The Best You'll Ever Have (12 page)

All women are physically capable of having multiple orgasms, defined as one orgasm spilling into another and another, without a refractory period between. According to Betty Dodson, author of
Sex for One
and the high priestess of orgasm training for women, the key to multiples is breathing through an orgasm (not holding your breath, which is typical). Easier said than done, of course. Learning to breathe during orgasm takes practice. Dodson also mentions that orgasms range in intensity and that perhaps multiples are a pileup of small blips, as opposed to a huge bang. Timothy Leary claimed to have seen a woman on LSD have a hundred orgasms in a row. Sex researchers have documented women having fifty plus, and even back in 1953 (when this must have been a really taboo subject) 14 percent of Kinsey’s female subjects reported having multiple orgasms regularly. There’s probably no limit to how many you can have. The book
Extended Massive Orgasm
purports to teach women how to keep orgasms coming for an hour. For the purposes of this book, I’d like to concentrate on making sure my readers have at least one every time they have sex. A modest goal perhaps, but you’ve got to start at the beginning, and go (I mean,
come
) from there. See the sidebar later in this chapter on how to multiply your fun with multiple orgasms.

Compared with men, women are more orgasmic. Men come and all the blood flows away from their penises, making them soft. They have to wait a few minutes at least to get hard again. Women don’t have the same refractory period. The excess blood in our genitals doesn’t rush away as quickly and completely as in men’s. We don’t have to wait, and therefore we are ready to go again immediately. It’s ironic that women have been considered less sexual than men when, biologically, we are engineered for greater pleasure.

A brief caveat: the last thing I want to do is to make any woman feel inadequate if she takes longer than eight minutes to come, or never has multiples, or needs to take a long break between sessions before she can come again. Some of the most sexually self-actualized women I know don’t tend to have more than one orgasm in the same day. Sometimes a clitoris is just way too sensitive after orgasm to be touched again for an hour. My desire is to simply let women know what’s going on with other women so that we can all come again and come often, however we each see fit.

If you’ve never had an orgasm, you may wonder what it feels like. The French refer to it as “le petit mort”—the little death. While it might sound a little gruesome, it does encompass the intense feeling—the stopping of time, the blocking out of place, thoughts, anything but sensation, and the losing of oneself in the moment. Or maybe they mean that you have to die a little to get a taste of heaven on earth.

Masters and Johnson collected descriptions from their female subjects about the sensation. Here’s the consensus, as they recorded it: it starts with “a momentary sense of suspension, quickly followed by an intensely pleasurable feeling that usually begins at the clitoris and rapidly spreads throughout the pelvis. The physical sensations of the genitals are often described as warm, electric, or tingly, and these usually spread through the body. Finally, most women feel muscle contractions in their vagina or lower pelvis, often described as ‘pelvic throbbing.’”

Anaïs Nin, erotic short story author and bohemian extraordinaire, describes the experience in her poetic and risqué diaries using phrases like “a fiery and icy liqueur through the body,” “the pleasure of a gentler wave,” “electric flesh arrows,” “a rainbow of color,” “a foam of music.” She was trippy and mad for them, saying each day demands one.

4. THE FINAL STAGE: RESOLUTION.

Resolution—winding down once it’s all over—doesn’t have to
happen right after orgasm for women.

As I mentioned above, if sexual stimulation continues, a woman can experience additional orgasms. But once stimulation stops, postorgasm(s), the body returns to its normal relaxed state. The uterus and vagina revert back to their normal placement. The breasts and vulva go back to their normal size and color but may remain sensitive for a little while. Breathing and heart rate settle down. The sex flush fades. If an orgasm hasn’t occurred, there will be a feeling of heaviness and pelvic discomfort. Remember men’s complaints of “blue balls?” Well there’s no gender bias in discomfort when it comes to getting all worked up and not having a release. Blood is trapped in the pelvic organs and needs to be dissipated by orgasmic muscle contractions; everything is in a heightened state and waiting.

