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Note to G-Spot Debunkers: It Would Pay to Read the Original Book First Guys

Tue, 2010-01-05 00:13 — figleaf

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon has a very cool and fairly generous analysis of the, um, controversy over the existence, or lack thereof, of the “g-spot.” (Controversial not least because of some… interesting theories coming out of the same research shop. Via Debbie at Body Impolitic their theory was that women are supposed to have an evolutionary hard time having orgasms in order to test men’s prowess. Seriously. But I digress….)

Anyway, as part of her discussion Amanda correctly, I think, says

It’s interesting to consider if the G spot only occurs in some women, which would explain the huge gap between experiences without further shaming of women who don’t have G spot orgasms.

This is just a snippet, almost an aside. Read the rest of her post here.

For the record that’s what the original authors thought as well.

I’ve mentioned this before but I remember from Beverly Whipple, Ladas, Perry, and company’s original The G Spot: And Other Discoveries about Human Sexuality that the introduction goes specifically into that exact issue that not all women can expect to have them, and that if not they specifically shouldn’t worry about it.

In fact the book as a whole said more about handling expectation and shame than about any kind of tissue stimulation at all.

The introduction mentions specifically that women who read Freud in the 1940s and 1950s were expected to feel guilty for having orgasms from clitoral stimulation, and then later, after reading Masters & Johnson they were expected to feel guilty for having orgasms from vaginal stimulation. The authors thought that was… unfortunate.

Later there’s a whole chapter devoted to the principle that “the best is the enemy of the good,” by which they meant specifically that if people tried to obsess over having or (worse, I think) giving g-spot orgasms they were likely to wind up disappointed with their ordinary old eye-rolling, breathtaking, toe-curling ones. And, sure enough… But be darned if anyone should blame the original authors for that.

Oh, and another thing, the same book also introduced the idea of prostate stimulation in men. Gee, wonder why that idea wasn’t greeted with such widespread enthusiasm? And gee, wonder why men who can’t have them aren’t judged as losers the way women who don’t do the g-spot thing are. And finally, gee, wonder why no researchers are doing twins studies to try and debunk prostate sensitivity. But again I digress.

G-spots and prostates notwithstanding, another big contribution the book made was to introduce the importance of the pubococcygeus (a.k.a “PC muscle”) for both men and women’s genital health and sexual enjoyment. The authors were pretty adamant that Kegels and other pc muscle exercises were pretty important both for increasing the strength of orgasms (of any kind but especially g-spot ones) but also for reducing incontinence and prolapsed uteruses. Their proposed exercises for women are well known but less well-known are the ones for men which involve draping rolled-up towels and making them, um, bob.

Hmm. The book’s not actually that much about the actual g-spot. It was actually pretty radical (and thus most everything but the squirting parts have largely been ignored.) I highly recommend it. It used to be a huge best seller and I’m guessing you can still find copies in used-paperback bookstores. I imagine, could those researchers in the U.K. had they been interested. Just saying.

Bottom line, though, is that if you or your partner has one then great, cool. As long as you’re enjoying yourself and not stressing about it don’t worry about what researcher say. And of you or your partner doesn’t have one then, well, that’s great too. As long as you’re enjoying yourself and not stressing about it don’t worry what researchers say.

Blast From the Past: Rediscovering A Comment I Left at Em & Lo's About Blue Balls That I Should Have Posted Here

Wed, 2009-12-30 01:45 — figleaf


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.

—-

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.

An Em & Lo Reader Asks "Do Men Fake Orgasms?"

Thu, 2009-10-15 11:51 — figleaf

In this week’s Wise Guys feature Em & Lo pass along the question do men ever fake orgasm. They get three answers, all different, all interesting — from a straight single man (“of course!”), a straight married man (“I have personally only faked once.”) and a committed gay man (“If guys fake orgasms, then I ‘d love to know how.”) Read their answers in full here.

My take is it’s actually easier than it sounds. Even easier when there’s lots of lube. And even easier than that when you’re wearing a condom. (You can just say “oops, gotta get this off before it leaks” and scamper to the bathroom.) Back in the old pre-web days a popular Usenet poster also said it was easier than you’d think if a partner was deep-throating him.

And you might wonder how, if one was being deep throated, one would need to fake it. One answer would be if you’ve had too many orgasms recently but you still really like sex. Another would be that you’re taking those #%!$% SSR anti-depressants where you can’t come to save your life, where sex still feels really, really good, and where your partner nevertheless feels bad/inhibited/inadequate/uninterested if you’re not going to have one. There are other less cheery reasons as well (untreated depression, for instance) but those will do.

