pulled toward orgasm, she took a deep slow breath and returned her attention to Patrick.
She didn’t hit the brakes, she just took her foot off the accelerator.
After Patrick’s orgasm, they switched, and Olivia kept her attention tuned to the sensations of her body. As her arousal grew, she continued to breathe deeply and slowly, not allowing her abdominal muscles to tense too much.
The result was an orgasm that lasted several minutes as her body shuddered and rolled, and Patrick stayed with her, holding and kissing her, fingers pressed against her vulva. It ended with joyful tears and a kind of bubbly chattiness quite unlike Olivia’s usual postorgasmic self.
She felt open and raw and tender.
She told me later, “It was like being way out in the center of the ocean, when I usually just surf on the shore. Bigger and slower . . . and scarier, too, in some ways. I was all the way open. I had to let go of all control. I had thought I was an erotic powerhouse because I could have a lot of orgasms and because I wanted sex often. But it turns out my greatest erotic power only emerged when I stopped pushing toward orgasm and just allowed pleasure to be still inside me.”
Not every woman wants to experience this kind of radical vulnerability with her sexuality. Not every woman trusts her partner enough to allow herself to let go so thoroughly. Not every woman has a life that allows the time—an hour, generally, for most people—and relaxation necessary to get there.
But given the right context, I believe every woman is capable of it, and, in my opinion, every woman deserves the opportunity to try it.
Even if you don’t experience minutes of oceanic ecstasy, it will still be
an hour well spent! how do you medicate a flock?
The kitchy 1968 cult movie Barbarella imagines a forty-first century in which people take “exaltation transference pellets” to have orgasms, to save on the mess and bother of having sex. You take the pill, sit palm to palm with your partner, and within a minute your body pulses and your hair curls.
Boom. Done.
You can see the appeal. I want ecstasy to be easy and instantaneous, too, like taking a pill. Many of us live lives of constant tension, doubt,
obligation, and effort. Couldn’t pleasure, of all things, just happen, without our having to work at it?
The closest we can come to that in the twenty-first century is a vibrator.
In fact, even though there are no drug treatments for “female sexual dysfunction” approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, there is 28 an FDA-approved $200 vibrator!The right vibrator provides an intensity of stimulation for your gas pedal that you just can’t replicate with any nonmechanical stimulation. Even if your brakes are still on—you’re stressed out, anxious, sad, or frustrated—a vibrator is often intense enough to generate an orgasm much faster than manual stimulation.
A vibrator won’t necessarily persuade all the birds to fly in the same direction. It provides high-intensity stimulation for the parts of your brain that respond to sexually relevant stimuli; it can turn on the ons like nobody’s business, but it doesn’t turn off the offs.
This idea of pleasure as an emergent property of the interactions of a collective of desires (aka a flock) is what makes medicating pleasure, arousal, desire, and/or orgasm so difficult. A drug would have to twiddle not just the SIS or SES but also the stress and the love and the body image and trauma history and the relationship trust and the other things that are known to impact women’s sexual wellbeing. Tugging one bird toward orgasm won’t help you if the rest of the birds are busy avoiding predators.
Pleasure is an emergent property of the interaction of multiple systems —it’s a process, not a state, an interaction, not a specific area of the brain or the body. Pleasure is the whole flock. Pleasure is all of you.
Vibrators About half of women in the United States have used a vibrator, and these women are more likely to report better 29 arousal, desire and orgasm.Eighty to ninety percent of those women report experiencing no side effects, and of those who did report side effects like numbness or irritation, nearly all of them said it lasted for less than a day.
A small study of women using vibrators as part of sex therapy found that women varied a great deal in their response 30 to the vibrator and had a wide range of feelings about the experience.Initial resistance—“I should be able to orgasm without having to use a ‘tool’ ”—and concerns about whether vibrator use somehow disrupts sexual connection with a partner—“Am I cheating on him with it?”—often gave way to a sense of freedom and exploration. While there was a great deal of variety, even in a sample of only seventeen women, the overall experience was a new kind of pleasure and opening up their perspective on the idea of sexual autonomy.
You’ll recognize the worry that it’s not “natural” as the “sanctity” moral foundation that I described in chapter 5. The idea that there’s a pure, good, natural way to have an orgasm and a wrong, bad, unnatural way to have an orgasm is a cultural pigeonholing of experience shaped by those three messages—Moral, Medical, and Media.
The concern people most often bring to me about vibrators is that they’ll get “addicted” to them, but it doesn’t happen. Here’s what does happen: Orgasm with vibrators occurs relatively quickly for many women because a vibrator provides such a high intensity of stimulation. And some women get very comfortable with how quickly they orgasm with their vibrator, which leads them to forget how long it took without the vibrator. And when they get frustrated by how long that takes, the frustration makes it take even longer. But by this point in the book, you probably know the answer to this problem: frustration = impatient little monitor. So change the goal, change the effort, change the criterion velocity.
Pleasure, not orgasm, is the goal. If it takes five minutes, that’s five minutes of pleasure. Hooray! If it takes thirty minutes, that’s thirty minutes of pleasure! Also hooray!