SexyPrime, a blog by Susan Crain Bakos

THE UNCOUPLING--The Novel by Meg Wolitzer and The SexyPrime Saga of the Moment

 
Photo credit:  "Red Mask Lady" by Gustav on Photobucket

 

A group of women and teenage girls suddenly lose interest in sex in Meg Wolitzer’s new novel, The Uncoupling (Riverhead Books).  They are all teachers, counselors or students at a New Jersey high school; and their abrupt uncoupling (confusing husbands and boyfriends) coincides with the new drama teacher’s choosing of the school play, “Lysistrata” by Aristophanes, an ancient Greek drama set in Athens.  Yes, there is magical realism afoot.

The female characters in the play, led by Lysistrata, stage a sexual strike to end the Peloponnesian War; and the strike is a sacrifice to these lusty ladies longing for the touch of their men.  They yearn.  For the novel’s characters, however, sex is an instantly forgotten pleasure with rare moments of desire (“generic moments of longing”) like the odd twitches of a phantom limb barely felt beneath the new prosthesis.  How did that happen?

The drama teacher is a bit of a witch, responsible for the mysterious cold wind that blows up the women’s skirts and into their hearts, one at a time.  Wolitzer is such a wonderful writer that she makes this dramatic device work—as well as John Updike did in The Witches of Eastwick, another witty novel using the supernatural in exploring female sexuality.  I believed the women shut down sexually—and was not surprised that, in doing so, they opened up to so many other possibilities in their lives.  The teen queen turns to political activism, a shy girl discovers her acting ability.  They are like students in an all-girl high school, relieved of the need to attract boys.

All the characters are finely drawn, but the mid-life women interest me most.  They could be married to the male SexyPrime readers writing to ask me, “What the hell is wrong with my wife and why doesn’t she want to have sex with me anymore?”  (If you have read Abandoned Husband's story, you will see how he fits right in.)

Wolitzer describes the women’s process of turning away from the hurt and angry men, good men, feeling bereft and betrayed in their cold beds.  In real life, women either turn deeply into themselves—into “finding” themselves—or to a new man or another woman.  Not often do they turn back to the husbands, not cruel and abusive, simply regular men who no longer excite.  The author explores the dynamic of the sexually disinterested wife without offering solutions.  I get the impression that she would find the standard advice—date nights, romantic gestures, sexy games—a rather sad form of “settling”. 

What is the origin of the cold wind blowing up the skirts of so many women at midlife?  How did once-sexy young wives turn into middle-aged judgmental prudes in their forties (sometimes sooner)?

Surely you’ve heard their litany of complaints:  Husbands who masturbate to porn, selfish and inept lovers who can’t find their clitoris or G spot, the domestic taming of desire, sometimes his as well as hers—and the lethal effects of relationship issues creating anger and frustration, chipping away at lust. 

Rarely does anyone say:  The sex was never that good; I didn’t have as many orgasms as I faked and so I shut down.  But that is often the underlying truth, the big dirty secret midlife women hide like an enormous dust bunny under the marital bed.  Perhaps they tell their best friend or the next man, but not the husband who shared the bed but never looked beneath it.  The men who ask, “Why doesn’t my wife want to have sex anymore?” don’t want to hear the truth anyway.

A man I’ve been coaching said:  “The sex was always great; we just didn’t have it often enough.”

Did she think the sex was great too?

“Oh, yes.  She just didn’t get horny more than once a month.”

Yet when she left him, she said, “We could stay together like this if you only want sex three or four times a year because that is where we’re headed.”  I suppose she was anticipating only getting “horny” on a quarterly basis now.

I nudge him to ask the obvious question:  If the sex was “great”, why didn’t she want it more often?  He resists the suggestion.

“I don’t understand why she left,” he said.

I thought of this passage from The Uncoupling—

[When a character heard about a couple divorcing over sex]….”Still she would say, ‘There must be something else,’ for how terrible it was to give up a good and loving marriage because of sex.  Because of no sex.  Many people stayed married forever in low-sex or no-sex marriages.”

He doesn’t want that, of course, but he wants his wife to come back to him, morphed into the once-sexy young wife.  Magic realism.  It won’t happen.  Wherever the cold wind originated almost doesn’t matter, it has blown up her skirt and into her heart.

I won’t spoil the book for you by telling you if any of the characters get their old magic back.  But read it; you’ll love it.  Meg Wolitzer is one of my favorite novelists.  If you are just discovering her, you have a lot of good reading ahead of you in catching up with her backlist.

  

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

EROTIC SPANKING, ANAL SEX AND SEX REBELS--PLEASURE BOUND gives us Victorians we can love

 
Photo Credit:  "Victorian Beauty" on Photobucket

 

The Victorians were not Puritans without the funny hats, which is how we think of them, if we think of them at all.

In the Victorian heyday, prostitution was legal; death was eroticized; lesbians could sleep together as “friends,” socially invisible lovers, because nobody thought women were that sexual; flagellation porn was the favorite flavor; and bosoms most certainly did heave above those restraining corsets.  Yes, Oscar Wilde went to jail for being gay; women didn’t have the vote; and any little STD could kill you if the treatment, including institutional incarceration for prostitutes, didn’t get you first.  No historical time period has it all, but this one was livelier, more intensely interesting and certainly more relatable to modern men and women than most people would ever guess.  

