Come as You Are (37 page)

But you know better now, and you know how to make the most of any desire style. Embrace responsive desire. Adore it. It asks that your partner help you in creating good reasons for you to be turned on.

When you welcome someone new into your garden, remember, that person is used to working in their own garden, and that garden is different from yours. That person’s body, brakes and accelerator, the seeds that their family and culture planted, the way that person was taught to tend the garden, all may be similar to yours . . . or they may be totally different. If you and your partner are different from each other, remember that
neither of you is better or worse
—even if one of you conforms more to the cultural standard. A potato farmer would be plain old wrong to suggest that your roses should be growing underground. What works for aloe won’t work for tomatoes.

I hope that anyone you like and respect enough to invite into your garden likes and respects you, too. Just as you want to help the other person’s garden thrive, so the other person wants to help your garden thrive. They just might not know how to do it.

So you have to teach your partner about responsive desire. You’re not broken, you’re a tomato plant in a world that expects you to be an aloe. If you thrive on more water, tell your partner, and celebrate it together. Say what contexts activate your accelerator, turn you on, and say what contexts hit your brakes, shut you off. Talk about the sexiest sex you’ve had together and what your partner can do to make it happen again.

Good things happen when you create space in your relationship for responsive desire. When Olivia and Patrick flipped their desire styles on their heads by making Patrick, with his context-sensitive desire style, the initiator, he had to figure out what exciting things would propel him from idling to interested. Olivia patiently allowed Patrick space and time to explore his desire, and she was rewarded with an intensity of erotic experience that her own spontaneous style rarely allowed for.

This level of mutual acceptance and self-acceptance is itself a specific and vital characteristic of the most exuberantly sex-positive context. It requires not simply being aware of how each person’s sexuality works, but also accepting and welcoming those sexualities, just as they are. It’s not how your sexuality works that matters; it’s how you feel about your sexuality. How your partner feels about theirs. And how you both feel about each other’s.

That right there is the ultimate sex-positive context. And it’s what chapter 9 is about.

But before we get there, how about we talk about orgasm?

tl;dr

• About 15 percent of women have a spontaneous desire style—they want sex out of the blue. Thirty percent experience responsive desire—they want sex only when something pretty erotic is already happening. The rest, about half of women, experience some combination of the two, depending on context.

• Sex is not a drive, like hunger. It’s an “incentive motivation system,” like curiosity. So . . . stay curious.

• When sex feels like a drive, it’s because of the little monitor in your emotional brain, whose job is to reduce discrepancies. The monitor motivates you to pursue novelty, pleasure, ambiguity, etc.

• To increase sexual desire in a relationship, increase novelty, pleasure, ambiguity, and intensity (increase your heart rate!). See the worksheet on
this page
to find out how.

turning off the offs

This worksheet is designed to help you create a practical plan for turning off the offs. The research suggests it’s most effective when you repeat the four steps each day, but you can try doing it weekly, and even going through the exercise once would be great.

Step 1:
Review your Sexy and Not-So-Sexy Contexts worksheets from chapter 3, where you identified the contexts that hit your brakes and activate your accelerator. Write a summary here:

Step 2:
All these brakes-hitting and accelerating-hitting contexts are your potential targets for change. Choose one that you could change if you decided to try turning off the offs. List five things you and/or your partner could take to implement this strategy.
Hint:
The more concrete and specific you are, the more useful this will be.

Step 3:
Anticipate barriers. What obstacles might you encounter?

Where and when—specifically—will this obstacle occur?

What could you do to prevent these obstacles?

What—specifically—will you do to get back to the goal if you face these obstacles?

Step 4:
Think about what it would feel like to be a warm and erotic woman who is curious and playful about sex. What is it like? What else is true?

Some questions to consider:

• What strategies would you use to create more time for sex?

• What would give you more energy for sex?

• What aspects of your relationship would enhance sex?

• What challenges in your relationship would you like to overcome?

• What would your relationship with your body be like?

• How would you initiate sex?

• How would you respond when your partner initiated?

• What sexual cues would you notice?

• What kinds of thoughts would you have about sex?

• How do you feel about your partner’s sexual arousal, desire, and orgasm?

• How would you feel about your own desire, arousal, and orgasm?

• How would you feel about giving pleasure?

• How would you feel about receiving pleasure?

• How would you manage the cultural shaming that some people would try to impose on you for being empowered and in control of your own body?

• What would be your favorite thing about your sexuality?

Examples:

• I can lose myself in my partner’s touch and experience pleasure in the moment, without worrying about orgasm.

• I would think about the sexy and romantic interludes I’ve shared with my partner and let that build up my desire.

• I want sex even if we’re arguing.

• All the doors and windows are open on my sexuality—I’m a big exuberant YES.

• I won’t let anything get in the way of pleasure.

• I would allow myself to want what I want and not judge it.

• Exploring my sexuality is more exciting than scary.

• I would turn to sex and pleasure in times of distress.

