TUNE IN SO YOU CAN TURN ON
“After a while you just get exhausted from the constant self-criticism about your body and give up. I’ve cut myself off from my emotions to the point that sometimes I don’t even know what I’m feeling.”
— Laura, 40, Bellevue, Illinois
Have you ever seen a speaker tap a microphone that’s obviously working and ask, “Is this thing on?” That’s actually what happens with body-conscious women. All the physiological signs of arousal are at work, but they still ask themselves, “Am I turned on?”
Women who are dissatisfied with their bodies are less able to accurately estimate heartbeat, blood glucose levels, and muscle contractions. This tends to create a greater disconnect between the physical signs of arousal (rapid heartbeat, muscle tension, etc.) and your subjective experience of it (“Am I turned on?”). In other words, your fires may be stoking, but you can’t sense the heat.
In this chapter we are going to close the gap between your physiologic response and your subjective awareness, and we’re going to do it with a mirror, a hand, and a vibrator. Yes, we’re going to chart your erotic terrain. It’s only by understanding what your body responds to and how it responds that you’ll be able to pick up on its subtleties, interpret them correctly, and act on them appropriately.
In chapter five, we saw how awareness of, respect toward, and attention to your body’s desires improves your sense of well-being. It’s no different in bed. Let’s apply the skills we learned in cultivating sensuality and make it work in the bedroom. It all starts by asking yourself the mother of all sex questions: Do I like it like this or like that?
All Hands on Deck
Women with bedroom body shame tend to have a one-way relationship with their bodies. They speak and their bodies listen. It’s time to switch roles. Listen and let your body speak. It has a lot to say, and believe me, you’re going to love what you hear.
Your body has lots of pleasure zones. Some are obvious, some aren’t. Your job is to find out what’s hot and what’s not. There’s no better way to do that than to be, as Jerry Seinfeld once bragged, “the master of your own domain.”
Let’s say you discover your orgasms are much more powerful if you avoid directly stimulating your clitoris and focus on the area slightly below it. You not only discovered something pleasurable, but you also gained a profound understanding of how your body works and, in turn, gained mastery over it. You’ll gain new respect (and wonder) at your body and be more willing to share it with the person you love.
Filling Yourself Out Like an Application
The best way of “listening” to your body is to “map out” your hot spots. You’ll see lots of techniques in the following pages, but they’re essentially variations of a three-step process—hauling out a hand, a vibrator, and asking the same question you learned in cultivating sensuality: How can I make this more physically pleasurable?
By understanding how your body responds to touch, pressure, temperature, moisture, positions, fantasies, and environment, you will become more confident in bed. It will be easier to sense the signs of physiological arousal, act on it, and, just as importantly, communicate it to your partner. Believe me, he wants to know. Knowing how to turn on a woman is a man’s biggest turn-on.
Unless it’s mind-blowing oral. But we’ll get to that in the next chapter.
Mapping the Goods
The problem with most body-conscious women is that they’ve spent so much time covering or avoiding their body they’ve never actually taken a good look at their pleasure center. It’s hard to conduct erotic cartography when you’re too embarrassed to look at the map.
Some studies suggest that nearly 30 percent of women have never examined their own vulvas in the mirror. It’s a good bet that a majority of women with appearance anxiety have never done it. So haul out a hand mirror, ladies; we’re going to do a little aerial reconnaissance.
I will leave you to decide how to conduct the guided tour of your personal landscape. The goal isn’t to become an anatomical expert as much as to familiarize yourself with the location, look, and power of different joy-joy zones, from the outer third of the vagina (where most of the sensitive nerve endings reside) to the clitoral glans to the G-spot.
Look at your genitals by spreading your legs and using a mirror. Lie down on your back or sit up. Put your feet up against the wall or squat. There is no “correct” position. Explore yourself. You’re not there to see if you like the look of your vulva (if you’re a lifelong practitioner of body shame, it’s a safe bet you won’t) but to understand what it looks like, to make it more real for you. Just like looking at yourself in the makeup mirror gives you a sense of your personhood, looking at your vulva gives you a sense of your sexual self. Don’t judge; notice.