By comparison, “contemporary pornography is kind of boring,” says Deborah Lutz, author of PLEASURE BOUND:  Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism (WW Norton); and she should know because she has a Victorian porn collection.

An English professor at Long Island University, with a specialty in erotica, Deborah lives in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn which my car service driver told me last night is “very far away.”  Pause.  “Far.  Very.”  We had that discussion on the phone at 7:30 p.m. Thursday night, the exact time I was supposed to be at Greenlight Bookstore having a public discussion with Deborah about sex.  (Have you ever been stuck on a train in a tunnel feeding into the Penn Station terminal while signals were down?  Don’t plan on making your dinner reservations when it happens.)  The driver said:  “Ten minutes to get to you at Penn, maybe fifteen, at least thirty minutes, depending on traffic, to get you to Greenpoint.  Ms. Bakos, I think you would be arriving too late to introduce the author.”

I hope everyone at Greenlight Bookstore realizes that it wasn’t fear of Brooklyn that kept me away.

When Deborah and I made plans to meet the week before for drinks to discuss her new book, she suggested a Brooklyn bar.  Though I’ve surely been to that borough a dozen times in my 25 years in New York and will go back again when necessary, I held out for downtown Manhattan and managed to move her slightly up to the Village.  Still, I was running late; and she text-ed me, “I am the glasses and plaid shirt at the bar.”  She was, but also lovely, with long dark hair and smart/sexy eyes, like an Indy movie star, the visually perfect person to play the role of professor busting some myths about those stuffy Victorians.

The first question many of us who have seen Victorian porn must ask:  Why all the spanking and flagellation?

Deborah acknowledges the theory that corporal punishment in public school inculcated masochism in some young men, but she seems more inclined toward viewing the dominant men who went to brothels to be spanked or whipped as predecessors of the powerful bankers and lawyers and CEOs who pay doms for a milder version of the same punishments today:  They needed a break from being tightly in control; and they wanted to experience submission and “powerlessness” —exactly my conclusions when I researched Kink:  The Hidden Sex Lives of Americans over a decade ago.  In this and many other ways, you will discover in this delicious book that the Victorians and 21^st Century people have common sexual ground.

I was as pleased as a good student to hear that Deborah and I shared some of the same insights into her material.  Make no mistake, Pleasure Bound is the work of a learned author, an intellectual—but it is also a pleasurable, accessible reading experience even if the poets and painters are previously unknown to you.  I can think of no other book that combines this level of expertise with approachability.  Reading it is like eating French chocolates.  Maybe your previous chocolate experience was Godiva or M&Ms (which I also love), but you won’t need a translator to fall in love with La Maison du Chocolat.

Deborah’s publicist sent me a copy of Pleasure Bound toward the end of last year, one of the highlights of the holiday season.  I’d wanted a copy because one of my favorite historical characters, the explorer and author Sir Richard Burton, translator of Eastern sex books like The Perfumed Garden, was a character in her story.  A group of 19^th Century artists, writers and poets dedicated their lives to casting off religious fundamentalism, patriarchy and sexism.  To some extent, they succeeded, laying the groundwork for women’s rights, gay rights, and government programs to help the poor and influencing art and literature even today.  Burton, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, the sensual painter, Algernon Charles Swinburne, poet and frequent customer of flagellant brothels, socialist William Morris and the girl in the group Christina Rosetti, Dante’s sister, were among the members of two Bohemian groups, the Cannibal Club and the Aesthetes, challenging the world order through art, literature, intellectual discourse and outrageous behavior, including all manner of sex parties, often fueled by laudanum and opium.

 As she details in the book, they raised a lot of interesting questions, like:

 “To what extent does penetration (or the possibility thereof) determine social dominance, and what happens when the penetrator becomes the penetrated? How do gender roles hold up when the buttocks are eroticized instead of the genitals, and how does this demolition of the male-female binary influence women’s rights in society?”

She says, “To be frank, I’m not entirely sure.  The buttocks have no genitals.  Both men and women have the same equipment back there, so there is a sense of genderless-ness.”

 Now what does that tell us about the national obsession with anal intercourse?

In one of my favorite anecdotes in Pleasure Bound, Dante Rosetti and other Aesthetes dig up the grave of his wife, Lizzie Siddal, dead for seven years and before that, dying slowly for years.  She was his beautiful muse of sex and death.  He’d been so distraught when her life at last expired that he buried a manuscript of unpublished poems with her.  Seven years later, he was prying the lid off her putrid coffin.  Had his undying love died?  Was the loss of his art greater than that of his wife? 

Deborah explains that the Aesthetes saw art as eternal, life as temporal.  With afterlife an uncertainty, he had to rescue the poems, stained with decomposition, just as they all felt the need, even obligation, to celebrate the pleasures of the flesh while that flesh lived.

