Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm (21 page)

But you are not broken, you protest. You can handle just as much as he can, if not more. (Let
him
try out menstruation and childbirth, and then we’ll see who’s broken.)

You are right. And yet this is one of the most painful things I have to point out to women: we work very hard to convince others that we just can’t do it. We are the queens of the “yes, but…” We are ready at any moment to rattle off a litany of our flaws—all the reasons we are not enough. This works with our women friends; we’ve long known how to read between the lines. But men take things at face value. If you talk about all the ways you are less than, he starts to believe it.

If, on the other hand, you show him your ability—how whole you can be, how you
can
handle it—then his need to be alpha will subside.

This is key, since one of the greatest hopes of my women students is that their men might learn to show more emotion, to be more intimate, to let them in. Understand that
he cannot show you his emotions if you seem to be falling apart all the time. If he is to open to you, you have to first show him that you can handle his emotions. Show him you can hold him.

Once in a workshop a woman was weeping, crying to the point where she could barely speak. She was telling her husband how much it hurt her that he was not more emotional. His response said it all: “How can I be? One of us needs to hold it together.”

He is going to do everything he can to maintain equilibrium. If he sees you in a perpetual state of falling apart, he will swing to the opposite pole. If you want him to feel safe letting go, then it’s up to you to develop the muscle of steadiness. Your steadiness itself will give him the freedom to show you what is really going on in his heart.

3. Nice is the trump card.
I meet so many fantastic women. Women who are smart and sexy, witty and charming. Women with charisma and verve, who can work a ten-hour day and then throw a dinner party for eight without so much as a nap. Women, it seems, who can do anything.

Everything except find and keep their man. They watch the men they desire fall desperately in love with women who aren’t as smart, who aren’t as sexy, who wouldn’t know the first thing about choosing the right wine to go with mole chicken. Women who have accomplished nothing at all with their lives. Why
her
?

When the men are teaching the class and the women ask this question, they are momentarily stunned by the response. It’s simple, the guys point out. The woman they go for is the one who is
nice
to him.

The one who loves him. Who he can see appreciates him.

“We would do anything in the world for you,” they say, “if we thought it meant you’d be
nice
to us.”

All the other credentials pale in comparison. Everything else is icing on the cake, more for your own pleasure than for his. This isn’t to say that your accomplishments aren’t important. They’re what make the experience of being
you
just fun enough that your joy can overflow onto him. But much more important than your credentials is your capacity to feel full enough yourself that you can extend toward him with care. Start with one moment of genuine appreciation, and feel your way from there.

4. Say it to a man every time like the first time.
The female ear, like everything else about us, is trained to operate on multiple channels. It’s why we can all talk at once and still be understood. It’s why we know what she’s saying, even when she’s
not
saying what she really
wants
to say—because we can hear her on all different levels, even the silent ones.

Men are trained to hear well on one channel at a time. If you come to him with more than one channel broadcasting—saying one thing but meaning another—you will miss your target completely. He will only hear the one you are saying out loud. The same thing is true when it comes to sex. For women, sex is operating on many channels at once. It’s about emotion, connection, nourishment, and—sometimes but not always—desire. When you’re “doing it,” you’re “doing it” on multiple levels. Your man, however, is doing it on just one level at a time. Hate to say it, but most of the time he’s just “doing it.”

The way to bring your two worlds together, whether in
communication or in sex, is to slow down and repeat. Say everything as if you were saying it for the first time. Every stroke a new stroke. Every request a new request. No condescension, no judgment. Just a willingness to start over again in every moment.

5. Fixing is what a man does when he can’t figure out how to turn you on.
We women have been trained that the only way to get our needs met is to assume the role of victim. To collapse, to break beneath the weight of our unmet desire. Your man wants to help, but all he sees is you, lying there, broken. He does not hear the desire, he hears only the complaint. So he takes the complaint into his little woodshop, pulls out his trusty tools, and commences to fix. To fix the problem. To fix his woman and make her happy again.

But of course, fixing isn’t what we want at all. When we’re not turned on, what we want is to be
turned on
. Turn-on happens through play. We want to be tempted and teased, not poked and prodded. We want to be held and felt, not told what to do. When he turns to his workbench and begins to tinker away, we accuse him of ineptitude. We feel like he doesn’t see us, like he doesn’t understand us. In truth, all he’s doing is responding to what feels like an emergency in the only way he knows how.

Instead, you can use his fixing nature to inspire your own turn-on. Remember that his tendency to go into handyman mode is his way of saying “I love you.” It’s all he has. It may be in a foreign language—it may be all consonants and no vowels so it’s a bit clunky and awkward—but it is “I love you” nonetheless. Let the love fill you up, turn you on, and then gently redirect him toward your desire.

“Most men my age don’t know how to touch a woman. I don’t blame them. They never really learned. So it’s been amazing to have my partner touching me in a way that truly feels good for the first time.”

—Donna, 58

6. His conditioning says for him to be autonomous and independent.
For a while at OneTaste, we were teaching a lot of sexuality courses specifically for women. Then one day we got the bright idea to teach a class for men. We called it “What Ten Women Want You to Know,” and that’s exactly what the guys got: ten real women telling them exactly what they wanted men to know about women.

As you can imagine, there was quite a lot to say.

I moderated the discussion and watched as each of the guys leaned in, silent, not moving a muscle. I’ve never had such a rapt audience, before or since. I thought we’d struck gold—this was the best, most amazing course we’d ever created. These guys didn’t want to miss one word of what we women were telling them.

But then the men left for their lunch break—and didn’t come back.

We couldn’t figure it out. The guys seemed to
love
the course, giving us their full and complete attention and showing no signs of overload. But then they disappeared before it was over.

