Blogging from A - Z Challenge April 17 O

O is for Orgasm.

Of course.

According to Foucault, it is not the restrictions we have placed on discussing sexuality that have caused problems in our sexual lives, but rather the way we approach the conversation. Sex is one of those things that is talked about almost constantly, and yet everyone has an experience of it being unexpressed. This is Foucault dilemma, citing problems such as labels as part of the misscommunication about sex, so that people need to "understand" what something like "homosexuality" is, rather than dealing with these connections in different ways.

No where is this more accurate than in the area of orgasms.

Even though orgasms have been studied and talked about in the most exhaustive fashion, they are still a giant mystery. I am old enough to have lived at a time when many women didn't have orgasms. I haven't done the research, but I would hope that even if a partner can't provide, that women are able to get an orgasm from their own bodies these days, and are far more willing to try than they were decades ago.

Female orgasms are still filled with a radical mystery, however, especially when we try to use pop-scientific explanations for their existence. Male orgasm is easy to explain, because it is accompanied by ejaculate, but why do women orgasm? I have been told it is because it opens up the womb to be more receptive to sperm etc, but what remains confounding is the niggling problem of the clitoral orgasm, that happens without penetration. Why is there a part of the body that provides the height of sexual pleasure that has absolutely nothing to do with getting pregnant?

It is for this reason, the clitoris remains such a problem, and why for years it was ignored, and even in some cultures removed. It is a subversive little organ whose existence stubbornly insists that we look at sexuality differently from our safe definitions around reproduction. No matter how you explain it away, it is still there, and it still defies rationality. Even Freud, one of the first to openly say women experience orgasms, considered the clitoral orgasm to be juvenile, and the height of sexually mature fulfillment for a woman was to experience orgasm with a penis inside her.

This seems like a joke now, and yet the female orgasm remains a problem because of its refusal to be easily categorized.

Blogging from A - Z Challenge April 16 N

N is for Nancy Friday

(for some reason Blogger won't let me add this video, so click on this link to watch it)

I have to thank Nancy Friday for her books over and over and over again. Not only are they open and honest, but they end up being very sexually thrilling. They include their own passions.

I've added this video of her in an old interview. It's not great, but its so lovely to see her talking about her important and interesting books, and also to see how far ahead of her time she was. Here she is talking about women taking the initiative. It is still something women have trouble with, and she is right when she says men need to understand how to turn women down with grace and gentleness.

If you are unfamiliar with Nancy Friday, check out her books which, even though old now, are still fantastically relevant and thrilling to read. 

Blogging From A - Z Challenge April 12 K

K is for Kink.

You've heard that rather tasteless joke by Woody Allen haven't you - that one about eroticism is using a feather and kink is using the whole chicken? I may be taking a bit of poetic licence with that one, but it is something that I find rather amusing.

Sexual fetishes are complex things, and greatly misunderstood. When I was in the BDSM scene, there were people there who were experimenting (I fell into that category) and there were people there who didn't properly understand themselves and were trying to understand why they were attracted to something extreme (I fell into that category as well) and then there were the fetishists, those who knew as early as two years old that they were sexually different.

Kink is most interesting when you're dealing with someone with a true fetish.

Coincidentally, when I was first discovering practicing kink, a straight freight I had all my life came out to me about his foot fetish. It had been a great contributor to the death of his marriage ("it's disgusting, don't even talk to me about it" was what he lived with) and he lived in terrible misery with it. It was a consuming thing, overwhelming. If he sat in the wrong place in a crowd - such as in a cinema, or meeting at work - and a woman was in view allowing her shoe to slip down her foot and dangle off her toe, he would have at best a painful throbbing erection, and at worst, evident spillage.

My friend described being a small child, and calling his "teddy bear", "tessy bear", and dancing Tessy up and down his body as if she were walking over the top of him. His kink was connected to powerful women, and he adored Madonna for her overt displays of sexual power. He had been caught around the age of five several times, hiding under the display frames in department stores, sliding his hand out in the hope a woman would accidentally tread on it in her heels. Something like that, and the consequential masturbation, could satiate the fetish for a small while, and ease the throbbing need of it.

