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The Unfulfilled Orgasmic Potential of Today’s Woman

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hysteria

Soundtrack: R. Kelly “The Greatest Sex”

Expanded Sexual Response (ESR). Ever heard of it? It’s something that scientists have been formally studying for a few years now. They define it as “being able to attain long lasting and/or prolonged and/or multiple and/or sustained orgasms and/or status orgasmus that lasted longer and more intense than the classical orgasm patterns defined in the literature”. They have written in their findings:

“During our detailed preliminary survey to investigate the claimed ESR phenomenon in some particular women, we also investigated the subjective feelings and altered states of consciousness (ASC) during very intense and prolonged orgasms in the women with ESR. During our preliminary survey 72 types of different subjective feelings and ASC patterns were described in the 47 women with ESR. Among these were: depersonalization; out of body experience; flying; dying feeling (petit morte); ecstasy; rapture; explosion feeling; quivering, earthquake feeling; flooding; absorbing; spurting; blessed; shuddering; intense love; unreal; surreal; voyage to nature; seeing light flashes, color flashes, geometric shapes, figures; peacefulness; physical and spiritual warmth; loss of control; spreading; flowing; mystical experience; unification with the partner and/or the universe; de ja vu; crying etc…Pudental, pelvic, hypogastric and vagus nerves play major roles in the development of single or ESR orgasms, as well as at least two oxytocin pathways may contribute to it. In blended, ESR orgasms and/or status orgasmus, more than one ‘orgasm reflex arch pathway’ may trigger the orgasm at the same time, while other pathways play a supplementary role.” 

What this basically means is that women have been shown, under the weight of scientific scrutiny, to be able to have orgasms that last for 30 minutes or more, and when this happens they are having altered states of consciousness similar to being high on mushrooms or LSD or Molly.

Why are most women not having anything near this kind of experience? Let’s talk about it. Let’s look at the history of the female orgasm. Lord Acton was only repeating what everyone knew in 1875 when he declared, “The majority of women, happily for them and for society, are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind.” You can draw a straight line between that and the whirlwind of social media talk surrounding Amber Rose’s planned #SlutWalk.

Women are not supposed to enjoy sex as much as men. Women are not supposed to have sexual urges. Women are there simply to satisfy the sexual urges of their husbands. Women have to put up with sex in order to keep their husbands happy and have children. This was the dominant belief in western society for as far back as the mind’s eye can see. And although things have changed ever so slightly in recent decades, slut shaming is still very much a Thing.

This belief was behind the psychological diagnosis of “hysteria” that so many women received in the 1800’s and early 1900’s. Women of this era complained to doctors of anxiety, sleeplessness, irritability, nervousness, erotic fantasies, feelings of heaviness in the lower abdomen, and wetness between the leg. Many 21st century women could easily recognize this as sexual frustration but back then this syndrome became known as “hysteria,” from the Greek for uterus.

Documented complaints of female hysteria date back to the 13th century. Doctors of that era understood that women had libidos and advised them to relieve their sexual frustration with dildos. In the 16th century, physicians told married hysterics to encourage their husbands’ lust. For hysteria unrelieved by husbandly lust, and for widows, and single and unhappily married women, doctors advised horseback riding, which, for some, provided enough clitoral stimulation to trigger orgasm. But riding provided many women little relief, and by the 17th century, dildos were less of an option because the arbiters of decency had succeeded in demonizing masturbation as “self-abuse.”

Fortunately, a reliable, socially acceptable treatment appeared. Doctors or midwives applied vegetable oil to women’s genitals and then massaged them with one or two fingers inside and the heel of the hand pressing against the clitoris. With this type of massage, women had orgasms and experienced sudden, dramatic relief from hysteria. But doctors didn’t call women’s climaxes orgasms. They called them “paroxysms” (a sudden attack or violent expression of a particular emotion or activity) because everyone knew that women were incapable of sexual feelings, so they could not possibly experience orgasm.

Unfortunately for doctors, hysteria treatment had a downside—achy, cramped fingers and hands from all that massage. In medical journals of the early 1800’s, doctors lamented that treating hysterics taxed their physical endurance. Chronic hand fatigue meant that some doctors had trouble maintaining the treatment long enough to produce the desired (and lucrative) result.

Necessity sometimes being the mother of invention, physicians began experimenting with mechanical substitutes for their hands. They tried a number of genital massage contraptions, among them water-driven gadgets (the forerunners of today’s shower massage devices), and pumping, steam-driven dildos. But the machines were cumbersome, messy, often unreliable, and sometimes dangerous.

Then in the late nineteenth century, electricity entered American homes, and the first electric appliances appeared: the electric fan, toaster, tea kettle, and sewing machine. In 1880, more than a decade before the invention of the electric iron and vacuum cleaner, an enterprising English physician, Dr. Joseph Mortimer Granville, patented the electromechanical vibrator.

Fast forward to 2015, for most people, knowledge of female orgasm is limited to the various ways to stimulate the clitoris. The general public’s knowledge of what is possible, men and women, is extremely low. We know only what porn and our uninformed friends have told us.

The pleasure range and orgasmic potential of women is immense. Some women tremble and shake in pleasure from nearly every part of their body being touched, some orgasm from their Achilles heel being massaged, or from a hand pressing their lower belly, some orgasm from their ears or breasts being licked, some orgasm the moment they are penetrated, some women orgasm solely by contracting their vaginal muscles, some orgasm with no physical stimulation, just by focusing their awareness on their sexual energy, magnifying it and pulling it up. Some women orgasm while meditating, practicing Hatha yoga, singing devotional songs, or looking at the sunset. Some women orgasm when they go on a roller coaster or bungee jumping. Some women orgasm when their partner tells them he loves them, or when a powerful man holds their hands and looks them deep in the eyes with love and presence. Some women don’t experience an actual orgasm, but rather go into a state of Bliss within moments of penetration.