I only understood once I stopped thinking of the men as women. Women, who are conditioned to connect in groups, and thus feel comfortable letting their feelings be known to those around them. Who nod when they like what they’re hearing and grimace or look away when they
don’t. From the time we’re little girls, we’re taught to fly in flocks. So we know how to recognize one another’s signs and how to make our feelings known in subtle ways.

I had to start thinking of the men as men, who are trained from a very early age to keep it all in. Who are more comfortable as their own independent entities. These men had no way of letting us know when we were giving them too much information. They didn’t think they had a right to tell us they’d had enough, that we were going too far. Instead, they held it all in—and then fled at the first opportunity.

With men, we must go slow and check in frequently. Give lots of breaks, chances for him to blow off some steam. Otherwise long before you notice any signs he may overload and then head for the hills. The lesson is this: one stroke at a time.

And men, if you’re wondering what tips we gave out during that class, it all came down to one sweet request: be more you. That’s it. Show yourself to us. It’s all we’ve ever wanted.

7. He really is that simple, and it’s not the same as dumb.
One of my favorite exercises in the workshop is to have the men and women partner up and speak every thought that comes into their minds for two minutes. The women begin, and they have great fun with it. They are dreaming about a new life, or thinking about their girlfriend’s wedding, or planning a trip to Mexico, or wondering what is happening with that other couple across the room. When the bell goes off, there is a pained moan. The exercise is over? It went so fast.

Then we have the men start talking.

I said,
then we have the men start talking.
Start talking, men!

Another pained moan, this time because they have nothing to say. Really. What are they supposed to say? When the exercise is over, there is an audible sigh of relief.

The male brain, to the women’s amazement, actually seems to be focused on
what he himself is doing right now
. All the delicate nuance that a woman sees happening around her, all the time—it doesn’t even make it to his radar. We expect him to be communicating via body language and studied silences. He, on the other hand, has already said everything he needed to say. He couldn’t have been more clear. That’s why our men become frustrated when we’re always asking them to tell us four times what they
really
meant. They
really
meant what they said. Just what they said, and no more. They have been taught to focus. To be straightforward, direct, and honest. They say what they think. Integrity comes before all. So when he doesn’t go into detail, do not take it personally. It is not that he doesn’t love you, that he can’t feel you. It’s that he already told you. Go back to his words, and allow their full weight to land within. You may discover you have no more questions at all.

8. When you hit, it hurts.
Remember the first time you hurt someone you love? You were probably a kid, playing with your little brother or your best friend, and you were horsing around as all kids do. Maybe you were pushing a bit too hard, and you knew on some level that you were crossing a line, but you didn’t think any harm would come
of it. You had no intention of actually
hurting
him. So when he started to cry—to cry for real, with big juicy tears falling off his eyelashes and down the front of his T-shirt—the pain was like someone was trying to surgically remove your heart without anesthesia.

That’s how the women feel in class the day the men tell us how easily, and how often, we hurt them with what we say. The first time I heard a guy say it with such honesty, I think the pang in my chest may have left a scar.

I see this in my coaching as well. For example, a couple takes part in class and the guy won’t be saying very much. His partner will say something that could seem innocuous if you weren’t listening very carefully, and he’ll explode.

“Did you hear that? I just can’t take her put-downs anymore!” he’ll say. And she’ll look at him like he has four heads.

“He
got
that?” she’ll be thinking. Most women have no idea that the barbs they send out even land with him. We’ve learned over the course of time that the only way to get our desires is to try to squeeze them in through the back door. So we start to squeeze a whole lot in through the back door, including—in the case of this couple—a whole lot of our pain. We want it to be acknowledged, but we have never gotten very far with direct communication. So we cloak our true feelings with a joke or a smile or a backhanded compliment.

Until we realize that when we cut him down—even if we do it with a smile on our face—he feels it. In class we do an exercise where throughout the day, the men will raise their hands whenever a woman in class says something that hurts. It’s shocking how many hands are in the air, and
how often. It’s a wake-up call for the women; men actually
feel
! Even though they’ve been trained not to acknowledge it, to let it run off their backs, to dismiss our commentary as nagging or bitchiness or “that time of the month.” In that one exercise, the truth comes out—they feel us, even when we think we’re being sneaky. It’s a cycle of viciousness: we’re being mean because we think he’s going to dismiss us if we speak our desires directly; he’s dismissing us because we’re being
mean
.

The cure is communication. Pure, simple, unobstructed. Start with sex, with OM. Tell him what he’s doing right, and ask him if he would do just this one thing a little bit differently. Be neutral. Remember the first rule: what he wants more than anything is for you to be happy, for you to be nice to him. Show him that you’re on his side during sex, that you are setting him up to succeed at this life’s work, and soon you’ll be able to get your desires met in the bedroom and beyond.

9. Men get confused when women withhold information.
We women are better at strategy than an army general. When we have something important to say, we ruminate on it all day long. We think of twelve different ways we might phrase it in order to get just the response we’re looking for. We’ll wait and wait for the perfect moment. We’ll use all of our energy to hold back. We’ll plan out how we’re going to use 25 percent fewer words than we really want to—you know, for
impact
. Then we will wait and hold, wait and hold, until we can’t keep it inside anymore and we have to let it out.

At which point, without fail, it comes out all wonky and hysterical-sounding. First, because only 75 percent of the
information is there. Second, because unexpressed desire has a very short shelf life. When it arises, it’s all bright and shiny and perfect. But let it stand out on the counter until “just the right moment,” and you can guarantee something that is a little moldy and stinky and soft in the middle.