This philosophy reflected a growing skepticism among Victorian intellectuals about traditional Christianity and the notion of Heaven and Hell. With the afterlife an uncertainty, Rossetti and like-minded bohemians concentrated on the here and now, engaging in the pleasures of the flesh and elevating orgasm as spiritual fulfillment--as the spirtual sex believers do today.

But how did a nice girl from Boulder, Colorado, get involved with Victorian sex rebels?

“I was very influenced by a professor who specialized in Victoriana; and then I started collecting the porn.  I really wanted to paint a picture of what it was like to be a sexual radical in Victorian London,” says Lutz. “I wanted to bring the time period alive.”

And she does.  Don’t miss Pleasure Bound and give my love to Brooklyn.  Hit the Greenlight Bookstore link above and buy from them. 

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

"ORGASM INC", THE ORGASM LOOP--and the ongoing scientific quest for Her Big O

 
Photo Credit:  "Black and White Woman 1" by Linda Terry

 

Last Thursday I went with my friend Kim—not our Kimmie—to a special showing of “Orgasm Inc.” by the filmmaker Liz Canter at Quad Cinema, a Village institution, six little shabby rooms with screens so small that a wide screen TV could take them in a turf war.  But we love The Quad, don’t take it away from us.  In the Q/A following the film, Canter told the audience that she’d worked ten years on  bringing her project to the screen—which explains why it seemed a bit dated, though interesting and sometimes very funny.  She began making a documentary on Vivus, one small pharmaceutical company, and their race against the big guys to create “the female Viagra” in pill, cream (Vivus), patch or nose spray—and she ended up articulating a position on their endeavors and taking on Big Pharma, the pharmaceutical industry; Dr. Laura Berman, Oprah’s anointed national sex therapist; American sex education; vaginoplasty, scary and problematic cosmetic surgery to create designer vaginas—and more.  Because we already know that every version of The Great Pink Hope yet produced has failed to earn FDA approval, there wasn’t much drama.  (I blogged about the quest for the pink pill in three parts, "Do We Really Need a Pink Pill?", "A Little Pink Pill Can't Restore Lost Desire", "The Little Pink Pill Vetoed by the FDA."

Canter’s position is not a novel or new one:  She blames Big Pharma for turning women’s sexual issues into a disease, Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD), and creating a consumer demand for lifestyle drugs like sex pills through direct-to-consumer prescription drug ads—“drugs for the healthy and wealthy while research on real diseases doesn’t get done.”  All the blame for creating that new illness, FSD, is piled on the drug makers—much as some folks insist cyberporn is responsible for sexless marriages.   In America, we have trouble remembering the past, unless, of course, we’re re-enacting the Civil War.  It’s as if every problem sprang up anew in the current TV season.

Full disclaimer:  A member of my family is an executive with a big pharma company.  One tends to look more kindly on the employer who feeds one’s relatives.  Even so, I think what I think—

And it is simplistic to place all the blame for the pathologizing of female sexuality on the pharmaceutical industry—good corporate capitalists who perceived, defined and are attempting to seize a market.  Before anyone thought of pills for sexual desire, there was a nasty medical diagnosis called “frigidity.”  Women who were turned off to sex for a variety of reasons, grandmothers of the women now labeled FDS, were “frigid”—and a man with a frigid wife had social carte blanche to cheat on her.  “Nymphomania” was another pejorative medical term, this one applied to women who liked sex too much, even inside marriage.   Other women who likely were getting aroused but not reaching orgasm (because they had no idea how to do that) were diagnosed with “hysteria” and treated with early vibrators.  Yes, doctors actually brought women to electric orgasm in their offices without mentioning the word “clitoris” or suggesting the power of touch.

Before female sexuality was pathologized, it was demonized.  Histories of the witch trials in this country are fascinating for the insights to be gleaned into how repressed sexuality can burst into flames.  Women (and sometimes men) claimed they were visited by the witches who flew into their beds at night and drove them into a sinful state of sexual frenzy.  Caught masturbating?  Blame the neighborhood witch.

Today the root of the problem is still sexual ignorance, a cultural failure to educate men and women, much less teens and younger children, on how their bodies work and other physical, emotional and intellectual aspects of sexual function and behavior.  Just last weekend the Republican-led House of Representatives voted to defund Planned Parenthood altogether, their predecessors having nearly eviscerated it under Bush.   For decades, we have been hamstrung by ridiculous right wing Christian beliefs like abstinence-only sex ed in the schools and Just Say No to abortion and,by the way, to providing food and medical care to those babies whose mothers can’t really afford to raise them alone.   The underlying thread of illogic holding these beliefs together is a fierce and fearful disapproval of sex, especially female sexuality.

American culture gave us FSD, in one form or another, hundreds of years ago, long before TV and prescription drug ads with the obligatory lists of possible side effects read in double time in order to get them all in.   We have colluded in our victimization.  Women believe we should all have orgasms the way female characters in the novels, mainstream movies and porn films do—via vigorous intercourse following a little heated foreplay (or not).  Possibly, women have believed this since cave drawings pictured us screaming and shaking in delight while being mounted and pounded.

