twenty-two years!” she said. “A little voice told me that if I could get comfortable asking for what I really want during sex, that alone could revolutionize my entire world.”

The Other Side of Orgasm

That little voice of intuition was the voice that first drew me to OM. It’s the same voice that brings students to my class, and I’d wager it’s the same voice that has brought you this
far. I like to think of it as the voice from the other side—the other side of
orgasm
. Because that’s what we experience when we OM: a side of orgasm that is slow, deep, and extended, rather than fast, fiery, and climactic. This more female side has no real beginning and end. It has multiple peaks and valleys; it is saturated and roundabout and complex—a lot like a woman’s anatomy, in fact. It is unfathomably deep and lush with hydration. It nourishes not the part of us that wants a smashing finale, but the part of us that wants insight, ignition, and intimacy. The part that wants to have richer sex—and a richer life.

Without frequent access to the kind of slow, deep orgasm that OM offers, we’re missing out on half of the nutrients we need in life. At the risk of sounding dramatic, it’s as if all of us—men and women alike—are suffering from an orgasmic deficiency, whose symptoms include but are not limited to the following:

• difficulty connecting to other people
  
• lack of true intimacy within relationship
  
• deficit of sexual turn-on (especially in women)
  
• inability to feel sensation or be present in our own bodies
  
• disconnection from our own desires
  
• underlying sense that something more is possible, in sex and in life
  

Orgasm is the primary source of this nourishing, hydrating sensation we crave. Slow Sex teaches everything you need to know to be able to access this more female side of orgasm as frequently as you need it and as deeply as you want to take it. The ingredients that form the foundation
of the practice of OM—stripping down, paying attention to sensation, and asking for what you desire—are the proverbial keys to the kingdom. Together they give us access to everything we’ve known was possible from sex: an appreciation of our own genuine experience, an unending source of turn-on, and the true intimacy we’ve known was possible but haven’t been able to access.