How can women overcome challenges to achieving orgasm. What are the different types of anorgasmia. Which factors contribute to difficulty reaching climax. How do medical conditions impact sexual pleasure. Why is open communication crucial for sexual satisfaction. What role does mental health play in orgasmic ability. How can couples enhance intimacy and pleasure without pressure.

Understanding Anorgasmia: Types and Causes

Anorgasmia, the persistent inability to achieve orgasm, is a common concern for many women. It’s important to recognize that this condition doesn’t define one’s sexual worth or potential for pleasure. Let’s explore the different types of anorgasmia and their underlying causes.

The Four Types of Anorgasmia

• Lifelong anorgasmia: Never experiencing an orgasm
• Acquired anorgasmia: Losing the ability to orgasm after previously experiencing them
• Situational anorgasmia: Only achieving orgasm under specific circumstances
• Generalized anorgasmia: Inability to climax in any situation

Understanding which type of anorgasmia you’re experiencing can be crucial in finding the right approach to treatment. Is your difficulty reaching orgasm a recent development or a lifelong challenge? Identifying the pattern can help guide your path to sexual fulfillment.

Medical Factors Affecting Orgasm

Various medical conditions can interfere with a woman’s ability to reach orgasm. Dr. Joshua Gonzalez, a sexual medicine specialist, highlights some potential culprits:

• Diabetes
• Multiple sclerosis
• Hormonal imbalances
• Pelvic trauma or surgery
• Spinal cord injury
• Cardiovascular disease

Additionally, certain medications, particularly SSRI antidepressants, can significantly impact libido and orgasmic function. Have you noticed a correlation between starting a new medication and changes in your sexual response? It’s essential to discuss these concerns with your healthcare provider.

The Mind-Body Connection: Psychological Factors in Sexual Pleasure

While physical factors play a role in orgasmic ability, the psychological aspects of sexuality are equally important. Mental and emotional well-being can significantly influence a woman’s capacity for sexual pleasure and orgasm.

Addressing Past Trauma and Negative Associations

Unresolved sexual trauma or negative experiences can create barriers to orgasm. These underlying issues may not be immediately apparent but can profoundly affect sexual response. How might past experiences be influencing your current sexual satisfaction?

Anna Kaye, a certified sex therapist, explains, “Past unprocessed sexual trauma can lead to the body holding back, feeling unsafe, and therefore not allowing the person to surrender to an orgasm.” Seeking support from a mental health professional can help address these concerns and pave the way for more fulfilling sexual experiences.

Sociocultural Beliefs and Their Impact

Societal norms and cultural beliefs about sex can also play a role in orgasmic difficulties. Negative messages about female sexuality or pleasure may create unconscious barriers to sexual enjoyment. Examining and challenging these beliefs can be a crucial step in reclaiming your sexual agency.

The Power of Communication: Enhancing Intimacy and Pleasure

Open and honest communication with your partner is vital for a satisfying sex life. When orgasm proves elusive, it’s essential to voice your concerns and work together to find solutions.

Recognizing Relationship Red Flags

Sometimes, difficulty reaching orgasm can be a sign of deeper relationship issues. Anna Kaye notes, “Women may have trouble achieving an orgasm if they are trying to make it happen with a person whom their gut doesn’t feel good about.” Are you fully comfortable and trusting with your partner? Addressing relationship concerns can often lead to improvements in sexual satisfaction.

Strategies for Effective Sexual Communication

• Express your desires and boundaries clearly
• Listen actively to your partner’s needs
• Be open to trying new techniques or approaches
• Provide positive feedback when something feels good
• Discuss any concerns or anxieties about sex openly

Remember, effective communication extends beyond the bedroom. Building emotional intimacy can enhance physical connection and create a more conducive environment for orgasm.

Exploring Female Anatomy: The Key to Unlocking Pleasure

A thorough understanding of female anatomy, particularly the clitoris, is crucial for both women and their partners in enhancing sexual pleasure and achieving orgasm.

The Clitoris: More Than Meets the Eye

The clitoris is a complex organ with over 8,000 nerve endings, making it highly sensitive to stimulation. However, much of the clitoris is internal, extending beyond the visible glans. Understanding the full structure of the clitoris can lead to more effective stimulation and increased pleasure.

Techniques for Clitoral Stimulation

1. Direct manual stimulation
2. Oral sex
3. Use of sex toys or vibrators
4. Indirect pressure through positioning during intercourse
5. Combining clitoral stimulation with penetration

Experimenting with different techniques and communicating with your partner about what feels good can significantly enhance your sexual experience. Have you explored various methods of clitoral stimulation to find what works best for you?

Releasing the Pressure: Focusing on Pleasure, Not Performance

One of the most significant barriers to orgasm is the pressure to perform. When the focus shifts from enjoying the journey to achieving a specific outcome, it can create anxiety and tension that inhibit sexual response.

The Paradox of Pursuing Orgasm

Anna Kaye advises, “Don’t work hard or get frustrated trying to make an orgasm happen, because in that situation it won’t.” This paradoxical approach suggests that by releasing the expectation of orgasm, you may actually increase your chances of experiencing one.

Shifting Focus to Sensual Pleasure

Instead of fixating on orgasm as the ultimate goal, consider these alternative approaches:

• Focus on intimate caressing and stroking
• Engage in playful, non-goal-oriented activities with your partner
• Explore different sensations and erogenous zones
• Practice mindfulness during sexual activities
• Celebrate all forms of physical pleasure, not just orgasm

By reframing sexual encounters as opportunities for intimacy and exploration rather than performance, you may find that orgasms occur more naturally and frequently.

Bridging the Orgasm Gap: Understanding Gender Disparities

Research has revealed a significant disparity in orgasm frequency between heterosexual men and women, often referred to as the “orgasm gap.” This discrepancy highlights the importance of addressing female pleasure in sexual encounters.

The Statistics Behind the Gap

According to Indiana University’s National Survey of Sex and Behavior, there’s a notable difference in perception and reality when it comes to female orgasms:

• 85% of men report that their partner had an orgasm during their most recent sexual encounter
• Only 64% of women report having had an orgasm during their most recent sexual encounter

This discrepancy suggests a communication gap and potentially a lack of understanding about female sexual response. How can couples bridge this gap and ensure mutual satisfaction?

Strategies for Closing the Orgasm Gap

1. Prioritize female pleasure equally to male pleasure
2. Increase education about female anatomy and sexual response
3. Encourage open communication about sexual preferences and needs
4. Incorporate foreplay and non-penetrative sexual activities
5. Challenge societal norms that prioritize male orgasm

By addressing these factors, couples can work towards more equitable and satisfying sexual experiences for both partners.

Seeking Professional Help: When to Consult an Expert

While many orgasmic difficulties can be addressed through self-exploration and communication, there are times when professional help may be beneficial or necessary.

Signs It’s Time to Consult a Professional

• Persistent inability to achieve orgasm despite various attempts
• Significant distress or relationship strain due to orgasmic difficulties
• Suspicion of underlying medical conditions affecting sexual function
• Unresolved trauma or anxiety related to sexual experiences
• Desire for personalized guidance in exploring sexuality

Remember, seeking help is a sign of strength and commitment to your sexual well-being. What types of professionals can provide assistance with orgasmic difficulties?

Types of Professionals to Consider

1. Sex therapists
2. Gynecologists specializing in sexual health
3. Urologists with expertise in sexual medicine
4. Pelvic floor physical therapists
5. Psychotherapists specializing in sexual issues

Each of these professionals can offer unique insights and treatments tailored to your specific situation. Don’t hesitate to seek a second opinion if you feel your concerns aren’t being adequately addressed.

By understanding the complexities of female orgasm and addressing both physical and psychological factors, women can work towards more satisfying and fulfilling sexual experiences. Remember, every individual’s journey to sexual pleasure is unique, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Embrace exploration, communication, and self-compassion as you navigate your path to orgasmic bliss.

Why Can’t I Orgasm? – How to Have an Orgasm

Ever needed to sneeze—nose tickling, whole body clenched, staring up at a light in hopes that a big “ACHOO!” will free you—only for the sneeze to somehow stall out, leaving you shaking clenched fists as you accept that the release just ain’t happening? Not being able to have an orgasm after a big build-up often feels like that…times a million.

Inability to orgasm is frustrating for someone trying to achieve sexual release through sex or masturbation. Chronic problems reaching climax can also sap the joy from a couple’s sex life when disappointment spoils what’s meant to be a playful encounter: Eventually, you’re worrying about whether “it” will happen before your clothes even hit the floor. Or worse, sex becomes a fraught activity and you avoid it altogether.

If you’ve experienced trouble reaching orgasm, you’re far from alone, and it happens to both women and men. Here are some expert tips on getting there if you can’t orgasm, but would very much like to,

Anorgasmia is the persistent inability to achieve orgasm.

Not a failure to achieve orgasm, mind you—in fact, let’s ban the word “failure” in this arena from here on out (we’ll touch on why later). The word “inability” is a tricky one too, says Anna Kaye, a counselor and certified sex therapist who works with adults struggling with relationship and sexuality issues.

“The fact that one doesn’t have an orgasm sometimes, most of the time, or even ever, doesn’t necessarily mean that they are UNABLE to have one,” Kaye explains. “It means that in that circumstance, with that partner, with that moment’s mindset, one doesn’t.”

In other words, even if you’ve been affected by anorgasmia for most of your life, you’ve got plenty of reasons to hope that can change.

According to the Mayo Clinic, there are four types of anorgasmia: Lifelong anorgasmia (have never had an orgasm), acquired anorgasmia (you’ve had orgasms before, but now they elude you), situational anorgasmia (you can only come a certain way, such as through masturbation), generalized anorgasmia (you can’t climax, period). Understanding which type describes your situation can light the path to treatment.

Visit a doctor to rule out medical issues.

“Certain medical conditions, like diabetes or multiple sclerosis, can interfere with orgasm,” says Joshua Gonzalez, an L.A.-based doctor trained in sexual medicine. Gonzalez and Kaye both note that certain medications, particularly SSRI-class antidepressants, can wallop your sex drive as well.

Those are far from the only biological factors that may be at play, which is why voicing your concerns to a qualified doctor can help. “Additional reasons include hormonal issues, pelvic trauma or surgery, spinal cord injury, and cardiovascular disease,” Dr. Gonzalez says.

If the difficulty only occurs with a certain sex partner, that may be a red flag.

If you’ve previously been able to climax but can’t make it happen with someone you’re definitely attracted to, your instincts may be telling you something.

“Women may have trouble achieving an orgasm if they are trying to make it happen with a person whom their gut doesn’t feel good about,” Kaye says. “In other words, the relationship isn’t right, or the person isn’t right for them.”

Kaye points out that communication problems can be at play, so before you kick them out of bed for good, voice your concerns.

Past negative associations with sex are worth exploring with a therapist.

Dark thoughts about your sexual self may not be at the forefront of your mind in bed, but it’s possible they’re roiling under the surface. “Sociocultural beliefs about sex, underlying anxiety and depression, and prior emotional, physical, or sexual abuse can also negatively affect orgasm,” Gonzalez says.

