How to Be a Great Lover

Lou Paget

How to Be A

G R E A T L O V E R

Girlfriend-to-Girlfriend Time-Tested Techniques That Will Blow His Mind

Chapter One

The Kama Lou Tra

HOW I CAME TO TEACH THE SEXUALITY SEMINARS

"I can now throw out the message 'If you're too experienced or know too much—you’re a slut.' I now see that couldn't be further from the truth. There is such power in owning one's sexuality and self"

FEMALE SEMINAR ATTENDEE, WRITER~PRODUCER, AGE 39

Gathered in a boardroom in an elegant midtown private club, ten to fifteen women, ranging in age from early twenties to mid-fifties, stare at the table center. The table itself is laid with silver flatware, linen napkins, and fresh flowers. It's evening and the lighting is dim, provoking an air of expectancy.

"Okay ladies, this will be the first of many choices you will have to make this evening." I stand at the head of a long, rectangular mahogany table.

Some of the women are dressed in couture suits; others are dressed more casually, in slacks; others are still more casual, decked in a downtown hip look. The women are staring rather mutely at the center of the table, in which are placed a selection of what I affectionately call "instructional products" (better known as dildos).

"Without being overly PC, please select the color of your choice—white, black, or mulatto—and the size you prefer— 8-inch, 7-inch, 6-inch, or the ever-so-popular 5-inch executive model."

I hear a few peals of laughter and then I smile at the newcomers and say again, "Ladies, go ahead and choose an instructional product."

A tall, lanky woman in her mid-forties says, "Do I have to choose what I have at home?"

Gales of laughter follow. The women look around at each other and can't believe they are laughing so hard. I know now, after almost six years of conducting The Sexuality Seminars across the U.S. and in Canada, that this is the ice-breaking moment, when the women who have come to learn more about sex, and specifically, to learn how to become a better lover, begin to relax.

How to Be a Great Lover
is a cumulative extension of these seminars and includes not only what I have learned from my research, but also what I have learned from the many women who have attended the seminars. Throughout the book, you will hear their voices, as well as the voices of their men, sharing their experiences—woman to woman. As one woman, a fifty-five-year-old housewife from Seattle, told me, "I found out learning about sex isn't just for my children's generation. After my husband's death, I am dating again and at my age, I HAVE to know about safe sex."

I want to be absolutely clear about the spirit with which this book was written. It was never my intent to sit down and create a book about how to please a man. While there is no point in arguing the fact that the man in your life will be a major beneficiary of the information found here, the real purpose is threefold: to empower you as a woman, heighten the intimacy of your romantic relationship, and enable you and your partner to enjoy yourselves in intense new ways.

While biology may have graced us with a basic understanding of how to have sex, we are not necessarily born great lovers. We learn to be great lovers. And I have always believed that anything worth doing is worth doing well. Wouldn't you agree that t he better we are at something, the more we enjoy doing it? Sex is no different. It shouldn't be an experience just to get through, but rather an experience to be relished from beginning to end. 'or that to happen, you've got to know what you're doing.

I also believe that every woman has the right to be sexually proficient. You'll find that knowing what to do to your man's body can provide you with as much power as it does pleasure. And contrary to what we've been made to feel in the past, there never has, nor ever will be anything unladylike about being masterful in the bedroom. The truth is, being sexually savvy is no less a part of being a woman than motherhood, and learning how to be a great lover is about excelling in all areas of womanhood.

It's for these reasons, as well as the demand from the women in the seminars, that I decided to write a book that teaches women the art of sex, and. I hope to give you extraordinary tools that will enable you to please your lover beyond his wildest expectations.

The first place most of us learned about sex was in the company of our girlfriends. It is certainly the first place we laughed about it. Most of us can vividly recall squirming in uncomfortable silence while our mothers struggled to tell us the facts of life, or how we sunk deep into our chairs during health class, praying the teacher would spare us the humiliation of having to discuss the subject out loud. At the same time, we can also remember those wonderful Friday nights, sitting pajama-clad in a circle of five or six of our closest pals, listening intently as the girls with the older sisters shared amazing stories about what they'd seen and overheard through keyholes. We absorbed their tales as if they were gospel, giving far more credence to their words than those of our mothers and teachers. We may have giggled and acted shocked, but secretly we couldn't wait to experience sex for ourselves. Indeed, sex seemed like a fabulous, exciting adventure.

Years later, when we were finally ready to act on our exciting adventure, we knew little more about how to proceed than what we could remember from the long, lost tales of those older sisters. We may have grown more comfortable with the thought of
having
sex, but we weren't any closer to really knowing what to do. Complicating matters further was the feeling that there was no place we could go for information about
how
to learn to do it, much less how to be
good
at it. Neither our mothers nor our health teachers ever included any specific how-tos in their sex education chats. We can't blame our mothers; I'd bet that if they
weren't
ignorant about techniques, they would still be way too embarrassed to get into the specifics with their daughters. And I doubt a teacher who taught sexual technique would last long in any school district.

