SexyPrime, a blog by Susan Crain Bakos

Money, Sex, God: Why New York City Isn't The Big Sexy

Photo credit:  "Cluj napoca sexy lips" by Claudia Veja

"For liberals, sex has become the problem that has no name; one simply does not hear liberals articulate a defense of sexual rights. Instead, what we have witnessed is a coalescing of conservative evangelical and mainstream secular perspectives on sex. The conversation on sex in America -- when sex is discussed in a serious and earnest way at all -- tends largely to adopt the parameters set by the Religious Right."--Louis Bayard, Jesus Loves You--and Your Orgasm” on salon.com, July 8, 2008.

Yes, it’s true. The Christian Right has co-opted sex. In Manhattan, where sex has long been about money and power, not sex--the “za-za-zous“, as Carrie Bradshaw described the erotic energy back in the day, has gone missing even from that exchange. Babes, I’ve been to sex parties recently (strictly as a journalistic voyeur) where there isn’t much sex--and what there is seems less real than porn. Couples can't wait to disengage and talk about their money fears to strangers.  Sex--another casualty of the Wall Street debacle?

Very attractive men and women, single and coupled, keep telling me that they aren’t having sex. Loss of interest in doing it is particularly common among single career women in their thirties. They cite reasons from disappointment in casual sex to disgust with men and the old stand-by, no time/no energy.

Worse, many of the old sex negative attitudes still live within women; and the sex critical brain is lust's great enemy. Our clothing styles and behavior, may change, but sex negativity is lodged in our brains, put there not by original sin, but by original shame. Every time I think “The Rules” is dead, I read some young woman writer passing judgments on her sisters’ sexual behavior, warning us that we can’t have sex without relationship and advising some form of withholding sex to get the commitment. That illogic keeps coming back like the monster who won’t die in a horror film.  Why, I ask you, are they in such a hurry to rush into the sexless marriage?

So where is sex thriving in America? The Bible Belt.

"We think the G-spot should be seen as one more way God gave us to share in the pleasure of sex," said the Reverends Paul and Lori Byerly on their online site The Marriage Bed.

Evangelical pastors are the new sex therapists proselytizing on the joys of (married) oral sex, mutual masturbation, reading “Christian porn”, even anal sex.

“And on the seventh day, there was no rest for married couples, A week after the Rev. Ed Young challenged husbands and wives among his flock of 20,000 to strengthen their unions through seven days of sex, his advice was--keep it going,” wrote Gretel C. Kovach in “Pastor’s Advice for Better Marriage,” in The New York Times, November 23, 2008.

As I read this article, I suddenly realized: Protestant pastors have figured out what the women’s service magazines have known for years: Sex, faith (and chocolate cake recipes) sell.  Isn't this an argument for married priests?  The Catholic church has yet to discover that Jesus loves your orgasm.

For a few years I wrote sex advice articles for Redbook magazine.  In the earlier days of that, especially under editor Debra Birnbaum, I had some fun, sexy and creative assignments, including one to invent a new position.  The magazine evolved under changing editorial guidance; and the assignments became more formulaic, not so much fun.  Every article was based on this premise:  You are having great married sex with your guy--and this advice will take you over the top!

Oh, yeah.  I could only do that for so long; and then I got snarky.  But times are tough now.  Paying jobs for freelance writers are harder to find.

Maybe I should contact a pastor and tell him or her:  I can ghost the perfect sex advice book for you.

 

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime 

The Thanksgiving Quickie, Whipped Cream Optional: She Comes Too

 

How do you have sex with the house full of relatives and the kids off school?  Or, while staying with your parents or siblings? 

Please.  Where there is a hard dick, I will find the way.

Here are The Quickie Essentials from The Orgasm Bible:

 

Sex Your Brain

You can't wait for lust to overtake you like a pirate seizing booty.  Encourage your sexual thoughts and fantasies so you'll be ready.  Put sex in your head.  (Isn't that more interesting than Aunt Patty's dinner table diatribe?)

Prepare Your Body

Rub a little lube, like my fav Liquid Silk, into your genitals.  Stash an individual packet in your pocket--right next to the Pocket Rocket or other mini power vibe.  And wear panties that can be easily pushed aside.  No pantyhose!