If you haven’t, consider unpacking your experience with a trusted mental health professional. “Past unprocessed sexual trauma can lead to the body holding back, feeling unsafe, and therefore not allowing the person to surrender to an orgasm,” Kaye adds.

Pressure is an orgasm-killer.

You might try shelving the expectations for an orgasm altogether, so worry doesn’t snuff out your libido and chase hopes of climax further away.

“Don’t work hard or get frustrated trying to make an orgasm happen, because in that situation it won’t,” says Kaye. “Instead, focus on intimate caressing, stroking, and playfulness with your partner. An orgasm may just be a wonderful side effect of the intimacy that blows your socks off (if they were still on).”

Heterosexual women, and their partners, can try getting to know the clitoris better.

According to Indiana University’s National Survey of Sex and Behavior, “About 85% of men report that their partner had an orgasm at the most recent sexual event; this compares to the 64% of women who report having had an orgasm at their most recent sexual event.” Those numbers suggest men think their getting their female partner off more than they actually are.

Therapist Ian Kerner, author of She Comes First: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Pleasuring a Woman, jokes that this is because men tend to be “ill-cliterate,” and clitoral stimulation is a major (for some, even necessary) part of achieving orgasm for women.

She Comes First: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Pleasuring a Woman (Kerner)

William Morrow Paperbacks
amazon.com

“The clitoris is the powerhouse of the female orgasm and responds to persistent stimulation of the vulva, rather than penetration of the vagina,” says Kerner, who calls the external part of the clitoris “the visible tip of the orgasm iceberg.” A significant number of women need clitoral stimulation to achieve orgasm—as opposed to penetration—so penis-in-vagina intercourse may not take you over the edge.

Unsure where your clitoris is? Check out Planned Parenthood’s handy female sexual anatomy explainer. And speaking of getting hand-y…

Masturbation is the best way to learn what you need.

We can extol the many benefits of self love (and we have); it’s truly the best trial-and-error practice around when it comes to coming.

“It’s important for women to be able to masturbate and give themselves an orgasm, so they can create the ‘neural wiring’ for orgasms to happen,” says Kerner. If you find that your hand doesn’t get the job done, you can pick up one of these excellent vibrators for beginners.

For men, though, Kerner cautions that masturbation can occasionally hinder a man’s ability to orgasm with a partner “due to a combination of pressure and friction that’s difficult to replicate during sex.” He recommends either taking a break, or trying your non-dominant hand instead.

You may not be getting enough foreplay.

If an orgasm is a flame, foreplay is the gasoline. Foreplay is a catchall term for any pre-sex play that heightens excitement: Deep kissing, footsie, nipple stimulation, a striptease, dirty talk—the list is honestly endless, so long as it turns you on.

Foreplay makes partners more present in the moment, can foster a sense of safety through doting attention, and, as Kerner points out, turns up the heat: “A lack of adequate foreplay or percolation of arousal is also often at the root of a woman’s lack of orgasm during partnered sex. ”

Is stress chasing your orgasms away?

“In my clinical experience men are able to get interested in sex even when external stressors are high with chores, deadlines, and fatigue,” Kerner says. “Conversely, many women complain that during sex it’s very hard for them to get out of their heads and into a state of arousal.”

Learning how to relax and let go is easier said than done, but Kerner suggests couples work together to reduce external stressors outside the bedroom, and then create a soothing environment that sets the stage for intimacy. Light candles, bust out your softest sheets and try exchanging massages with your partner.

Dream up a hot fantasy (especially during solo sessions).

Getting lost in a sexual fantasy is another way to put life’s stress and distraction out of mind and achieve the big O. Kerner advises clients not to feel guilty or less present when they’re imagining a hot scenario—”it’s really okay to fantasize during sex”—and suggests strengthening that fantasizing-muscle while masturbating.

Take your sweet time.

Play, experimentation, and patience are essential in discovering (or rediscovering) how you orgasm, so there’s no need to cut solo or partnered sex short because they’ve finished and you don’t think it’s going to happen for you.

Try staying in the moment for five, ten, fifteen minutes more to see what happens, and go heavy on the affection. And remember that intensity varies by person, so if you don’t experience the kind of leg-shaking, eye-rolling Os you see in movies, that’s not a failure on your part (there’s that word again).

As Kaye says, “The success and satisfaction of lovemaking doesn’t come from how fast one reaches an orgasm, but how much one enjoys it.”

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The Elusive Female Orgasm – How To Achieve Female Orgasms

For many women, consistent orgasms are out of reach, which can leave both parties feeling underwhelming as lovers. Dr. Sadeghi explores what might be at the root of it, whether it’s sexual trauma, failure to be in the moment, or issues with the pelvic floor. More poignantly, he suggests that an emotional inability to reconcile all the different parts of ourselves can manifest through disease. He explains below.

What Do a Presidential Candidate and Orgasms Have in Common?

By Dr. Sadeghi

The answer to that question is probably not what you think. In order to explain, let me first tell you about my own history with a certain candidate and some of what I know about developmental challenges in the sexual realm.

I was a young medical student when I first found the lump in my left testicle. Medical students are known hypochondriacs, so my late brother, then a doctor himself, counseled me not to worry too much about it. But I just had this feeling. When I went to the doctor, he confirmed the worst: I had Stage 2 testicular cancer.

As if that news weren’t bad enough, I then learned the treatment plan my doctors had devised for me. They offered only one option: to have all the lymph nodes in my gut removed, along with the affected testicle, followed by extensive rounds of radiation and chemotherapy, accompanied by recurring prescriptions for anxiety and depression. The plan was so extreme, so invasive, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was the best one for me.

After much anxious consideration, I decided to go through with some of the suggested treatment, opting to have just my left testicle removed. I have obviously lived to tell the tale, but beyond that, the experience put me on a new path, one that taught me about myself, led me to confront past traumas, and helped me discover the kind of doctor I wanted to be.

A pivotal moment in that journey came during a psychiatry lecture my second year of medical school when I got up in front of the class to talk about what I was going through. There I was, studying to become a physician while experiencing what it was like to be a patient with a critical condition at the same time. My professor listened to my story and something about it struck a chord. After class, he approached me and recommended an article for me to read that he believed related to my case. It was called “Cancer, Disease, and Society,” by Bernard Sanders. At the time, the name was unfamiliar to me, but today he is better known as Bernie, Democratic candidate for President of the United States.

That article, published in the Vermont Freeman in 1969, may have been several decades old at the time, but it offered a perspective on disease that was new to me. It led me to look beyond a person’s physical symptoms and the various tests, medicines, and treatments that Western medicine had to offer. It inspired me to wonder what else in a person’s life might be contributing to his or her condition. As Sanders asks at the beginning of the article: “Can disease be understood solely by looking into test tubes and microscopic slides, while ignoring the emotional lives of the people who succumb to them? Is disease just a tumor, or an ulcer, or a headache, or are those merely symptoms and manifestations of a person’s whole state of being?”

A New Perspective on Healing

“A person’s whole state of being”…that phrase resonated with me. If I really wanted to heal myself, and go on to be of service to others, could I just treat symptoms in isolation or did I need to look at a person’s whole state of being? That question led me to look more closely at the works referenced in Sanders’ article, including the writings of Dr. Wilhelm Reich, a psychoanalyst who came to the U.S. from Austria in 1939, and then the work of my teacher, Dr. Morton Herskowitz, author of Emotional Armoring. I came to understand that there was no separation between mind and body when it came to health and healing. True healing meant taking into account a person’s emotional well-being, their sexual health, their past experiences and traumas, as well as their physical symptoms. It meant looking at anything and everything that might impact someone as a whole.

So, what does this have to do with orgasms? Sanders’ article was essentially an exploration of the link between emotional and sexual health and cancer. He even cited a 1952 study of breast cancer patients, which found that a high percentage of the study’s cancer sufferers “had never experienced orgasm, did not enjoy intercourse, and considered it a distasteful, wifely duty. ”

I don’t mean to suggest that an inability to achieve orgasm causes cancer. The link is not that simple or direct. What I am suggesting, however, is that our minds and our bodies are merely different parts of the same whole, and what affects one affects the other. I came to view my own cancer from this perspective after reading Reich and Herskowitz. Their work helped me see how I’d donned emotional armor years before to cope with the physical and sexual abuse I’d experienced as a child. Based on everything I was learning, it suddenly seemed like no coincidence that years of sexual abuse, repressed emotions, and struggles with my masculinity created negative energy that manifested as cancer in my sexual organs.

To some, this idea and its sources may sound controversial (Reich’s work was even burned by the government during this lifetime), but to others they are likely to resonate even if they aren’t sure why. Anyone suffering from sexual dysfunction, for example, is likely to understand that the problem is a lot more than just a set of physical symptoms.

“Maybe we’re not doing it right.” “He feels so bad he can’t satisfy me that it’s hurting our relationship.” “He said he’s never had a problem satisfying other women, so what’s wrong with me?” These are just some of the things I’ve heard from patients who are having trouble achieving orgasm. Depending on the severity of the problem, it can lead to depression and feelings of isolation. At the same time, a woman’s partner may feel sexually inadequate and the relationship suffers. Difficulty experiencing sexual pleasure can negatively impact a person’s emotional well-being, sense of self, intimate relationships, and more. If we consider a person’s “whole state of being” and how the different parts of ourselves—mental, physical, emotional, spiritual—are intimately intertwined, is it that much of stretch to think that a person’s inability to engage in a satisfying sex life can, if left unchecked, contribute to the development of other issues, including a disease like cancer?

When It Comes to Orgasms, What’s Normal?

Before I talk more about this link and what you can do about it, it’s important to clear up a few things about female orgasm in general. Research shows that about 10% of women are anorgasmic, or have never had an orgasm (1), and another 10% can easily reach orgasm (2). That means that 80% of all women require some work to reach climax or may occasionally not reach orgasm during sex. Despite what many women and their partners may think, this is completely normal. In fact, women within the normal range reach orgasm only about 50%-70% of the time (3).

It’s also important to know that, in spite of what we see in Hollywood and adult films, 75% of women cannot reach orgasm through intercourse alone and require the help of sex toys or oral/manual manipulation (4). This has far less to do with a woman’s desire or the skill of her partner than it does with her physical anatomy. The closer a woman’s clitoris is to her vaginal opening, the more likely she is to be able to climax from intercourse alone. For this to happen, the clitoris to vagina measurement, or C-V distance, should be no more than 2.5 centimeters or about one inch. Any further separation will prevent the clitoris from receiving adequate stimulation during penetration. Many women needlessly worry because they’ve never had an orgasm through intercourse, but can easily reach one through masturbation. This, of course, is also normal. I encourage partners to educate themselves about C-V distance so there’s no pressure that a woman’s orgasm has to come from the penis alone because it very rarely does.

