THE SURPRISINGLY SIMPLE SECRET OF GREAT SEX
Would you like to be the great lover you’ve always dreamed of being? Would you like women to sing your sexual praises? Do you want your penis to be as large as it possibly can be? Would you like ejaculatory control to last as long as you want? Are firmer, more reliable erections on your wish list? And would you like your relationship to feel more erotic, both in and out of bed? All these sexual benefits—and more—can be yours without a great deal of effort. Great Sex explains how.
Before I reveal the surprisingly simple secret of great sex, I should mention that I’m not a doctor, psychologist, or sex therapist. But for 30 years, I’ve been a sex educator, counselor, and journalist specializing in men’s sexuality. During that time I’ve interviewed the nation’s leading sex researchers and therapists, and have written extensively about sexuality, particularly about men’s sexual issues. For 5 years, I answered the sex questions submitted to the Playboy magazine Advisor. Since 1998, I’ve answered the questions submitted to Xandria.com, the Web site of the nation’s largest marketer of sex toys.
The information in this book comes not only from my three decades of research and writing, but also from the leading resources in sexology and sex therapy. Space does not permit listing the additional 51 books and 374 medical journal articles I also consulted. If you’d like to peruse them, visit www.greatsexthebook.com. The book also took shape with the assistance of some of the nation’s most experienced sex therapists (see here for biographies of the Great Sex advisory board members). Also central to this volume are the two largest and most comprehensive American sex surveys completed to date. The landmark 1994 “Sex in America” survey from the University of Chicago studied a representative sample of 3,150 men and women aged 18 to 59. The National Sexual Health Survey, a 1996 study from the University of California, San Francisco, involved a representative sample of 8,000 Americans aged 18 to 80.
Combine these resources with many years of my own experience in the field, and I like to think I’ve learned a thing or two about lovemaking—notably, the surprisingly simple secret of great sex. This secret is the central message of this book: Stop trying to imitate what you see in pornography—the rushed, mechanical sex that’s entirely focused on the genitals. Instead, cultivate the opposite of porn: leisurely, playful, creative, whole-body, massage-based lovemaking that includes the genitals, but is not obsessed with them.
Porn is all-genital, all the time—and that wreaks havoc on men in bed. When you stop trying to imitate porn, most of your sex problems disappear—in particular, involuntary ejaculation, erection difficulties, and trouble ejaculating. The reason is that our bodies work best sexually in the context of relaxed, full-body sensuality. Unfortunately, the approach to lovemaking most familiar to the majority of men is pornography, and familiarity breeds imitation. Mimicking porn also hurts men another way: It makes them lousy lovers. According to the “Sex in America” survey, one-quarter of women have difficulty expressing orgasm during partner sex, or can’t come at all.
The sexual approach I advocate happens to be the way most women enjoy making love. Every major sex survey agrees that the vast majority of women would like men to expand their erotic view beyond the genitals and adopt a love style based on whole-body, massage-inspired sensuality. Most women consider the entire body—every square inch—one big erogenous zone, and can’t understand why so many men explore only a few corners of this vast erotic playground. Many women find it impossible to become sexually aroused with only the limited, largely genital touch so many men provide.
When men make love the way women prefer, women become more arousable, enthusiastic, and complimentary lovers. They’re more likely to enjoy orgasm, and less likely to say, “Not tonight.” In other words, when men jettison porn-style sex and embrace a creative, whole-body approach to lovemaking, everybody wins. Both you and your lover have more fun in bed and suffer fewer sex problems—not to mention that your relationship is likely to feel more intimate and fulfilling out of bed as well as between the sheets.
Impossible? Not at all. The simple secret of great sex can transform your erotic life for the better—much better—often in just a few weeks. All you have to do is to abandon forever the idea that sex should proceed the way it does in adult entertainment. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a regular guy just like you. I’ve seen a good deal of porn, and I happen to be an enthusiastic admirer of women’s breasts, butts, and genitals. These wonderful body parts certainly should be a part of your lovemaking, but not to the exclusion of what really excites the vast majority of women—gentle, loving, sensual touch of everything else. So from one regular guy to another: Ditch porn-style sex and the many problems it causes in favor of the love style that turns her on, and turns you into the confident, accomplished lover you want to be.
Now about porn. Social liberals defend it as a form of free speech, and some sexuality professionals recommend it to pique erotic interest, or to familiarize people with some sexual techniques. Meanwhile, social conservatives excoriate porn as debased, sinful, abusive of women, and evidence of moral decay.
Let me state at the outset that in the Great Porn Debate, I side with the liberals. I have no problem with pornography’s unprecedented availability in video shops, on cable TV, and over the Internet, nor do I believe that sexually explicit music lyrics should be restricted. I have two teenagers at home, and I don’t lose any sleep over their listening to songs with sex-drenched lyrics, or viewing the pornography they can see for free on the Internet (though when one asked about using my credit card to subscribe to a porn site, I said no).
But the bitter cultural debate about sexually explicit media misses a key point. Pornography is bad for sex. Very bad. It causes or contributes to all of men’s major sex problems: hang-ups about penis size, involuntary ejaculation, erection impairment, and ejaculatory difficulties. It also completely misrepresents how women become sexually aroused and experience erotic fulfillment. Pornography is like the chase scenes in action movies—exciting and fun to watch, but definitely not the way to drive.
Let’s get one thing straight: I’m not down on men. My heart goes out to guys who try to be good lovers but get no real coaching except from adult media. In our society, despite women’s decades-long march to sexual equality, girls are raised to be sexually passive. As a result, young men feel pressured to know the ins and outs, as it were, of sex, so they can lead their presumably more naive girlfriends in intimate explorations. Few parents discuss the fine points of sex with their sons. At school, if a young man receives any sex education at all, it is confined to sperm, eggs, sexually transmitted infections, the importance of abstinence until marriage, and possibly the various contraceptives.
Faced with woefully inadequate sex education at home and in school, what do guys do? They fall back on the resources available to them—other poorly informed young men, and pornography, which ignores whole-body sensuality and instead features men with elephantine penises and women who can never get enough.
Since the mid-1960s when William Masters, M.D., and Virginia Johnson developed modern sex therapy, it has become abundantly clear why so many couples’ sex lives are agony instead of ecstasy. The rushed, mechanical, all-genital love style most men learn at the curbside, in the locker room, and from pornography ignores women’s erotic needs and causes men’s sex problems.
It’s possible that you might require a prescription or several months of sex therapy to resolve your sexual concerns. But for all the anguish that sexual difficulties cause, sex is pretty straightforward; and many problems, perhaps most, can be resolved with self-help.
Of course, there is no dearth of sexual self-help books. But only Great Sex is organized around the simple secret of great sex. In our sex-obsessed culture, it’s a sad commentary that this secret remains such a mystery. Men need to slow down, understand women’s real sexuality—not the nonsense depicted in porn—and appreciate leisurely, playful, whole-body sensuality. If you do, here’s what I guarantee: You’ll suffer fewer sex problems. The woman in your life will be more sexually responsive. And both of you will feel happier with each other and more erotically fulfilled.
Michael Castleman
San Francisco, 2003
www.mcastleman.com