Explore with the mirror several times over the next couple of weeks. Shock and shame may dominate the first session as you’re not accustomed to seeing body parts that are almost always covered up. It’s only in subsequent sessions that those feelings attenuate, affording you a better sense of how you’re put together. If you’re like most women, you’re going to be initially surprised by the size, shape, color, and texture of different areas of the vulva. Some of your discoveries will be pleasing, some won’t. Try not to judge. Notice.
What’s Your Pleasure?
Now that you have a better understanding of your landscape, let’s see what rich ores lie beneath. It’s time to test-drive your vulva. Set some time when you can be alone, away from any distractions, including your partner. This is about you and you, not you and him. Prepare your self-pleasuring sessions with a little shopping expedition. Buy lubricants with different textures and smells. Consider using videos or reading sexually arousing stories to eroticize the context.
It bears repeating that if you can’t sense the physiological signs of your arousal, if you don’t figure out what you like and don’t like (and communicate it to your partner), sex will remain a chore instead of a choice. But the more important reason to follow the recommendations you’re about to read is that masturbation primes the body’s sexual plumbing. Pleasuring yourself regularly creates a cycle of craving that amps up your libido and warms the path to partner sex.
Ready, set, explore. Stroke the clitoris, touch the labia majora, caress the perineum. Get a sense of ownership and agency of your body. Experiment with different kinds of touch. Harder, softer, quicker, slower. Every woman is different—there is no right way to do this, only your way. A lot of women are partial to gently and rhythmically rubbing the clitoris with a finger or two, slowly increasing the intensity. Others like to stroke the area around the clitoris, and still others like to put pressure on the areas above and below it—the pubic bone and urethra.
Try combining this with manual stimulation in and around the vagina. Rub up and down, back and forth, around and round in different directions. Experiment with different speeds and pressure. Don’t forget to stimulate the area in and around your anus. Tighten and loosen your pelvic floor muscles while you’re doing all this. Try crossing your legs and exerting rhythmic pressure on your genital area. Rock your pelvis. Breathe deeply. Relax. You’re not a lab rat, and this is not a science experiment. Listen to your body. What does it want? What does it respond to? How is it reacting?
Women may have the same parts, but they don’t have the same number of nerve endings in those parts. That’s why what turns your friends on may turn you off. Breast play, for example, can bring you to orgasm or bore you to tears. It all depends on the concentration of nerve endings in your breasts.
Don’t use a vibrator until you’ve done this exercise a few times. Vibrators are healthy ways to get stronger stimulation, but skin-to-skin contact is the best way of gaining mastery, competence, confidence, and comfort in what your body responds to. Once you feel at ease with your fingers doing the walking, you can graduate to motorized stimulation.
Put Your Phone On Vibrate
If Cleopatra could find something to pleasure herself, so can you. A curator of New York’s Museum of Sex says there’s evidence the Egyptian queen kept a hard-shelled gourd filled with bees for use as a primitive vibrator. She literally took the sting out of masturbation.
Now, you don’t have to go to those lengths, but it wouldn’t hurt to become a busy little bee and do some field research. So go to an adult toy store or shop online and buy a range of products made with different materials, speeds, and power. Plastic vibrators are popular because they’re terrific at transferring vibrations, but some women prefer vibrators made from jelly because they’re softer and more flexible. Others like silicone because of the higher quality material and varied textures.
You may have given up on some good vibrators because you didn’t try them with the speed and pressure that turns you on. Consider electric vibrators. They’re far more powerful than battery-operated toys. True, you have to plug them in, but maybe it’s time to put a little vrrrooom in your room.
How to Shop for a Sex Toy
Buying sex toys is a little like opening a Christmas present—you never know whether you’re going to like it until you open the package, and then it’s too late. Only a few companies give you a satisfaction guarantee, and I’m not aware of any “try-out” rooms before you buy. And you can’t exactly borrow your friend’s vibrator (and if you can, you may have to rethink your friendships).