Redefine Sex

Skip the foreplay.  Have intercourse in a sitting or standing position and use the vibe.  Maybe intercourse isn't possible.  How about mutual oral sex in the back seat of the car, parked in the garage, while the children watch a DVD? 

It's All About The Clitoris!

Someone's hand (or vibe) needs to be on the clit at all times.

Be Edgy

Do it with your coats on in your mother's gazebo at midnight.  Or in the rest room of your favorite pub.  Or on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial or the public library.  You don't have to take your clothes off.  Improvise!

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime 

His Penis, Your Clitoris--And A Case Of Clitoral Discrimination

Great piece on Susie Bright's blog today:  http://susiebright.blogs.com/susie_brights_journal_/2008/11/clitoris-on-googles-banned-word-list.html

If your Google filter is set for "strict", you will find no entries under "clitoris", but 33 million under "penis." 

How outrageous that information about female health and sexuality is banned! 

I am in all in favor of parents setting up age appropriate parental controls on computers used by their children.  In addition to Google, AOL and other internet service providers may already be acting as your personal censors; and that's not okay.  Let's tell Google (and others) what we think about clitoral discrimination.

I'm On Playboy Radio Today!

Catch me at 3:00 p.m. ET on Tiffany Granath's Afternoon Advice show.  She does a terrific job; and I always have a great time being a guest.  Her listeners are smart and thoughtful guys who ask good questions and make interesting observations. 

We'll be talking about my latest book The New Tantra:  Simple and Sexy.

I took all the sexy bits from Tantra and left the woo-woo out.  This may not be a book for the aging Chakra Chanters, but it is for you--Tantra for the hip and hot.  And you don't need a regular partner to do it.

Girl-on-Girl: Just To Please Him?

Photo Credit:  "Color" on Photobucket 

I had an interesting conversation about the new sexuality in the city the other night with Richard Anton Diaz of Sexy Spirits, Palagia, founder of One Leg Up and some friends. 

What is the new sexuality?

Women are in the midst of our own private sexual revolution.  Bi-Girls rule the downtown scene and prevail at sex clubs and sex parties where the single female is sought after by many couples.  Cougars are on the prowl; and we are thought to be sexy and sophisticated while older guys after Kittens are old guys chasing young girls.  Women have amazing new sex toys, including vibes so beautiful, they are object d'art. 

Yet Palagia sounded a dissenting note when she said, "The female fantasy is not girl-on-girl.  Women admit to me that they fantasize having two guys but do it with another girl to please their men."

I don't think all bisexual women are doing it to please men.  For years, swingers have been telling me that the bisexual wife calls the shots--and that women who aren't bisexual usually aren't enthusiastic about swing parties.  Moreover, girls tell me that they like playing with other girls--OR go there in their disappointment with boyfriends, not to please them.

(Palagia also said that, in her thirties, she is now "tired of teaching men" and understands why so many women give up on them, at least for a while.)

Here is a common scenario:  Two twentysomething editors I know, roommates, fell into one another's drunken arms one night, after weeping/commiserating over their failed relationships.  They had sex, declared themselves lesbians, were advertising for "a boy to join us in a threesome" on craigslist within three months.  They told me about their need for cock in a crowded, noisy bar one night.

"Why do we want cock?"  and "Why do we need cock?"  they kept asking me.  "We love each other!  We're happy together!  Why do we want cock?"

I answered loudly:  "Because cocks are so much fun to play with!"  The bar grew silent; our drinks were free the rest of the night.

In another three months, the girls were iving in separate countries.  One is in a relationship with a man; the other has remained happily on the Sapphic path.

I don't think bisexual behavior in women is all about pleasing the guy.  But what do the rest of you think? 

By the way, I read on Page Six in The New York Post today that Lindsey Lohan and her GF Samantha Ronson are fighting.   Rumors have her "going straight back to guys" if the two split.  Now what do you think about that?

The other part of the new sexuality, the evolution of men--we'll discuss another day.

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime 

Do You Squirt--and if so, What IS That Stuff?

Last night I attended a demonstration of Orgasmic Providing by Richard Anton Diaz at Sexy Spirits in midtown.

