Goddesses Never Age: The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being (25 page)

And it’s not enough to simply know the map, although that’s very useful. In fact, Figure 1 shows what your erotic anatomy looks like, minus the part that is located in your brain, which is very much involved in your experience of your sexuality. When you can name something and simultaneously feel deep in your body the sensations associated with it, you have access to your personal power. You no longer think of your pelvis as an unknown
area that only some outside expert can negotiate. Becoming familiar with your female erotic anatomy also helps you own and operate it sensually. Energy follows thought. Even just seeing this illustration and thinking about and putting your attention on your erotic anatomy will begin to bring blood and pleasure to that area of your body. This is how you light your own pilot light—and ignite your own engine of power and pleasure!

Figure 1. The erotic female anatomy

Were you shown an illustration of the erotic female anatomy back in your school days? Probably not—or if you did, the class
discussion did not work its way around how to own and operate this part of your anatomy. I want you to start exploring and learning about your erotic anatomy by yourself, through self-pleasuring. Get a hand mirror, or stand over a large mirror, and start looking at yourself between your legs—spread them so you can get a really good look. Describe what you see. Is it a beautiful pearl, nestled in folds of rich purple satin? How does it feel and look when you massage the lips surrounding it? Observe how your genitals look in both aroused and non-aroused states.

Practice stimulating yourself around your own clitoris. Use plenty of lubrication. For most women, the most sensitive hot spot is slightly to your left and to the top of the clitoris. The G-spot is a quarter-shaped, slightly raised spot inside your vagina at 12 o’clock, two to three inches in, on the top of your vaginal canal (toward your front, not your back). You will feel it only when you’re in a sexually aroused state—and you have to squat down and insert into your vagina your second or third (or both) fingers, fingernail toward your tailbone. If you rub yourself in that area, you will feel its sensitivity because the G-spot is abundant in nerve endings. Try up and down strokes and circles. Work it with your fingers—stroke it, as if you were kneading out the knots in a sore muscle. At first, you may experience pain or numbness. Over time, you can make this area wake up to bliss—and a loving partner can assist with that. If you have vaginal dryness, use plenty of lubricant.

In addition to self-pleasuring, you can also have your partner massage your vulva and around your clitoris. But even if you have a partner, don’t deny yourself the delight of self-pleasuring, or, as the ancient Taoists called it, “self-cultivation.” This practice is also known as masturbation (an awful word believed to have derived from word roots meaning “to defile with the hand”). Self-cultivation is a healthy way to experience sexual pleasure, orgasm, and the release of rejuvenating nitric oxide into the bloodstream. Consider making self-pleasuring a ceremony in which you offer your pleasure and your time to your inner Aphrodite. Feeling good emotionally and physically is the sacrament.

SHAME-FREE SELF-PLEASURING

Think back to the first time you self-pleasured. Did you feel uncomfortable? Secretly ashamed? Or elated? As one woman put it, “I felt as though I had just happened on the best thing my body ever did—available for free … at my convenience.” Self-pleasuring might at first bring up a feeling of shame because you’ve internalized the dominator culture’s messages about women’s sexuality. Take a moment to illuminate the shame so it dissolves and you can embrace your inner erotic creature fully and joyfully.

Self-pleasuring is the ultimate safe sex, which may be why then U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders was asked in a UN forum on AIDS prevention back in 1994 if masturbation should be taught as an outlet for healthy, safe sexual expression. She agreed it might be a good idea and was almost immediately forced to resign because of the backlash. That’s how powerful the self-pleasuring taboo in America was back then. But even today, there are still some states that try to control or ban self-pleasuring, as well as the sale of vibrators because they’re often used for this purpose.

Taboos against self-pleasuring can be found in most major religions, and they have affected policy and practice in the medical community over the years. Circumcision of boys and men became popular in the U.S. in the 19th century because it was thought to prevent them from self-pleasuring, which was blamed for a host of ailments from tuberculosis to blindness to insanity.
Victorians sometimes tied the hands of boys and girls when they went to sleep so they wouldn’t touch themselves, a practice advocated by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (who also created corn flakes as part of a bland diet designed to reduce sexual desire). In fact, Kellogg once said, “A remedy [for masturbation] which is almost always successful in small boys is circumcision … The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind …”
⁸
I’ve done hundreds of circumcisions on infant boys as part of my job as an ob/gyn, so I’ve seen how traumatic these operations are—and how unconscious about this trauma our culture is. Circumcision is a practice rooted in fear and it needs to end.

Why are we so afraid and ashamed to talk about self-pleasuring? Let’s look at what it does that some might find scary or threatening. For both men and women, it bestows the power of sexual expression without sanction from a church or another authority. It provides pleasure for the self, not others—unless it’s incorporated into sexual activity between two people, with one watching the other, which apparently the anti-self-pleasuring folks are unaware of. Self-pleasuring by men prevents them from impregnating women because they “spill their seed,” as it says in the Bible. That means the self-pleasuring person isn’t following the Christian and Jewish teaching to “be fruitful and multiply”—the purpose of sex, according to these religious traditions.