[Disclaimer: I also appear in Em & Lo’s Wise-Guy rotation. —fl]

Good Advice from Petra Boynton: Sex is an Experience, Not an Achievement

Tue, 2009-08-25 13:54 — figleaf

Dr. Petra Boynton slips in a really critical point about sex in general, in a very nice post about difficulties with orgasms.

Sex is something to experience, not achieve

She said it here.

Couple of points:

She’s most often asked by straight women about orgasm difficulties but her answers aren’t exclusively for them. Which is handy since whatever the averages might be, individuals with problems come in all genders, orientations, and ages. And as you read her post it’s very clear that she doesn’t mean you just experience sex and not worry about having orgasms.

But what strikes me about that little phrase is how it applies to so much else about sex besides orgasms, from virginity to marriage to first kisses to, for that matter, 20th (or 50th!) Anniversary celebrations. As Boynton says “It sounds corny but if you focus on the destination you may miss out on the journey.”

Note: I’ve made this post about one small almost-unrelated aside in Boynton’s post. If you do have problems with orgasms during sex, or feel you do, the rest of her post is worth a read.

O Say Can You See?

Wed, 2009-03-11 17:53 — figleaf

Ok, so… imagine we lived in a culture where people mostly just never smile. At least not in public, or even at home much, especially with the lights on. Although sometimes they’d get together, especially when they had a lot of trust and intimacy, and at home, in bed, with the lights off, they’d sometimes daringly tell each other jokes. And they’d enjoy it quite a lot, although they knew it was dirty and naughty and not what you should talk about during the day.

Imagine how shy and embarrassed they’d be about letting anyone see their “smile” face. :-) Talk about funny looking! I mean, eyes squinching shut? Cheeks bulging to the sides? Teeth showing and sometimes the whole inside of the mouth?!?! Occasionally tears in the corners of their eyes?

Ewww, totally embarrassing, right? And no way anyone would want to see them that way.

Even if they had lovingly, carefully, secretly, thoughtfully told the joke that produced that awful face, right? Why that would be the last person you’d want to see you that way! Right?

That’s sort of how I feel about worrying about “O” face.

It’s not that I wouldn’t worry about other people seeing my O-face. Because… well… um… because even though yours is adorable… beautiful… and outright heart-beatingly, breath-shorteningly, denim-strainingly hot… mine just has to look awfully, embarrassingly dumb. Right? It’s not just because I’m not used to seeing my own either. It’s not, it’s not! Right? :-)

Ahah! What Ev-Psych *Really* Thinks About Women's Sexuality

Mon, 2009-01-26 01:54 — figleaf

Holly of Self-Portrait as tracked down the answer to a question that was bothering me earlier. (I didn’t mention it in this post but I nearly snarked that however solid the research it couldn’t have been done by sociobiologists evolutionary psychologists because they did the research on men.)

But what REALLY irritated me was this statement:

The female orgasm is the focus of much research because it appears to have no reproductive purpose. Women can become pregnant whatever their pleasure levels
Yeah, well, ejaculation and orgasm are typically linked in men, but they don’t have to be. When there’s orgasm but no ejaculation, it’s called a “dry orgasm.” When there’s ejaculation but no orgasm, it’s called ejaculatory anhedonia. Google the terms if you don’t believe me.

And ejaculation could have evolved so that it felt every bit as good as emptying one’s bladder or sneezing forcefully or smoothly moving one’s bowels—but no better.

Seriously. Why is there this sense that men’s pleasure is completely appropriate and natural and biologically wise, but women’s pleasure is mysterious, weird and superfluous?

Read the quote in context here.

First of all while I mostly agree I think that “focus of so much research” business is bullshit. They study women’s orgasms for the same reason they buy heterosexual porn — it’s an excuse to get closer to women’s pee-pees, which, despite being a feature of roughly 51% of the population is nevertheless an elusive holy grail to those guys. But second of all I think it’s because, like way too many other people (but clearly not Holly) they see men as the sex-class side of the no-sex class paradigm and just take men’s orgasms as inevitable, uninteresting, and assumed.

And Holly’s right. Male behavior in quite a few other species, even mammalian species (see, for instance, ungulates), seem to be a lot more like an urgent itch than anticipation of an eyeball-rolling orgasm. Which eyeball-rolling distraction, for prey species like, say, antelope, would be an invitation to dinner with the nearest lion anyway. Therefore just assuming the only way to get men to mate is to dangle the kind of orgasms we… and actually only a handful of other species… have is biologically problematic.

