Vagina (46 page)

His steadiness, combined with his sense of fun, risk taking, and surprise, activate both sets of her needs at all times of the month.

Does that mean that nice, overscheduled, hardworking men reading this should despair, or take stupid lessons from seduction con men, as in Neil Strauss’s
The Game,
about how to be mean to women? No. But it may mean that one way to keep a woman interested and faithful for life, if you are a man, is to never give up your role as seducer, and to never stop growing, changing, and finding little and big ways to surprise her.

Both archetypes of the male are there to provoke her, to get all her complex and continually shifting carnal and evolutionary needs met; and it may be her challenge in her real life to build enough excitement and unpredictability into her “safe” relationship, or to secure enough safety and emotional commitment in contexts in which the risky mastery that may attract her is what prevails.

DO WHATEVER SHE LIKES TO HER NIPPLES

Whatever she likes you to do to her nipples—do it the way she likes it, and as much as she likes. As we saw earlier, nipple stimulation releases oxytocin, which will make a woman feel that the world is a good place, that love exists, that it is meaningful, and that her circumstances can be trusted (men also can have nipple stimulation during sex, but it is less sustained and frequent, in general). It may also help her see the connections between things and help her to read subtle emotional cues better—making her a more sensitive partner, a better leader, a more gifted creative artist within the circumstances of her own life, and a more tender mother. I find it very interesting that when I ask women to reflect on when they encourage nipple stimulation from their lovers, what I find anecdotally is that women want their nipples touched, pinched, or sucked by men they love or like. They can have very hot sex with men they do not like, but many women reported to me finding those men’s touches of, or suckling upon, their nipples unbearable. You may have to trust your partner already to want to encourage your body to feel even more trust.

As we saw, it is scientifically well established that a baby’s sucking on a mother’s breasts releases oxytocin in the mother, which in turn firms the bonded feelings the mother has toward the baby. A man’s sucking on a woman’s breasts would also release oxytocin—generating that chemical response in women that makes them feel relaxed and affectionate, making the woman, in short, feel bonded to the person suckling her nipples. Given this possibility, women would be well advised not to let those men (or women) to whom they do not wish to feel attached and trusting, engage with their breasts. Oxytocin appears to play a big role in easing “neophobia” or “fears of the new” and anxiety; the more a lover sucks on your breasts, the more like “home” he will feel. Because of oxytocin, women are both aroused and relaxed by a lover’s sucking on their nipples. In this way, too, women become “hooked” on sexual attention from their lovers, “hooked” on love.

Women may wish to be aware that if they want to have hot anonymous sex with some guy they may not trust, but don’t want to fall in love with him—they would be well advised to discourage him from interacting with their nipples.

EJACULATE

Does male ejaculate affect women’s feelings? Dr. Helen Fisher takes so seriously the psychological effect of sex on women that she warns that, since antidepressants can suppress ejaculation, men who are prescribed the medications should be told that if they can’t ejaculate, they may “lose the ability to send courtship signals.”
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Receiving his ejaculate during lovemaking may make a woman feel differently about a man than does lovemaking in which she does not receive his ejaculate. Semen has sugar, sperm, and some aromatic compounds. Because it is viscous, it is sexually stimulating to more parts of a woman’s vagina and cervix than penile thrusting can manage alone; a woman actually ingests the sugar in an ejaculation through the walls of her vagina. If she feels energized and “up” after sex with ejaculation, it may also be because she is on a minor sugar high, combined with the deeper stimulation she receives from hot viscous liquid. Dr. Cindy Meston and David M. Buss, in
Why Women Have Sex,
assert that semen contains trace mood elevators: “Semen contains hormones including testosterone, estrogen, follicle-stimulating hormone, luteinizing hormone, prolactin, and several types of prostaglandins. All of these hormones,” they claim, “have potential mood-altering abilities and can be absorbed into a woman’s bloodstream through the vaginal walls.”
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If people practice safe sex, then sex without a condom can signal that lovemaking is taking place in the context of a secure, committed relationship that is conducted with safe sex practices—boosting still more the oxytocin and opioids she may experience. Many women reported to me that they did indeed feel differently about a man after making love with ejaculation, without a condom, than they had felt before. They felt closer to him, more satisfied, and more joyful, and little things that had annoyed them before seemed less bothersome.

