The Best You'll Ever Have (4 page)

Open Wide

Okay, so when you were a kid, everything between your legs was untouchable, unspeakable, invisible, and unknowable. By hook or by crook, you get to know yourself anyway, and hopefully you still are. It should be an ongoing process. You are constantly changing. You probably study your hair, face, pores, belly, and butt in the mirror every day, scrupulously looking for change (fatter, slimmer, fine lines, gray strands). The vulva gets short shrift. If you look at it at all, it’s probably not half as often as you twist around uncomfortably to see how your butt is doing.

Well, I’m proposing that you treat your nether regions with as much interest and respect as you pay to your skin or your hair—which, incidentally, gives you pleasure only when it’s not too humid. The clitoris will give you pleasure in the rain, snow, sleet, hail, at any time of day or night. The first step to having such a dependable relationship is getting up close and personal.

A Place for Everything, and Everything in Its Place

My daughter is 8 years old. We have her in a very progressive school
where she’s encouraged to ask questions about anything, which the
teachers answer factually. She came home the other day from school
and asked me if I knew that pee comes from one hole but that there
are two others holes in girls. I wasn’t sure she was right about there
being three orifices, so I said, “Is that so?” Then I called my friend,
who’s 42 like me, and she told me that my daughter is right. I always
thought we peed from the same place as the vagina. I’m mortified.
How can I be this old, have two kids, and not know anything
about my own body?”
—Jan, 42

Jan told me this story two years ago, at one of my first Salons. I was shocked—but not nearly as shocked as Jan was to learn the truth, and the degree of her own ignorance. Again, not to beat this point to death, but
she is not alone in being misinformed.
In fact, all the misinformation I came across in Salons led me to triple-check my own information. If I wanted to teach women about this stuff, I wanted to be sure I knew as much as I could inside and out, as it were. I plowed into research like a maniac.

This is what I learned: regarding the clitoris, some of the most famous modern medical literature might as well have been written in the Stone Age. This is a slight exaggeration, but only slight. The ancient Greeks understood the clitoris and its importance for female pleasure. They considered it a junior (and therefore inferior) equivalent to the penis. In the intervening thousands of years, knowledge of the clitoris and female pleasure shifted as attitudes toward women experiencing pleasure shifted. In the early 1900s, medical experts agreed with Freud that women should get their pleasure from intercourse—not their clitoris (fundamentally this meant that the in-out motion men so enjoyed equaled sex and women should like it the same way men did). At the same time, few people thought it dignified if a woman really enjoyed sex. Men were considered animalistic and women were supposed to be above that. So a lot of cultural beliefs got in the way of knowing what good sex is from a woman’s standpoint.

The anatomy of the clitoris wasn’t even considered. The fact that it’s more like a penis than not and wants the same amount of attention couldn’t be accepted until our culture changed. At the turn of the century, people thought women ought to wear corsets and long dresses to play tennis and didn’t see a connection between the corsets and women fainting—instead, they chalked it up to women being “the weaker sex.” Clearly a lot had to change to face the fact that women like sex and can be just as “animalistic” about it if their pleasure is being attended to and they are allowed to be themselves.

Compounding the cultural blinders, the physiology of the clitoris wasn’t high on the top of researchers’ priority list at a time when doctors were dealing with issues like the search for a cure for scarlet fever (penicillin was only discovered in 1929) and a lot of other illnesses that we rarely get now. Julie Egan, curator of the Human Mind and Body Program in Australia, explains that the early diagrams of women’s anatomy done during the Renaissance were based on only three females—a six-year-old child who’d been exhumed and two criminals who were executed. These drawings were the standard for a very long time.

By the early twentieth century, science was booming and progressing by leaps and bounds but the morality of the Victorian times deemed the clitoris unsuitable for research. It isn’t necessary for reproduction; it doesn’t get sick. The only problem seemed to be keeping little girls from touching it (masturbation was also considered an illness). Oddly, the cure for the main female illness in adult women was to stimulate the clitoris. This condition, called “hysteria,” was considered the main cause of female troubles for the first half of the twentieth century. Doctors believed that the womb often became unmoored and wandered around a woman’s body, causing her to be very emotional. To calm the symptoms, the clitoris was often treated manually or with vibratory devices in the doctor’s office. (Yes, doctors would actually masturbate these women’s symptoms away, but if women touched themselves, they were sick). The fact that this doctor-applied clitoral stimulation calmed down lots of “hysterical” women and that orgasms made these “sick” women feel better didn’t add up to a diagnosis of sexual frustration to doctors back then. But then perception is reality. Facts don’t stand a chance against deep-seated beliefs.

