The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex (13 page)

I have to work at orgasms, but once they arrive I keep coming, i.e., my clit keeps throbbing, especially with firm pressure.

I used to have something more like multiple orgasms, which occurred after the second or third when they would all blend together into a continuous extremely high state that was almost torturous (but great).

Spontaneous Orgasm

This term refers to the phenomenon of reaching orgasm without touch. A fair number of women report that they can reach orgasm purely through mental stimulation, breathing techniques, and contracting the PC muscle. Wet dreams are better documented in men than women, but both sexes can attest to having orgasms in their sleep. Women and men with no genital sensation because of spinal cord injuries have also been documented experiencing orgasms while sleeping. People with nerve damage can often learn to have orgasmic sensations in other parts of the body. The long and short of it is, there’s plenty of proof to the adage that the brain is the biggest sex organ.

Interesting note about orgasms: I can have them hands-free. If I lie or sit pretty still and focus on a fantasy (especially if I’ve smoked a joint first), I can have intense, mind-blowing orgasms without any kind of physical stimulation. Lucky me!

I was born a paraplegic, so I cannot feel below my waist. This has limited my ability to orgasm through the sense of touch. However, I am very intuned to my thoughts. My vagina does lubricate and I do orgasm when I can concentrate.

The Big O

We realize it may seem a bit contradictory to follow our assertion that orgasms are but one of many reasons to have sex with several pages full of orgasm tales. We do believe that orgasms aren’t the be-all and end-all of sexual experience, and we know that many people have great, pleasurable sex without orgasms. But orgasm strikes us as a fascinating and revealing topic because in many ways people’s feelings about orgasm serve as microcosms of their feelings about sex in general. If you were asked the question, “How are you feeling about your orgasms?” your response would doubtless include, not only the sensations and the emotions you experience during sex, but also your feelings about your body, your genitals, your relationships, and your desires. Try answering this question, and see what you learn about yourself.

Since learning to masturbate, my response cycle has evolved so that I will come and then shortly after (less than one minute) my crotch will be begging me to do it again. These days I will come once or twice, but for a while nothing less than twice would do! It was an amazing feeling to have the need be beyond my control or creation, in a way. I have had trouble coming with partners and being able to sexually respond well, so there is something special about this.

Orgasm is my elusive best friend. I’ve been sexually active since about 13, and I only started having orgasms a few months ago, at the tender age of 23. That’s when I started to use my vibrator. I really enjoy my orgasms, demure and non-earth shattering though they may be. That warm, warm feeling is just terrific. I try not to think about having one while I’m masturbating, because I think it lessens their intensity. When I’m not masturbating, I do think about them. I remember how my temperature goes up, how I lose sense of time, how these waves pulse through my insides and hips up through my stomach. I like the noises I make.

Sex and Your Doctor

In an ideal world, members of the medical community would be valuable resources for your questions about sexual anatomy and response. Despite the fact that we count on doctors for accurate physiological information, at least as many people have been intimidated, alarmed, or actually misinformed about sex in their doctor’s office as have received useful, reassuring advice. It’s understandably challenging both for laypeople to bring up sexual matters to medical professionals, and for medical professionals to address these matters. Consider the following limitations and our suggested coping mechanisms:

Lack of Training

Medical schools offer no standardized program of training in human sexuality, and state licensing requirements are hardly strenuous (for instance, in the state of California, medical students are only required to have a total of twelve hours of human sexuality training). There’s a growing movement to provide better sex training for doctors, but effects could take decades to trickle down.

Grassroots organizations can provide up-to-date, accurate information for laypeople on a host of medical issues. Sex-information hotlines (see our resource listings for referrals) offer far more extensive human sexuality training to their volunteers than medical schools do to students. If you have access to the Web, you can find a wide range of information online.