In contrast to women, 98% of men say they always reach orgasm during sex (5). In her book, The Case of the Female Orgasm, Elisabeth Lloyd, professor of biology at Indiana University, gives her theory as to why there is such a difference between women and men when it comes to reaching orgasm from sexual encounters. According to Lloyd, the male orgasm is essential to continuing the human species so it is directly connected to ejaculation. One might say that the consistent male orgasm has been highly selected by evolution. Because the female orgasm isn’t central to propagating the human race, women overwhelmingly don’t orgasm during intercourse. This is evidenced by the fact that a woman’s ability to orgasm has no effect on her fertility. In much the same way, nipples are highly sensitive in women as opposed to men because they are also crucial to carrying on life on earth.

So, if it takes you a bit of time to work up to an orgasm, if you have never had an orgasm from intercourse, or if you don’t make it over the top once in a while, congratulations, you’re normal. If, however, you have never experienced an orgasm (known as primary anorgasmia), have experienced orgasm but never again after a certain time period (secondary anorgasmia), or suffer from any other sexual dysfunction outside of what is medically considered to be the normal range of experience, it might be time to look deeper into what’s going on. Because all women possess the proper anatomy to have an orgasm, there is no reason why all women can’t eventually achieve one with relative consistency.

This is a topic that’s often uncomfortable for women to talk about, even with their doctors. If the promise of a satisfying sex life isn’t enough to convince them to do so, then perhaps the ideas put forth in Bernie Sanders’ article will. There may be more than just good sexual health at stake. An issue in any part of your being can affect the whole. Sexual problems may be a signal that it’s time to look more closely at your life and consider what in your past or present experience could be contributing to your condition.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the common reasons why women have trouble achieving orgasm and what you can do about them.

Abuse Issues

Many women discover that their inability to achieve orgasm is connected to some form of emotional, physical, or sexual abuse from their past. Sex may be seen as dangerous causing them to hold back. They may feel it’s wrong to enjoy sex or low self-esteem may convince them that they don’t deserve the enjoyment. Negative body image issues may also come into play, as well as religious and social taboos. All of this leads to a woman’s inability to remain present during sex, often being distracted by sudden feelings of fear, guilt, shame, anger, or isolation. These women often report experiencing the build-up of sexual tension and then hitting a wall.

It’s important to remember that memories of abuse may be subconscious and just beyond a person’s immediate awareness. A physical disorder or illness can be an attempt by the subconscious to get our attention about a much deeper issue. In these cases, Reichian therapy might be of service, as is a loving, patient partner. With courage and the right support, many women have overcome their past and achieved the joy of orgasm.

Lack of Intimacy

Physical touch is very important for building momentum during sex, especially for women, but it has to be the right kind of touch. Most couples already touch, hug, and kiss during sex, but is intimacy involved? Is it loving? How long does it last? How a woman receives and perceives touch makes a great deal of difference in whether her body is primed for orgasm or not. This isn’t to imply that a man is solely responsible for a woman’s orgasm, but touch is where every sexual encounter begins. It is a powerful form of communication that resonates in every cell of the body. When a woman feels loved, safe, adored, and even worshipped by the kind of touch she’s experiencing, her mind will quiet and her body will relax and open into a receptive state that’s primed for pleasure.

As we get older and hormone levels change, intimate touch becomes an invaluable tool to help women build up to an orgasm that we used to achieve in only minutes when we were in our 20’s. In fact, a study from the University of Chicago found that women in their 50’s and older were nearly three times less likely to achieve orgasm when there was little or no intimate touching involved (6).

Another study found that the optimal amount of time for sexual intercourse was between 3 and 13 minutes, with the average being 7.3 (7). Sadly, this amount of time accounts for the entire sexual encounter for some people, not just penetration. During the rest of the time you might want to consider slow or prolonged kissing, spooning, touching the face while keeping eye contact, kissing the forehead, kissing down the length of the arms, legs or torso, laying your head on your partner’s chest to hear the heartbeat or playing with their hair.

I can’t stress enough how important building intimacy in this way is to a woman’s orgasm. This means taking time and slowing things down, sometimes way down. Letting go of goal-oriented sex where orgasm is the prize greatly reduces sexual expectations and stress and allows the body to progress at its own pace. The reward will be a deepening of your relationship and the opportunity to have experiences that are in many ways even more satisfying and longer lasting than a fleeting orgasm.

Imbalance Between Relaxation and Tension

As the body approaches orgasm, it requires the perfect balance between relaxation and tension, but how can we be relaxed and tense at the same time? In this case, the body must be in a state of tension while the mind is relaxed or silent. Because the male orgasm is highly selected for sex by evolution and the male thought process is generally linear in nature, it’s not very difficult for a man to get his mind into the orgasm zone during sex. Odds are very good that in the heat of the moment, he’s not thinking about that business proposal he has to present at the end of the week. Some research suggests that women, however, can have a bigger challenge keeping their mind in the moment.

To minimize distractions, I usually recommend giving yourself enough time to have longer, more intimate sex. The time to have sex isn’t 30 minutes before you have to leave the house for an appointment. Make sure the kids are taken care of so you don’t have to think about them. Even holding back during sex because you’re afraid the noise will wake them up is enough distraction to prevent orgasm. Meditation can be helpful in learning to quiet the mind as is visualizing an abstract concept like white light. If religious or sexual taboos are a distraction, Reichian-based counseling can be helpful. Regularly introducing new positions, toys, and so on can be a good way to keep your mind in the moment and stop it from zoning out because sex has become routine.

While the mind relaxes, the body needs to be tense. For women, this means the buttocks, thighs, and pelvic floor muscles, the ones you use to stop the flow of urine. Consciously tensing these muscles during oral or manual masturbation and even penetration helps increase physical tension, brings additional blood to engorge the genitals, increases sensitivity, and assists the body in building to orgasm. A condition known as pelvic floor prolapse is a loosening of these muscles that support the pelvic organs, and can be caused by pregnancy, childbirth, straining from constipation, chronic coughing, or aging. If you leak a few drops of urine when you sneeze, laugh, or cough, this might be an issue for you.

Kegel exercises help tone the pelvic floor muscles and are easy to do. Simply tense the muscles you use to stop urine flow, hold the contraction for five seconds and then release for five seconds. Repeat for a set of ten. Try to get three sets in during the day. Eventually, you’ll want to work your way up to contracting for ten seconds and releasing for ten. Remember, this is an internal exercise, so there should be no movement of the abdominals or any other visible muscles.

Medications and Surgery

Drugs for depression, anxiety, regulating blood pressure, and sedatives all delay or impede orgasm by preventing the muscles around the vagina and clitoris from becoming adequately engorged with blood, which is necessary for sexual pleasure. Consult your physician about the possibility of reducing your prescription or taking a trial period off the medication to see how your body responds. Sometimes switching to a different medication can make a difference, as some drug companies are now promoting brands that they claim come with minimal or no sexual side effects. A clitoris vacuum pump, which draws extra blood into the clitoris, used in conjunction with a medication change, can provide added support.

Significant scarring from injuries or surgeries often blocks one or more of the energetic pathways in the body, called meridians. The result is a condition known as reverse polarity. When energy travels down a meridian and hits scar tissue, it either pools up and stagnates in this area or ricochets off this roadblock and flows down another meridian where it doesn’t belong. In either case, it can create physical problems in the vicinity of the scar or in remote areas of the body. For many women who used to have orgasms but can no longer achieve them, the culprit is often a scar from a C-section birth.

A procedure known as integrative neural therapy (INT) injects Procaine into the scar tissue. This generates a release of some of the rigidity and stagnate energy through the miasmatic process. Homeopathic agents are added to accelerate the release and reopen the pathway. Results are often immediate and dramatic. It sounds incredible, but many women have had sexual pleasure restored to their lives through INT, never suspecting that their C-section scar could have anything to do with the fact that they lost the ability to orgasm shortly after they had their babies. INT has also been effective in alleviating dyspareunia (painful intercourse) after C-section birth. Interestingly, the Japanese use a vertical incision for C-sections to avoid disrupting the energy meridians of the body.

Hormonal Imbalance

Testosterone is the hormone of desire, even in women, not estrogen. Although women only need a small amount of testosterone for sexual health, the slightest imbalance is enough to create a big problem, such as lack of libido or inability to orgasm, which is why it can be a good idea to get hormone levels checked by a physician if you are experiencing a problem. Bio-identical testosterone is available in a number of different applications, and testosterone-based creams are available that may be applied directly to the clitoris to heighten sensitivity.

Letting the Body Lead

Our cells can’t speak to us, but our bodies still send us messages all the time if we are only willing to listen to them. Whether it is a lack of sexual pleasure, or another physical problem, understanding the factors that may be contributing to the condition is essential.

Inability to orgasm doesn’t necessarily mean something is wrong with your relationship or that either partner is inadequate. The best prognosis is to be open to what your body is trying to tell you and to communicate with a loving partner about what you’re experiencing. In other words, consider using this as a way of creating a deeper level of intimacy. It’s important to remember that every woman is different and that orgasm isn’t always an earth-shattering experience. Let go of your expectations. Better yet, just let go, and let your body reveal what orgasm is for you.

I’d like to dedicate this article to my teacher, Morton Herskowitz, author of Emotional Armoring, who taught me so much about the emotional armor that was weighing me down.

For more health and inspirational insights from Dr. Sadeghi, please visit Behiveofhealing.com to sign up for the monthly newsletter, as well as an opportunity to purchase the annual health and well-being journal, MegaZEN. For daily messages of encouragement and humor, follow Dr. Sadeghi on Twitter at Behiveofhealing.

(1) Female Orgasms: Myths & Facts. The Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada.
(2) Thacker, Holly. (June 4, 2014). There’s Help for Women Who Can’t Achieve Orgasm. Cleveland Clinic: Health Essentials.
(3) Thomas, Lisa. (November 19, 2011). Help! I Can’t Have an Orgasm: Anorgasmia or Inability to Achieve Orgasm or Anorgasmia is a Fairly Common Problem. Psychology Today.
(4) Donaldson, Susan James. (September 4, 2009). Female Orgasm May Be Tied to ‘Rule of Thumb’. ABCNews.
(5) Ibid
(6) Galinsky, Adena. (2012). “Sexual Touching and Difficulties with Sexual Arousal and Orgasm Among U.S. Older Adults.” Archives of Sexual Behavior, 41(4), 875-890.
(7) Corty, Eric. Guardiani, Jenay. (2008). “Canadian and American Sex Therapists’ Perceptions of Normal and Abnormal Ejaculatory Latencies: How Long Should Intercourse Last?” The Journal of Sexual Medicine, 5(5), 1251-1256.

7 Surprising Facts About Female Orgasm

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Given the amount of pop culture and media devoted to sex, it might seem like the facts are pretty clear. But mainstream pornography and the success of fantasy films like “50 Shades of Grey” have only propagated many of the myths surrounding sexuality — in particular, female sexuality.

The proliferation of these myths leads not only to sexual dissatisfaction, but serious self-esteem issues. According to one study, more than 60 percent of women have faked an orgasm during intercourse or oral sex. Many of these women were motivated by fear of intimacy, insecurities about sexual functioning, or the desire to get sex over with. When popular culture typically portrays women achieving effortless, earth-shattering orgasms with every sexual encounter, many men and women are left with a poor understanding of the complexities of female sexuality.