• Sex isn’t separate from the rest of my life—it’s a part of my life, and my life is a part of it.

• There’s no pressure to be or do anything that isn’t 100 percent of what feels right to me.

part 4

ecstasy for everybody

eight

orgasm

THE FANTASTIC BONUS

Spectatoring is the art of worrying about your body and your sexual functioning while you’re having sex, and Merritt was a master practitioner. Rather than paying attention to the pleasant, tingly things going on in her body, her head would fill with anxious thoughts about how her breasts were moving or how she didn’t have an orgasm the last time they had sex or what her inability to focus on pleasure meant about her as a sexual person. She worried about the sex she was having, instead of
enjoying
the sex she was having. And worry is the opposite of arousal. Worry hit her brakes.

And when the brakes are on, orgasm doesn’t happen.

Which is why she could easily count the number of orgasms she had had with Carol in their two decades together.

And which also is why she decided that orgasm was the perfect way to practice the pleasure—and the trust in herself that pleasure required—that she wanted to build in her life.

“Okay so tell me how,” she said to me. “How do I make orgasm happen?”

“Ah, you don’t make orgasm happen. You allow it,” I said.

She nodded—then shook her head. “I don’t know what that means.”

I recommended she read
Becoming Orgasmic
by Julia Heiman and Joseph LoPiccolo. Although it’s written for women who’ve never had an orgasm, it’s really the quintessential guide for all women who struggle with it. Merritt got the book, read it, and did some exercises . . . and then she did another remarkable thing. She decided not to try to have orgasms with Carol after all.

“For me, having sex until I have an orgasm would be like running until I lose weight. It just doesn’t work that way. So I’m going to stop trying.”

Once a week, she and Carol traded massages and kisses and oral sex. They just played, and they paid attention to how it felt, and they weren’t goal directed at all.

And guess what happened.

Yup.

This chapter is about orgasm, the full range of orgasmic experience available to women and the barriers that stand between women and ecstatic pleasure. Merritt’s sensitive brakes made orgasm—especially orgasm with another person—elusive. She used the science I describe in this chapter to turn off the offs and find her way to a more profound experience of orgasm than she thought she would ever experience.

Several years ago I supported a friend as she began her first sexual relationship, having never so much as masturbated in her life, much less had an orgasm. She asked me questions from time to time, and one of them was, “How do I know when I’ve had an orgasm?”

I told her that orgasms feel different to everyone and that orgasms can vary from each other, depending on the mode of stimulation, whether you have a partner with you, maybe even where you are in your menstrual cycle—any number of factors. Sometimes women feel a rhythmic pulsing of the muscle around their vagina, sometimes not. The main thing most women describe most of the time is a sense of “doneness,” a sense that you’ve crossed a threshold and something has completed. There’s often a peak of tension where your muscles tighten and your
heart pounds. Orgasms are kind of like art, I told her. You know it when you see it. It may not be what you expect, but it will be different from everything else.

She nodded eagerly and said, “I think I had that!”

And then one day she walked up to me, grinning from ear to ear, and said, “It wasn’t what I expected, but you were right. It was unmistakable.”

This great variety and variability makes orgasm almost impossible to define—though scientists spend thousands of words puzzling over it. But when you strip it down to the universal essentials, here’s what you get: Orgasm is the sudden, involuntary release of sexual tension.
¹

Notice how much is missing from that definition: genitals, muscle contractions, sexual behavior, pleasure, or indeed anything that specifies what it feels like or how it happened. Orgasms vary—from woman to woman, and from context to context. They happen while you’re making love—and sometimes they don’t. They happen while you’re masturbating—and sometimes they don’t. They can happen from clitoral stimulation, vaginal stimulation, thigh stimulation, anal stimulation, breast stimulation, earlobe stimulation, or mental stimulation with no physical contact at all—or not during any of these. They can happen while you’re asleep, while you’re exercising, or while you’re in a variety of other completely nonsexual situations. They can be delightful, humdrum, spiritual, annoying, ecstatic, fun, or frustrating. Sometimes they’re awesome. Sometimes they’re not. Sometimes you want them. Sometimes you don’t.

In this chapter, we’re on a quest to explore the entire landscape of orgasmic experience, so that we can find our way to the secret garden at the center of it all. To begin, I’ll tell you what orgasm is not: It is not a genital response, “pleasure,” hierarchical, or an evolutionary adaptation. I’ll roll out a red carpet of statistics and a cheering crowd of women’s stories, to normalize your experience (or lack thereof) of orgasm. Then I’ll describe what it takes to overcome difficulty with orgasm, whether it’s learning to have that first orgasm or learning to orgasm in different contexts. And
I’ll tell you how to find inside yourself the kind of orgasm that makes the stars explode into rainbows.

I want to prove to you that whatever your orgasms are (or aren’t) like is normal, and I want to empower you to have the most profound and intense orgasms you’re capable of, orgasms that turn the universe inside out. It’s possible for everyone, I believe, but only when you let go of all the things orgasm isn’t.