One of the fun things about sociobiology/ev-psych, though, is that the state of research is such that you can make up all sorts of stories without worrying about fear of contradiction.

My own favorite pulled-out-of-my-hat explanation of big orgasms in the human male, by the way, also resolves the alleged mystery of women’s orgasms in a reproductively significant but not sexually significant way: as infant head size in humans grew to the point it significantly affected the survival of both infants and women contingent evolution seized randomly on materials at hand… which happened to be the already malliable-due-to-dimorphism tissue of the internal clitoris… and grew it so it would better pad the urethra from crushing as the baby’s head passes through the birth canal. Survival-driven evolution often being a lot less exact than commonly thought, making the inner clitoris bigger would make connecting nerves bigger as well. And given that so much of basic fetal genital male architecture is derived from shared genes rather than genes on the male-only Y-chromosome, any increase in women’s enervation would tend to be picked up in male genitals as well. Bottom line? Women because women needed bigger clitorises in order to survive labor and delivery they incidentally got bonus orgasm and… even more incidentally men got them too. Mystery solved…

Or solved at least as solidly as the average cultural-assumption-reinforcing, heterocentric ev-psych explanation. Hey, where’s my grant?

Oh yeah, and with the mystery now being solved maybe we can pull some seduction-community subscribers Ev-Psych researcher’s hands out of their pants and start doing a little more basic research?

Sheesh!

Men and Women Aren't *Exactly* the Same... But We're Not *That* Different Either

Sat, 2009-01-10 14:15 — figleaf

Dr. Kate, who’s recently moved to her own blog, Gynotalk, posts a reader’s question

So, here’s a twist: I (the girl) orgasm super easily, while my boyfriend does not—in fact, he’s only come during sex with me once, and that was the first time in his life (he’s almost 30). He can come if I go down on him (although I am the first girl he has been able to with and he didn’t for the first few months of our relationship) and it took him a while to even come when I used my hand. He thinks something is physically wrong with him

Read the quote in context here.

I don’t actually mind her answer but I do have some reservations about it.

I don’t think that your boyfriend’s issues are physical ones – a circumcision (good or bad) shouldn’t affect his ability to orgasm (though yes, it can affect his surface sensitivity) – for most men, it’s primarily a pressure/friction issue, not a skin-touch issue, like for women. And the fact that he can come “pretty regularly” in ANY way, means that his “plumbing” is fine. So that’s the good news, since most physical problems don’t have easy answers.

But what I think is happening is that he has some mental difficulty with intimacy and sex – if he can regularly come through masturbation, but has a harder time with a partner, then something larger is going on.

It’s entirely possible that something larger is going on with the correspondent and her partner, but maybe it’s just because I’m old enough to remember advice in sex manuals from the 60s**

But check out the results if you run that post through Regender.com’s very-clever gender-switching engine (which among other things replaces “Dr. Kate” with “Dr. Karl”)

Dr. Karl,

So, here’s a twist: I (the boy) orgasm super easily, while my girlfriend does not—in fact, she’s only come during sex with me once, and that was the first time in her life (she’s almost 30). She can come if I go down on her (although I am the first boy she has been able to with and she didn’t for the first few months of our relationship) and it took her a while to even come when I used my hand. ...

I’m sure the problem is compounded by other stuff. She’s less self-conscious about this than she used to be, but if in 10 years of having sex YOU weren’t able to orgasm, it would just be like the biggest, most embarrassing elephant in the room, right? I can’t help but think that there’s something more I could do. I really, really want her to be able to come again, and now it’s all I think about! Before she did, I didn’t think much of it because she had said she wouldn’t be able to and I just went with that. But then she did, and it was amazing for both of us, and now it’s like my hopes are up.

Wishing for Coming

Dear Wishing,

I don’t think that your girlfriend’s issues are physical ones … for most women, it’s primarily a pressure/friction issue, not a skin-touch issue, like for men. And the fact that she can come “pretty regularly” in ANY way, means that hers “plumbing” is fine. So that’s the good news, since most physical problems don’t have easy answers.

But what I think is happening is that she has some mental difficulty with intimacy and sex – if she can regularly come through masturbation, but has a harder time with a partner, then something larger is going on. Kudos to you for being so caring and concerned about her pleasure, and clearly she feels more comfortable with you than with previous partners.