I conducted informal interviews with groups of women with whom I met both in person and online. I told them about the possible effects of semen, and then I asked them to remember back to a relationship in which they had at first religiously used condoms, and then after they had taken their STD tests—this was a group of very sexually responsible women—had stopped using condoms. Same guy, same sexual style, same scent: any difference?

I saw looks of shocked recognition cross my interviewees’ faces. “Totally different,” said Julia, a graphic designer. “Oh my God. Once we stopped using condoms—the little things [a boyfriend] did that had annoyed me were cute. He looked better! His geeky shirts didn’t bother me! I felt the relationship was somehow more serious and not just because of the commitment implied by not using condoms anymore. . . . I can’t believe this.”

“I felt different afterward,” confirmed Anastasia, a student in New York City. “I felt much more involved. I had seen him with some detachment before. After we stopped using condoms—I felt connected to him, fired up about him, motivated.”

“Different. I felt different with him when we stopped using condoms,” confirmed Dianne, an operations manager. “I felt more in love. I felt more satisfied. Happier. More connected.”

“Our relationship completely escalated when we stopped using condoms,” said Nina. “And now that I think of it our best times were right after we had made love. My mood lifted right up at those times. I hadn’t felt he was that great before, when he wasn’t ejaculating inside of me—I hadn’t felt he was the right guy for me. But when we stopped using condoms, that coincided with my feeling that he could be the one.”

Many women tried hard to remember if they had the same emotional alteration of mood upon swallowing semen after giving oral sex; several reported that they believed, in retrospect, this may have affected their mood to some extent—the sugar rush, perhaps—but that the effect was much less obvious than it had been with ejaculate in the vagina, with its opioid-boosting, and possibly other kinds of mood-elevating, action.

I am in no way seeking to undermine the important message of always practicing safe sex. But I do think it is important to understand what may happen to the female mind when we do take in semen. Think of a time when you were falling in love with a man, and using condoms. Then, after you committed to each other exclusively, you may have stopped using condoms; you were making love frequently, intoxicated by his nearness and smell, and it may also be that your sense of safety was enhanced by the exclusivity this implies, which as we now know boosts female orgasm. Think of the emotional exaltation after such lovemaking. Now think of a time when, for whatever reason, you reentered the dating scene and made love again using condoms. Did you feel a letdown, a sense of distance, and did you feel emotionally very different, after the act?

When a man comes in a woman’s mouth, she may feel energized; when he comes in her vagina, it can boost her tenderness and, if Meston and Buss are right, help elevate her mood. Women’s responses to men’s ejaculate varies immensely from one man to another, and science has yet to explain why some men’s semen feels so much more “right” than that of others. Many women have told me that some men’s semen right away felt “wrong”: many heterosexual women I heard from confirmed that a turning point in any number of otherwise promising early relationships was the moment when they realized they did not like—sometimes it was could not tolerate—the semen of a new lover. It is very possible that this issue is part of what women refer to when they speak of a man who is otherwise a good potential mate having “no spark” with them, or “no chemistry.” When odors are aversive, people avoid coming into contact with them; it is the same with tastes. A first-time ejaculation without a condom, in a couples context, introduces a new smell and taste. At this point, many women may find they like or love the ejaculate, or at least its effect on them; other men’s tastes and scents are offputting.

“So are you suggesting,” many of my interviewees asked, in one way or another, completely unprompted, “that even when things are not going that well—I should get myself some of his semen to feel better?” Many of them laughed when they asked me this, but they were understandably quite serious, too. It seems that the old folk wisdom of “just have sex till you want to have sex” may have some biochemical foundation to it. The extra opiate boost provided by an ejaculation in women, and potentially other kinds of mood elevators—if their mates are doing other nice things for them, too—may indeed help get some couples through tough moments.