Here are seven facts about female orgasms that will improve your understanding of female sexuality.

Fact #1: The majority of women can’t orgasm from intercourse alone.

Only about 25 percent of women can achieve orgasm through intercourse alone; most need clitoral stimulation as well. According to professor and author Elisabeth Lloyd’s book “The Case of the Female Orgasm,” a comprehensive analysis of 33 studies over the past 80 years reveals that only a quarter of women regularly and reliably experience orgasm from intercourse alone.

Most women require clitoral stimulation, but because of the clitoris’s location just outside the vagina, many don’t receive the sensation they need for full arousal. “Just as the head of the penis is the center of sexual sensitivity for most men, the clitoris is for most women — and these are homologues, so they function very similarly,” says Good Vibrations staff sexologist Carol Queen, PhD, author of “The Sex & Pleasure Book: Good Vibrations’ Guide to Great Sex for Everyone.” “Most intercourse doesn’t give adequate clitoral stimulation, or starts before she is optimally aroused. Without high arousal the chances that orgasm will come from intercourse are slim.” For direct clitoral sensation, most women require oral or manual stimulation.

Fact #2: It’s possible to have an orgasm and not know it.

Not all orgasms involve the classic signs — sweating, rapid breathing, and muscle contractions. They can be much more subtle and mild, producing the sensation of gentle relaxation after arousal. “Many women have bought into the ‘mind-blowing rockets and volcanos’ model learned from romance novels and other unscientific sources,” Queen says. “Some orgasms are toe-curling and even transcendent, but some are gentle blips.”

Fact #3: Orgasms don’t happen in the genitals.

They actually happen in the brain, which is possibly one reason that medications like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors impact orgasm for so many users. “We generally feel them in the genitals, and we’ll feel a powerful orgasm all over the body,” Queen says. “But the orgasm itself occurs in the brain.” When the millions of nerve endings in the genitals are stimulated and aroused, they send messages to the nucleus accumbens, otherwise known as the brain’s pleasure center.

During orgasm, the brain is also flooded with oxytocin, the chemical responsible for feelings of intimacy and connection. Both men and women experience this hormonal surge, but higher levels of testosterone in the male brain may combat some of the effects, which may explain why many women experience more intense feelings of connection after sex than men.

Fact #4: Vibrators appeal to specific nerves.

There’s a reason vibrators are a popular choice for self-stimulation — the body has specialized nerves to perceive the sensation. “Nerve endings adapt to all sorts of body functions and sensations,” Queen says. “Sensing vibration is one of them.” The most important consideration when using vibrators is safety: Make sure your sex toys are designed for the purpose for which you plan to use them, and always clean them with mild soap and warm water or a cleaner made specifically for sex toys.

Fact #5: Underwhelming orgasms can be caused by weak muscles.

Pelvic floor health is an important part of sexual function. Weak pubococcygeus (PC) muscles can impact the strength of orgasm — another reason Kegel exercises are important. “PC muscle contractions help us feel our orgasms,” Queen says. “If the muscles are weak, the contractions don’t feel like much, and it may feel like the orgasm didn’t quite ‘get there.’”

Kegels strengthen the pelvic floor muscles that support the uterus, bladder, small intestine, and rectum, and regularly performing the discreet exercises can also aid in urinary incontinence. They’re easy to do: Tighten the muscles that stop urination, then relax them for 5 seconds. Repeat several times in a row and work up to holding and relaxing for 10 seconds at a time. Try to perform at least 3 sets of 10 repetitions a day.

Fact #6: Orgasms are not an innate ability.

“That it’s a potential ability of almost all is true, but the body also must learn how to do it,”

Queen says. “Like crocheting or throwing a ball, nerves will actually grow to support one’s ability to come.” Some experts recommend relaxation exercises and Kegels, but it’s important to talk to your health care provider if you feel a medical condition or medication may be hurting your ability to climax.

Fact #7: Women don’t have to orgasm to enjoy sex.

Many women enjoy the closeness and physical intimacy of sex and are satisfied even if they don’t always have an orgasm. According to researchers, many women say their most satisfying sexual experiences had more to do with the connection to their partner than the sole pleasure of orgasm. “Lovely as orgasm can be, it’s just a bodily reflex, and many people value sex for other reasons: arousal, pleasure, connection, touch, intimate time with a partner,” Queen says. “This notion shouldn’t stop any woman who wants the ‘cherry on top,’ but it isn’t the only valuable part of sex!”

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Michelle Konstantinovsky

Michelle Konstantinovsky is an experienced writer, regularly producing content on a variety of wellness-oriented topics ranging from breaking health news to fitness and nutrition.

Michelle has a master’s degree from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and has written extensively on health and body image for outlets like O: The Oprah Magazine, Slate, SPIN.com, xoJane.com, and The Huffington Post. To read more of her work, visit www.michellekmedia.com.

The One Medical blog is published by One Medical, an innovative primary care practice with offices in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Orange County,Phoenix, Portland, San Diego, the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and Washington, DC.

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Everything you want to know about orgasm but are afraid to ask

It is believed to be a similar experience for men and women because the penis and clitoris are made from the same tissue and are connected to the brain and spinal chord by the pudendal chord.

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It is the physical and emotional climax of intercourse, and consists of involuntary muscle contractions in the anus, lower pelvis and sexual organs, accompanied by a sudden release of endorphins.

How often do people experience orgasm?

People have more orgasms the younger they are. In 1948’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Alfred Kinsey reported that men had an average intercourse frequency of four times per week when they were 15-20, three times per week at age 30, twice per week at age 40 and less than once per week at 60.

How long does it take to reach orgasm?

Men typically require two to ten minutes of intercourse to reach orgasm. Some women orgasm within 30 seconds of self-stimulation, while most reach climax after 20 minutes.

How can I tell if my partner is faking?

You probably can’t. Both sexes fake because they don’t want their partner to think they’re dissatisfied. For men it’s harder because orgasm is followed by ejaculation, while a women’s orgasm may occur with or without external signs. The only way to know for sure is to ask.

How many calories does an orgasm use up?

Only three – a compelling argument for multiple orgasms, if ever there was one. And 30 minutes of vigorous sex for the average male uses up 63 calories, compared to 288 for 30 minutes of jogging.

Can orgasms cause a heart attack?

Death ‘in the saddle’ is rare. In one study of 5,559 cases of sudden death in men, fewer than 20 occurred during a sexual act. The exertion associated with sexual activity is more the culprit than the actual orgasm. A heart attack is also more likely if the man is married but consorting with a non-spouse in unfamiliar surroundings after a big meal and alcohol. Most scientific articles on death by sex focus on men.

Do orgasms stop at a certain age?

Sexual function starts to decline in the 30s and 40s, but some people experience orgasms past the age of 90. However, a typical man in his 80s is twice as likely to be sexually active as a woman of a similar age (41 per cent versus 18 per cent).

Why do men become sleepy after orgasms?

Nobody knows for sure, but it’s very common. Since the physical exertion for a 175lb man having 30 minutes of vigorous sex expends only 63 calories, it’s likely to be something else that causes it, but so far the research is inconclusive. Male rats also fall deeply asleep shortly after mating, but then so do female rabbits, while their human counterparts prefer a little post-orgasm tenderness and bonding, however brief.

Are orgasms good for the health?

Despite not being particularly effective at burning calories, having orgasms is still good for our overall health. Research suggests that benefits include longevity, increased immunity to disease, improved reproductive health and management of pain, and a possble reduction in the risk of heart disease and cancer. There is even some evidence that male orgasms may also protect women, as antigenic proteins in a partner’s sperm boost the immune system. Apparently, it seems that the more sexual partners a woman has, the lower her risk of breast cancer.

Do different cultures view orgasms differently?

Yes, but historical texts from a variety of cultures describe pleasurable orgasmic sensations, and discussions concerning how both men and women can and should experience sexual pleasure, including orgasm, are often part of their tradition. Sometimes the intention is to reduce sexual activity, at other times, to foster a good marriage – in some Islamic cultures, for example, men are encouraged to withhold ejaculation until they are certain their wife is satisfied.

Some societies have recommended restraint in men because ejaculation was considered debilitating, while others have considered it beneficial for vigour and health.

In 1910, researcher Havelot Ellis surveyed historical and religious pronouncements on the appropriate frequencies for marital coitus (and presumably orgasm) for men, and reported the following recommendations – Zoroaster, Persian religious leader: once in nine days; Hindu authorities: three to six times per month; Solon, Athenian statesman and poet: three times per month; the Koran: once a week; the Talmud: once a day to once a week, depending on occupation; Martin Luther, German founder of Protestantism: twice a week.

Delayed orgasm: the sexual technique that’s better than sex

Perhaps 40 of us, an equal number of men and women, sat on rows of folding metal chairs in a high-ceilinged room in the ground floor of a church in New York’s East Village that had been converted into a community centre. Most were 30-something, good-looking, well-dressed Manhattan professionals. Nicole Daedone, author of the book Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm (2011), and inventor of a sexual technique called ‘Orgasmic Meditation’, walked confidently to the front of the room. She was a tall, attractive, rail-thin woman, with high cheekbones and shoulder-length blonde hair. She wore a black skirt and top that looked sprayed on, and black suede boots with four-inch stiletto heels.

Although this was the first time I was seeing her, I’d been on the track of Daedone and her ilk for some weeks as a journalist. They were part of what Daedone like to call the ‘Slow Sex’ movement, but which I was starting to see as a full-blown orgasm industry, composed of groups and individuals mostly centred in the San Francisco Bay area. All focused on the skill of gently stimulating a woman (or a man) to the edge of climax in order to extend his or her orgasms, and therefore theoretically her ecstasy, past its normal limits. They were connected in that they spoke the same lingo, had identical or similar practices, and appeared to share the same Ur-source. What that source was I wasn’t sure yet, but I was getting close.

By her own admission, Daedone has led something of a chameleon’s life. ‘I have been a magna cum laude academic, a gallery-owner, a stripper, an underworld traveller, and the daughter of a man who died in prison for child molestation,’ she wrote in a blog recently. ‘I have been a postmodern feminist lesbian and a meditation practitioner, a yogini and a mystery-school student.’

She must also have been involved in psychotherapy. In a 2011 TedX talk, Daedone explained how she came to the revelation that something new was needed. ‘Woman after woman was coming through my office,’ she said, ‘chanting what I call the Western Woman’s Mantra: “I work too hard, I eat too much, I diet too much, I drink too much, I shop too much, I give too much, and still there’s this sense of hunger that I can’t touch.”’ I could hear low murmurs of agreement from some of the women in the audience.

‘We have a pleasure deficit disorder in this country,’ she continued. ‘I don’t think it’s medical. I do think it’s a cultural issue. And I do think there is a cure. That cure is orgasm. But it’s going to be a very different definition of orgasm than we know. It’s going to be a definition of orgasm that actually works with a woman’s body.’