This was the second time I watched Anton work his touch magic on a lovely naked model gracing his massage table. Both were extraordinary events, so above anything I’ve ever witnessed as a peripatetic sex journalist that I cannot put them into one of the usual categories, like Tantra/WooWoo and Relationship Yada, Yada, Yada. Anton operates from a place of great integrity and intelligence, attracts like-minded people--and takes everyone in the room on a journey.

Each time the audience was composed mainly of men who watched in rapt and respectful silence as he massaged all the woman’s body before moving, at last, to her vulva. The first model some weeks ago seemed to go quietly and deeply inside herself during genital massage, gently pulsating beneath Anton’s fingers, her being defined by her sweet, bare little pussy. The second goddess, a little hair covering her mons, writhed and throbbed, wailed and moaned as she came--and even talked to the audience at times. Her prominent proud clitoris and her full juicy lips, purple in their passion, claimed pleasure. She made frequent eye contact with Anton in a power gaze of charged energies exchanged.

And she ejaculated. Copiously. Towels were placed around to catch the overflow.

Her pussy was positioned away from the audience, but a camera focused exactly on her so that we could see (almost as if they were 6 inches away) every detail of her, as well as how Anton stroked her, on the screen above them.

“The camera gives her more privacy because her pussy is not fully exposed,“ he says. “The audience is not focusing on her but on the image on the screen. They can see the orgasmic pulsing. And I want their attention on the strokes as that is happening.”

Yes, our attention was on the strokes--and, in this case, the generous squirts of fluid shooting out.

Some women are squirters, at least occasionally, most likely with G spot stimulation--which this goddess did not have last night. (Though Anton’s Orgasmic Providing strokes include internal ones, his fingers did not leave her clit and labia.) Many Western sex experts dismiss the “ejaculate” as merely a gush of fluid composed of urine and copious vaginal secretions. Others believe it is fluid from the Skene‘s glands, a string of several masses of tissue, embedded in the urethra, which when stimulated sexually in some women, releases the fluids into the urethral canal. Devotees of Amrita, the “nectar of the goddess”, base their cult on ancient Tantric writings. Men ejaculate sperm from the testicles via tubes that go through the prostate gland where the sperm mixes with seminal fluid--a very clear process that everyone understands.. There is no question that whatever this fluid that some women “ejaculate” or squirt, upon orgasm is--it is not the female equivalent of seminal fluid. Strictly speaking, there is no female ejaculate or ejaculation.

If not ejaculate, what? Something does happen for many women though no one [Sorry, Amritas.] has answered definitively the question: Pee or Amrita? I lean toward the Skeen’s glands theory because it makes the most sense to me.

Female ejaculation isn’t exactly a technique. If you want to try to make it happen, use G spot stimulation and don’t hold back when you feel the urge to urinate. Bear down. Anton’s goddess of the Amrita drinks water before the demonstration. Some women empty their bladders before trying to squirt because they want to be absolutely sure they aren’t peeing. Whatever soaks your towels!

Anton’s philosophy of life and sex is: Give a woman everything she wants. You see why women love the man?

In comparing the two demonstrations of orgasmic providing on two very different women, I realized how beautifully he does that, adapting his style to suit the needs of the goddess at hand, going with her flow, be it an electric current in her pussy or a gusher of wondrous fluid spurting forth.

I have squirted on rare occasion, always involving a lot of oral and manual play, a large dick and too much wine. One time was particularly memorable--a hottest ever sex adventure; and I will write about it for Christmas because it happened just before the holiday, a few years back in Soho.

 

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime 

Give Your Guy A Blow Job Day!

Photo Credit:  Photobucket

 

I had titled this:  Give Your Boy Toy A Blow Job Day!  But I realized:  some women don't have boy toys. 

There are days when I just need to suck a cock.l  I want that big pacifier in my mouth and feel stress and tension flow out of my body as I suck.

Here's my directions for The Basic Black Dress of Blow Jobs.  (Feel free to add your own accessories.)

http://sexyprime.typepad.com/sexyprime/2008/05/the-basic-black.html 

 

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime 

Why Do You Keep Picking The Wrong Guys?--You Don't Understand Your Desire Curve

Why do you keep picking the “wrong” guys?

I can answer that in one crisp sentence: You’re trying to force your lust into a relationship.

