Great Sex Secret (6 page)

• Reliable birth control eliminated one of the biggest worries—getting pregnant.

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With these revolutionary developments came the
potential
for women to be more assertive and articulate about their sexual desires and the
possibility
that couples might come to see intercourse as an arena for mutual enjoyment and fun—not just procreation and male pleasure. Given the long history of Wham-Bam sex, this was potentially a profound shift—especially the idea that intercourse could
and should
give sexual satisfaction and emotional fulfillment to a woman.

But
wanting
to make this happen has never been enough. Making love in a way that is mutually satisfying has never been easy or obvious. To overcome the built-in barriers, a couple has to be able to
talk
about what’s working and what isn’t and experiment with solutions, giving each other honest feedback at every turn. While some creative lovers have found their way to mutual satisfaction, they are the exception, and the reason is most people’s very low comfort level talking about sex—all stemming from the continuing shame and ambivalence that hovers around the subject in most homes and sex-education classes.

Many women—even some feminists who are highly liberated in other spheres of life—are not comfortable enough with their own sexuality to point out what their partners should do. They’re reluctant to demand equal time in the orgasm department—and perhaps most important, don’t have a clear sense of how mutual
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pleasure can occur during intercourse.

Women who don’t communicate their sexual needs are going to have to put up with clueless, unsatisfying lovemaking year after year. After all, a man isn’t born knowing how to give pleasure to a woman any more than a woman is born knowing how to cook. And where are men supposed to learn how to sensitively and appropriately stimulate the clitoris during lovemaking?

Certainly not from their tongue-tied fathers, their boastful locker-room peers, high-school “health” classes, love scenes in literature, porno films, orgasm-faking prostitutes, and the vast majority of sex advice material.

No, the best place to learn how to make love is with a lover. And is there anything sweeter than a couple (safely) exploring and learning about sexual pleasure together?

This is where a man can get the kind of honest, minute-by-minute feedback that will help him progress from bumbling ignorance to loving proficiency.

But communication barriers prevent many couples (even the most romantic) from making much progress in bed. Here’s how one man described this dilemma as he and his first lover tried to figure out how to make love: Why didn’t I just ask her some questions? Very few men are comfortable asking a woman what feels right for her, heightens her experience, and makes her climax. It seems to be something that men generally don’t do.

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Even if a man asks, the woman may be at a loss to explain to him what to do. A woman may know how to touch herself, but very few seem to know what a man can specifically do to excite her and make her come. Perhaps we fear that if we talk about it, the magic of the moment will go away. Well, not talking about it has created a situation that is not working for many people.

Unless men get specific and supportive under-the-sheets training from their partners, most will continue to be clumsy and ineffective and real gratification in the couple’s sexual encounters is mostly one-sided (i.e., the man’s). As the person on the losing side of this lopsided dynamic, a woman has the biggest incentive to speak up. But all too often she is disempowered and acts as a coconspirator with her sexually ignorant partner, a silent and unhappy enabler of lousy sex.

Among couples striving to make intercourse mutually satisfying, there’s often talk about premature ejaculation—the man reaching his climax too early. In
Satisfaction
, Kim Cattrall writes, “Premature

Over the years, eager readers

ejaculations were the

of even the most sophisticated

bane of my existence for

sex manuals were getting

most of my adult sexual

exhortations
,
not explanations
.

life. I felt used, frus-

trated, and unfulfilled.”

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This is a rare case of men being blamed (or blaming themselves) for unsatisfying intercourse. But the “fixes”

often suggested for men—masturbating before heading out on a date, training the muscles to hold back ejaculation, squeezing the base of the penis just before orgasm, distracting oneself with nonerotic thoughts (baseball box scores, perhaps), or pulling out of the vagina—do not address the real problem. Since penis-in-vagina intercourse isn’t producing an orgasm for most women, finding ways to keep the man thrusting for a longer period of time won’t make things much better. Yes, it would be nice if the man could learn how to slow down and get his “hair trigger” under control (an especially difficult challenge for young men), but what these couples are really looking for is a way to stimulate the clitoris and bring the woman to orgasm as part of making love. Standard-issue intercourse, however long it lasts, will almost never accomplish this.

Some women don’t have a problem speaking up in bed; they know exactly what they want sexually and have no hesitation in asking for it. But even when women do speak up, they are sometimes not heard. A liberated and assertive woman may tell her lover exactly what gives her pleasure, but there is a disturbing pattern: the man follows her directions for a short time but then reverts to what he was doing (or not doing) before she coached him. This seeming imperviousness to instruction was mentioned by a number of respondents in
The Hite Report
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puzzles many women. How can men be such bad listen-ers and such slow learners in bed? Is it
that
difficult?

In fairness to men, it’s hard work
unlearning
our society’s deeply ingrained idea of how sexual intercourse is supposed to work—which may explain why so many men keep “forgetting” the helpful pointers their braver partners give them. The accepted sexual script has a powerful, self-sustaining logic that has kept it alive from generation to generation. Rachel Maines describes the conventional wisdom as follows: the man and woman get aroused by kissing, caressing each other’s bodies, and touching each other’s genitals (foreplay); then the man puts his penis into the vagina (penetration); then, after some passionate thrusting, both partners reach the celestial heights (mutual orgasms). Maines calls this the androcentric paradigm. For the sake of clarity, let’s call it the penetration-produces-female-orgasm model.