Eventually, even without an orgasm, the body will calm and the blood will dissipate. The discomfort, however, takes time to resolve. Frustration isn’t fun. If you think you’re being selfish by wanting to have an orgasm after your guy is done, think again.

How to Multiply Your Fun

While multiple orgasms are a lot of fun to aim for, don’t ruin the orgasms you already have by pressuring yourself to have more. The key to multiple orgasms is to surf a wave of pleasure. So catch a wave and keep on riding it instead of waiting for it to break. That’s very different from what most of us do. We tend to do what men do: build up to a giant single orgasm and then they rest. Often they just drop off to sleep. Unlike men though, we have other options. Most women aren’t aware of this. And why should they be? It’s not like we have multiple orgasmic role models, but now we do have some research. If you haven’t had any or many multiple orgasms, consider the following:

When you feel an orgasm start to build, keep breathing.
Think about the orgasms you’ve had. Do you tend to hold your breath?

Most of us do. Deprivation of oxygen to the brain heightens orgasm. Excited, erratic, shallow breathing at the point of orgasm is practically instinctual. But this breath holding makes it difficult to keep going from one orgasm to another. First, your brain demands oxygen, so after you come, the blood flows out of the genitals and back to the brain. But to come, you need the blood in the genitals. Keep your breathing normal and you won’t divert blood flow back to the brain.

As you keep breathing through an orgasm you might feel like
you’re losing orgasm momentum.
Keep in mind that this is only the first wave of pleasure and don’t expect it to feel like one big event.

Visualize multiple orgasms as a drive into the mountains. First
there are the foothills and then the bigger peaks.
Go toward them without any expectation and wander around. Don’t try to get to the top of a big peak. It’s all about the journey, not the destination. A big peak can rise up behind any foothill, and a series of foothills can stretch on for a long, fabulous trip. Don’t try to force anything. After all, not finishing is the goal.

Multiple orgasms require time, the absence of pressure and lots
of lubricant
(you can never have too much lubricant anyway, but in this situation it keeps things flowing nicely).

As I mentioned earlier, orgasms often come out of nowhere.
Concentrate on what feels good to get the first one.

Try to stay in the moment, which will take you onto the next one.
Keep breathing through and let go of the goal of having any orgasm at all. Try this with or without a partner and notice the differences in the two situations. Be a keen observer of your own pleasure.

Once you experience going from one orgasm to the next you will,
more and more often.

Don’t judge yourself or your orgasms.
Multiple orgasms are great, but so is one strong explosive one and so is the simple feeling of massage all around the clitoris all on its own. Don’t pressure yourself to achieve anything and you’ll have more of everything.

Sexual Frustration through History

ABOUT 70 PERCENT OF WOMEN CAN’T HAVE AN ORGASM THROUGH INTERCOURSE ALONE. Not surprising to accomplished solo flyers, 90 percent of women who masturbate do so by stimulating their clitoris exclusively. Only 10 percent of women stimulate their vagina while masturbating, and even they usually stimulate their clitoris at the same time. Despite all this expertise, many people (of both genders) are under the impression that a woman should be able to get off through standard intercourse and to come at the same instant as her partner.

If you believe that, you probably think Prince Charming will be arriving shortly with a glass slipper in your size. As I mentioned in chapter 2, this female orgasm myth was embedded in our culture by men like Sigmund Freud, whose three essays on sexuality (published in 1905) misinformed generations about the nature of the female orgasm. His belief was that the clitoral orgasm is immature and should be transferred to vaginal orgasm, that is, one had during intercourse once a girl hits puberty (or really once women have started having sex with men). Written like this, doesn’t it sound silly? What’s wrong with a clitoral orgasm? Why should we need to transfer anything except to conform to irrational male beliefs? Freud’s theories on the female orgasm, by and large, are ridiculed nowadays, but medical experts throughout history have labeled women’s sexuality as various forms of illness—he wasn’t the first, but he had an enormous impact on the twentieth century. All the way back to the fourth century B.C. until 1952 (half a century
after
Freud’s early fame), women who didn’t orgasm during intercourse were “diagnosed” with hysteria and “cured” by being brought to orgasm manually by a doctor. Women’s inability to have an orgasm through intercourse was considered a deficiency and an illness.

