Good Sex Begets More Good Sex
If you are like most women, you are not experiencing nearly enough pleasure during lovemaking. As a result, sex stops being a priority. Given our tremendous orgasmic capacity and pleasure potential, this is a tragedy. Our ability to experience long, powerful multiple orgasms that bring us to another level of consciousness far exceeds what most men can experience. What few women and even fewer men understand is that a woman’s desire for sex follows her arousal, which is completely the opposite of a man, whose arousal follows his desire. The more we women have sex, the more we want sex. But in order to be interested in sex in the first place, women must become aroused enough for our desire to kick in. We will get into this in more depth in Chapter 13.
When a woman starts to experience physical pleasure on a regular basis, her desire for sex will go through the roof. But most women never even come close to experiencing sex as pleasurable. In fact, women often have intercourse long before they are sufficiently aroused. In the best-case scenario, this makes for sex that is “only OK” and, in the worst-case scenario, outright painful.
I totally get it. If sex is “only OK,” and you are doing it more to please your partner or out of obligation than to please yourself, it falls low on your ever-growing to-do list. If it starts to feel like work rather than play, resentment builds up. If you are putting up with touch that really doesn’t feel good—which is the number one complaint that women have about their sex life—you start harboring even more anger, disappointment, and regret that further disconnects you from your partner and your sex life. If you, like most women, desire strong masculine energy and sometimes want to be “taken,” with consent, and your partner comes to you with sweet, “good boy” energy that does not turn you on, you start losing attraction to him. All of this creates a downward spiral, further tamps down your desire, and disconnects you from your sexuality. But the number one reason that holds us back from experiencing pleasure and connecting to our desire and the true potential of living an orgasmic life is SHAME. In the next chapter, we will explore all of the ways in which shame shuts us down and why it happens in the first place.
Shame: The Nastiest Five-Letter Word in the Universe
Most of us don’t spend a lot of time thinking about shame. We know the feeling of embarrassment when we say or do something stupid, but shame is more elusive, not really on our radar screen. There’s a reason for this: shame is so deeply repressed we can’t even access it.
Therein lies the problem: shame is something we don’t talk about. It’s so insidious that we can’t even see it for what it is and rarely bring it up except in a special context such as therapy. And yet shame drives much of our behavior, especially with regard to our sexuality. Its influence is both powerful and harmful, which is why I consider it the nastiest five-letter word in our universe.
The Shame/Pleasure Paradox
If shame is what holds us back from enjoying sex and experiencing pleasure, where exactly does it come from? After all, human beings are designed to experience pleasure. Think about babies. For a short period of time, they do live an orgasmic life. Babies and toddlers freely explore and touch their bodies with wonderment and joy. They love to put their toes in their mouth, coo when they are breastfeeding or drinking from a bottle, touch themselves all over, and freely express pleasure. As we get older, our spontaneous expression of joy lessens as we are compelled by our environment to rein in our pleasure-seeking impulses, especially those that are sexual in nature. Little ones naturally reach for their genitals and are often subtly or overtly reprimanded for doing so.
It’s an odd paradox, given that we have over ten thousand nerve endings in our genitals. It would seem as though our bodies are designed to experience sexual pleasure. Did you know that, inch for inch, your clitoris has as many nerve endings as a man’s penis? Unlike the penis, the clitoris does not serve a specific role in reproduction. The only purpose of the clitoris is for us to experience pleasure. Of course, experiencing pleasure encourages procreation, but a clitoral orgasm does not get you pregnant! Pleasure and orgasm have many health benefits: reducing stress, improving sleep, pain relief, boosting your immune system, and providing a natural antidepressant.
Our bodies are a source of pleasure, and our physiology supports the argument that we are meant to experience pleasure. But when we get older and want to touch ourselves, an element of shame often seeps in, spoiling our experience of bodily pleasure. This paradox creates tension around our sexuality. As you will see, sexual shame comes from a variety of different sources.
Ancient Cultures Were Sex-Positive
If we look at sexuality from a historical perspective, we find that attitudes toward sex in many ancient cultures were actually quite positive. According to Paul Chrystal, author of In Bed with the Ancient Greeks: Sex & Sexuality in Ancient Greece:
…love and sex were inextricably connected with the creation of the Earth, the heavens, and the underworld. Greek myth was a theogony of incest, murder, polygamy, and intermarriage in which eroticism and fertility were elemental; they were there right from the start, demonstrating woman’s essential reproductive role in securing the cosmos, extending the human race, and ensuring the fecundity of nature.” Many ancient religions also worshipped sex. In ancient Hindu temples all over the world, we find statues of Lingams (penises) and Yonis (vulvas) worshipping the God Shiva and Goddess Parvati.2
Yoni Lingam Statute, Siem Riep, Cambodia, Angkor Wat Temple Ruins, 12th Century
It was the Judeo-Christian religion that vilified sex. Adam and Eve were shamed for their nakedness, accused of “original sin” for eating the “forbidden apple” and banished from the Garden of Eden, that paradise wherein pleasure and joy were one’s birthright. We have been paying the price of their banishment and carrying the weight of their shame ever since.
Shame and Your Sexual Blueprint
To understand where our shame comes from, we have to examine our sexual blueprint. Similar to an architectural blueprint that shows all the details of the plumbing, electricity, drywall, windows, and doors that make up a building, you have a sexual blueprint comprised of all the early life experiences that make up your sense of yourself as a sexual being. I call it a blueprint to emphasize the impact of the early experiences that govern your relationship with your own sexuality as well as how you relate to members of the opposite or the same sex. The elements of your sexual blueprint include:
•Messages you received about sex as a child from parents, other adults, and society
•Early childhood sexual exploration with yourself and/or others
•Your first sexual experiences
•Relationships with your mother and father or primary caregiver
•Seminal events that impacted your body image
•Religious ideology or indoctrination
How these messages impact you differs for everyone, but we all experience shame…that is a part of human existence. Let me give you an example of how this plays out. When I was growing up, I had a dog whose name was Lucky. He was a yappy, high-strung, neurotic Yorkshire terrier; we did not have the best relationship. Lucky often barked at and nipped me. He loved to hide under my bed and then growl at me when I tried to get him to come out. When I was nine years old, Lucky started to lick my private parts