This doesn’t mean you can’t improve the chances of getting what you like the first time. After your hand-driven self-pleasuring sessions, you should know the kind of stimulation that turns you on. This will narrow down your options. For example, if inserting your fingers into your vagina doesn’t do much for you, then you can eliminate penis-size dildos made for vaginal insertion.
Sex toys aren’t made for different types of people; they’re made for different types of stimulation. There are basically three things a sex toy can help you with: external stimulation, penetration, or both.
How Much Do You Want to Spend?
There isn’t always a correlation between quality and pleasure. An inexpensive sex toy can be just as much fun as a luxury toy, but it probably won’t last as long. Once you know what you like, I do recommend investing in high-end sex toys as they are less wasteful and often have better designs. But to start off with, unless you’ve got a lot of money to spend, I recommend sticking with budget toys until you know what you want. There’s nothing worse than spending $130 on a sex toy that ends up as a jewelry tree.
Getting the Most Out of Your Toys
Whatever you pick, try the toys in different positions. What makes you yawn on your back may make you howl on your stomach. Try some lubrication, too.
Do you have areas that are too sensitive to touch with a vibrator? Some women find their nipples and clitoris too sensitive for direct stimulation. Try a “brush-by,” a light glide that barely touches them. Try stimulating yourself on one side of the clitoris as opposed to the other. If you’re particularly sensitive, do it through your panties and gradually your body will be able to tolerate more and more direct stimulation.
You can also drape a hand towel over your genitals to diffuse the intensity. Just make sure you don’t wipe off your natural vaginal lubrication. It’ll cause redness, irritation, and sometimes burning.
Use your other hand to stimulate at the same time. You might find, for example, that stimulating your nipples while the vibrator stimulates your clitoris sends you reeling into deep space. And move your hips and body rhythmically as you do all of this. One last thing: don’t hold your breath. You’ll experience more by breathing fully.
Multifactor your self-pleasuring. Use fantasy, erotic books, videos, even memories of mind-blowing sex, as you tour your personal landscape. Don’t separate the physical from the emotional or psychological. Your body responds to all stimulants in a way that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
Tongue-Tied in Bed?
It’s time to communicate what kind of stimulation makes you hear colors. Tell your partner what kind of touch, kiss, or stroke makes the difference between hearing pastels and primary colors. What kind of speed, pressure, and friction do you need? He needs to know if playing with your nipples does anything for you, and, if so, what exactly he needs to pay attention to. He needs to know when, how far, what angle, and how fast you want him inside you. He needs you to guide the pacing and the depth of his thrusts. He needs to know all of this and more because, well, and I say this with love, what men don’t know about women is a lot.
Men learn how to pleasure women by watching porn and listening to each other in the locker room. I don’t know which source should scare you more. Almost all porn ignores or deliberately misrepresents female sexuality to center around male needs. Add the ill-informed, locker-room mentality (“Chicks love it when you pull their braids thug-style”) and you’ve got, well, a lot of work cut out for you. Even guys who’ve been with lots of women aren’t necessarily good in bed. Not if the women were too shy, fearful, or intimidated to let them know what they needed.
The good news is that most guys want to know how to pleasure women. As long as you don’t frame your request as an insult or a demand, or lace it with sarcasm, as if he should know better, you have a great shot at shaping him into being the lover you always dreamed of.
There are few things that exemplify male ignorance or confusion about sex more than intercourse. Typically, men get more enjoyment from it than women because the penis gets direct stimulation, while the clitoris doesn’t. Men (and a lot of women) are taught that the vagina is the primary sexual organ and greatest source of sexual pleasure for women. This adds up to a steaming hot plate of cluelessness: confusion on a bed of unfamiliarity with a side of uncertainty. There’s a meal where everybody goes home hungry. He may not know that he (or you) should manually stimulate the clitoris during intercourse, and you may be too shy, reserved, or intimidated to tell him.
Communication leads you to the all-you-can-eat buffet. Once everybody’s clear on what everybody likes and how to deliver it, everybody goes home full. The question is, how do you communicate a delicate matter without it being taken the wrong way?
Good lovers are born, not made.
If your partner really loved you, he’d know what you like.
You shouldn’t have to tell him things that are so obvious.
These three sentences are the kinds of misinformed beliefs that can stop sex in its tracks. Guys aren’t born with a vagina and a clitoris—they know about as much about the vulva as you do about the penis. Less, actually, because male sexuality is a lot less complicated.
And it’s not like they can ask. The male ego is like a giant skyscraper built on a landfill. Nothing will open up the ground faster than admitting ignorance about something “real men” are supposed to know. Men think it’s better to pretend you know what you’re doing than to admit you don’t. That’s why waiting for a guy to ask what you like is like waiting for him to ask a stranger for directions. It’s possible, but by the time it happens you’ll be making a left in Middle Earth.
So, unless you have an enlightened male, it’s pretty much up to you to initiate sexual communication. Fortunately, it’s not very hard or even awkward to do if you follow a few rules:
Show, don’t tell
Hands communicate better than words. If you want him to touch you a certain way, gently guide his hand and say, “I really like it like this.”
Reward his behavior
When he’s doing it the way you like, exaggerate your pleasure by moaning or groaning a little louder, kissing him a bit harder, and drawing him in closer.
Don’t reject, redirect
If he’s touching an area that isn’t doing it for you, don’t push his hand away; redirect it to its rightful spot. It’s okay to pull back slightly, wiggle away, or even say “ouch” if it hurts, as long as you guide him.
Tell him what you want more of, not less of
Don’t tell him he kisses you like he’s committing a felony, tell him you love it when his tongue presses gently but firmly against yours (if that’s what you like). And always end a request with these two words: “Like this.” And show him how.
You Want WHAT?
Speaking of communication, you’ll need lots of it if you have a partner who might be insulted at the thought of bringing vibrators into your playpen when that’s something you want to do.
Men don’t understand why women like to use inanimate objects to deepen sexual pleasure. We don’t need them so we sometimes we have a hard time accepting why you do. We don’t have mysterious pleasure zones whose very existence is up for debate (like the G-spot). And we don’t know what to do with a vibrating device, except to stuff it in the DVD player to cool it after playing nonstop porn.
The truth is, sex toys are nothing but motorized masturbation. If he doesn’t mind you masturbating, he shouldn’t mind you motorizing it. Typically, the best way to a man’s heart is through his eyes—by allowing him to watch you masturbate with the toy. You can’t go wrong by giving men a chance to Wow, you mean I get to watch?!!!! Or by appealing to their discriminating sense of Can you do that thing again? Or his selfless desire to Don’t move, I need more lube!
Typically, that takes care of the problem, but if you’re too self-conscious to let him watch, you need to take a different approach. A lot of men think sex toys are an indictment on their ability to satisfy women, and they can become quite paranoid about it. They’ll misinterpret everything you say. “I want to spice things up” means you think his penis is too small. “We’ll discover new horizons in pleasure” means you’re squinting, then rolling your eyes at it. And “I want to have deeper orgasms” means you’re thinking you would’ve been better off dating his brother.
Fortunately, it’s the rare man who can’t be turned around with a little reassurance. Just poke a hole in the myths. No, sex toys aren’t part of your nefarious Penis Replacement Plan. No, you’re not going to get addicted and join a twelve-step program because the G-spot finder made your life unmanageable. Yes, you’ll leave him for a pair of AA batteries—as soon as they plug into something that kisses and holds you like he does.
And yes, even the best carpenters use power tools.
The Power of Knowing What You Like
Studies confirm that body-conscious women have a harder time recognizing physiologic arousal. They’re less likely to notice or process it as the initial stages of sexual desire. By surveying your landscape and testing its boundaries, you’ll get definitive answers to what you like and what turns you on. You’ll not only be better able to recognize the physical signs of arousal, but also create and heighten them. You’ll also set the stage for better sex by communicating your needs to your partner, who can then take over and take you places you can’t get by yourself.
Of course, recognizing early-stage arousal is important. But what if your newly tuned radar doesn’t pick up on anything because there’s nothing there? What if you can’t sense the heat because the fire never got lit? As you’re about to read, libido is sometimes a do-it-yourself job.