In addition to spreading the “blame”—Has Canter never read women’s magazines?—she should have more plainly acknowledged that some women do need medical intervention to restore, which is not the same thing as create, their desire, arousal and ability to orgasm.  Hysterectomies, cancer treatment, anti-depressants and other prescription drugs, lifestyle issues like work overload, stress, overweight, sedentary habits—all have taken away what many women once had, sexual desire.  Few questioned whether or not the man who couldn’t get a decent erection for physical reasons should have Viagra.  Female desire and arousal are more complex than male—or we would already have the pink pill to put into the hands of women who medically need the help.

Can we dismiss drugs that might accomplish something as important as the restoration of sexual functioning—male empowerment, female empowerment—with the phrase “lifestyle drugs for the healthy and wealthy?”  Is sex of so little value and importance in our lives? 

Rather chastise everyone who believes that a miracle sex pill can work against all odds.  The woman who isn’t turned on by her husband because the sex isn’t satisfying, or is shamed or embarrassed or too damn ignorant to know how to stroke herself during intercourse, or mistakenly believes that having a fantasy about another man means she is no longer in love with her husband—these and other women won’t be helped by a drug. 

Give Dr. Laura Berman the benefit of the doubt when she says some of her patients have been helped by the male Viagra because they need the stimulation of increased blood flow to the genitals just as men do.  Does encouraging this off-label Viagra use, and apparently accepting payment from the manufacturer as a consultant—negate her findings? 

Finally, how can you make a documentary about questing for orgasm without spelling it out for women, not merely hinting here and there, hit and miss:  Masturbate, stimulate your clitoris during intercourse, use vibrators?  The middle-aged woman who submitted to an orgasmatron planted into her spine—with the only result being her leg jerked when she turned it on—was granted little dignity, certainly less than the opponent to every drug, Dr. Leonore Tiefer.  An older woman craving a sexual experience that is also avidly desired by young women, a no-hands orgasm during intercourse, that brave woman willing to try anything seemed almost an object of amusement to the filmmaker.  Inject a little empathy into your humor segments, Ms. Canter because the one thing you will assuredly be unless you die young is older.  Laugh with her at the jerking leg, not the desire for pleasure that led her to submit to the surgery.

There is still much to like and enjoy in “Orgasm Inc.”  See the film, then do your own research and draw your own conclusions.  I do so hate reflexive genuflecting. This film already smells like a feminist sacred cow; and I eat cheeseburgers in India.  You just have to know where to buy them.

 

This weekend, I want to re-introduce you to The Orgasm Loop, the no-fail, no-hands technique I created for women who want an orgasm on intercourse alone.  I’ve kept O Loop's light under the basket for too long.  Many colleagues have been after me to conduct workshops, make a DVD, take private clients, get the word out beyond the books.  (O Loop is also featured in The Sex Bible for Women and The Little Book of Big Orgasm). 

My new motto:  Teach O Loop and prevent possible spinal cord damage.

 

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

IS IT OBLIGATORY LOVE?--A Romantic, Sexy Valentine from Lynda Belle

 

 
Image Credit:  "Sensuality 6" by Aubrey Knight on Photobucket

Most of my readers comment via email rather than on the posts.  (I would love more comments on posts.)  Lynda Belle very generously shares with everyone.  In case you missed her comment on Tuesday's post "Is Love Really Enough?"--here it is, a little jewel of a Valentine essay that shouldn't be hidden away in the comments section--

Is It Obligatory Love?  by Lynda Belle

Hmmm. I am one of those who despises Valentines. Obligatory Love, guilt, loneliness.  It starts when we were kids and ~having~ to give valentines to the class, with candy hearts and flowers for the teacher, if you liked them or not.  Obligatory love is worse than obligatory sex. MHO!

I have felt this way since 4th grade when I ~had~ to give a Valentine to the girl class bully. 'Be My Valentine' to girls from a bigotry house was confusing at best and to kootie-filled boys was just gross. "Be my friend" was never in the box.

That all changed one day when my husband and I were just friends. No way was I getting married, ~ever~, and I was done with relationships. Besides he had a three year old. ~No WAY!

He came to my work one day and asked if we could get together and I said sure, but my next day off I had to do laundry, so maybe the next day off after that.  He said he knew just the place and would help me with my laundry.

"Okay, are you sure?" I asked. 'My next day off is Friday'

He paused, then said "I'll pick you up at 1:00."

Me totally clueless I was just happy not to have to go to the laundromat alone. So he picks me up and takes me to Soap and Suds, a place to do laundry with a bar. We get the laundry in the wash, go to the bar and order screw drivers, and play sex trivia while waiting for the laundry. We ate finger foods, fed each other tid bits, drank more screw drivers, and I beat him at trivia. It was so much fun.

We laughed, and talked, and got my mountain of laundry done. On the way back to my place I'm not sure what possessed me. Blame it on the screw drivers, or blame the great casual friendship day together, but we hit this red light and I looked at him and all of a sudden I had this overwhelming need to kiss him. So I did.