What’s more, self-pleasuring bestows power on women who practice it because once you know how to trigger your own orgasm, you don’t need a partner to do it for you. A 22-year-old lesbian who had just discovered self-pleasuring said to me, “Now I don’t need to go out to bars anymore, because I don’t need a partner to get me off.” As far as the old dominator culture is concerned, women having sexual pleasure without men threatens the status quo. So what are we going to do with all these women pleasuring themselves? I say, encourage them! You can start by checking out Betty Dodson, a pioneer in encouraging women’s self-pleasuring who is now in her 80s. She has a marvelous website devoted to this topic:
www.dodsonandross.com
. She can teach you just about anything you’d want to know about
how to pleasure yourself with your erotic female anatomy, and she is wonderfully frank. I also enjoy the work of Layla Martin, who teaches an online course in female sexuality and pleasure at
www.layla-martin.com
. She makes the important point that a woman’s relationship to and comfort with her erotic anatomy are key to her overall happiness. All manner of depression, anger, and sadness can be eliminated when a women honors this area of her body and takes the steps necessary to work through the shame and judgment that can reside there.

Self-pleasuring is a positive practice that will help you understand your own sexual response and needs while making you feel good. And if you think about it, how is a partner supposed to know how to touch you to make you feel good if you don’t know yourself?

UNLIMITED PLEASURE IS YOUR RIGHT

Your ability to experience orgasm is infinite because of how you are wired as a woman. Now that is a right to celebrate! The clitoris has more than 8,000 nerve endings and is the only organ in the human body designed solely for pleasure. I think we ought to respect evolution on this one and use the clitoris as it was intended. As part of your erotic anatomy, the clitoris is connected to the G-spot and through glial cells to the pineal gland in the brain. That’s the gland responsible for the release of DMT, the brain’s endogenous hallucinatory neurotransmitter, and melatonin, the neurotransmitter that causes us to dream.

You are sitting on a throne of gold, the fountain of youth, and it is your erotic anatomy. Explore it and get to know it. Turn back to
Figure 1
if you want to. Don’t be squeamish about inserting your fingers into your own vagina. We should be teaching our daughters and granddaughters to familiarize themselves with their anatomy and let them know that many girls and women explore and touch their genitals for the sake of pleasure.

We want the real deal and so do our partners. Faking it is never a good idea. You’re robbing yourself of pleasure and your partner of the pleasure of learning how to make you lose yourself
in sexual ecstasy. Don’t do it! Your partner wants to be invited into that delicious expression of your inner Aphrodite. Healthy, strong men are not afraid of our Aphrodite power. They enjoy it. In fact, the reason men are so turned on by the sight of two women sexually pleasuring each other is because their bodies respond powerfully to the creative, erotic, female energy in those women. It awakens their own inner desire to be a part of that powerful, ecstatic experience.

Most women don’t experience orgasm through intercourse alone, which only indirectly stimulates the clitoris and much of the erotic anatomy. By combining intercourse with other forms of stimulation—or skipping the intercourse, for that matter—you can experience orgasm more easily. In their personal teaching and writings, Drs. Vera and Steve Bodansky call the first contraction of the PC (pubococcygeus) muscle with sexual stimulation the beginning of the orgasm. The minute you begin to think of your first sensation as an “orgasm,” the performance anxiety about struggling to “achieve” something goes away. You just sink into the sensation of every stroke. And that changes everything. It removes performance anxiety from the entire discussion. The minute you begin to feel pleasure is the beginning of the orgasm. There. Doesn’t that definition feel better?

If you have a sexual partner, offer feedback to guide him or her. When you’re engaging in pleasure, teach yourself how to vocalize and use positive reinforcement—“wow,” “that feels fantastic,” “you have great hands,” “you’re the best,” and so on—to give directions and encouragement. Release sounds of pleasure, which will turn you on as well as your partner. There’s a very strong connection between the throat and the genitals: a relaxed, open throat enhances energy flow and pleasure. Make a list of positive words:
yes, ahh, more pleasure, thank you, wow.
If you’re intimidated, play some music. Don’t hold back because you’re afraid of what the neighbors, or your kids, will hear or think. Invest in some soundproofing if you want to. Find a way to be sure you’re comfortable letting yourself vocalize the energy that’s coming straight from your lower chakras. The sounds of lovemaking and the sounds of birth are remarkably similar. This is what pleasurable creation sounds like.

In Sanskrit, the penis is referred to as a wand of light imbued with the sacred masculine life force, so when it penetrates a woman’s vagina, it brings healing power. That is very different from what many women have experienced in intercourse! But whether you are having intercourse with a male partner or you are stimulating your erotic anatomy in some other way, imagine your vagina as a sacred portal, bringing divine, loving energy into your body. Imagine each loving stroke removing sadness, anger, trauma, and pain that’s embedded in your tissues.

You probably know that our major organ systems are represented by reflexology points elsewhere on the body—on the soles of our feet, the palms of our hands, and our ears. The vagina also has reflexology points that correspond to the major organ systems (see
Figure 2
). Note that the innermost part of the vagina—near the cervix—is energetically connected with the heart. And that is why having intercourse or stimulating yourself vaginally can be a healing practice, stimulating and awakening the entire body. It’s also the basis of what is known as “sex magic,” in which you dedicate a session of raising sexual energy to attracting more abundance (which is nothing more than creative energy). Remember—the health of the pelvic organs is related to money, sex, and power. So sexual energy and abundance are highly correlated. You are, quite literally, ramping up the energy that created the world in your own body! However, this same creative energy is one of the key reasons why a woman can become addicted to a man after having sex with him. The very act of having intercourse turns on her heart and causes the release of bonding hormones. In a loving, committed relationship, this kind of physical/energetic bonding is glue that helps keep the couple together. But in a noncommitted relationship, a woman can be left with longing and an addiction to the man that feels as intense as a crack cocaine addiction. Hence, it’s very important to be selective of whom you “let in.” And remember, you can always stimulate these reflex centers on your own until the right partner arrives.