As recently as the 1960s and 1970s, after the “wandering womb” beliefs were refuted, doctors were still diagnosing American women with “frigidity” if they didn’t have orgasms during standard missionary position sex. Their husbands, backed up by science, declared these, the majority of women (80 percent of them), defective. Women’s feelings of inadequacy with their husbands were compounded when they went to the doctor only to be told they were indeed sick and were often put on drugs. Since muscle relaxants aren’t magic orgasm-producing pills, women’s problems were perpetual. Years of masturbation prohibition (pleasuring oneself was still thought to cause insanity and severed hands) made the sexually frustrated women feel much worse.

Luckily those days are over. It’s incredible to think that all this misinformation was so recent. This dark history is part of why so few of us talk about sex today and why the clitoris remains shrouded in mystery.

Can We Talk?

THE STORIES TOLD IN SAFINA SALONS MAKE WOMEN LAUGH, NOD IN RECOGNITION, OR SPONTANEOUSLY SHOUT OUT, “OH, NO!” IN EMPATHY OR SURPRISE. YOU MAY HAVE SIMILAR STORIES OF YOUR OWN. CHANCES ARE YOU HAVEN’T TOLD A SOUL. HERE AREA FEW OF OTHER WOMEN’S STORIES OF THEIR BIG SECRETS VIS-À-VIS THE CLITORIS.

A LITTLE TRIM

I was afraid of waxing my bikini area, so I thought I’d just do a little
trim and eliminate some of the excess. I got out my manicure scissors,
which are very sharp. I sat on the edge of the bed and started snipping
away. I thought my pubic hair did look better shorter. And then my
hand slipped. I felt a sharp, intense, blinding-white sudden pain. I
pressed down on the whole area in a panic, but when I took a quick
look, I saw blood. I couldn’t look after that. I started to cry. I was too
scared to examine the extent of the damage. I was in serious pain.
Terrified, I couldn’t move.

My boyfriend heard me and came rushing in. I felt so stupid.
There I was, sitting on the side of the bed with my robe open, hands
pressing down, looking up at him. He knelt down and held my
shoulders and asked so sweetly, “What’s wrong? What’s going on?”
I couldn’t speak I was crying so hard.

“I … cut … my … clitoris,” I gasped.

He said, “Let me see.” I didn’t want to let go. He got a wet towel
and wiped me off and took a good look and then his tone changed
completely, “You didn’t cut your clitoris,” he said. “You just nicked
the hood a tiny bit. Take a look.”

“What hood?” I asked. He gave me a hand mirror and showed me
the clitoral hood and the clitoris underneath and the urethra and
the vagina. I didn’t even know there was a hood—and mine is huge.
It’s like a folded flap of skin. If you pull it back, and he did, you can
see the clitoris. I’d taken a mirror and looked maybe once or twice
before that, but I never thought to pull back the skin. I thought the
flap
was
the clitoris. So here’s my boyfriend, the same age as me,
who’d been with me for four or five years since the middle of college,
explaining my body parts to me. I felt so foolish and embarrassed.
At the same time, I was so glad I hadn’t cut my clitoris. I’d thought
I’d never be able to fix it, that I’d never be able to enjoy sex again.
So one minute I was thinking I’m doomed, and the next, my boyfriend
is taking me on a tour of my vulva.

I demanded to know how he knew so much. He said, “I took an
interest. I’ve read books. I can’t believe you never wanted to know
about yourself.”

I couldn’t believe it either. I’ve since taken a real interest, and
that’s why I became a Safina Specialist. I knew that if I could be so
clueless there had to be others in the same state.
—Shameka, 29

MAGIC FINGERS

You know what amazes me about my clitoris? The time I wasted on men
who didn’t know what to do with it. It took me 32 years to find a man
who knew how to touch it. I figured out a long time ago when I was a
little girl that if I barely touched it, it felt amazing. I knew to start up
higher, near my bone, not directly on the clitoris. I knew that if someoneelse did it, it would feel even better. But no one ever took enough
time. I’d say, “Barely touch me,” and the guy would zero in and press
down and then massage like I had a muscle kink that needed kneading.

I’d try not to shriek at them, but it was awful. It was painful. I know
I should’ve shown them what to do. I should’ve talked to them about it
before we got in bed. But I always hoped the next guy would know what
to do and that he’d listen to me when I told him to barely touch me.

I met Mike when I was 32. I really liked him. On our third date
(the sex date), I was nervous about what would happen. When we got
in bed, Mike’s fingers were feather light. He started at my stomach
and he made circles and wavy lines almost in the air above me. Even
when he got close to the clitoris, he didn’t change his approach.
The light touches gave me shivers. I couldn’t believe a sensation
could be so overwhelmingly good. Pure happiness shot through me.
It was the best sex of my life. It was a deal-sealer. A
deal-sealer!
We got married two and a half years later.
—Laura, 35