Specialization

Doctors tend to have very specific areas of expertise and knowledge. If you’re experiencing a specific sexual problem, discuss it with the appropriate specialist. Take your erectile concerns to a urologist. Discuss your vaginismus with an OB/GYN. If your concerns aren’t exclusively physiological, you may find that a sex therapist is best equipped to help you.

Most doctors operate from a disease-based model, and are more likely to be able to diagnose medical conditions than to discuss behavioral guidelines. If you’re seeking advice on sexual practices, you may find that a family practitioner has a more holistic, better-informed approach than a specialist. Nurse practitioners and social workers can also be valuable resources. The staff at women’s clinics are frequently well-informed about sexual matters, thanks largely to pioneering work within the feminist health movement.

Embarrassment

Doctors are raised in the same sex-negative society as the rest of us and aren’t necessarily any better equipped to discuss sex than the average person. Don’t expect your doctor to be the one to raise the topic of sex. You’ll need to be proactive in requesting information. Come to your appointment with a clear idea of what specific questions you’d like answered—it can be helpful to write these down beforehand just to identify what it is you want to know. Even if doctors can’t answer your questions right then and there (remember, they may not know the answers), they should either schedule a follow-up appointment or refer you to another professional who can help you.

You may have qualms about approaching the doctor with whom you have or hope to have a long and trusting relationship with a question that might embarrass one or both of you. For example, “You’ve told me I shouldn’t have vaginal intercourse until six weeks after childbirth, but what about anal intercourse?” or “After my heart attack, is it more dangerous to masturbate or to have sex with my wife?”

Well, the choice is up to you. You can ask the question and assume that your doctor will either have a good answer or will have to research the answer, in which case you’ll have made a valuable contribution to sexual consciousness-raising in the medical community. If your embarrassment might prevent you from clearly communicating what it is you want to know, you can take advantage of anonymous resource options, such as sex information hotlines and the Web.

Power Dynamic

There’s an inherent power dynamic in the doctor-patient relationship. Not only is the doctor an authority figure, but whatever he or she puts into your medical records will be easily accessible to other doctors and insurance companies.

Here again, you can either go public with your concerns for the sake of increasing the general pool of medical knowledge, or you can opt for anonymity (for example, many free clinics offer anonymous HIV testing). In medical emergencies, you need to get to a doctor regardless of what will or won’t show up in your patient files. Be aware that there’s nothing new under the sun, and that emergency staff won’t blink twice at situations that might strike a layperson as unusual.

The bottom line is that doctors are people, too, and you’re going to find some who are excellent, sensitive communicators about sexual matters and others who aren’t. You deserve access to accurate sex information, and if you can’t get this from a doctor, please don’t assume you’ve exhausted all of your resources.

If Not You, Who?

Regardless of the response you may get, we do encourage you to bring up sexual questions and concerns to your doctors; to identify, support, and refer others to the sex-positive doctors you find; and to talk with friends and family about the sexual repercussions of medical and physiological events throughout your life. Bringing sexual topics out into the open is a crucial step toward normalizing sex, which leads in turn to a freer exchange of accurate information. Changing the status quo demands everyone’s proactive participation, and you can make an invaluable contribution to raising the sexual IQ of everyone in your community simply by speaking up.

CHAPTER 4

Sex Over a Lifetime

Everyone is a sexual being. Six-month-old babies and 92-year-old grandmas are all sexual beings, so don’t ever think that you are the only one who has these feelings or that any of them are wrong, deviant, or bad.

Each individual’s unique sexuality is shaped by developmental milestones and significant life events. Sexual impulses are with us from cradle to grave, and sexual self-discovery is not a single journey, in which we map out our personal terrain once and for all. Rather, our bodies, relationships, desires, and patterns of sexual response are ever-evolving. Change is both chaotic and enlivening—if you approach the inevitable changes in your sexual experience with a spirit of curiosity and adventure, your whole life can be enriched.