In light of what we know today, it’s obvious why this model doesn’t work. Because the clitoris receives only indirect stimulation (if that) when the penis is in the vagina, intercourse is one of the least effective ways for a woman to reach a climax—which is why in study after study, 65 to 85 percent of women report that they don’t have orgasms during intercourse. These figures notwithstanding, many people—especially men—find it difficult to let go of the penetration-produces-female-orgasm myth. Why is this sexual script so persistent in the face of
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such well-documented evidence of its shortcomings?

There are ten possible reasons:

1. It seems, well,
logical
that both men and women should reach orgasm together during the “main event,”

the procreative act. Why would Mother Nature have set things up for this not to be so?

2. Men tend to believe that what feels good for them must also feel good for their partner. And this belief is not as silly as it sounds. Until he is taught otherwise, a man tends to think of the vagina as a kind of inside-out penis, with the same sexual nerve endings on the inside that the penis has on the outside. From classical antiquity through the end of the seventeenth century, this is how most scientists thought of the female genitalia. With this mental picture, it’s natural to think that penis-in-vagina intercourse will produce pleasure for the woman similar to what the man feels when his penis moves inside the vagina, and at the same pace.

3. The penetration-produces-female-orgasm paradigm has become deeply rooted in the male ego (“Don’t worry, my penis can handle this job”). The belief is therefore stubborn and resistant to change. A man can become defensive—in fact, downright petulant—when a woman tells him that she isn’t sexually satisfied by his passionate thrusting.

4. Not enough women speak up to correct men’s misguided assumptions. This reticence may stem from 5 8

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ignorance (Where is my clitoris, anyway?); from shyness (Will my sexual appetites shock him?); from shame (Will he think that I masturbate?); from insecurity (I’m not very good at this); from fear that there is something wrong with them (Am I frigid?); from a desire to appear worldly and mature (like in the movies); from fear of provoking jealousy (Will he think I’ve slept with other men?); from selflessness (It’s too much to ask of him); from fear of seeming pushy (Will I come across as too demanding?); from fear of hurting his feelings (Will he hold this against me?); and from fear of losing the man (Will he dump me if I bring this up?).

5. The first few times a man has intercourse, his sexual attitudes are, relatively speaking, a
tabula rasa
. This is the ideal time for him to learn how to make love in a way that gives mutual satisfaction. But the beginning of a sexual relationship is also the time when a woman is
least
likely to take on the role of the teacher. She may be unsure of what she
should
be feeling during intercourse and worry that her partner is comparing her to other women he’s slept with. In addition, the novelty and passionate intensity of first-time sexual encounters can keep a woman from tuning in to the finer points of lovemaking. It’s all so exciting and hot and wet that she may not even
care
that she doesn’t have an orgasm. These factors conspire with the other reasons for not speaking up to produce an unfortunate result: the teachable moments in early sexual
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encounters often slip by without the man getting the feedback he needs to become a better lover.

6. Every time a woman fails to speak up about being unsatisfied with lovemaking, she inadvertently
trains
her partner in the correctness of the penetration-produces-female-orgasm model. This Pavlovian conditioning is further reinforced by the fact that basic intercourse is sexually satisfying for the man—he’s rewarded with an orgasm. If nothing happens to provide negative reinforcement and suggest that there’s more he needs to do, he’s going to be increasingly convinced that sex this way is just fine.

7. Females have less physical, economic, and societal power in most relationships, and male perceptions therefore tend to rule. The more unequal a relationship is—the bigger the difference in age, wealth, self-assurance, and dependency in the man’s favor—the less likely she is to rock the boat.

8. Societally-induced self-doubt, worries, and low self-esteem lead many women to blame themselves rather than their partners for unsatisfying sex. They are much more likely to think there is something wrong with them than to challenge the accepted model.

9. Sex scenes in movies and works of fiction often depict couples who have no trouble reaching peaks of passion during penis-in-vagina intercourse with no evidence of clitoral stimulation. Lady Chatterley reveled in 6 0

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climaxing with her lover in the D.H. Lawrence classic
Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
The sexually insatiable Samantha in
Sex and the City
moans and shouts ecstatically when she makes love. And in
Forever
, Judy Blume’s controver-sial novel about a teenage girl’s first love that became must reading for every teenager when it came out in 1975, having an orgasm during intercourse sounds pretty straightforward:

This time Michael made it last much, much longer and I got so carried away I grabbed his backside with both hands, trying to push him deeper and deeper into me—

and I spread my legs as far apart as I could—and I raised my hips off the bed—and I moved with him, again and again and again—and at last I came.

This scene has been read and reread countless times, and it’s fascinating. But like so many other fictional erotic scenes, it adds nothing to our understanding of how mutually satisfying lovemaking really works—and perpetuates the myths that leave us all fumbling in the dark.

10. No recognized authority in the field of sexuality has come right out and said: “Now hear this: penis-in-vagina intercourse rarely produces a female orgasm, and if thrusting is all you do, you will forever miss out on mutual satisfaction.” Without a strong statement like this, the other nine reasons continue to operate and each new
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generation of lovers reinvents a one-sided way of making love.

And so it goes. A man might start out with the best intentions (it’s a point of pride these days for a man to give his partner an orgasm),

but communication in

most bedrooms is so poor

Women who don’t

(and the available litera-

communicate their sexual

ture is so unhelpful) that

needs are going to have to

few men escape their clue-

put up with clueless,

lessness. Some intrepid