Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

While reassuring yet another correspondent who’s concerned about being able to… I dunno… perform vaginal orgasms Jessi Fischer of The Sexademic nails the crippling folly of making orgasms the stat-counter of sex. That and the equally crippling trap of distinguishing “foreplay” from the “real thing” of intercourse.

Of course, none of this is to suggest you should toss penetrative vaginal sex off the list of enjoyable sexual stimulation. Kissing may not make you come, but damn it feels good.

She said it here.

There’s so much about sex that feels good. Orgasms? Oh yeah, and woe betide those who arbitrarily decides they’re not necessary for their partners! But if the only point was orgasms then why would anyone ever bother with kissing?

It’s not a trick question. There are plenty of things that feel good about sex, sometimes very good, that don’t* make you come. Kissing is only the most obvious.

* Ok, ok, someone somewhere will always pipe in that THEY are able to come from activity X, Y, or Z. But while that’s obviously wonderful for them, if most people don’t come that way it doesn’t refute the point.

Via the authors of the NCBI ROFL Discover Blog, medical researchers used ultrasound to record the anatomy of penis-in-vagina intercourse. Their shocking conclusion?

We focused on the size of the clitoral bodies before and after coitus. Results. The coronal section demonstrated that the penis inflated the vagina and stretched the root of the clitoris that has consequently a very close relationship with the anterior vaginal wall. This could explain the pleasurable sensitivity of this anterior vaginal area called the G-spot. Conclusions. The clitoris and vagina must be seen as an anatomical and functional unit being activated by vaginal penetration during intercourse.”

Read the quote in context here.

It’s basically confirmation that the nominal controversy over the “g-spot” is more semantic than anatomical: there’s a spot. It might or might not be “the Gräfenberg Spot.” Or instead it could turn out to be something else in the same location that responds to stimulation in the same way that we just call the G-spot.

This might sound a bit like oversharing (although I think I haven’t been sharing enough lately) but it occurs to me that a big part of the controversy is that it’s considered a problem that 100% of women don’t respond to stimulation in the area. Except that a) it’s not considered a problem that some women don’t respond, or don’t respond “correctly” to stimulation of any number of other locations including direct contact with the external clitoral body. And also that b) it’s not considered a problem (in fact it doesn’t appear to be considered at all that different men respond best to stimulation of different parts of their genitals too.

The oversharing bit would be that I’m really only orgasmically sensitive in one spot on my penis. It’s about the size of a nickel about a quarter of the way down from the top. Other men are evidently sensitive in other areas. I know this because until they had the time to figure out how I worked other partners have tended to concentrate their attention on other spots — ones that worked for their own previous partners. The glans itself for some. The corona for others. The frenulum seems to be very popular. And one partner, who hadn’t had a lot of partners, was completely baffled when I asked her why she concentrated so much at the very base of my penis. Turns out that had been a holy-grail spot for her two previous partners.

Let’s call that last spot the male “B-Spot.” And do a bunch of MRIs, and electromyography, and write dozens of books, hundreds of articles, and thousands of blog posts and tweets about whether it does or doesn’t exist. Let’s spend a lot of energy demonstrating that anatomically there’s no special gland, duct, specialized tissue, or ganglia at that location that could possibly account for reports that it might in fact respond well to stimulation in some men. We can call the glans area the male “g-spot,” the corona the “c-spot,” the frenulum the “f-spot,” and my spot “the other f-spot” just to make it all sound more obfuscating. Oh, and for extra credit let’s spend a little time castigating men for either claiming they prefer stimulation in some of those spots. Or for instead claiming they don’t. I know, we’ll call them “immature,” or “repressed,” or “not in touch with their bodies,” or even thralls of penetrative ideology” if they can’t find theirs. Then let’s sell a bunch of books and videos demonstrating how men can “find” theirs. And finally we’ll create a whole ‘nother culture around saying how if they ever could find them they’d have mind-blowing orgasms instead of the perfectly lovely orgasms they already have.

Oh wait, no, for men it’s just one spot, “the penis,” and everybody knows all about that. Never mind that men’s “g-spot” is about the same number of centimeters distant from their “b-spots” as clitorises are from women’s “g-spots.” And if it doesn’t work the same way then they’re probably latent homosexuals if they prefer female partners, or maybe latently hetero if they prefer men.

Or we could just acknowledge that genitals, men’s and womens, are delightfully diverse puzzles for which there’s usually no “right” answer.

That’s how I like to read research like the one cited as “ROFL” whacky. And while I strongly agree with Sungold that we might want to keep electromyography (ouch!) to a minimum, I’d still like to see more rather than less interest in the ways all our different spots work.