We were good friends, I was experimenting with sexuality and was not in any monogamous relationships, so for a while I agreed to walk on him, as he'd never had that before. It only lasted a while, his possessiveness and sexual intensity didn't suit me, and It was accurate to say that I was more interested in the sex (it was fascinating) than in connection romantically with him, so inevitably it imploded in a horrible dark intensity that even our friendship didn't survive. I'll always have a tender place for him, though, He's a very special, deeply intelligent man and I treasure the time I spent with him in my life.

In many ways, I envied him. Imagine being that clear about what you wanted sexually? All the time. Imagine if a desire controlled you to that extent? This is what fascinates me about kink. Men and women are definitely driven by desire, and they think about sex "all the time" but not to the point where you can orgasm at the sight of a naked foot, and mostly these drives are part of the noise of our mind, part of the day, and you "find yourself "crotch watching" (a truly embarrassing habit I have) or "cleavage glancing" or fantasising over bottoms. I'm not talking about these kinds of things.

I have felt the ecstasy of teen female transcendent love - and that is probably the closest one can come to a real fetish like my friend had. I think back very fondly on our lovemaking - it always involved me standing on him, hurting him in small ways, demanding he do things, and inevitably punishing him for non-compliance. Probably the best word to describe it was intense. It was a very intense experience, but one I am very grateful for having had.

The Sexual Pleasures of Monogamy

I have always maintained, and do still, that in our westernized cultures we are for the most part rather prudish about sex. We giggle like school boys at the most banal dirty jokes and we are still socked by swear words. For the most part, our pornography is repetitive and dull and fulfils only a teenage male’s sexual fantasy.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in our attitudes to monogamy.

Monogamy is seen to be this giant rapidly rising chastity belt that means your wife owns you and you will never have sex again as long as you live.

This theory conveniently forgets of course that men were the ones to come up with monogamy, and are still the ones who need it the most – that is in order to be sure of their offspring’s DNA. 

Which brings me to another aspect of this prudishness – the desire for sex to be only about procreation. This is an across the board prudishness. Both the religious and the biological determinist (usually arch enemies) are deeply contented bed fellows on this topic. (I make no apology for the pun) They roll around all over each other with such abandon that you can’t tell where one starts and the other finishes. Both stand somewhere on the time line that has sex only ever for procreation on one end and sex is ok, as long as it is primarily used for procreation on the other. 

Even so, both these “disciplines” expect that even if you have sex, that you acknowledge that it really is meant to be for making a baby. Another aspect of this belief that these two schools of thought share is that sex does not need intimacy and that monogamy is some sort of punishment that will ensure you never have to enjoy sex again.

All of this, thank fully is complete nonsense. Couples have been enjoying their sex lives for many thousands of years. I know, in my immediate acquaintance now, of two couples who have been married for over twenty years where the wife still confesses to me that she worries that the physical is the primary drive in their relationship and suspects this may not be healthy.

My answer to each of my friends is always the same.  How wonderful.

There is always talk that states we all need to be “aware” that most couples will have to deal with infidelity at some point, either together or alone, but this is based on statistics where people volunteer information about their sexual habits. Any psychiatrist will tell you that people lie more about sex and money and that it adds to the self esteem (lord knows why) of the individual if they can establish themselves as having cheated on their spouse at some point.  I’m fairly convinced people cheat out of boredom – not with the marriage, but with their day job, their life, and their age – that sort of thing. I think it has more to do with immaturity and a lack of emotional development than any kind of biological or “natural” need.

The reasons I think this, is because sex with someone who knows you really well is just so infinitely superior to sex with people who don’t know you. If you are addicted to porn, or need the school boy thrill of seeing your first pair of naked breasts then yes, you will need the stimulation of something new to distract you. But if you are at all familiar with the deep pleasures of your erogenous zones, you will know that your lovers tongue on your ear lobe, delicately pushing around inside your ear and then whispering what they wish they could do to you, will send you wilder than any across the room flirt with a woman who you think is hot purely because you know nothing about how much she hates her mother or how old her children are.  

Over time and experimentation and the changes in the body, your long time lover can provide you with pleasures no instant gratification type can offer.

So I say the sooner we get honest about monogamy the better. Basically there is a reason everyone in the world wants it so much.

Because it’s wonderful.