• Dries to a Silky Powder Finish. Whereas water-based lubes often dry to a sticky, gummy mess on your hands, silicone lubes feel soft and powdery, so you can caress your partner’s body and face without feeling like you’re smearing spirit gum all over your lover. • Great for Sensitive Folks. It’s also very unlikely to cause an allergic reaction or yeast infections (unlike flavored lubes or lubes with glycerin), it has no flavor, so you can taste your partner’s skin and fluids (yum!).
The one thing silicone lube isn’t good for is use with some silicone toys.
It may break down the surface of the toy, so put condoms on them, or else use water-based lube.
The best silicone lube will have just a few ingredients, like dimethicone, dimethiconol, cyclopentasiloxane, or cyclomethicone, and a preservative like tocopheryl acetate (vitamin E). That’s all. ripe fruit Let’s go back to the garden for a minute.
For a male gardener, if the fruit in his garden is ripe, he’s usually in the mood for fruit—not always, but often enough that if you notice some ripe fruit, it’s worth asking yourself if the gardener might be craving some.
For the female gardener, it takes a lot more than ripeness to feel like having fruit. Maybe she wants fruit most when she’s feeling happy. Maybe fruit is what she turns to when she’s feeling sad. Regardless, her desire for fruit has little to do with how good she is at noticing that there is ripe fruit in the garden. It has much more to do with—you guessed it—the contexts
in which she enjoys ripe fruit.
Got it?
Good.
Camilla explained nonconcordance to Henry. For her, nonconcordance was a perfect example of how the cultural narrative had failed to tell her the truth, and she was pretty pleased to find another way she was, yet again, totally normal.
It was a little more complicated for Henry, because he was still figuring out the whole desire/wanting thing. He was trying to get comfortable with the difference between the brakes version of not wanting—“I want that to stop”—versus the accelerator version of not wanting—“I like that yet feel no urge to seek out more.”
He said, “I understand that genital response doesn’t tell me what turns you on. You tell me what turns you on, and I believe you. But what I don’t understand is how you get turned on without first wanting the thing that turns you on.”
Which is maybe the most complex—and controversial—element of women’s sexual wellbeing.
The answer to Henry’s question is: Arousal comes first—before desire, that is. Like this: Genital response happens when your brain notices a sexually relevant stimulus—“This is a restaurant.” Arousal happens when your brain is in the right, sex-positive context—when your brain is open to the idea of going to a restaurant. Desire comes along when your brain shifts from being open to the idea to actively wanting to go.
And it’s the subject of chapter 7. tl;dr
• There’s a 50 percent overlap between blood flow to a male’s genitals and how turned on he feels. There’s a 10 percent overlap between blood flow to a woman’s genitals and how turned on she feels. • The reason for the difference is that sexually relevant (expecting) is not the same thing as sexually appealing (enjoying). In men there’s a lot of overlap between the two, most of the time; in women the overlap is more context dependent. • This difference between women and men doesn’t mean women are broken; it means they’re women. • The best way to tell if a woman is aroused is not to notice what her genitals are doing but to listen to her words.