YOU WILL INADVERTENTLY DRIVE HER CRAZY IF YOU IGNORE THE GODDESS ARRAY

In our culture, the woman is tasked with “keeping the fire alive” sexually in a relationship—showing up at the door wearing nothing but Saran Wrap, as women were counseled to do in the 1970s in Marabel Morgan’s bestseller,
The Total Woman,
or exhausting herself with costumes and novelties to get his attention. But practitioners of Tantra think this model is backward. In their worldview, it is the man who must tend the fire; the man who, in Mike Lousada’s terms, must “hold” the woman. Many Western men, sadly, ignore the Goddess Array unless they want sex—and often even then—and allow what Tantrists call “the fire” to subside in their wives or girlfriends to almost nothing. Then, misguidedly, they reach for their wives’ or girlfriends’ vaginas—as if that were part of lovemaking’s beginning, instead of the end result of a long and complex sexual and emotional process. A vagina eager and ready for lovemaking is the by-product of a complex and dynamic process between two people, a process that unfolds over all twenty-four hours of the day, in which the man has, in Tantric terms, done many other apparently nonsexual things to “stoke the fire.”

A straight woman who lives day to day in close relationship to a man who attends well to the Goddess Array—who, in the midst of all the other responsibilities of his life, doesn’t forget to give her a strong, warm hug when he comes home from work in the evening, who doesn’t skip taking the trouble to tell her she looks beautiful in a new dress, who finds the energy, even when he is tired too, to stroke her hair—this woman is, even when she is just watering her garden or opening her mail, living inside a positive, exciting sexual and emotional, yet physical, environment that her mate has created for her. Because of the idiosyncracies of the female system, creating this uniquely relaxing and stimulating environment is more the task of the man than of the woman (she has other emotional responsibilities if his biochemistry is to be taken into account). In this atmosphere, she is living with a calm SNS, which allows her circulatory system to lubricate and flush with blood easily; in turn, the hormones that elevate her mood and create confidence in her and attachment to him are steadily replenished. So when the time comes to make love, she already wants to; for she is, on all the levels that are so completely interconnected in women, eager to
and able to
—two different things for women—open up to her husband or lover.

Indeed, Dr. Pfaus’s lab has found evidence—at least in lower female mammals—that there is a physiological “point of no return” for females experiencing bad sex with males—a vanishing point, if you like, related to female sexual disappointment, after which a positive connection with a mate is not physiologically recoverable. Remember the experiment in which the female rats were made “horny” through hormone injections, and one group was allowed to get pleasure from mating with males, while the other group was injected with naloxone that inhibited their experience of pleasure?

The negative results of the experiment lasted long after the actual experiment, in the reactions of the female rats who experienced disappointing sex. After the fifth experience of bad sex, the female rats begin not just ignoring the males—they start actively fighting them. They do so even if they are now injected not with naloxone, but with saline; in other words, even though now they
can physically
experience pleasure, they don’t want to bother with having sex at all.

Dr. Pfaus explained: “These female rats are fighting the males, not soliciting, not showing full-intensity lordosis (meaning not arching their backs to signal a desire for sex). There is no naloxone on board, so what has happened? The female rats have formed an expectation that sex sucks—they have gone through the motions, but they won’t get off. So despite the hormone priming, they still don’t want to have sex! They have had five prior experiences of bad sex! They seem to have psychologically concluded: ‘This is just painful. Why should I do this anymore?’ (We are now looking at how long that effect lasts.)

“So female rats can conclude: ‘He is a crappy lover.’

“Female rats are not blaming themselves—they are looking at an external cause for their sexual disappointment. The conclusion? There is some point at which your female partner won’t want to have sex with you in the not-distant future if you give her bad sex enough in the recent past.”
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