As she talked, Daedone made a curling gesture with her right-hand index finger, a finger that knows how to play a woman like a cello. She isn’t currently a lesbian, as her concupiscent personal dating blog makes clear, but she was about to perform on her close friend and lieutenant, Rachel Cherwitz, who was hovering nearby, a pale and thin young woman whose sad eyes were framed by dark, shoulder-length brown hair, calling to mind a melancholy angel in a Pre-Raphaelite painting.

‘In a moment,’ Daedone announced, ‘I will put my finger on the upper left-hand quadrant of Cherwitz’s clitoris; if she were facing you, that’s the one-o’clock position. Both she and I will be putting our attention on the same point. It’s a fairly intense point, mind you. And then, just like a master chess player absorbed in a game, or a meditator absorbed in his breathing, you’ll see her get absorbed into that place. The difference is that she will be there with a partner. She will be allowed to have this most profound and deep experience with another human being.’

Her followers don’t call her ‘the Jimi Hendrix of strokers’ for nothing

We in the audience made awkward small talk as Daedone’s assistants set up a padded massage table strewn with upholstered pillows. Quietly averting her eyes, Cherwitz stripped off her trousers, and then her underpants. She climbed up on the table to sit facing us, and then gracefully swooned back until her head touched the bolsters, allowing her pale thighs to butterfly open with her knees bent, so that her feet almost touched. One does not often see such an unashamed public display of intimate nakedness in New York City. At Daedone’s invitation, the more adventurous of us crowded in a little closer, and as Cherwitz shifted her hips to get comfortable, the collective pulse quickened. Daedone hooked some lubricant into the crook of her finger and put a gob on her forearm. The lubricant she uses is a specially concocted slippery blend of olive oil, beeswax, shea butter and grapeseed oil.

Leaning over, she placed her left thumb on the lower entrance to Cherwitz’s vagina (the introitus), and then gingerly slid her right thumb and forefinger on either side of Cherwitz’s clitoris. Cherwitz shifted and groaned at Daedone’s touch; her toes began to twitch, and I noticed a small blue tattoo on her ankle.

‘Ooo!’ Daedone exclaimed, looking up at us with an elated grin. ‘She’s already quivering!’

Working slowly and gently at first, she began to stroke up and down and around Cherwitz’s clitoris, ‘lightly as an eyelash’, she said. Cherwitz’s moans grew louder with each stroke, and soon the young woman’s ahs and ums and ohs began to modulate back and forth from an original deep, mournful treble to a high alto trill. After a few minutes, Daedone slowed her stroking and temporarily brought Cherwitz down to earth.

‘I’m grounding her now, do you see? I will take Rachel to several peaks before bringing her back down to a normal level.’ As Daedone picked up her pace again, she invited several of the women attendees to place their hands upon Cherwitz’s thighs to feel her muscles begin to quiver in continuous orgasm.

In orgasmic meditation, or OM (pronounced so that it rhymes with ‘home’), the stroker’s skill lies in slowly bringing his (or her) partner to the very brink of orgasm and then keeping her there, continuously surfing on the crest of ecstasy, for minutes, even hours, without allowing her to fall off into climax. Regular OMing is supposed to have all kinds of positive effects, from increasing energy levels and reducing stress, to restoring hormonal balance, lifting depression, increasing libido, creating a deep connection with one’s partner, and even curing frigidity. Plus, it makes one feel very, very good, obviously.

However, Daedone let us know that what we were seeing was different from the way orgasmic meditation is usually practiced. Normally, the woman will lie on the floor in a special ‘nest’ of pillows and towels and perhaps a yoga mat. She will be naked from the waist down, while her partner, usually a man, but often not her lover, will remain fully clothed. He will sit on a high pillow with his left leg draped over her stomach in a manner that hopefully doesn’t cause uncomfortable pressure. Their right legs will intertwine so that her thighs are pulled apart, allowing him the freest access to her vulva. Before he begins to stroke, the man will take a moment to describe what he sees in simple terms. He might say: ‘I see your clitoris glistening, pink and bright. Your labia are growing darker, almost brown.’ Or he might say: ‘I see a pulse running from the bottom to the top of your vulva.’ Though I could imagine this ritual might lose its gloss if it were carried out every day, Daedone told us that the first time a man paid such close attention to her genitals, her eyes flooded with grateful tears.

Daedone began stroking Cherwitz with greater speed now, pushing her again and again to the cliff edge of climax. Prancing back and forth over Cherwitz’s spread legs, she acted out her friend’s ohs and ahs the way a guitarist mouths the sounds produced on a guitar by a wha-wha pedal. At times, she flapped her whole body over Cherwitz’s supine form like an enormous bird of prey, while throwing her full head of blonde hair back to give us a knowing and triumphant leer. Her followers don’t call her ‘the Jimi Hendrix of strokers’ for nothing. Some 10 separate, minute areas of the clitoris can be plucked, rubbed or brushed, she claims, using as many as five or six stroking variations – and she seemed to be hitting all of them.

Eventually, Daedone brought Cherwitz, and us, down to a ringing silence. Then she placed four fingers on the bottom of Cherwitz’s vulva and held them there with strong pressure, finishing the session. It had been a virtuoso performance.

After a short pause, Daedone pulled Cherwitz back up into a sitting position, facing us. She pointed out dark shadows under Cherwitz’s eyes, noting how plumped up and blood-puffed her lips had become in the deep engorgement of sexual excitement. ‘This is what women’s makeup is designed to emulate,’ she said. Cherwitz smiled wanly. She had been skirting orgasm for perhaps 15 minutes without ever climaxing. She seemed only half-emerged from a revelatory dream.

The notion of being able to strum a woman like a musical instrument is, of course a decidedly male fantasy – even a puerile one: witness Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye (1951) saying: ‘a woman’s body is like a violin and all, and that it takes a terrific musician to play it right’. To the women in the audience who saw themselves as casualties of the dating wars, Daedone offered a big sister’s sexual frankness and the promise of regular, deep, exalted connections to men with whom they did not have to have sexual relationships or even know very well. If you practised orgasmic meditation every day, she claimed, you would return to the dating arena with the determination and poise of a sexual ninja, girded and ready for action. (There could be no better ice-breaker on a first date, I imagine, than to ask your potential dinner and movie companion to treat you to a 13-minute orgasm.)

But what of the men? Daedone had little trouble luring young males to her gatherings, for voyeuristic reasons perhaps. But the question she’s often asked is: ‘What’s in it for the guy?’ Daedone maintains that OMing opens up neurological pathways through the tip of a man’s finger, so strong that his pulse and breathing will become locked with those of his partner, and she says that through these pathways the ecstatic high is shared. I’d developed my own unscientific ‘X-Box’ theory, however, that OMing satisfies the average male’s innate manual urge to twitch, twiddle and jerk, with the clitoris standing in as the ultimate joystick. For the man, poised with his finger on the hot spot, the woman has become the ultimate gaming device. While he masterfully negotiates one of the most complex biomorphic systems in evolutionary history, his payoff lies in having total control of another human being. The woman’s body is a silver neuron surfboard that he will use every ounce of reflex and training to keep riding the crest of delight. Instead of beeps and sirens, he’ll know how well he’s doing by her keening, her moans, the fluttering of her hands, and her involuntary contractions.

To me, orgasmic meditation was the perfect complement to the social isolation of the internet, where young people passionately interact with each other via Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, but never have to share physical contact. With OM, the process works in reverse: two people can touch in the most intimate way possible, but it isn’t necessary for them to know each other, or even talk, outside of the bare minimum of words necessary to convey: ‘A little faster. A little more to the left.’

Reserving and tending of orgasm isn’t rare and unheard of, but might be a universal human practice

Of course, the seemingly counterintuitive idea of withholding or even denying climax in order to achieve pleasurable states that exceed orgasm goes back long before Daedone. In the Mandarin court 1,000 years ago, Taoist dandies learned to withhold their jing or ching (ejaculation) during intercourse, not only because they believed that retaining semen would make them live forever, but because sex without orgasm was infinitely more pleasurable, and allowed their partners more time for sexual fulfilment. Male climax, except in the service of creating a baby, was considered draining and depressing. ‘When ching is emitted, the whole body feels weary,’ warned The Classic of Su Nu, an 11th-century marriage manual. ‘One suffers buzzing in the ears and drowsiness in the eyes; the throat is parched and the joints heavy. Although there is brief pleasure, in the end there is discomfort.’ Similarly, in medieval India, male and female adepts of the Tantric sex cult refrained from climax using muscle control they learned from yoga. During intercourse that could last for hours, accompanied by chanting and pungent clouds of incense, couples would rise to a timeless ecstatic state in which they transubstantiated into gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon, and at the highest point switched genders.

Curiously, Christian traditions of sex without orgasm go back even farther than those originating in Asia. The early Gnostics practiced a kind of ‘bodily union without orgasm’ or sacred embrace, as an ecstatic spiritual exercise and to form all-too-close connections between the priests and their ‘spiritual wives’. Gnostic males might have been partly motivated by the fact that intercourse without ejaculation can be a workable form of birth control. According to the Gnostic Gospel of Philip: ‘All those who practise the sacred embrace will kindle the light; they will not beget as people do in ordinary marriages, which take place in darkness.’ The practice grew so widespread that Saint Jerome found it necessary to condemn it in a letter: ‘Even if your own consciences acquit you of misdoing, yet the very rumour of such brings disgrace upon you.’

The Romans of Petronius also might have deliberately suspended orgasm during sex, and a steamy passage in the novel The Plumed Serpent (1926) by D H Lawrence – in which his heroine continually rejects ‘the white ecstasy of frictional satisfaction’ with her lover for something else, ‘the new, soft, heavy, hot flow, when she was like a fountain gushing noiseless and with urgent softness from the volcanic deeps … dark and untellable’ – hints that enhanced proto-orgasmic states could occur well past the Edwardian era, at least among a certain sexual elite. Such examples show that reserving and tending of orgasm isn’t rare and unheard of, but might be thought of as a universal human practice, liable to pop up anywhere and at any time.

As early as the 1950s, the Zen philosopher Alan W Watts, a gentle, hyper-educated British transplant who lived in San Francisco and hosted a popular public radio programme, was spending a lot of time thinking out loud about the problem of man and woman, and therefore of orgasm. He noted that the contemporary sexual landscape was a dismal wasteland. According to Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), the vast majority of American males flabbered themselves out orgasm-wise in two minutes, and not a few within 10 or 20 seconds. Orgasm under those conditions was a ‘bestial convulsion’, Watts thought, good for relieving tension, but little else, showing how far we were spiritually cut off from the fundamental there-ness of life. ‘The greater part of sexual experience in our culture falls far short of its possibilities,’ he concluded. ‘The encounter is brief, the female orgasm is relatively rare, and the male orgasm precipitate or “forced” by premature motion.’