Another finished draft I inexplicably neglected to post earlier this year provides a timely opportunity to link to Emily Nagoski. —fl

Going back to that goofy idea proposed most recently by g-spot denier Tim Spector that women have “evolved” orgasmic (difficulty during intercourse only, natch) in order to “test” the reproductive worthiness of their male partners.

That notion’s first screeching collision with reality, as Holly Pervocracy and I’m sure others pointed out, would be where waiting for orgasms during intercourse would seem to be a bit late in proto-women’s mate-selection process.

The second obvious collision with reality would be the part about where roughly a third of all women report they never have orgasms from intercourse.

A third obvious collision would be that there’s no evidence whatsoever that women who have fewer orgasms from intercourse reproductively “penalize” their partners by having fewer children than women who do. (A corollary would be that there’s no evidence that childless women are any less, or more, orgasmic than their childbearing counterparts.)

There’s a completely non-obvious collision.

It’s non-obvious because it’s not particularly related to orgasms.

Which makes it almost completely non-obvious because if you’re reading this in English you’ve almost certainly been indoctrinated with the idea that sex is all about orgasms. Or, in the slightly more sophisticated version sex is all about orgasms for men, and all about the promise that they might “give” women orgasms on the way to having their own. Or in the slightly less sophisticated version sex is all about orgasms for men and economic security for women and “their” babies.

The non-obvious part is that even men and women who never have orgasms at all, let alone orgasms with partners, let alone orgasms during intercourse still desire sex.

Intensely.

Sometimes achingly.

If you wanted to claim humans were evolved to desire sex, meaning sex just about any way you care to define it, I’d have to agree. No problem. If you wanted to claim humans evolved to have orgasms I’m probably quibble that they’re more of a side effect than directly selected for. If you were going to claim, though, that one sex evolved not to have orgasms in order to “test” the fitness of the other sex? I’d have to pat you on the head as if you were a simpleton and write long posts about it.

In fact, protestations of armchair evolutionary psychologists notwithstanding there’s no evidence that women or men really need to have orgasms to reproduce. That doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy them thoroughly, just that there’s no evidence that they’re needed to encourage other organisms to reproduce, nor is there evidence that we need them either.

Photo “Blue bells or something” by Flickr user leff. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Em & Lo have a year-end post titled “Top 10 Things We Learned from EMandLO.com Commenters in ‘09.” One of the items on their list was “Blue Balls Exist.”

Turns out I left a comment about it there that, in retrospect, is good enough — and first-person enough, to repost a minimally-edited version here.

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I didn’t start getting them till pretty late in life. It’s a deep ache, not so much in the testicles as higher up. It sounds like it’s different for different men but for me just being aroused for a long time isn’t enough to trigger it. It also has to have been a pretty long time (maybe a week or longer) since my last ejaculation too. Since that doesn’t happen very often blue balls don’t happen to me very often either. I mean, even without frequent partnered sex you can still have frequent masturbation.

And speaking of which, I’ve got a feeling that as masturbation has lost most of its stigma blue balls has probably become a lot less frequent in the general population. And if nothing else, its certainly painful enough, and the “preventative medicine” is pleasant enough and harmless enough, that it shouldn’t have to be terribly common either.

I agree with some of the other men [who commented at Em & Lo’s] that ejaculation once you’ve got blue balls isn’t entirely pleasant. The orgasm’s nice but the achy cramps in (what seems to me like) the epididymis and vas deferens knocks out a lot of the enjoyment. But! The nice thing? If it’s been that long since my last orgasm it’s pretty easy to get aroused again. And the next orgasm feels just fine.

All that said, I disagree completely with anyone who suggests that “taking care” of blue balls anyone’s responsibility but one’s own. It’s usually up to you to go that long without ejaculating, it’s easy (and often surprisingly quick) to deal with, and if you’ve had them once you can recognize the warning signs soon enough to call things off before it really gets bad.

So. Sample script you can try out: “I’m really enjoying this but if we keep it up I’m going to get blue balls. I’d like to keep going if you’d feel comfortable helping me have an orgasm. But otherwise I want to stop.” And, incidentally, by making it a choice for your partner instead of an obligation she (assuming your partner’s a woman) may be a lot more interested in continuing than she might otherwise have been.

(I originally said it here.

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Note: further down in their comments a number of women mention that they get distinct and painful aching after prolonged arousal. I’m betting they’re not the only ones. Yet more evidence that men and women have more in common than Mars/Venus ideology would have us believe.

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Feel free to chime in with your experiences with “blue balls,” whether you have actual balls or not.