His smell was ambrosia as I breathed him in; and the electricity probably was the cause of the static cling in the laundry.  But when we broke apart, he looked in my eyes and I looked in his; and we might as well have been the only two people in the world because we started kissing the most amazing toe curling kiss again.  We kissed for 3 lights. {clearing throat} until the cars behind us reminded us where we were and that they wouldn't sit through another green light.

Ahhhh young love..I mean friendship. He pulled into a parking lot and for some reason we couldn't get enough of one another. My lips still tingle when I think of that 'once in a life time' moment, when everything just clicks and is perfect. We pulled ourselves apart; and he said he had to take care of some things and go get his kid from his parents who were baby sitting.

"Oh of course," I said.

Nothing to bring you back to reality like "I gotta pick up my child.'" Works better than a jump into a freezing pool in February. So he dropped me at the door and we were greeted by my roommate who had a card and special kiss for him.

"'Happy Valentines day." she adoringly greeted him. '

"Valentines?"' I asked?

"Of course. Who forgets Valentines?" she asked.

Me apparently. I smiled and thanked him for the help on the laundry monster and went to my room, giving the two of them privacy. He made his excuses and left. I picked up a shift and went to work. He showed up towards closing and asked if he could take me, with kid in tow, to Jo Jos for something to eat.

"Sure I could eat."

You know I was totally oblivious about his feelings for me, and thought he a roomie, who went to a 'party', might be having a 'thing' and he and I were  just friends.  Then I got in his car he had all this stuff in the back. One card stood out. It was a work of art, hand drawn, and a special Valentines from a very hopfule Valentine. He said he had several dates and broke them all and that was all the things cards, candy, toys for his child, that he'd received from the broken dates. He still has that hand made card and I think it's lovely.

 'Why did you break your dates?' I inquired very innocently.

"'Because I want to be with you," he said.

"Oh No! We're just friends." I protested; and he just smiled.

We were married 3 months later. Fast forward 25 years and the raising of 2 daughters and many class rooms worth of obligatory valentines. Sometimes ',I love you.' is all we had for each other and other times like our 12th Valentines, he bought me a heart pendant with 12 rubies. A dozen "I love yous" for every anniversary of our first real kiss. We have cut hearts our of construction paper at our poorest times, and drawn special messages on the mirror when Valentines Day was remembered at the 11th hour. We have had expensive dinners with roses and picnics at the beach with hearts drawn in the sand.

But through it all my Hubby, who has never been obligated by me to show Valentines love has given me unforgettable love-filled moments. So from a woman who scoffs at 'Valentines' but has a Hubby who showed her the real meaning of the words, Yes Susan, sometimes 'I love you' is more than enough!  When it really comes down to it, what else matters ~but~ real love?

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

A SHAMELESS WOMAN--Pamela Madsen's Journey from Shamed to Sexual Liberation

 

Do you know how much personal courage a woman must summon to seek her own sexual pleasure when—

• She feels “too fat” to show her body;
• Everyone in her life likes her the way she is, funny, smart, accomplished and successful—and not particularly “sexy.”
• Her knowledge of alternative sexuality options is minimal (very minimal);
• Her only role models for exciting sex lives at midlife are her friends who are “cheating” on their husbands;
• And she’s happily married and doesn’t want to “cheat’ on her husband?

Sooooo much courage.  I don’t know how to define or quantify it.  I only know most of us aren’t that brave.  Thank you, Pamela, for being the intrepid sexual freedom fighter women need to read about.

A few months ago I met Pamela for lunch at an Indian restaurant.  Excited about her upcoming first book and bubbling over with great anecdotes about her sexual quest, she is the sort of woman Mama called “pleasingly plump,” back in the day when that was a good thing, not a bad thing because now we are all supposed to be size 0-6, max.  If I were a man (or bi or gay) I’m sure I would have fantasized touching her creamy skin and caressing her voluptuous flesh—because she is an appealing, sexy woman even if societal body ideals keep telling her she is not.

But Pamela is more than a curvaceous little ball of energy and charisma—she is a pioneer in fertility advocacy and founder of the American Fertility Association (AFA), a woman whose work is held in high regard in professional communities.

And that begs the question, Why would she risk encounters with “happy ending” masseuses—and much more!—and then make it all public in a book?

“My goal is to help emancipate women from the ‘woulda’s’ and ‘shoulda’s’ that have kept us in denial and darkness for thousands of years,” she says.  “I know it’s possible for women to heal their sexual identities and embrace their bodies and desires in a safe, sane and consensual way—even within the bounds of marriage.”

Even within the bounds of marriage.  That is what sets Pamela apart from other midlife women gone sexual adventuring.  She doesn’t find a Boy Toy on an island vacation (or in her own back yard, cleaning the pool.)  Nor does she do it with the neighbor’s husband, a co-worker or a guy she met at an upscale bar.  In fact, she doesn’t “do it” in the conventional sense at all.