For an antidote to this sorry state of affairs, Watts reached far into the misty past. He felt that knights returning home from the Crusades might have brought back with them Tantric-style sexual traditions that had drifted westward, possibly through Persia. Among these knights, the Cathars, a heretic group active in southern France and northern Italy, practised a form of idealised love, defined by Watts as ‘prolonged sexual union without orgasm in the male’, in which a knight would embrace the naked form of his true love throughout the night (often, tragically, she was the wife of his prince) while holding back from the final crisis. ‘He knows nothing of donnoi (pure love) who seeks to fully possess his lady,’ as a poet wrote. Such notions of romantic or courtly love, spun down through the centuries by the ballads of medieval troubadours, were eventually taken up as official doctrine by the church, which was one reason why marriages are made for love today rather than arranged like business contracts as they often were in the Middle Ages.

If followed with an open mind, Cathar-style lovemaking still had use, Watts thought. His version, which he called ‘contemplative love’, allowed the full exploration of ‘spontaneous feeling’ between a man and a woman through prolonged Zen-like sexual encounters in which ordinary climax wasn’t the primary goal. Watts compared the subtlety and richness of contemplative lovemaking to the ‘most intense aesthetic delight’ found in brewing and sharing tea with friends or encountering a craggy rock in a garden.

Orgasm would be not the paltry ‘sneeze of the loins’ but ‘an explosion whose outermost sparks are the stars’

Watts gave very specific instructions as to how this was to be accomplished. One might lie face to face in the missionary position, or sit cross-legged, as if meditating, the woman’s legs around the man’s waist, her arms around his back – naturally this position made it almost impossible to move at all, which was all the better. Or one could take the advice of Rudolf von Urban – a Viennese psychiatrist living in Los Angeles in the 1950s and ’60s who promoted similar modes of orgasm abstinence – and lie at right angles to one another.

In any case, once the genitals were engaged, the point was to remain as still as possible, and to wait with the mind and senses fully open to ‘what is’, communing psychically. ‘It becomes possible to let this interchange continue for an hour or more,’ Watts wrote, ‘during which the female orgasm may occur several times with a very slight amount of active stimulation, depending upon the degree of her receptivity.’ Or both sides might prefer to remain completely stationary, ‘and let the process unfold itself at the level of pure feeling, which usually tends to be the deeper and more satisfying way’. In the end, should orgasm happen along, unwilled, as if by chance, it would be nothing like the paltry ‘sneeze of the loins’, described by Kinsey, but ‘an explosion whose outermost sparks are the stars’.

In Watts’s words one can hear the plaintive cry of seagulls in the mist, the lap of waves against a houseboat, the thrum of avant-garde jazz in a North Beach coffee shop, and the desperate yearning and striving for godhead and ecstasy through individual action. In the following decade, as his interests branched out from Eastern mysticism into psychedelic drugs and various sorts of sexual exploration, Watts became a spiritual beacon for the counterculture movement, much like his friend and fellow British expatriate, Aldous Huxley, who was living in Hollywood at the time and writing about his experiences taking mescaline. In 1962, Huxley was to publish his final novel, Island, about a tropical utopia whose inhabitants practiced free love using a ‘yoga of love’ very similar to Watts’s ‘prolonged sexual union without orgasm’. Unlike the dystopian Brave New World, published three decades earlier, Island showed the direction that Huxley felt the world should be heading in, towards truth and freedom and away from the cycle of sexual dissatisfaction in which our culture found itself trapped.

While Watts didn’t manage to convert the repressed beach-blanket culture of hot rods and back-seat dalliances to the subtle allures of courtly love, his words continued to vibrate among a select few long after his death in 1973. One was the young Daedone who became so enamoured of the erotic philosophy of Watts that she moved to San Francisco to study under one of his protégés. According to her oft-told story, she was on the verge of taking vows of celibacy in order to become a Buddhist nun when she met Ray Vetterlein at a party.

‘When the traffic jam that was my mind broke open, I was on the open road, and there was only pure feeling’

In terms of Daedone’s biography, Vetterlein goes a long way towards explaining how the gentle strumming of contemplative love turned into the antic shredding of the female lower parts characterised by orgasmic meditation. He was a scrawny 75-year-old from Novato, California, with a gravelly voice and a craggy jawline, who was seen as something of a living national treasure by his followers. For half a century, he had done little, apparently, but give women deep, sincere, life-changing orgasms. Vetterlein died in 2011 at the age of 85, and towards the end of his life he had come to see sex as a purely spiritual act. Sexual energy, he would say, was the same energy that joined the stars together in the cosmos and atoms together in your hand, the same energy as the electromagnetic or the strong and weak forces or gravity. Eventually, he learned to make a woman climax just by gently stroking her earlobe, touching her arm, placing his palm on her belly, or even by looking at her from across the room, or so he claimed. He could sustain orgasm in a woman for three continuous hours. ‘I don’t know what the limit is,’ he told an interviewer once. ‘I don’t think there is any.’

By Daedone’s account of the party, with little preamble, Ray had said something like: ‘Take off your pants, honey, lie on the floor and spread your legs. I want to try a sexual technique on you. It will take 15 minutes, and when I’m done you can walk away and never see me again.’ With some trepidation, she complied. At first nothing happened. ‘I was where I always was … in my head,’ Daedone said later in her TedX talk, describing the scene. ‘I was thinking about whether or not I looked good. I was thinking about whether or not I was doing this thing right. I was thinking about whether or not this guy was kind of creepy. I was thinking about whether or not I was going to marry him. I was thinking about whether or not my stomach looked a little poochy.’

Then without warning, as Ray continued rhythmically to stroke her clitoris – up-down, up-down, up-down ­– she was transported into a timeless revelatory-ecstatic state. ‘When the traffic jam that was my mind broke open,’ she recalls, ‘it was like I was on the open road, and there was not a thought in sight. And there was only pure feeling.’ The experience blew away the tranquility she’d found in Buddhist meditation, and she felt an overwhelming urge to weep and to bring the rest of the world along with her.

Orgasm works its ecstatic ways by triggering some of the deepest regions of the brain, such as the amygdala and the hypothalamus, to produce neurotransmitters that cause pleasure, such as dopamine and oxytocin as well as endorphins. In fact, scientists say that an orgasm is the most powerful event that can happen in the brain short of an epileptic seizure, which to a large degree it resembles. As this potent cocktail of neurochemicals baths our neurons and our organs, our breathing speeds up, our pulse races, and the conscious parts of our brain dealing with stress and anxiety grow quiet. And then comes what the writer Anaïs Nin charmingly called ‘the gong of orgasm’, when all else in one’s mind disappears under an avalanche of sensation.

There is ample medical evidence that orgasms are good for you. For a woman, having regular orgasms can boost the immune system, improve digestion, regulate menstruation, relieve pain, discourage breast cancer cells from developing into tumours, and even make her look a decade younger. For a man, the benefits are similar: regular orgasms can reduce levels of stress, improve memory function, reduce depression, improve sleep, and lower the risk of heart attack and prostate cancer. A man who has three or more orgasms a week (as opposed to the national average of 1.5) can add three years to his life. If he has the will and the stamina, having an orgasm a day will add yet a fourth year.

But ordinary orgasm, as we know it, isn’t a particularly lasting experience. Your eyes close, your lips part, your breathing increases, your muscles tense, suddenly your body floods with a soft, dreamy, syrupy sensation of pleasure, goes through 8 to 12 involuntary spasms or contractions that occur 8/10ths of a second apart, and then, famously, it’s over. ‘Is that all there is?’ asks the Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller song. ‘Is that all there is?’

The fleeting nature of orgasm, followed for some by hollowness and loss can make some of us quite cynical about the experience. In modern literature, the overwhelming urgency and pleasure of orgasm is often paired with the sense of depletion and malaise, especially when it is over. As the writer William S Burroughs said: ‘There is the pleasurable orgasm, like a rising sales graph, and there is the unpleasurable orgasm, slumping ominously like the Dow Jones in 1929.’ Doctors have a name for the post-coital blues: tristesse, after the French word for sadness. Tristesse can strike for a variety of reasons, including anxiety about performance, emotional distance from one’s partner, prior sexual abuse, and guilt and shame due to one’s religious beliefs.

But there’s also evidence that postcoital tristesse might be hardwired in our systems, caused by a withdrawal of the very addictive neurochemicals that make orgasm so pleasurable. The chief culprit, dopamine, floods the pleasure centres of our brains during orgasm so that everything, for the moment, seems beautiful and calm, and we feel at one with ourselves and everyone else, but these neurochemicals soon dissipate, leaving us dissatisfied and depressed. It is no wonder that some people become sex addicts, trying to procure that same orgasmic high over and over again.

orgasm in women reduced blood flow in the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex, causing reduced anxiety

Arguments for OM and the like sometimes devolve into age-old moral oppositions, with ordinary lovemaking with the goal of climax seen as a form of instant gratification (and therefore ‘bad’) while orgasmic restraint is praised as a quest for a higher purpose using self-control (and therefore ‘good’). Some imagine a kind of epic battle taking place within the brain between the easy virtue of the neurotransmitter dopamine, produced by climax, versus the lasting goodness of connection and trust induced by the neurotransmitter-hormone oxytocin, which is created by mothers when they breastfeed and by couples when they hug, and is also supposedly produced in large quantities during Orgasmic Meditation.

These arguments might be exaggerated. But perhaps Daedone and Watts et al put their finger on a significant feature of the US sexual arena when they decided that conventional orgasm – that is, climax – wasn’t necessarily central to existence, and that one can sometimes do as well or better without. A large-scale scientific study of US sex habits – Sex in America: A Definitive Survey (1994) by Robert T Michael, John H Gagnon, Edward O Laumann, and Gina Kolata – found that the majority of women (and some men) didn’t have regular orgasms. The surprising find was that most were pleased, even enthralled, with their sex lives. ‘Our data was unexpected. Despite the fascination with orgasms, despite the popular notion that frequent orgasms are essential to a happy sex life, there was not a strong relationship between having orgasms and having a satisfying sexual life.’

What happens scientifically when orgasm is delayed or denied, as in OM, is a little hard to pin down. To find out, I paid a visit to the laboratory of Barry Komisaruk at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Komisaruk, 76, is one of the nation’s premier orgasm researchers. I found him buried in one of his own fMRI machines donating an orgasm to science so that its effects on the brain could be read in real time. He has found that vaginal stimulation produces pain-reducing peptides in the body. He also discovered a previously unknown neural pathway from the genitals to the brain through the vagus nerve, an ancient nerve that wanders up through the body touching each of our important organs on its way to the brainstem. This wandering aspect might explain why having orgasms (or perhaps nearly having them) is so healthful to human physiology. In one study, Komisaruk observed that women who’d had devastating accidents that severed their spines were still fully capable of having orgasms.

One thing that Komisaruk hasn’t observed is the anxiety centres of the cerebral cortex shutting down, something that was seen during stimulation by the neuroscientist Gert Holstege of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Holstege placed 12 healthy young heterosexual Dutch women into PET scanning machines. Then he asked their boyfriends to bring them to orgasm. This they did, upon command, up to three times (those women who attempted to fake their orgasms were easily caught by the pressure-sensitive plugs the doctor had inserted in their rectums). Holstege found that orgasm in women reduced blood flow in the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex, causing reduced inhibitions and anxiety – in effect, putting them into a meditative, ecstatic state. Theoretically, in primitive times, a woman found it useful to be able to ignore danger signals all around her at least long enough for the sex act to be completed. But Komisaruk, using more sophisticated fMRI scanners, hasn’t been able to duplicate Holstege’s finding. He remains a skeptic of orgasmic meditation as well. ‘I like to get where I’m going,’ he told me during our interview. ‘These women are on a slow boat to nowhere.’