Regender-ized version from here.

Probably not the advice one would offer were the roles reversed!

I’m saying this not in a “what about the men” sort of way but because while the bell-curve distribution of orgasmic success for men tends to lie to the left of the graph for women it’s still a bell-shaped curve.

Speaking for myself I’m pretty sure I’m sexually perfectly healthy but I didn’t figure out how to have orgasms from fellatio till well into my 30s (not enough pressure where I needed it, and generally not enough pelvic-muscle involvement to make up for it.) And when I briefly took a prescription anti-depressant I still thoroughly enjoyed sex but was barely able to have an orgasm manually, let alone during any kind of sex with a partner.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that cliches about expected male functionality can be as perilous as the ones about women were 30 years ago. (Cool by the way, that Wishing doesn’t feel out of place that she comes super easily. In earlier times women often would preface something like that with “I’m like a man that way because I…”)

[** By the way, see Holly’s post for why I might remember so much about sex manuals from the 60s! And while I’m at it see also Lynn Gazzis-Sax’s take on the extent of gender differences in “Men are from Baltimore, Women are from Philadelphia.” Oh, and finally, see also Anastasia’s take on the return of orgasms after discontinuing use of anti-depressants. —fl]

The Chivalry/Chauvinism of "She Comes First"

Fri, 2008-10-10 15:36 — figleaf

I love me some Debauchette. She’s got a post that’s just dear to my heart. (Italics mine.)

I just read this: A man should always give a woman an orgasm before he lets her please him. Nice sentiment, but it bothers the hell out of me.

There are plenty of things about that sentence that make me uncomfortable, but I’m especially hung up on this word “give.” I don’t think orgasms can be given. Maybe other people feel differently, but to me, they’re more alchemy than entity.

I think that sentence bothers me because it puts the responsibility on men to make that orgasm happen, to “give” it (and it suggests that it’s theirs to give), when it’s also a matter of being physically sensitive, responsive, and receptive as a woman. It makes me think of the men I’ve been with who seemed so stressed at the prospect of sex; they approached my pussy like they were defusing a bomb. I think we tend to do that generally, as a culture, teach men to think that our pussies are dormant and dependent on their fingerwork and/or cockplay to come alive. Which I don’t want to downplay — my sexual world revolves around those cocks and those hands, and wrists and forearms, and… mm. But I imagine that we shift the responsibility to men because we encourage women to be sheltered from sexual knowledge, something I strongly disagree with. It does nothing for communication between the sexes when one is supposed to know everything and the other is supposed to remain ignorant.

Read the quote in context here.

I totally get what motivated the whole “she comes first” movement (previously it was something more like “she comes at all? eww!“ so it was a big step up)I don’t think I became a considerate lover, or really even a good one, till I figured that orgasms, let alone what happens after “consent,” wasn’t all up to me. Or, ahem, all about me.

She also highlights the other sour note in that “he gives first” philosophy.

Another thing I don’t like about that sentence up there? The idea that sex is just a sequence of acts or, worse, a bartering system where perfectly good sex acts are reduced to tit for tat (unless you’re doing some hot secretary/boss roleplay). The best sex I’ve had has never been a sequence of anything. Just a deeply satisfying, bruising blur of motion.

Sure, “give her an orgasm first” sounds nicer than, say, “give her 50 bucks before you let her…” or “give her a ring before you let her…” but it’s still kind of transactional that way.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with transactional sex, but it’s kind of gotta be an agreement from both parties, and that “give her an orgasm before letting her pleasure you” sounds awfully unilateral. Not to mention all about him. Which would be fine if he was a fucking customer, or if women really were supposed to be up there on pedestals passively waiting for men to bring them stuff but…

You’d think sex was a lot more intimate than, say, car-pooling but I don’t really remember anyone saying “you give a carpool buddy a ride before you let them give you one.” And it’s because with something like car-pooling you’re really being partners — you’re taking care of each other.

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Nerd digression: Ya know, if I was a sociologist or cultural anthropologist I think it would be interesting to investigate whether or what kind of cross-pollination there might have been between the post-1980s devolution of top-down, hierarchical business industrial organizational models into more “bubble up” team-focused tech-style models on the one hand and the emergence of post-80s agency-based models of sex and intimacy? I’m definitely not saying one derives from the other, just that it’s interesting that both developed around the same time and I’m wondering how much of a coincidence it might be.