 

Shameless:  then I ditched the diet, got naked, found true pleasure and somehow got home in time to cook dinner (Rodale Press) opens with Pamela and friends, including a sister, at a Korean Day spa in Fort Lee, New Jersey.  Their conversation about weight and diets too quickly dissolves into sex talk, the kind of talk that leaves her feeling resentful and restless because she wants some of what they have—passion, big orgasms.  She writes like she talks, fast and smart and funny.  Here is an excerpt—

“Ya think we stand out enough?” Vicki said in her best Bronx honk. What didn’t she inherit from our mother?

“Nah, we blend right in,” I countered, glancing down at my ample C-cup breasts bobbing, cocking my head at the trainer bra–sized boobs of the dozen other boiling women and their offspring.

“One wrong move and my butt could cause some serious injury. I never saw so many small-boned people,” Beth whispered.

I was ready with my “back on Atkins—I have to lose 60 pounds—women are so screwed” rap when Beth usurped my place.

“I got the most amazing head last week,” she burst out, totally smug.

Oh no she didn’t! She’d switched up the order of our traditional agenda: weight and body image first, then sex…

.As I read the book—and I’m not giving away the intimate details because I don’t want to spoil it for you—I had moments between laughing and raising my fist in the air and saying, YES!—when I worried about Pamela.  Women pay a price for being publicly sexual.  I’m sure she is, or will be, getting hate mail from the anti-sex forces, but the fan mail will dwarf it.  I admire her tremendously for stepping outside the confines of her secure life as a wife, mother and professional woman to share her sexual journey with other women.  Trust me.  You will learn something here and find inspiration for your own journey—even if you aren’t starting out as something of an erotic novice.

Pamela Madsen gives of herself out of an astonishing and frankly touching  abundance of caring about other women.  She knows that sexuality is intrinsic to our identity.  And she believes that spending one’s life sexually frustrated is a terrible waste.

You can learn more about her and buy the book on the Shameless website.

 

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

ARE SINGLE WOMEN AFTER YOUR HUSBAND?--"Mate Poaching" in the U.S. and the U.K.

 
Photo Credit:  "Sasha with Red Rose" on Photobucket

 

“It’s true, married men are sexier; and I’ve got your husband in my sites,” is the title of an article by Amanda Parkin in the The Daily Mail.

My pal Steve Otero at Sexy Spirits sent me that link and several others related to the new theory:  Married men don’t go after single women; the ladies pursue them.

Last year a study conducted at Oklahoma State University found that four times as many single women were interested in married rather than single men.  Wives, on the other hand, reported the single guys more attractive.  This sexual selection by marital status would seem to violate the research on sexual attraction informing us that men are drawn to women with bust, waist, hip proportions indicating fertility (the hour-glass figure) and ovulating women hunger for very masculine men—and, oh, by the way that all of us want symmetry in the facial features of idealized mates. 

Now comes an article from London’s The Daily Mail rounding up more recent British studies on the same phenomenon and asking—

What’s going on here?

“It is a worrying question that has crossed many a married women’s mind:  does my best friend have a crush on my husband?  According to scientists, their concerns could well be justified,” writes Fiona MacRae.

In England, they call it “mate poaching” and Angelina Jolie is its most famous practitioner.  But not every single woman wants to poach, preferring merely to play with another woman’s man. In Mistresses:  A History of the Other Woman (Duckworth)  Elizabeth Abbott tells the fascinating tales of famous women who relished the role of mistress and didn’t want to be wives.  (The book will be published later this year in the U.S.)  In France, the regular post-work dalliance of a man with his lover is called the “sinq a cept”—after which he goes home to wife and kids a happier man, one presumes, than the American husbands trudging back to the suburbs following their Happy Hour bar indulgences.

Read Amanda Parkin’s bracingly honest account of why she likes being a mistress and, as long as the wives don’t find out, plans on staying one.  Modern mistresses like Parkin expect the man to pay for expensive dinners and gifts.  Otherwise, they are unlike the kept women of old.  They support themselves.

England seems to be catching up to France in adopting this more sophisticated view of adultery.  Can we in the Colonies be far behind?

From a SexyPrime reader who prefers married men:  “Once you’ve realized the best ones are married, it’s not a far stretch to—why not?  Besides, he’s not having sex (or good sex) with his wife.  Just ask him.”

If you are a wife, what do you think about that?

 

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

Men Don't Feel Desired, Sex Makes Us Happy, He Says She Doesn't Fake--and other favorite sex science stories, 2010

 
Photo Credit:  "Merry Sexy Christmas" on Photobucket

 

2010 was a very good year for sex science geeks like me.  We finally got a big American sex survey that didn't sound like the data was collected by untrained housewives hired by a right wing Christian organization.  (Among other things, the survey says women still fake orgasm and men say, "not in my bed, she doesn't.")  There is very encouraging news in the battle against the AIDS epidemic.  fMRI scans continue to show us how the brain works, including where it lights up in orgasm.  While some clit loyalists will never accept this:  An orgasm is an orgasm is an orgasm in a woman's brain, no matter how she got it, from clitoral stimulation through "thinking off" and including vaginal stimulation alone.