Nan Wise, a non-traditional therapist/coach, professor and neuroscience researcher--and one of the women I most admire-- developed an elegant and sophisticated tool for understanding desire (or lust). The Desire Curve may be the most useful piece of applied neuroscience you ever encounter. Once you “get it,” you realize: Omigod, what I thought was love (or the reverse, falling out of love) was just my brain on drugs.

   

The Desire Curve begins at your Desire Set Point,--the amount of sex you naturally crave whether you have a regular partner or not--rises to the thrill of New Relationship Euphoria (NREU), then settles back to Desire Set Point. NREU lasts from eighteen months to three years. We typically commit while on that high.

“The misconceptions about desire are appalling,” Nan says. “We make decisions based on desire without understanding the Desire Curve where NREU is the high point, not the natural state of being. When we come down to the Desire Set Point, we’re disappointed and blame our lover, the relationship,“

It’s not unusual for a man or woman with a low desire set point to mate with a partner whose set point is higher. In the throes of new passion, they don’t realize how mismatched their sex drives are. That partner with a low desire set point suddenly wants more sex than he or she typically does—and foolishly, of course, ascribes the rise of libido to true love and the fall of libido to the loss of it.

What’s really happening in that hot relationship if it isn’t love?

Also called “limerance”, NREU, is a chemical high. The first neurotransmitter chemical firing off in your brain when you are strongly attracted to someone new is phenylethylamine, PEA. A natural form of amphetamine, it floods the regions of the brain influencing sexual arousal. (Now you know the true meaning of the terms “love addict” and “love junkie”.) Norepinephrine, a second euphoria-inducing chemical kicks in and stimulates the release of adrenaline causing your blood pressure to shoot up when you see or touch your beloved. PEA releases dopamine—the body’s “feel good” neurochemical— which helps to stimulate the production of Oxytocin, dubbed the “cuddle chemical” because it encourages bonding and attachment. This powerful cocktail of brain chemicals creates a state of euphoria in the new lovers. Intercourse and orgasm intensify the Oxytocin production. That is not love—it’s a neurochemical high.

Here’s how NREU gives you the big kick:

• Sex, especially if it includes intercourse and orgasm, adds large amounts of the attachment chemical oxytocin to the rush of neurochemicals already bathing her fevered brain.

•  Women are more affected by oxytocin then men because it works in concert with estrogen and is somewhat subdued by testosterone.

• Intercourse produces more oxytocin in women than cunnilingus or other sex acts.

What can you do when the thrill is gone?

 

Forget Hot Monogamy. It’s a lie. You cannot sustain a NREU high throughout the decades. You can, however, create peaks in your valleys--a pattern of undulating waves of desire. (Now that you understand the Desire Curve, you can relax and be grateful for the natural hormonal cycles that make you crave again.)

 

Here are some suggestions for creating the peaks:

• Break sexual habits.

• Habituation is deadly in a sexual relationship. You have to shake it up. Learn some new tricks.

• Get physical (as in exercise) with your partner.

• Do what scares you a little.

Try anal sex. Visit a nude beach. Let your secret “top” or “bottom” come out. Make sexual demands. Go to a swing club. Take some risks and get your adrenaline pumping. (Your brain needs a new chemical kick.)

• Have a secret sex life.

Masturbation. Fantasies. Sex parties or swining. A flirtation, fling or affair with someone else. The compulsion to tell your partner everything is annoyingly American and erotically

Read more about The Desire Curve in The Sex Bible for Women.





copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime 

Don't Ride Bareback With Strangers--and That Sexy Condom Trick

Photo Credit:  Photobucket 

Over the past few weeks, a half dozen women, age 26 to 50-ish, have confided to me that they are having sex without condoms--because it "feels better."  I gave them my safer sex lecture--the one that ends in "Use condoms until you have both been tested for STIs and committed to a monogamous relationship."  This can't be a trend!  (Or so I thought,)  Then I had lunch at Inoteca, a fabulous wine bar on the Lower East Side, with a man who told me he's had 33 partners to date this year--and rarely uses a condom.  I marched him next door to Babeland at 94 Rivington Street where I showed him the array of condoms and individual packets of lube.

And finally my pal Steve Otero at Sexy Spirits emailed me an article on the growing prevalence of Bareback Riding among young women.  I did some more research and discovered that women of all ages are often failing to use condoms in their casual sex encounters.  (Some weeks ago Rebecca did a great piece on the Dick Check.)

What's going on here?

