Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

This is one of those tricky posts that starts out seeming to be exactly like one thing, but is actually about something else entirely.

Bad Influence Girl has a suggestion (not really a “sex tip”) that I just can’t speak highly enough of: don’t feel weird about rubbing your or your partner’s clitoris during intercourse.

for some reason i was always one of those girls who believed that masturbating yourself while having sex with a partner was rude.

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when you’re making love you have to be sensitive to your partner’s feelings and you have to try to work your suggestions into the session without being quite as declarative about what you might want.  or at least that’s what i used to think.

i thought that right up until i was fucking my ex-lover and he wanted to fuck and i wasn’t feeling really ready yet but i did it anyway and since i didn’t give a fig about him i reached down and i started to masturbate myself.

i did this cautiously because i really did believe that a man would get insulted by a woman helping herself out during sex. yeah, i don’t get what i was thinking either.

his response was, needless to say, not what i expected.  he proceeded to get more turned on and say something along the lines of “oh yeah” and then charge forward with every evidence of greater enjoyment.

this was astonishing to me.  wait wait wait, you mean if i help myself out that will turn you on???

Read the quote in context here.

Now it’s really really important that you don’t mistake encouraging women to get themselves off (with fingers or toys) as letting men off the hook or, even worse, as yet another way to put on a show to make the man think you’re “hott.” Nuh-uh. There’s still plenty of ways he can cooperate with you to make sure you both have an equally fulfilling time.

But let’s get over the notion that “She Comes First” means her/your orgasms are all his/my responsibility. It’s not that it’s not very, very nice of a partner… not to mention fun and intrinsically pleasurable… for a man to put their hands, tongues, thighs, and/or cocks to work with focus aforethought to his partner’s climaxes. It’s just that an awful lot of the “she comes first” mentality revolves around regressive ideas about men were designated the active party and women were supposed to receive passively whatever he he dished out, however capably or incapably.

And let’s get over even the faintest fantasy that women’s orgasms from hands-free intercourse are “normal” or “real” orgasms. First because that would make somewhere between 60% and 80% of women unreal and abnormal… and that’s just not how rounding numbers up or down in arithmetic works. And second because, again, as Rachel Maines puts it, assuming cocks are the right, best, or most “natural” tool for producing orgasms is being pretty androcentric. Remember, this isn’t saying nobody has orgasms from hands-free intercourse, just that nobody should assume that if they don’t they or their partners are doing something wrong.

Speaking for myself I started out in that me-the-provider, she-the-beneficiatry mindset where no matter what position, I made sure I was in good contact with her clitoris, and no matter what there was no way I was going to come before her… which considering how cramped my wrist might get, or tired I’d get supporting all my weight with one free arm, wasn’t all that difficult. And to be honest it’s fun, it’s sexy, it feels wonderful (for both of us) and most of the time, in most positions, in most situations, it’s not hard to swirl slippery-slick fingers over the pencil-firm ridges under butter-soft hoods. And finally, immature thuggery notwithstanding my orgasms feel especially good when you’re bucking and throbbing and squeezing your muscles through your own.

But! I’m just sayin’ though that it doesn’t have to be his job. There are some positions where my hands might be needed more to brace me, to hold you, to keep us at tempo, or upright (or even afloat!) And if not? Well, it’s still ok, even great, for you to slip a free hand between or over or underneath us to press and roll your own flesh. Even if what I’m doing feels good, even if it feels very good, if you can make it feel even better then the more the merrier!

If the idea of women being responsible for their own orgasms would have been largely off the table for first-wave feminists and their partners (who weren’t even allowed to vote let alone use birth control let alone express anything but puritanical virtue), and if the idea would have been infuriating to 2nd-wave feminists (who with 100% justification were dead sick and tired of men not even realizing their partners could have orgasms, and being slightly squicked — in court! — at the very idea) it seems like it seems perfectly logical to third-wave feminism where enjoying sex for one’s self instead of “giving” yourself to a man was one of the earliest distinctions.

Anyway, while it might seem a little counterintuitive for a man to encourage his partners to take care of their own pleasure during sex, and especially for a man to be encouraging other men to encourage their partners to do likewise there’s a method to my madness.

Two methods, actually. If the first method is that men and women both need to get over the notion that men should ultimately be the providers of women’s pleasure[**] and women the passive recipients, what of my second method?

Well, Bad Influence Girl hints at it in her post…

...it’s funny that i ever found [masturbating myself] strange since i always (and still do) liked it when a man helped himself during fellatio.  in fact it made fellatio more fun for me when they participated… and yet i still thought it was weird.

And this gets to the point I really wanted to talk about. Oh, but let me make one more little digression: almost everything we talk about when we talk about “immutable truths about sex” deals primarily with sex between the ages of, oh, fourteen and twenty four. Period. Anything after that is pretty much expected more of the same thing only maybe with more wrinkles and practice, plus some kind of something to do with hormones, yada-yada-yada.

Instead both men and women’s interests and drives tend to continue to develop, converging to a considerable degree sometime in the 40s so that both men and women report that intimacy and sex are equally important. And, not infrequently, the roles occasionally reverse such that older men may be more content to snuggle while women begin to grow a little impatient with it.

So after that brief digression where are we? Oh yeah. If you look at the entire sexually active population rather than just the 14-24-year-old section, you start running into a lot of women who know what they like and how to ask for it, and you start running into a lot of men who’ve discovered the pleasures… and sometimes the necessity… of taking your time.

And given our weird little sexist tradition of women rejecting younger partners at much the same rate men reject older ones, and you wind up with a years-long period in the average heterosexual relationship where it’s the man rather than the woman who many need to help himself out the way Bad Influence Girl helps herself.

And I’d like to add that it’s no more good or bad when men do it than when women do. And, as with Bad Influence Girl’s experience, it doesn’t, and even shouldn’t have to be “cheating” to do so.

This is not, incidentally, an invitation to, or justification for, the pornified convention of “facials” and “money shots” as a matter of course. Just making the point that not everybody, at every point in their lives, is able to come with the (stereotypical) effortless reliability of a teenage boy.

Oh, one final point for both men and women: there are a number of medications out there that suppress elements of sexual functionality. The anti-depressant Prozac was notorious for almost completely blocking orgasm while allowing lust to build, and interest in sex remain, unimpeded.

Years ago now I took a mild dose of a related anti-depressant and yeah, for about two years sex was great but orgasms elusive in the extreme! This was pretty demoralizing for my partner at the time who didn’t object to my energizer-like endurance but did object to how pretty much everything she or I did left my cock standing happy with the attention but perplexed as to what to do next. In that situation, if I was going to have an orgasm at all it pretty much had to be me with my hand, moving at exactly the right speed, with an almost scary amount of pressure, for a really, really long time.

Again, because sex is actually a ton of fun even without orgasms, I really didn’t mind a bit. But again, it left my partner at the time quite a bit less enthusiastic, and unsure of her own abilities. If I’d had the realization then that Bad Influence Girl raised we probably could have had more productive conversations and a lot less guilt on both our parts.

So. To conclude what’s become a really unforgivably long post, At various times in one’s sexual life we all might find it helpful to take mattes into our own hands during partnered sex. That’s perfectly fine, but I’d like to add that it’s also not necessary to wait till it’s helpful as… it can also be a lot of fun, for both parties.

[** Note: Yes, even though through porn and knuckleheaded Details Magazine articles men seem increasingly content with unreciprocated blowjobs, the fact remains that if women are going to get orgasmic rather than service-related or “job-well-done” related pleasure from men the assumption is that it should be the men who do… or don’t… “give” it to them. So I stand by my point. —fl]