DAY 60: BIG O THURSDAY
The Secret Orgasm Mind-Set, Hers

I call the secret orgasm mind-set “claiming pleasure.” The idea that women who reach orgasm easily have made up their minds to claim their pleasure grew out of the stories women tell me. At some point, they decide: I want it, I will take it, orgasm is mine. Often, they write about how finding their sexual pleasure changed their lives in other ways. In discovering orgasm, for example, they found their self-confidence and became more effective at work and in all their relationships. After finally asserting their needs and desires to longtime partners, they knocked down the barricades and found the intimacy they craved. Or they realized they would never find it there but they did have the courage to move on. No woman is truly empowered unless she is sexually empowered.

“I had my first orgasm—and it not only rocked my body, it changed my world,” a twenty-eight-year-old woman wrote. “I lost my virginity and faked my first orgasm when I was fifteen. I knew how to fake an orgasm from watching movies, not even porn. It didn’t occur to me that the women probably had to fake because they weren’t getting clitoral stimulation. I thought she was supposed to come from what her lover did to her, especially intercourse. I didn’t have skilled lovers; I was playing with boys and whatever they did to me, oral or manual, wasn’t enough.”

If you don’t have as many orgasms as you would like to have, then change your mind-set. Declare that, from this day forward, you will claim your pleasure. He doesn’t have to give it to you because you can take it for yourself—and paradoxically, that makes the gift all the sweeter when he does give it.

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