I’m not bringing that up to be completely random (as the one-time flat-hierarchy/small-group-organization advocate Bill Gates used to say) but because when I gave up my own “heirarchical” model of sex I discovered that two contributors bring way more creativity to a relationship than just one can.

And speaking of that (and perhaps speaking also of the strong responses disputing the imagined decline of sex writing) Scott Adams had something interesting, and apropos, to say about creativity today at Dilbert.com Blog

Recently I was asked if human creativity is nearing its limits. It seems as if every idea has already been done. Regular readers of this blog know that every time I describe what I think is a new idea, someone provides a link to an earlier description of the same idea.

I don’t think creativity is coming to an end. I think creativity is increasing at an increasing rate, and always will.

Creativity is generally a combination of existing ideas. If there were only two concepts in the universe, creativity would be “What happens if we put them together?” If you add a third and fourth concept to the universe, the number of creative combinations shoots up.

The Internet allows you to check the originality of your idea quickly, so it sometimes seems that all the good ideas have been taken. But the Internet also seeds us with many more concepts than we would otherwise be exposed to.

It’s pretty inspiring, especially in these doomy, gloomy times. Read the rest here.

Just saying

Radically Redefining Vanilla

Sun, 2008-02-17 10:43 — figleaf


Photo by Flickr user Saffanna. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Part A: Observation
So Sam Sugar of SugarBank reports that

The Mainichi Daily News, my breakfast read, reports that vaginal ejaculation disorder affects 70% of Japanese males… Supposedly it’s a byproduct of masturbatory techniques which don’t feel like a vagina.

See the rest of Sugar’s take on the story here.

And here’s a bit more detail from the actual Mainichi Daily News article

Tsueno Akaeda, a doctor who runs a clinic in Tokyo’s Roppongi, agrees with urologist Nagao.

“There are definitely more people with vaginal ejaculation disorder than there used to be,” he says. “There has been incredible progress made in masturbation goods and there are plenty of people who can ejaculate into an artificial vagina, but not the real thing. I get more than a few men come to see me about that. And those in their 20s and 30s have grown up watching adult movies. They find masturbation easier and more satisfying than intercourse.”

Experts say one of the main reasons men develop vaginal ejaculation disorder is that they learn how to masturbate using methods that feel distinctly different from vaginas, such as rubbing up against pillows or lying face down and moving back and forward for stimulation until climax.

“Naturally picking up somewhat unnatural methods has to be the main reason,” Nagao says. “Or, some guys obtain pleasure from some method they’ve happened to discover almost by accident and keep on doing it that way. It used to be that your bad buddies would tell you the best way to jerk off.”

Source: Mainichi Daily News, which appears to be the online, English-language version of Japan’s oldest newspaper but may or may not be its most respectable.

Sometime last year I think I linked to a post by a young man recounting to other young men how actual sex with actual women isn’t so much what one might expect when one’s entire prior experience has been masturbating to porn.

Which, now that I think about it, might explain the otherwise inexplicable popularity of porn-style “money shot” masturbation during real, actual sex with another person.

And this actually makes sense. Male masturbation really doesn’t feel very much like vaginal intercourse, and depending on how long one has been doing it then it really might take a little practice to learn to have orgasms another way. (Take that, evolutionary “male-orgasms-are-easily-tied-to-reproduction” psychologists!)

Oh, and while I’m at it, men obviously aren’t alone in this. My newsfeed reader informs me that “Slut Machine” of Jezebel just posted her own variation on a very familiar theme

I would read about “mind-blowing” sex in Joan Collins and V.C. Andrews books, passages that likened women’s orgasms to lightning strikes and bells sounding, so I had really hyped up sex in my mind. I knew I wouldn’t come on my first couple tries at sex with a boy. Finally, after fooling around with my boyfriend for a month or two, I came while he was going down on me, and I remember being like, “Oh! That’s what that is? I can do that better and faster by myself!” By then, I realized that what would happen when I touched myself was an orgasm, but for some reason I thought it would be different — or better — with a partner. And sometimes it is.

Read the quote in context here.

Part B: Inquiry

But here’s an interesting question: to what extent is the notion that penis-in-vagina intercourse as the inevitable, “natural” conclusion to heterosexual sex a social construct and how much of it really is biologically imperative? Seriously! For real! Totally serious question.