To my ears, this sounds like a ploy to make women feel bad about themselves, to get money out of them by pathologizing their natural needs, and to make the male feel better about himself. And it definitely sounds like a way to take advantage of them while charging them under the pretext of practicing medicine. Imagine going to a doctor today and he tells you he’s going to molest you and then take your money because you’re a sick, sick woman. You’d be on the phone to the police in three seconds flat. Back then, however, the job of treating (read, getting off) hysterical women was odious. No one wanted to do it, least of all the husbands, which is why the medical establishment took over at great profit. Pleasing a woman is a dirty job, but someone had to do it. It wasn’t until 1952 that the American Medical Association made a declaration to its members that hysteria is not really an ailment and ended a long span of time during which vibrators were “medical devices.”

Even though men knew women didn’t have orgasms from penetrative sex, doing anything manually or orally for the woman just wasn’t done. They believed a woman’s pleasure should mirror the three phases of male pleasure:

GETTING READY FOR INTERCOURSE,

INTERCOURSE, AND

RELAXING AFTER INTERCOURSE.

This thinking lingers, even now. Consider this: is it “real sex” if your partner penetrates you and comes, but you don’t? Is it “real sex” if you give him a blowjob or jerk him off? Is it “real sex” if he goes down on you and nothing more? Expanding the definition of real sex to revolve around a woman’s orgasm or to include oral and manual sex without penetration is still a hard sell. Bill Clinton didn’t view his hummer from Monica as “real sex.” For the most part, the nation agreed.

Medieval writers actually thought that women experienced pleasure by receiving male semen and believed nothing else was required to satisfy them. Semen was promoted as salubrious for women, so much so that contraceptive barriers were discouraged despite sexually transmitted disease and the life-and-death risks of childbirth.

Cultural taboos around masturbation made this situation even more horrible. A solo flight was considered immoral, a danger to women’s health, and a cause of insanity (ironic, isn’t it, that NOT masturbating drove these poor, frustrated women over the edge). More crucially, the men of that age believed that masturbation could lead to a lack of interest in intercourse and infertility. Furthermore, as men wrote in medical journals through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, woman who actually enjoyed sex were considered nymphomaniacs who were likely to cheat on their husbands, thereby threatening the concept of monogamy, the framework of the family, and the entire construct of a civilized society. Women were doomed if they didn’t get off and under suspicion if they did.

The diagnosis of hysteria ended in the middle of the twentieth century, not that long ago, only to be replaced with “frigidity” (a concern that went back to the early Freud days as well), which is defined as a lack of interest in intercourse or coldness to a husband’s advances. Frigidity was treated with muscle relaxants, hypnosis, and psychotherapy. In 1910, up to 75 percent of “civilized” women were thought be frigid (see how the numbers remain creepily consistent?). Turn-of-the-century radicals spoke out and suggested that hysteria and frigidity were both due to brutish treatment by husbands. But these dissidents were thought of as a bunch of crazies. As recently as the 1960s, doctors were actively discouraging men from satisfying their wives. Dr. Alexander Lowen, author of the 1965 book
Love and Orgasm,
was a student of Wilhelm Reich’s, who was looking into the orgasmic response and repression of sexuality, and Dr. Lowen had been writing on it himself since the early 1940s. By 1965, he knew and was clear in his writing that women needed direct clitoral stimulation to orgasm, but he made it clear that he empathized with the men at that time who thought that there was no good time to do this. He said that most men feel that bringing a woman to “climax through direct clitoral stimulation is a burden.” Before intercourse was a bad time because the man could lose his erection doing all that hard labor, during intercourse he could use a hand on the woman but then his penetrative rhythms might be disrupted, and after intercourse he wouldn’t be able to relax and the act would “be deprived of its mutual quality.” So even with doctors who understood women’s anatomy and sexual response, the male-centric focus of sex persevered.