Daedone announced that we’d now take an hour’s lunch break, and when we came back we’d be issued nests of pillows and small vats of lubricant, and taught how to play a woman like a cello ourselves. We filed out on shaky legs, blinking, into the stark sunlight of the East Village winter afternoon, somewhat stunned. Instead of following one or another of the chattering groups, I went alone to a nearby Indian restaurant and ordered a large-size bottle of Kingfisher beer.

I needed to step back a little, I thought. I considered myself a reasonably worldly man. I’d survived the unbridled debauchery of a mid-century suburban teenagerhood, spent a year in an art-school dormitory in Kansas City where exotic strains of chlamydia were traded like Pokémon cards, and had my wedding night on an Alaskan fjord where the unrelenting rays of the evening sun allowed no shadow to throw a modest veil over the naked truth of what we were attempting. I’d attended the births of all three of my children, during the third of which a placental abruption had painted the walls to resemble the cathartic final scenes of the slash epic Friday the Thirteenth. But Daedone’s demonstration that afternoon had frankly pushed me past my erotic comfort zone. Was I really ready to play Charlie Mingus on the bass strings of a stranger – comely as many of the women in the audience had been?

It would be perhaps too easy to dismiss Daedone’s distinctly entrepreneurial operation as New Age nonsense, dressed up in some very shaky 21st-century feminism and such recent buzzwords as ‘mindfulness’ and ‘flow’. But other practices once considered untenable products of fuzzy minds, such as meditation, vegetarianism, yoga, psychoanalysis and, yes, even feminism had moved from the hazy margins of society to the centre and were fully accepted now. Perhaps it wasn’t too far-out to consider orgasm less a mathematical constant, like pi, that remains the same in every case, and more a variable that can be cracked open, parsed, stretched out to the length of a Miles Davis trumpet solo, keyed, modulated, imbued with tonal variations, compressed and expanded. At best, Daedone might bring some slowing down to the fraught and frantic proceedings of the American bedroom. At worst, a couple might pursue a preposterous fad that, though it might bring disappointment, would certainly bring them no harm.

I drained a quart of beer while pondering these questions. My strongest urge was to go home and tell my wife what I’d just seen. I rose to my feet, a little unsteady, and stumbled to the subway.

This Is The Key To Female Orgasm, Say Sex Experts

You’re reading How To Get Off, our series celebrating bodies, pleasure and fantasy.

Women are always on, but is this stopping us from getting turned on? If we’re not actually doing something we’re thinking about doing it (washing up or filing our tax return or any of those 3,000 things on our to-do list that aren’t sex).

No wonder our minds often wander when we’re actually doing it. But worrying about gas bills that need paying is never going to be conducive to a good time. That’s because mindset is instrumental when it comes to the female orgasm – not only do sex therapists and sexologists believe this, but studies back it up.

One such study, from 2015, found women who regularly reached orgasm tended to focus more on the sensations of sex and how their body felt – basically, sex mindfulness – compared to women who found it harder to orgasm. A separate study found a link between a lack of “erotic thoughts” during sex and less frequent orgasm.

Negative thoughts during sex are also – perhaps unsurprisingly – a barrier. Among women, the most intrusive concerns cited tend to centre around appearance and, to a lesser degree, performance (no, it’s not just men).

Even the words we use to describe orgasm can play a part in making women less likely to come. “I prefer to think of orgasm as an ‘experience’ rather than something to ‘achieve’,” says sexologist Gigi Engle, author of All The F*cking Mistakes: A Guide To Sex, Love And Life. “The reason for this is pressure – women face enough pressure in every other area of life, so taking it off of sex is a pivotal component in having fulfilling sexual experiences.”

Some women might feel ashamed that they don’t orgasm as much as they’d like – some struggle to do it full stop (this is known as female orgasmic disorder) – but it’s actually a fairly common experience.

A survey of more than 32,000 women conducted by Massachusetts General Hospital found one in five had difficulties experiencing orgasm.

Removing the pressure to have an orgasm is key to freeing them up to happen, says Engle. “Why? Because having an orgasm is as much a mental process as it is a physical process,” she says. “When you put pressure on orgasm, you start to think you won’t have one or you have to have one – and then you don’t have one. Being in a calm, present mindset is key to allowing your brain and body to sync up for an orgasm.”

Switching on your body

Isiah McKimmie, sexologist and author of Epic Orgasms, says getting clued up on practical tips is key to reaching orgasm more easily and often. “Along with our cultural messages about sex, we also receive very little real education about sexual pleasure or get taught skills to enjoy ourselves more,” she says.

So, the basics. There are two key ingredients to the magnificent cake that is orgasm – adequate clitoral stimulation (the physical) and being in a sexy, relaxed mindset (the mental).

““When you put pressure on orgasm, you start to think you won’t have one or you have to have one – and then you don’t.”

“The clitoris is a huge part of orgasm,” says Engle. “Women are never taught about their clitoris nor are they taught to prioritise their pleasure. We’re taught to somehow have orgasms through intercourse and do whatever we can to make our partner orgasm.”

Some women can experience orgasm without clitoral stimulation. But a study published in The Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy found only 18% of women said vaginal penetration alone would do the trick. That same study found most women liked to be touched directly on the clitoris and cited up and down, with medium pressure, as their favourite way to be touched.

Spending 15-20 minutes on foreplay, especially if this includes deep kissing and oral sex, can help your orgasm along nicely, McKimmie suggests.

But in addition to the physical mechanisms at play, mindset plays an equally important part. Sex and relationship therapist Miranda Christophers says women need to feel emotionally in a place that will allow arousal, in order to get off. You need to be able to fully relax – so if you’re feeling tired or anxious, that might make things quite difficult. The idea is all about letting go.

“While not all women need to feel both to achieve orgasm, most females need to feel psychologically and physically excited and stimulated,” she says.

Turning on your mind

Once you’re clued up on the clitoral logistics, is there a way to get into a better mindset for orgasm? In the words of Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally: Yes, yes, yes! Communication is key, says Engle. “Your partner is not a mind reader. They are not responsible for your orgasm. You are responsible for your orgasm.”

Brits can be pretty reserved when it comes to talking about sex. A survey by eharmony found only a quarter of people in the UK are happy to talk about what goes on in the bedroom, with the over-55s least at ease. But plucking up the courage could actually change your sex life – and with two thirds of Brits saying they’re unhappy with theirs, it’s clear there’s some serious talking to be done.

Engle advises speaking to your sexual partner about what works for you, what you need – even telling them you’d like to bring your vibrator into the mix if that’s what you want. “If you lie back and think of England – as the old saying goes – you’re not going to feel pleasure, let alone have an orgasm,” she adds.

It can also help you get in the zone if you engage in relaxing, centring practices in everyday life, she says – whether that’s yoga, meditation or mindfulness.

Best of all, masturbate, says Engle. “Get yourself a high-quality sex toy – I love the We-Vibe Tango and the Womanizer – and get to know your body,” she suggests. “Find vibration patterns and rhythms that get you there. Experiment with external and internal stimulation. Try running a vibrator over your labia.and mons, and your nipples and inner thighs. When you take control of your pleasure and your orgasm, you give yourself the power to ask for what you want and to make your orgasm the centre of your experience.”

It’s time to get off

Next time you have sex, try to focus on the feeling, what turns you on – and nothing else. “Avoid focusing on performance or distractions and instead notice the pleasurable sensations within your body and allow the flow of sexually exciting thoughts or visual stimulation,” says Christophers, who advises clients to ‘fall into’ the feeling of pleasure once it starts. “If it begins by the feelings aroused by kissing, to allow themselves to immerse themselves into the feeling,” she says.

Not every sexual encounter needs a climax. “We don’t always need sex to end in an orgasm. It’s a perfectly valid choice not to, sometimes we can struggle to have an orgasm in a particular encounter,” says McKimmie. That’s okay.”

But harness your power. “The brain can really be considered our biggest sexual organ,” she says. “Our thoughts can help turn us on – or off.”

In fact, our mind is so powerful when it comes to orgasm, that some women can actually reach orgasm through thinking alone, she says. And if that’s not something to aim for someday, we don’t know what is.

How To Get Off is our answer to Valentine’s Day, celebrating bodies, pleasure and fantasy – whatever your relationship status. We’ll be exploring what really gets us off in 2020, looking at sexual awakenings, toys and erotica, and real-life experience.

How to Make a Woman Orgasm According to Science

It is not noteworthy news that women orgasm less than men. That is, in fact, very old news. But a new study of 52,000 adults in the Archives of Sexual Behavior suggests orgasming isn’t an issue of gender—male vs. female, he vs. she—but an issue of sexuality.

The researchers highlighted data proving lesbian women orgasm more than straight women—a lot more. For instance, 86 percent of women having sex with women reported usually or always orgasming, while only 65 percent of straight women reported the same. Sixty-six percent of bisexual women said they usually/always achieved orgasmed. In largely un-shocking statistics, 95 percent of heterosexual men reported almost always orgasming, as did 89 percent of homosexual men. This all helps explain the “orgasm gap” between genders in terms of sexual partners, not solely gender.

The researchers also pinpointed a “golden trio”—their words—of sexual acts that were most likely to achieve orgasm for women: genital stimulation, deep kissing, and oral sex, performed in combination with vaginal penetration. Other factors they identified as leading to more frequent female orgasms were experimentation in bed, relationship satisfaction, and women asking for what they want from their partners.

Also notable: 41 percent of straight men reported that their partner always reached orgasm. However, only 33 percent of heterosexual women reported they always orgasmed. So there’s apparently a sizable gap in communication as well.

[h/t: The Guardian

Sarah Rense
Sarah Rense is the Lifestyle Editor at Esquire, where she covers tech, food, drinks, home, and more. 

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90,000 How to bring a girl to orgasm

How to bring a girl to orgasm, how to do this or that correctly, and what is not worth doing.

It’s no secret that it is more difficult for girls to reach orgasm than for men. It’s all about physiology. However, this is not a problem if you know how to proceed correctly. After all, sex is a pleasure for two. What should you pay attention to?

Prelude

Foreplay is not very important for men. After all, it is much easier for them to get aroused. But the girls love this part very much and will be very grateful for the long foreplay, which will allow you to completely relax and tune in to sex.

• Massage is a great start.
• It is worth paying attention to the words that girls want to hear – these can be compliments about her appearance, character, you can talk about how a man wants her and what he will do.
• Gentle kisses are the right direction. Kiss her neck, ears, lips, and then continue talking to her. Then you can slightly increase the pressure, apply teeth and a little more force. Hot breath will enhance the effect of all movements.

By the way, during sex, do not forget about these places, because the neck and ears are a very strong erogenous zone.

