The Best You'll Ever Have (5 page)

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FIRST KIND

The first time a boy touched my clitoris was when I was about 9 or 10
years old. He was a kid my age. His family was staying in the hotel my
family owns. I don’t know how exactly I came to be lying down with
him massaging me. I’m sure we were playing doctor (had to be that),
but I don’t remember any details—except how his hand felt on top
of my shorts. Fantastic. I didn’t know he was touching my clitoris and
I don’t even know if he knew. I was just astonished that anything
could feel so good. I didn’t move or speak in case he’d stop.

I thought about that afternoon a lot afterwards. I’m talking for
years afterwards. I wondered what he’d done exactly and about how
good it’d felt. I didn’t talk about it and didn’t ever try to touch myself
(looking back, I wished I had). Seven years later, at 17, I got a boyfriend
who touched me through my shorts and then took them off. And I felt
the magic again. At that age, I still don’t think I knew where my clitoris
was (or what it was). But I was finally very motivated to learn.
—Suzanne, 33

JUST FOLLOWING ORDERS

The clitoris wants consistency. Why don’t men know this? I can’t tell
you how many guys I’ve been with who don’t take what I say literally.
During sex I’d scream, “Right there, don’t stop.” Hearing this, these
guys would somehow think, “If she likes that, wait until she sees this,”
and they’d do something completely different. I thought I was on
track to have the best orgasm ever (or the best this week) and the guy
would blow it.

After too many experiences like this, I decided to get this
straightened out upfront. In the profile I posted on the Internet, I
wrote, “If I say, right there, don’t stop. I mean RIGHT THERE, DON’T
STOP.” You have to be clear. Men can get too excited in the moment.
They want to please you, but they get carried away. The best time to
give directions is when they’re calm. My current boyfriend understands the meaning of “don’t stop.” Which makes him the best lover
I’ve ever had.
—Dara, 36

A RUN TO THE FINISH

I got my clitoral hood pierced a couple years ago. I heard it would
make sex more intensely pleasurable, and I thought, Why not? If it
doesn’t, I’ll take the ring out. The piercing itself hurt—much more
than when I had my ears done. I won’t pretend it didn’t. But I don’t
regret doing it.

A month after I got the newsecret ring, I was in Las Vegas at a
convention for work. I was late and tried to make the light across
a broad street—six lanes of traffic—to get to the convention hotel.
I was wearing very tight new jeans. Anyway, I start running and almost
immediately I felt an orgasm coming on. My jeans were rubbing
and the ring was moving against my clitoris. It was so strong and overwhelmingI had to stop and put my hands on my knees and try to catch
my breath. I knew I should keep going—I was still two lanes from the
other side, and traffic was coming—but I was coming too. I couldn’t
move. I didn’t even care. Can you believe that? It felt so good I didn’t
care if I was hit by a speeding car. Obviously, I lived to tell the tale.
But, from that moment on, I’ve become an avid runner. And I avoid
busy streets.
—Michelle, 30

SELF-SERVICE

You know how men say that no woman can give a better hand job than
they can give themselves? Well, I feel that way about the clitoris. No
man can make it feel as good as I can. I can’t give them directions fast
enough. How do you tell them how much pressure and when to move
to more direct touching while you’re thinking it? They’re always going
to be a little later than I want. That can be nice, but it’s not as perfect.
Don’t get me wrong, I love having sex with my boyfriend. I like intercourseand he does a good job with oral sex and his hand, but he’ll
never be as good as me at getting me off.
—Roxanne, 28

Great Things Come (Ahem) in Small Packages

The clitoris is a little organ, but it’s not as small as you probably think, you, and much of the world, including the medical establishment. In 1998, Helen O’Connell, M.D., a urological surgeon in Australia, went back to her textbooks and compared the anatomy drawings with the real women she’d operated on. She found that the anatomy diagrams for the female body—the ones she studied in medical school—had glaring defects and omissions. Like a few other doctors before her, she’s proven that the clitoris is a much larger structure than the anatomy textbooks show. During my research, I found only two diagrams of the full clitoral structure done in this century. One was drawn in 1922 and published in the 1949 edition of
Atlas of Human Sex Anatomy.
Another was published in the
Journal of Pediatric Surgery
in 1970.

I knew that the diagrams I saw in the majority of medical textbooks were wrong just by looking at my own body. Thankfully, Dr. O’Connell and other researchers like her are finally correcting them.

Here’s the truth: underneath the vulva folds, the clitoris
and its
roots
look very much like a penis. The clitoris works very much the same way as the penis. Surprising? Yes. And too true to ignore. Dr. O’Connell explains that the clitoris “is a large structure that wraps around the vagina and the urethra. The external ‘head’ is attached to a ‘body,’ two ‘arms,’ and a mass of erectile tissue, called ‘bulbs’ which, like the penis, swell with blood when aroused.”

To be clearer, the clitoris is shaped like a wishbone, the top of which is the clitoral glans or head that we can see under the hood when we look at ourselves. This external part of the clitoris can vary in size between a few millimeters to a half-inch. The clitoral head extends an inch or two into the body and then forks into two arms. The two arms of the wishbone are on average about four inches long. They straddle the urethra, running along under the skin where the labia are. From the roots to tip, the average clitoris measures roughly four to six inches long, close to the same size as the average penis.

For my Safina Salons, I decided to present what I learned in a quiz show format. I wanted to convey the details in a nonthreatening, cheerful way. I shout out a question and give the women in the room a chance to answer. If you get the answer right, you get a little prize (chocolate body paint, sample packets of lubrication, colored condoms). Women who don’t have a clue aren’t put on the spot and aren’t made to feel stupid and inadequate. Stories flow naturally out of the quiz show format. It’s proven to be one of the highlights of our Salons.

QUIZ SHOW QUESTION NO. 1: What is the clitoris attached to?

SHORT ANSWER:
Its roots.

LONG ANSWER:
In most illustrations, the clitoris is drawn as a
small red curve, which trails off inside the folds of skin near the top
of the vulva.
Any woman who’s touched herself knows this couldn’t be right. I can feel that my own clitoris is firmly attached and not some tiny floating pebble. The clitoris is, in fact, firmly attached, deeply rooted around the vulva like a wishbone. It has eighteen separate parts to it, which Rebecca Chalker, author of
The Clitoral Truth
outlines in her book. This may be a little inflated because she and the Feminist Women’s Health Center count the blood vessels as separate parts. But no matter how you add it up, the clitoris is far more extensive than meets the eye.

QUIZ SHOW QUESTION NO. 2: What’s the difference between a clitoris and a penis?

SHORT ANSWER:
The clitoris is MORE FUN.

LONG ANSWER:
The penis and clitoris are more similar than
different.
The clitoris and penis have the same superstructure. Most of us know that all embryos start out female. Around the seventh or eighth week in utero, if the fetus is going to go male, the clitoris extends outside the body to become a penis. What might have become a vulva closes and develops into testicles.

The penis also houses the male urethra and is a sperm delivery system. So, while it’s fun for play, the penis has serious work to do. The clitoris, on the other hand, has absolutely no practical purpose other than pleasure, and quite a bit of pleasure at that. It has four times as many nerve endings as the head of a penis, making it much more sensitive and responsive to the slightest stimulation.

The clitoris is the only human body part—male or female—that is solely for fun. Eve Ensler—creator of the renowned play
The Vagina
Monologues
—has done a great job of pointing this out to thousands of people around the world. I’m trying to do my part too. We women are possessors of a tremendous source of pleasure, and yet so many of us discount it or ignore it. If men had clitorises, they’d never get their hands out of their pants. Doesn’t the idea of penis envy seem absurd when you think about the sensitivity, specialization in pleasure, and compact neatness of the clitoris?

QUIZ SHOW QUESTION NO. 3: Does clitoral size matter?

SHORT ANSWER (AS IT WERE):
No.

LONG ANSWER:
Size is a hotly debated subject regarding penises.
But I’ve never heard a group of women (or men) swapping opinions on the pluses and minuses of having a big or small clitoris. Maybe if men couldn’t compare with each other they wouldn’t worry about it either. I was surprised, as you may be, to find out that clitoral size and shape varies just as widely as penis size. No two are alike. I found a book called
Feminalia
by Joani Blank that is a color photo collection of vulvas of all sizes and shapes. One after the next, page after page of photos, like any art book—but not the kind you want to take on the subway or bus. It is fascinating to behold the diversity. Some clitorises are visible, and some aren’t anywhere to be seen at all. The variations of labia range from small and pink to large, dark, and almost ruffled. Most women are asymmetrical, and you can see that the terms “labia minora” and “labia majora” are misnomers. Just because they are “inner” lips doesn’t mean that they are completely inside the “outer” lips. Very often the inner lips poke beyond the outer lips.

Brief digression: Last year, I met a plastic surgeon at a party in New York who is starting to do a brisk business in the field of labial surgery. This surgeon’s clients want their labia altered to be symmetrical, tidy, and uniform. I was shocked at this unnecessary mutilation of the most intense bundle of nerve endings in the human body—all predicated on ignorance. These women must think they’re abnormal and ugly. How would they know they aren’t? How many other vulvas have these women seen? Airbrushed
Playboy
pictorials don’t count.

Georgia O’Keefe, a leading member of the avant garde movement in the 1910s and 1920s, painted giant vulva-like flowers, with layers unfolding in shadows and light. Thinking about the vulva as an O’Keefe image is a very positive way to approach getting to know your own visually. It sounds very touchy-feely to suggest, but it is truly a good idea to take a look at your own vulva to see what’s going on. Expect asymmetrical lips and several shades of color that change in front of your eyes. Don’t fall into the trap of turning your vulva into yet another body part to obsess about negatively. Accept that you are normal and beautiful. There is no one way for a vulva to look.

Okay, digression over. Back to size variation. The average length of the external clitoris is a quarter of an inch. But the range runs from a few millimeters to an inch or more. Tanika, 24, attended a Safina Salon last year. “My boyfriend told me that I had a really long clit,” she said. “It’s about an inch long. I had no idea that all women didn’t have one my size. Now I realize that my clitoris is an outie, just like a belly button. More of it is external than other women’s. It works for me, and when I hear friends complaining about not being able to have an orgasm during sex, I figure I must be lucky. Because of my outie, I don’t have a problem with that.”