As confusing and difficult as it was for us to discuss sex back when we were young women, it only got worse as we got older.

Not knowing what to do sexually as a young woman is uncomfortable and at times embarrassing, but it doesn't compare to the inadequacy we feel in having to ask questions on the subject once we've passed the age when were already supposed to know.

Like me, many women have always felt embarrassed, even ashamed, for desiring to know more about sex or to

improve their skills in this area. After all, what kind of young lady would want to he good in bed? In other words, how does she admit she wants to he good in bed, and remain a lady? For me, this dilemma goes hack to the way I was raised: don't talk about sex, don't think about it, and above all, don't do it. So with that as my psychological imprimatur, how was I going to learn about sex? Men could learn how to be great lovers through experience. In fact, they were given kudos for it. What women were given for experience in this area, however, was a reputation. There's a complicated double bind here: on one end of the sexuality continuum, under what I call the "Don't Umbrella," we have the "don't ask because it's bad" attitude. On the other end of the continuum, we are taught that sex is a form of manipulation we should use to control our man.

Neither of these options ever made sense to me. I wanted something in the middle: practical, real information that would enable me to feel comfortable sexually. I believe that sex should he an expression and celebration of my feelings, and all I wanted was to be brilliant at sex with the one man of my choice. It didn't seem like too much to ask.

Where do we women usually go to develop sexual savviness? As one woman, an accountant from Chicago, said, "For most of us, the level of our sexual prowess is only as good as that of our best lover and we might have left him behind in high school."

So how do nice girls like us go about learning about sex? The most obvious place is from the man or men in your life, especially those who introduce us to our first sexual experiences. Often men are sexually active at a younger age than women, so we depend on them to show us the ropes. Unfortunately, they usually don't have teaching on their minds. Being goal-oriented, they just want to have an orgasm. If an orgasm is out of the question, their next focus is getting as close to it as possible. Young men like to see how far we'll allow them to go. They may know how to do it, but not necessarily how to do it well. So ideally, it is in a long-term relationship, where we (finally) may feel comfortable enough to ask questions and experiment, that we learn the most.

Another route to sexual knowledge is to practice on as many different men's bodies as possible, and perhaps, through trial and error, we may arrive at some confidence in our know-how. However, I believe that, with what we know today about sexually transmitted diseases, that is not a wise choice. The risk of AIDS and other STDs lurk dangerously close to home. But, if you're like most of us, becoming intimate with lots of different men is something you just may not be comfortable with, and for those of us in a committed relationship, this isn't an option at all.

For me, once I decided I wanted to learn more about what to do sexually, I went searching for a source that would help me master these skills, just as I had mastered other skills in my life. As I mentioned before, I'm a firm believer in the adage that anything you're going to be doing regularly is worth doing well. And of all the things a woman should want to be her best at, loving a man intimately seemed a logical priority. At the time, I was on the brink of my first truly romantic adult relationship with a man I'd hoped to be with forever (it didn't turn out that way, but that's another story altogether). And with my unwavering curiosity, I began a determined quest for reliable information about sex that made sense to me and wouldn't infringe on my values. The first place I turned was to books, and by virtue of its erotic reputation, my first stop was
The Kama Sutra
.

Long considered one of the oldest and most definitive written sources on sexual technique and pleasure,
The Kama Sutra
was originally compiled in the fourth century A.D. It was put together by a Brahmin and religious scholar named Vatsyayana, who gathered his material from texts dating back to the fourth century B.C. Since then, the work has been updated and appended several times and translated into many different languages. I'd heard about
The Kama Sutra
for years, and it always evoked a vision of sensual eroticism in my mind. When I finally opened the book and began to read, I was very surprised, for two reasons. The first factor that shocked me about this engaging and abundant work was the uninhibited view of sexuality in ancient India. The book's depiction of sexual acts between men and women made me wonder why and how sex ever got to be the taboo subject it has become in modern times. Furthermore,
The Kama Sutra
openly and unabashedly covers such topics as romance, marriage, adultery, bigamy, group sex, prostitution, sadomasochism, male and female homosexuality and transvestism.

The second aspect of
The Kama Sutra
that struck me is the uselessness of its information for contemporary women. This is not to say the book isn't fascinating, because it is. It's also highly entertaining. Furthermore,
The Kama Sutra
is a beautifully detailed representation of this antediluvian Indian culture. But rather than serving as a guide to sexual technique for both sexes as it has been billed, it's more accurately a coming-of-age-hand-book for upper-class adolescent boys and young men in fourth century India.
The Kama Sutra
discusses what were then the three aims in a man's life (virtue, wealth, love) and how they can be acquired through the mastery of erotic touch. For example, the book describes the conduct of a well-bred townsman (he must bathe regularly and keep a
separate
bed in his room to use with prostitutes), as well as explains the fine art of seducing a girl (including how to scratch, bite, and administer blows to her back and head). The book even provides advice and proper etiquette for those particularly delicate situations such as dealing with more than one wife at a time, and seducing other men's wives.