"I want to feel the real thing; and sometimes I take my chances on a guy, especially if he's just coming out of a longterm relationship":  K, 29.

What's wrong with that?

He could be carrying chlamydia and not know.  That STI is typically asymptomatic in men and women too.  Untreated chlamydia, however, can scar your Fallopian tubes, leaving you unable to conceive.  That's one reason young women end up in infertility treatment.

Or he could have herpes and failed to mention it.  Yes, you can contract herpes even if your infected partner does not have obvious lesions.  There are other grisly possibilities.  Get tested for everything.

"I've been sleeping with this guy for a month--and it feels more intimate without condoms":  C, 37.

I understand the desire to feel close and connected to a man.  But don't confuse "intimacy" with reckless bareback riding.  If you are craving skin to skin contact with the guy, spell it out for him.  Can you (post-testing) negotiate a "no intercourse with other people" clause in whatever kind of relationship you have with him?  Intimate partners know and respect--and protect--one another.

 

"Men lose their erections while putting on condoms" : D, 44.

Here's your sex tip of the day:  Putting On A Condom With Your Mouth

• Choose a non-lubricated condom, but rub a bit of lube on his cock.

• Put the condom in your mouth with the reservoir tipe pointing toward your throat, the ring in front of your teeth.

• Anchor the tip to the roof of your mouth with your tongue--and keep it under your tongue until the condom is on him.

• Holding his cock in your hands, lower your head on top of it. 

• Use your lips to unroll the condom down the shaft of his cock.

There's a sale going on at Babeland for a limited time:  Customer favorite sex toys 20% off.  Go there and pick up some condoms while you're shopping, online or in the stores.

 

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime 

A Little Sex, A Little Oprah, A Lot Of Hope

Barack Obama’s greatest gift may be his ability to call forth the best in us. I was in Harlem last night; and I wouldn’t have been anywhere else in the world, except, of course, Chicago. What a night! I looked from the television screen to the people around me and saw through my tears the same transformation on every face, black, white, Asian, Latino, old, young, male, female. Oprah Winfrey in Chicago (below) and a neighborhood woman I know to be homeless in Harlem, captured by the cameras on the edge of the crowd--the same face on both women. All of us, proud and humbled to be Americans on this night, our faces lit from within by the audacity of hope.

This is not a political blog, so I will leave further commentary to writers who do it better. Speaking of Oprah, she did a show on sex with Dr. Laura Berman this week. (Oprah doesn’t do much sex, but television is in the November ratings sweeps period when everybody does a little sex.) The program was Sex 101, complete with a discreet line drawing of the female genitals, the clitoris represented as a dot. But it was well done--and made me realize that sex authors and advisers sometimes are out of touch with the average woman. We are looking for the next new hot sex trick.

A lot of women, however, are still looking for their clits.

The brave married couple who opened up their sex life to scrutiny were interesting on more than one level: She is black; he is white. I keep telling black women who accuse me of “stealing” their men when I’m with a black man: Interracial goes both ways. I hear from many white men who are either attracted to black women in general or enamored of one in particular.

This couple's problem was sexless marriage--a problem they share with over 20 million couples in the country. Dr. Berman got them to open up about their fantasies and fears. Deb, the wife, admitted that she fantasized “being overpowered”--while acknowledging that she “infantalized” her husband by bossing him around. There is nothing sexy about a whipped husband.

Homework included buying a vibe! (Go to Babeland and buy your own new toy to celebrate America today.)

Deb had a rare orgasm while using the vibe on herself as her husband held and caressed her.

Tearfully, she said, “It was great! Overwhelming! Stuff works down there. Not being informed, you think you’ll get it from intercourse and you think, What’s the problem? I didn’t know there was another place.”

That’s right. This intelligent married woman did not know about the “other place“, the C spot, her clitoris--which is the orgasm place for most women.

Dr. Berman said, “Like Deb, the vast majority of women have never looked down there.”

My goodness. Please look if you haven’t already. Whatever the size and shape of your genitals, they are beautiful. You are beautiful.

May the Goddess bless Deb and all women in search of their orgasms, bless Oprah Winfrey for all she has given us--and above all bless Barack and Michelle Obama, our President-elect and his elegant equal partner, our next First Lady.

Don’t you love their public displays of affection?

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime