reason Laurie kept trying to want sex more was not that she really wanted to want sex, but that Johnny wanted her to want it.
In frustration, she booted him out of the house for the day, sent him with Trevor to the library so that she could have the luxury of the house to herself, to do laundry, get some work done, and maybe, if she was really lucky, take a nap.
And once they were gone . . . she missed them.
Often the best part of her day was her son’s bath time—far from being an exhausting chore or a hassle, she loved to splash and play with him. And now she found herself looking forward to their return, because . . . bath time!
And then she compared her feeling about sexy-pleasure to her feeling about mommy-pleasure. She thought, “It’s not selfish of me to enjoy being with my kid—enjoying it makes me a better parent! So how come I can give myself permission to have that pleasure, but I can’t give myself permission to enjoy other kinds of pleasure?”
Something clicked. She had all kinds of insights about having been taught that being a mom was the best thing about being a woman but having sex wasn’t okay, that the pleasure of delicious food was blocked by guilt about her body . . . lots of things. But in the end, something just clicked, and she let go of a bunch of stuff. She started wondering if maybe sex could be for pleasure, rather than something “for Johnny.”
Laurie remembered Johnny saying, “Maybe it’s about what it feels like, not about where we are or what we’re doing.” Maybe she could try that, try paying attention to what it feels like, regardless of
what’s going on. your vagina’s okay, either way I get asked a lot about orgasm during penile-vaginal intercourse, so let’s spend a little time with that. As we saw in chapter 1, the clitoris is Grand Central Station for erotic sensation. The dominance of the clitoris in women’s orgasms explains why 80–90 percent of women who masturbate typically do so with little or no vaginal penetration, including when they use 11vibrators.
But ya know, there’s this old saying: “It ain’t the size of the boat, it’s the motion of the ocean.”
The wisdom this attempts to convey is that it’s not the size of the penis penetrating the vagina, it is the collaborative stimulation between partners (or possibly the skill of one or the other of the “sailors”) that creates pleasure and orgasm for a woman during intercourse.
The fact is, it’s not the size of the boat, and it’s not the motion of the ocean either. Women just vary. Despite what you’ve learned from movies, romance novels, or porn, in reality less than a third of women are reliably orgasmic with vaginal penetration alone, while the remaining two-thirds are 12sometimes, rarely, or never orgasmic with penetration alone.
Yet women ask me all the time, “Why can’t I have an orgasm during intercourse?” The reason they can’t is very likely the same reason most women can’t: Intercourse is not a very effective way to stimulate the clitoris, and clitoral stimulation is the most common way to make an orgasm happen. In fact, a likely reason why women vary in how reliably they orgasm with penetration is the distance between the clitoris and the 13 urethra.It’s essentially a matter of anatomical engineering.
So the question is not so much why some women aren’t orgasmic from vaginal penetration, as it is why are some women? There are several hypotheses, but probably the two best contenders are: (a) stimulation through the front wall of the vagina of the urethral sponge (the female homologue of the prostate and the original hypothesized source of the G- spot); or (b) the vestibular bulbs, extending down to the mouth of the vagina from the head of the clitoris. But in the end, the answer is: People 14 vary.People vary in the layout of their genitals and the sensitivity of the tissue. My guess is that both of these hypotheses have merit, but you can imagine how challenging it is to get funding to do research on women’s orgasm, so it may be a while before we know for sure.
Now, if penetrative orgasms are comparatively uncommon, why do women ask about it so often? Why is it so often viewed as “the right way to orgasm”?
And the answer is, of course, “Ugh, patriarchy.” Men-as-default again.
Centuries of male doctors and scientists—Freud is often pointed to as a key offender here, and rightly so—claimed that orgasms from vaginal stimulation are the right, good, normal kind, and clitoral orgasms are “immature.”
But it’s men-as-default in a different way from how it worked with arousal and desire. Culture sanctions spontaneous desire as the “expected”