Two of my favorite studies aren't really about sex:

Writing in The New York Times on November 15, 2010, in "When The Mind Wanders, Happiness Also Strays" John Tierney reports on a study that concludes day-dreamers are depressed.  In making their case, the authors report that the happiest people are in the midst of having sex--an activity on which they are truly focused.  (Well, duh....)

But on June 28, 2010, John Tierney wrote "Discovering the Virtues of a Wandering Mind" on a study conducted by another group of scientists.  They found that daydreamers had more creative minds.  Pick the conclusion of your choice.  I'm going with parts of both:  "creative" and happily into sex. Science at its finest.

I reported on the news from South Africa about a vaginal gel that in trials prevented up to 54% of HIV infections with an average of 39%.  It also reduces risks of herpes transmission.  Now comes word that a daily pill in trials on gay men has lowered the risk of AIDS by up to 90%.  The Times article is your most accessible introduction to the study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine (linked in the article.)

I reported on the sex science story that touched me deeply in "Men and Their Missing Sense of Desire."  So many men wrote to saying they hadn't felt desired by a woman in a long time--and sometimes never had felt that.  If you missed this post, read it now.  (How often does a science story include a bit of erotica?  This one does.)

I've posed several sex science questions in the last few months--and will have the answers for you before the end of the year.

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

 

DAIRY OF AN AFFAIR, Part One: The Internet Seduction

Photo Credit:  "Lovers" on Photobucket 

 

Frequently strange men email me photos of their penises—and I am unmoved.  I delete them.  Or I write, “I am not aroused by a cock I’ve never met.  Put it back inside your pants, please.”

Now I am having spontaneous sleep orgasms, waking in orgasmic thrall to the images of a cock I’ve not yet met.

I told you about the stranger in the chair in the post Men and Their Missing Sense of Being Desired.  After a Facebook introduction, he sent me a photo, basically a bare-chested torso shot; and I put myself into that picture in a variety of ways, one described in the post.  He had me from the first photograph.  We quickly moved to emails and phone conversations—and, yes, more photographs—bypassing that awkward “getting to know you” phase.

He asks, “Want more?” before sending the next, more explicit photo.  I like that.  Already he is making me ask for it; and now that I have seen it, I know he will make me beg.  Without bragging or posturing, he knows what he has.

In one shot, he is standing, his chin and part of a smile visible above the bare chest—and a hint of cock showing where the unfastened jeans dip below his waist.

“Want more?”  Yes, please.  I squirmed in my chair waiting for it.  Oh—and more is so nice.  Standing straight out, beautifully formed—as regal a cock at attention as I have ever seen.

“More?”  Yes.

“Tell me what you want to see next,” he said.

“I want to see it in your hand.”

And, yes, in his hand, perfect.  Absolutely the perfect penis.  Beautifully shaded, thick and sturdy, proud head rising regally above the shaft.  Omigod, the quality of his erections……..

Twice before I have been dick-matized by exceptional cocks.  My heart pounds; and I know it is happening again.  But he, the man, has also captured my imagination.  The secrets he tells me, that I can’t repeat, are thrilling.  I want him more.

I write:

Tell me how you like it, how you want it, how you want me to handle that cock, how you plan to use it.......................

What do you love that you don't get enough of?

What do other women not want to do or don't do well?  I want to give you what they have not.

Don't be shy.  Don't think you have to say "the right things."  I want to know what you REALLY want....

I want:

To make him come in my mouth.

Him to tease my clit with the head of his cock, tease my clit with his fingers and tongue, roll it between his thumb and first finger, as if impaling my desire on a hook, while he barely penetrates me...

And make me beg him to fuck me hard.

And then do it, hard.

To take him up my ass, all the way, every inch of him until I feel his balls slapping against my pussy.  I want him to take long, slow deep strokes, pulling nearly out and pushing all the way in again, harder each time, until he is fucking my ass like no man has ever fucked it.  I want him to take me to a place through pain to intense pleasure and hold me there with his thumb massaging my clit until I think I will die from it.

 

He writes a fantasy

From behind, his hard cock is pressing against her firm ass.  The smooth leather of the skirt feels good against his cock.  His hands are at her waist moving slowly up to each button of the creamy white silk blouse.   She pushes her hip harder against his cock, very slowly moving side to side.  He leans his face in and begins to lightly kiss her neck.  She shivers and moans with pleasure.  The buttons on the blouse give no resistance, and he only needs to do three as she rarely has anything buttoned above her breast line.  When this last button is undone, he pulls the blouse open and back, peeling it down off her arms and dropping it to the floor, one easy move.   The demi-bra has her breasts lifted high, her nipples thrust out.  He unhooks the front closure and easily removes the bra.  He grasps her breasts tightly, her hard nipples pressing against his palms.  She grinds her ass against his hard cock, urging him to pump her. He pushes her forward against the desk and lifts her shirt up revealing her nakedness.  She never wears panties.  He reaches a hand down between her legs and she eagerly spreads them apart.  He pushes his hand between her legs and against her vagina.  She is very wet and his middle finger easily penetrates between her lips. He's teasing her now.  She reaches behind her, finding his cock and pulls him toward her.  She's breathing heavily; and little whimpers escape her lips, almost against her wll.  She is trembling and he knows she has to have him now.  He drives the head of his cocks into her, splitting her open; and he drives hard into her, making her gasp.  She leans flat against the desk, pushing herself harder against him.  He grasps her hips and pulls her as he pumps her hard.  The feeling of being inside her is nearly indescribable.  He breaths in deeply of the smell of her sex, intoxicating to him.   He's pumping her hard but trying to stay off his orgasm until he knows she will orgasm too.  Her moans and the way her pussy starts squeezing his cock harder tell him she is about to cum.  He pulls her hips harder toward him and pushes in deeper.  He can feel the head of his cock opening her up deep inside.  This extra tightness against the top third of his cock takes him over the edge. The next entry deep inside her rewards them both in waves of orgasm.   They stay in the position for several minutes afterward not wanting to give up the closeness they have just shared.

