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orgasm THE FANTASTIC BONUS
Spectatoring is the art of worrying about your body and your sexual functioning while you’re having sex, and Merritt was a master practitioner. Rather than paying attention to the pleasant, tingly things going on in her body, her head would fill with anxious thoughts about how her breasts were moving or how she didn’t have an orgasm the last time they had sex or what her inability to focus on pleasure meant about her as a sexual person. She worried about the sex she was having, instead of enjoying the sex she was having. And worry is the opposite of arousal. Worry hit her brakes.
And when the brakes are on, orgasm doesn’t happen.
Which is why she could easily count the number of orgasms she had had with Carol in their two decades together.
And which also is why she decided that orgasm was the perfect way to practice the pleasure—and the trust in herself that pleasure required—that she wanted to build in her life.
“Okay so tell me how,” she said to me. “How do I make orgasm happen?”
“Ah, you don’t make orgasm happen. You allow it,” I said.
She nodded—then shook her head. “I don’t know what that means.”
I recommended she read Becoming Orgasmic by Julia Heiman and Joseph LoPiccolo. Although it’s written for women who’ve never had an orgasm, it’s really the quintessential guide for all women who struggle with it. Merritt got the book, read it, and did some exercises . . . and then she did another remarkable thing. She decided not to try to have orgasms with Carol after all.
“For me, having sex until I have an orgasm would be like running until I lose weight. It just doesn’t work that way. So I’m going to stop trying.”
Once a week, she and Carol traded massages and kisses and oral sex. They just played, and they paid attention to how it felt, and they
weren’t goal directed at all.
And guess what happened.
Yup.
This chapter is about orgasm, the full range of orgasmic experience available to women and the barriers that stand between women and ecstatic pleasure. Merritt’s sensitive brakes made orgasm —especially orgasm with another person—elusive. She used the science I describe in this chapter to turn off the offs and find her way to a more profound experience of orgasm than she thought she would ever experience.
Several years ago I supported a friend as she began her first sexual relationship, having never so much as masturbated in her life, much less had an orgasm. She asked me questions from time to time, and one of them was, “How do I know when I’ve had an orgasm?”
I told her that orgasms feel different to everyone and that orgasms can vary from each other, depending on the mode of stimulation, whether you have a partner with you, maybe even where you are in your menstrual cycle —any number of factors. Sometimes women feel a rhythmic pulsing of the muscle around their vagina, sometimes not. The main thing most women describe most of the time is a sense of “doneness,” a sense that you’ve crossed a threshold and something has completed. There’s often a peak of tension where your muscles tighten and your heart pounds. Orgasms are kind of like art, I told her. You know it when you see it. It may not be what you expect, but it will be different from everything else.
She nodded eagerly and said, “I think I had that!”
And then one day she walked up to me, grinning from ear to ear, and said, “It wasn’t what I expected, but you were right. It was unmistakable.”
This great variety and variability makes orgasm almost impossible to define—though scientists spend thousands of words puzzling over it. But when you strip it down to the universal essentials, here’s what you get: 1Orgasm is the sudden, involuntary release of sexual tension.
Notice how much is missing from that definition: genitals, muscle contractions, sexual behavior, pleasure, or indeed anything that specifies what it feels like or how it happened. Orgasms vary—from woman to woman, and from context to context. They happen while you’re making