Childhood and Adolescence

Anyone who remembers masturbating or playing doctor as a child knows that children are sexual beings. Unfortunately, many adults mistakenly view children as sexless, so when a child demonstrates delight in his or her body or feelings, adults respond with anxiety or suspicion. This stems in part from puritan notions that innocence is a sexless state, but also from a tendency to project adult sexual feelings onto children. While children don’t necessarily masturbate or look at naked people with the same intentions as adults, they do touch themselves because it is pleasurable, and they do look because they’re curious. Too often these typical manifestations of child sexuality make adults uncomfortable at best and fearful at worst.

Yet it doesn’t have to be this way. Children’s sexuality should be given free reign to develop naturally, nurtured with information, encouragement, and guidance from adults—not denial, shame, or censorship. How else will today’s children become tomorrow’s sexually responsible adults? We don’t hesitate to encourage our children to cultivate healthy self-esteem, positive body image, and respect for others, and these same values can provide the foundation for a life full of sexual pleasure.

Many excellent book and websites are available to help both parents and educators understand and prepare for children’s developmental milestones, along with suggestions for how to impart age-appropriate sex information. We have written extensively about raising sexually healthy children in our own book
The Mother’s Guide to Sex,
and we encourage you to seek out as many resources as you can and to maintain an open dialogue with your children throughout their lives.

In this chapter we focus on the sexuality of teens and young adults—rather than prepubescent children—because:

• Statistics show that plenty of young people have sex. We believe in the sexual autonomy of today’s youth and want to offer them tools and resources for informed decision-making.

• The current emphasis on abstinence-only sex education not only is unrealistic but negatively affects teen sexual health.

• We hope parents, teachers, and anyone in the position to advise a teen about sexuality and decision-making will find the following information useful.

If you are a parent, we encourage you to take an active role in your child’s sexuality education. As we discuss below, the sex education that children receive at school or from peers will hardly prepare them for the difficult decisions they will face once their hormones kick in.

If you are a teen, welcome! One of the reasons we wrote this book is that we wish something like it had existed when we became sexually active in our teens. We applaud your quest for accurate sex information, and we hope you’ll find answers to your questions about anatomy, self-image, technique, safer sex, and communication in these pages. However, there are many other aspects of your sexual coming of age that we can’t address here, so we encourage you to check out some of the materials that have been written specifically for youth. Books like
Deal With It
(for preteen and teen girls) and
Changing Bodies, Changing Lives
(for teen girls and boys) discuss physical and emotional changes, deciding if you’re ready for sex, relationships, dealing with peers and parents, and contraception (among other subjects). The Web is also a terrific source of information, and we highly recommend sites like Sex
Etc.
and Coalition for Positive Sexuality as sources of straightforward information from other teens. Check our resource listings for recommended books, videos, organizations, and websites.

Teens Have Sex

According to the Centers for Disease Control’s latest statistics, 39 percent of teens in the United States have engaged in sexual intercourse by the ninth grade, growing to 65 percent by the twelfth grade. This should come as little surprise to the hundreds of our survey respondents who shared memories of their adolescent sexual experiences.

Clearly, teens have been and will continue to be sexually active, yet most receive little information and no real preparation about sex. Soon after the first edition of this book was published, we learned that it was being used in several college-level human sexuality classes. We were thrilled to think that young adults would be learning that sex was something they deserved to enjoy, and that it could encompass pleasure, experimentation, and safety, rather than danger and disease. Yet it seemed sad to us that the sex-positive message these young adults were receiving was arriving a little late. By college age, most of us have struggled through awkward, demoralizing, or just disappointing sexual relationships, and are already trying to repair whatever damage has been done. Even those who emerge from their adolescent sexual forays with positive memories probably would have benefited from a little more confidence and a lot less fear. It’s ridiculous that teens are given very little information about sexual pleasure and technique, yet when they reach early adulthood they’re expected to intuitively know how to please themselves and a partner. Imagine if we held this same belief about learning to drive a car!