We agree:

That we want a hot, sweaty, steamy, no-holds-barred, push-the-erotic-limits affair.  I want to rock his world.  I want to leave him feeling sated, sore, exhausted but still so turned on that I have to masturbate in the airplane rest room to make it home.

And we make plans to rendezvous in a month...

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

MEN AND THEIR MISSING SENSE OF BEING DESIRED

Photo Credit:  "Hold Me Tight" by Geminiskies on Photobucket 

 

 

Occasionally men write that they do not feel wanted and desired by their partners.  Men not feeling desired is such a little explored topic that you can’t go to google or bing and pull up a dozen recent studies.  Men don’t talk about it much amongst themselves either.

I found a literate discussion of the topic in a blog post that begins, “I’ve been thinking of the experience—or lack thereof—of being the object of other’s desires.”

The writer Hugo Schwyzer contends (and I think rightly) that women live with the knowledge that they are the objects of desire while men assume that only a Brad Pitt will incite the sexual longing of women.

He writes: 

“So many straight men have no experience of being wanted. So many straight men have no experience of sensing a gaze of outright longing. Even many men who are wise in the world and in relationships, who know that their wives or girlfriends love them, do not know what it is to be admired and longed for for their bodies and their looks. They may know what it is to be relied upon, they may know what it is to bring another to ecstasy with their tongue or their touch, but they don’t know what it is to be found not only aesthetically pleasing to the eye but worthy of longing.”

 

Some women, especially younger women, do speak of men as sex objects, but, usually the men are pretty boys.  When I say to women that I love men’s bodies—not pretty boys’ bodies, but real men’s—they grow uncomfortable with the concept, the language.  I am admonished that a man is not just a body.  My erotic memoir Dick-Matized, an ode to a particular cock, is so scandalous it will likely be published in Europe before the U. S.  (See excerpts under the category Dick-matized on the right.)

Last week a new Facebook “friend”—and we need a better word for these connections—confided hat he cannot remember the last time he felt sexually desired.  He sent me a set of three “chaste” photos (after I said that, yes, I would like to see them):  a bare ass; torso in black briefs; torso, seated, bare chest with hair, including a delicious line leading down the belly and out of sight into jeans open, revealing only a glimpse of blue briefs.  Nice shots, but the jeans photo really turned me on.  I caught my breath.  I wanted that man.

One of his arms is resting on the arm of a wooden chair; the other is outstretched, the hand out of the picture.  I imagine the hand is reaching out to me.  My breathing accelerates; my heart beats faster. 

I sink to my knees and caress those strong shoulders as I lick and suck his nipples.  Then I lick curls into his chest hair.  Follow the trail down his belly with the tip of my tongue, vibrating it to give him a hint of what is coming.  Run my hands down his chest and unzip his jeans with shaky fingers.  Pull out his cock; and his cock knows me.

Holding the shaft firmly, I swirl my tongue around the head, flick the tip of it back and forth across the ridge of the corona, run broad tongue strokes up and down his shaft—and then suck, slowly just the head at first, taking more of him into my mouth, dominated by his hands on my head, pulling my hair, gently pushing my head down further until he fills me and I can only just barely breath. 

He squeezes my nipples hard as he comes in my mouth—and I come too, not taking him out of my mouth as I savor the taste of his fluids and his throbbing sensations echo against the roof of my mouth.

In minutes, I have him hard again.  I mount and ride him this time….

And that is but one of several fantasies woven around the stranger in the chair.

Men send me photos of their cocks and I am un-moved.  Sometimes, I confess, I have laughed at their hubris.  But this man’s body…is a perfect and very personal object of desire.  I have put myself into that picture in so many ways.  Yet he says that he lives with a woman, his lover, without feeling desired. 

How is that possible--and why should it be acceptable?

Here is your science question of the day:

Women, do you desire men as sex objects?

Men, do you feel desired?

 

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

 

DO YOU NEED A REASON TO HAVE SEX?--I've Got One

Photo Credit:  "Kissing in the rain" on Photobucket

Some days it rains.  Is that so bad really?

I am taking a few days off.  So I urge you to go to the categories on the right hand side of the blog and explore some territory you may have missed.

This one, for example, got lots of positive email responses:

Why Women Have Sex:  Reason #238, Do Me

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