Chest

The breast should be touched both during foreplay and during sex. However, it is worth asking in advance if she likes it. After all, the chest can be too sensitive and any careless touch will cause pain or discomfort in this case. This is especially true of the nipples. Do not squeeze or bite them strongly, only gentle touches. But behind the nipples, do not forget about the entire breast, because there are a lot of nerve endings that support arousal and allow a girl to reach orgasm faster.

Kisses in the chest area will also not go unnoticed for the girl. The main thing here is no nibbling or strong bites. The exception is that your teeth can only slightly walk on the nipples. By the way, if a man caresses one breast with his tongue or lips, then he should not forget about the other, you can touch it with your hand.

Buttocks

The buttocks and also the reed are also very sensitive in girls. During foreplay, they need to be gently squeezed and stroked. But in sex, you can move on to more decisive actions – squeeze and spank strongly.The main thing is not to overdo it. You can also walk your fingers and nails over them, because not only girls can scratch!

Feet and legs

No matter how it was a discovery for most men, the feet and legs are also sensitive, like other parts of the girl’s body. They also should not be bypassed during foreplay. After all, a light massage will allow not only to relax the girl, but also to excite. Massage oil will help a lot with this.

Finger work

You can play with your fingers during foreplay, because sex can be started with light petting.But during sex, do not forget that some girls need additional stimulation to reach orgasm. In addition, this will increase the degree, it is worth playing with the breasts, grabbing them by the hair and holding them along the girl’s back.

Desires

Every girl is special. They have their own desires and preferences. Therefore, it is worth remembering that not everyone likes the movements or words, the attitude that, for example, is shown in porn films. Having talked with a girl on frank topics, you can find out all her desires, what she likes and what she doesn’t.Perhaps she loves to be dominated or vice versa – this can be played into an interesting plot of foreplay and sex.

By the way, most girls like sex toys and dressing up. Of course, you should not use them during the first sex, but gradually introducing it into sex – absolutely no one bothers. The main thing is not to insist or coerce, because the extra pressure can simply scare her.

As a result, it should be said that the main thing for the girl is that the man is not in a hurry. A long foreplay, a soft start, and then, a bright continuation – a good story of quality sex.It is worth discussing this topic with her before sex and finding out all her preferences, do not forget about kissing and stroking during foreplay and sex.

How to bring a woman to orgasm – Sex – TVNET Lifestyle – Self-development, hobbies and lifestyle – TVNET Lifestyle – TVNET

“My partner is simulating an orgasm. I feel it, but I don’t know how to tell her about it. Or maybe she frigid and just hides it? Tell me what to do. ” Michael P. The Good Samaritan Women Women, like men, often believe in the myths that they themselves invent.One such myth is the concept of “normal sexual behavior of a passionate lover.” The basic tenet of this homegrown teaching is: “A real woman has a vaginal orgasm and, therefore, does not need any additional stimulation.” Following this unwritten rule, the unfortunate victims of their own prejudices often voluntarily abandon true erotic pleasures in favor of the highly dubious image of a “true sex bomb.” They scream very naturally, have convulsions – and all this is just to show you their gratitude.On the one hand, it is, of course, convenient – in the company of a talented actress, you can feel like a real hero-lover without much effort. However, if you want your sweetheart to moan with pleasure, and not with pain or an overabundance of acting, try to find out what kind of sex she really likes. Relentless statistics say that in 25% of cases, women are not at all able to experience an orgasm during intercourse, therefore, the traditional missionary position can suit them only as a means of losing weight.Many of them are theoretically able to experience an orgasm of a different kind, but they are not even aware of this and continue to faithfully portray violent passion in front of men, being confident that they are not given the highest pleasure by nature. To “persuade” such a woman, you will need not only diligence and tact, but also a good knowledge of anatomy. I don’t believe it! In reality, most women experience orgasms solely through clitoral stimulation.Surveys conducted by American sex therapists have shown that only 30% of Eve’s daughters can have an orgasm without directly affecting the clitoris. However, women themselves, as usual, bring senseless chaos into this very harmonious and objective theory, assuring their partners that a simple intercourse is quite enough for them. Not content with American statistics, we decided to conduct our own blitz survey. And here’s what happened. Evgenia L., 26 years old, manager: “Usually I feel embarrassed to ask my partner to caress the clitoris.In my opinion, it sounds something like this: “Hey, man, you are not getting anything, so stop your fluttering and get busy!” Lisa A., 21 years old, flight attendant: “Of course, I pretend to be“ the highest pleasure. ”Every man wants to feel like a real“ macho. ”After all, it is not his fault that it is oral sex that turns me on the most. Sometimes I say bluntly: “Darling, kiss me there.” But it sounds kind of idiotic, so I often pretend that I “got it”, and then I run to the bathroom and finish the job myself. “Marina D., 28 years old, assistant: “I know that a real woman should have a vaginal orgasm. But, probably, this is not given to me. I can only count on the sensitivity of her lover. But how can I admit to him that all this time I have been lacking clitoral stimulation ? ” Elena R., 18 years old, student: “I enjoy having sex, although I have” problems “with orgasm. My last partner said that I probably have clitoral arousal. True, he could not find my clitoris. So whose problem is this ? ” As you can see, the ladies spoke quite frankly.Neither told us that she was thrilled with sex in the missionary position. On the other hand, almost everyone confirmed that they were embarrassed to admit to their partners their true passions, and the phrase “kiss me there” seems to them ridiculous and obscene, although none of the respondents has anything against the process itself. Rather, the opposite is true. The problem is that they do not know how to tell us about this, and they are sure that a man himself should be well versed not only in female desires, but also in female anatomy.For example, knowing where the clitoris is. Where is the woman THAT? According to statistics, about 35% of men do not quite clearly imagine where this vital organ is located. And if you, like the unlucky lover of the student Lena, cannot find the main source of pleasure from a woman, perhaps it is time to eliminate the annoying gap in education. Of course, the easiest way is to go directly to a woman for help. However, this is by no means worth doing. Firstly, you may be seriously offended – for some reason, ladies really do not like it when they are distracted from emotional experiences by various idiotic questions.In their opinion, if you have already dragged her into bed, then you must know what and how to do with her. Secondly, sexologists argue that many women themselves often have a very vague idea of ​​the exact location of this delicate object, so you risk embarrassing the lady with your questions. Let’s try to act according to science. In an anatomy textbook, everyone can read that “the clitoris is a cavernous venous formation, endowed with the foreskin and located in front of the vulva.” If the meaning of this definition eludes you, like the Latin from D”Artagnan, then you have nothing left but to investigate the physiological characteristics of your partner on your own.It should be noted that the last method is not only the most effective, but also the most enjoyable. Before proceeding directly to the matter, it is worth remembering the following. The clitoris is an incredibly sensitive point. Therefore, any of your manipulations can give your partner not only acute pleasure, but also no less acute pain. Remember this and try to proceed with the utmost care. Beginning “palpation” should be extremely delicate. You can use special moisturizing lotions, but if you have not yet stocked up on the necessary bubble, then it is better to act not with your fingers, but with your tongue – unless, of course, you are a convinced opponent of oral sex.The latter, by the way, may not read further. Secrets of Mastery There are a huge number of different schools of cunnilingus in the world, as well as many special manuals. However, before delving into professional subtleties, we note that even a very cold woman can be brought to orgasm if you learn, firstly, to correctly determine at what stage of arousal she is, and secondly, to distribute energy, since this type of sex requires a lot of energy from a man.Here are some know-hows from the professionals. Oleg N “stripper:” The more energetic your caresses, the faster you get tired. And the partner will not even warm up. Therefore, it is best to lie not between her legs, but to the side at a right angle. Do not touch the clitoris itself, it is better to rhythmically move your tongue around him, and not up and down, but from side to side, as if you are “rolling a pea.” It’s much easier. ” Dmitry G., sex therapist: “It has been scientifically proven that one side of the clitoris is much more sensitive than the other.True, women themselves usually do not have the slightest idea about this and it is absolutely pointless to ask them. Try experimenting with your partner. Depending on the outcome, pay more attention to the right or left side. “Amanda, lesbian:” The usual male question is, “How long should I do this?” Alas, as long as you can. If you hold out for the first time for five minutes, the reputation of a hero-lover is guaranteed. I know. True, there are several secrets on how to make your life easier.Firstly, being between her legs, you can not move your tongue back and forth, but slightly shake your head. The effect is the same, but less effort is spent. Secondly, no one forbids the use of improvised means. One of my friends is using a vibrator with might and main. She puts her tongue on her mistress’s clitoris, rests the massager against her chin … And the technique works for her. “ Dr. Grenberg’s Point If all resources seem to you exhausted, you can offer your beloved the following entertaining game.It is called “Find point C in honor of its discoverer – Dr. Grenberg”. Conducting manual therapy of his clients, the valiant Aesculapius discovered a small but extremely sensitive place in the female vagina, the effect on which has a downright stunning effect. Having experimented with the “G” point, Dr. Grenberg came to the conclusion that her stimulation could turn the finished “Snow Maiden” into a maenad mad with passion. However, the pioneer probably decided to keep the exact coordinates of the second most important (after the clitoris) “magic button” for himself.Stubborn followers of the doctor found that the Grönberg point is located, as a rule, in the lower third of the vagina on its front wall. Many women with sufficient sexual experience, when pressed on it, there is a very strong arousal, and with rhythmic stimulation – orgasm. Point C in the process of sexual activity becomes erogenous and “triggering” to achieve orgasm. To find the secret coordinates, the easiest way is to put your partner on your back, lie down next to her and carefully enter the “holy of holies” with one, two or even three fingers.At the same time, your palm should be facing the ceiling. Then bend your fingers slightly and try stroking the vaginal wall. Stimulation should be done as gently as possible, since the acuity of sensations can provoke a painful reaction. But if by joint efforts you find a “bewitched” place, you can be sure that the stormy delights, groans and convulsions of your partner are not a bright, but a fake show, but the most real ones. And this is entirely your merit.

How to bring a girl to orgasm in 30 seconds

It is believed that it is easier for men with a larger penis to bring a woman to orgasm.But this is absolutely not the case! It turns out that there is a unique way that you can bring a woman to orgasm in just 30 seconds, and even the smallest size is enough for this!

American scientists have made a discovery, which they called “Pattern 3-30”!

The essence of this pattern is that it is possible, in the shortest possible time, in 30 seconds, to give a girl pleasure, under the following conditions:

A woman is generally capable of having an orgasm

See also: What size of manhood is considered normal?

A woman fully accepts her partner on an emotional level

A woman is in the mood for sex

Read also: Member size map, depending on nationality!

A man knows about all the preferences of a woman

If all these factors are present, then even 3 centimeters is enough to bring a girl to orgasm in 30 seconds!

You can learn more about this by watching the VIDEO:

Video: How to bring a woman to orgasm in 30 seconds

American scientists have made a discovery, which they called “Regularity 3-30”!
The essence of this pattern is that you can give a girl pleasure in the shortest possible time, in 30 seconds.

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