Because it seems to me that while some men and women obviously take to it like cats take to landing on their feet, and while many others figure it out sooner or later, and while pretty much every story anthropological or erotic, dry as dust or tongue in cheek, assumes that intercourse is the natural, the inevitable, and the quintessential erotic experience for men and that women’s “problem” is that their architecture just isn’t “designed” to “properly” or “naturally” enjoy intercourse. Heck, the “fore” in “foreplay” is a contraction for the “playing around” men are supposed to do to “help” get our partners ready do before getting down to the… what?... the serious work of intercourse?

And yet along comes word that, left to their own devices men’s ability to have “vaginal” orgasms (ok, orgasms in their partner’s vagina) can easily approach the same rates commonly attributed to women.

But…

See…

Not to put on my tinfoil hat about evolutionary behaviorism again or anything but here’s one of my big problems with their most fundamental assumptions: all flatworm sex might be reproductive sex but not all human sex is reproductive sex. Instead much, in fact nearly all human sex appears to be recreational. When left to our own devices anyway. And, as Tsueno Akaeda in the Mainichi article or pretty much every Babeland page will tell you, the devices we can leave ourselves with demonstrate incredible progress in masturbation goods. Which, contra sociobiology, isn’t a issue at all unless a species becomes so incompetent at sex for reproduction that we manage do it at less than 2.2 times in our sexual lifetimes.

And…

Meanwhile…

I actually enjoy intercourse quite a lot, especially when a partner and I have been together long enough to be able to learn each other’s rhythms and rhymes well enough to both have orgasms that way. And given the subtle signals I’ve sometimes gotten from my partners (“I want you *here,” with a pull and a push, for instance) I’m not the only one who enjoys it.

But intercourse is a bit problematic orgasmically for me. It took me a couple of tries the first time I had intercourse. Later I had the opposite problem and had to wrestle with coming in the first moments which, platitudes about machismo not withstanding, deprives the victim as well as his partner of quite a lot of longer-term, slower-to-develop, deeper sensations and eventual orgasms. And even when I was experiencing prematurity with some partners there were others with whom I never came at all either because of fit, or degrees of lubrication, or how they would grind into the relatively sensation-free upper length instead of the highly sensitized bottom or sides of my cock.

But…

Then…

So if with just a little masturbatory habit-formation men as well as women can learn to have better orgasms without intercourse, and if vaginal intercourse is, on aggregate, the highest risk activity as far as pregnancy and social/sexual disease transmission (funny how the CDC never reports “honeymoon cystitis” as a sexually-transmitted disease even though it’s caused primarily by intercourse), then…

Part C: Recommendation

Why not make the heads of the Abstinence-Only/True-love-Waits/Virginity-Pledge/social-control-through-sexual-scarcity crowds explode (not to mention the heads of their minority-viewpoint “all heterosexual intercourse is rape” bedfellows) by recommending that young heterosexuals not bother with intercourse till marriage. Oh, heck, not to bother even after marriage except for procreation!

But not to avoid it because intercourse is precious, or special, or the seat of sexual oppression but because…

...once you strip away all its socially-constructed significance intercourse is actually kind of boring compared to all the other things one or more people can do with each other!

Feels Like Dancing?

Fri, 2008-01-18 16:17 — figleaf

So yesterday I proposed a little thought experiment. Here’s another based, in part, on the old joke that members of [insert organization of your choice] frown on sex standing up because it might lead to dancing.

Let’s say you like couples dancing. It doesn’t really matter which kind, ballroom, swing, or dire mosh as long as it’s one of those things you could do for hours just for the pleasure of moving your body in tune with one or more other people. Something you do whenever you can, something you seek out, invite others to, and no matter how tired you get you don’t want to stop, and no matter how sore your knees or feet or head next morning you’re ready to roll again by the weekend. In other words, like, you like to dance.

Now imagine you’ve got one or more dance partners, good dancers who love dancing with you, keep up with you, are as likely call you as you are to call, and are just the kind of people we all know who are just there for you any time you want to head out to a club or ball.

So now where would it put you if, without them being sneaky or anything, you know that sometimes your dance partners had an orgasm just from you dancing with them the way you love to dance and the way you’d dance with anyone else?

I ask in part because for a lot of my life I’ve always been kind of obsessive that my partner should always have an orgasm if we have sex… without much concern whether I have one. And while I often haven’t had orgasms during sex I don’t think I’ve ever walked home thinking “dang, what a disappointment that was!” Instead sometimes I’m sailing, as chock full of endorphins and emotions as if I’d, well, been dancing instead. Which shows how I feel about the thought experiment. But now I want to know your thoughts?

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