And yet, most women don’t experience whole-body orgasms during penetrative love-making, many can only orgasm by masturbation, and some don’t experience orgasms at all. Some women don’t even consider the subject of orgasm because they don’t  experience any pleasure at all during sex.

Modern science has measured and quantified a number of symptoms and conditions that occur while a woman is being aroused and when she’s orgasming. Arousal includes increased muscular tension, increased heart beat and respiration rate and depth, increased blood flow to the genitals, which causes the swelling of the clitoris, labia (outer and inner lips around the entrance of the yoni/vagina/pussy), and the vaginal walls; “ballooning” of the deep vagina and mild shifting of the cervix and womb towards the back of the body and slightly upwards, secretion of lubrication fluid from the walls of the vagina; increased sensitivity of the nipples and other erogenous zones.

As orgasm becomes imminent, the outer third of the vagina tightens and narrows, while overall the vagina lengthens and dilates and also becomes congested from engorged soft tissue; the nipples become erect. The main symptom of a female orgasm according to modern science is a series of involuntary contractions or pulsations of the pelvic floor (also known as the PC muscle or pubococygeus muscle), the vaginal walls, uterus and anus. However, some of the orgasm symptoms occur to some extent also before and after the actual “peak” of an orgasm.

What is the difference between the woman who never has an orgasm and the woman who has more than she count? Relaxation. For women, sex is first and foremost about turning off the “thinking” button and turning on the “feeling” button. You can’t think and feel at the same time. These processes come from two different parts of the brain that don’t work well together. If you are feeling something intensely, whether it be pain from an injury or extreme hunger pangs or a need to urinate or the pleasure of your lover kissing your neck, it becomes almost impossible to do something like study for a test at the same time. The reverse is also true. If your brain is focused on thinking about something, then your sensitivity to feeling things is seriously dampened.

The main idea or attitude that can improve the pleasure range and orgasmic experience of every woman is the following:

Every pleasurable sensation, every small wave of pleasure, is a mini orgasm, because for a brief moment, there is slightly decreased mind activity, decreased sense of personal “I”, and increased present moment awareness,  focus, surrender, dissolution and dissolving into the sensation.

Imagine someone is touching your exposed back with a feather, or blowing air gently on your neck, or tickling you, or hugging you, or gently caressing your face or hair, or moving his hands along the side of your torso, or touching your nipple, or gently brushing the back of his hand against your pubic hair.  All these sensations are portals into pleasure, then into greater pleasure, then into actual orgasm. At the moment of orgasm, for that (usually) brief moment, you become One with the universe. You lose your sense of being separate from anything else, time stands still and you are everywhere and nowhere at the same time. You are simply feeling.

Most men and women tend to view an orgasm as a single separate discernible peak aka “The Big O”, or, at best, a few peaks of orgasm, known as a multiple orgasm. The problem is that they miss out on a range of sensations, pleasure and orgasmic experiences. By changing your attitude and enjoying the inherent joy and pleasure in every moment and every kind of touch or sexual interaction, a woman can gradually experience deeper and greater and more varied kinds of pleasure and orgasmic states, and then an expanded awareness and higher states of consciousness.

In quality, every pleasurable sensation is a mini orgasm, an orgasmic moment, and the “quantity” of the pleasure can increase as you bring your attention into it. Learn to focus your attention on every pleasurable sensation, to bring awareness into every part of your body which feels pleasurable, to go deeper into the sensation, deeper into the present moment, and then to intensify these sensations and pleasure. That can’t happen if you’re thinking about whether you look fat, or is he gonna call you the next day, or any of that other shit that women obsess about. Turn off the thinking and turn on the feeling.

The other part of this picture, for most people at least, is the role of the man. Women need time; time to get warmed up, time to get out of the mind and into the body, time for the clitoris and labia to swell, time for the G-spot to descend down into the vaginal canal. Women can’t fully feel everything they are capable of feeling until all the machinery has gotten warmed up. Because men aren’t trained to appreciate this, most men are over and done before the woman is even ready to get started. Women are not experiencing the fullness of their orgasmic potential because both men and women are ignorant of what women need during sex.

Men have to be taught how to appreciate what they can receive from a fully sexually fulfilled woman. This is where those altered states of consciousness (ASC) come in. The vagina is directly connected to the brain in what I call the Brain-Vagina System. The cervix in the vagina is connected to the spine by the pelvic neural network. The spine leads directly to the brain stem. The reason that expanded sexual response (ESR) leads to ASC is because the nervous system is stimulated in very interesting ways. Usually unused parts of the brain are opened up and very cool chemicals get released.

There is a substance called DMT, produced in the pineal gland in the brain, which can also be found in at least 60 species of plants worldwide. One of these plants is ayahuasca which is popularly used in rituals to induce trance states and receive messages from other realms of reality. Well, you don’t need to drink a nasty brew or smoke anything to get DMT, your brain can make it by having awesome sex. Women who spend some time in ESR can get access to information that wasn’t available by other means. If you want to know how to get a business off the ground, how to solve a complex math problem, or any other mental hurdle, the answer just might be found in a woman’s orgasm.

Along with that, ESR produces the exact opposite of the hysteria women go into from sexual frustration. Deep calm, deep relaxation, deep contentment means no more of the incessant nagging that keeps so many men from wanting to go home after work. A woman who is truly sexually fulfilled is able to trust that everything will be alright. Everyone wins when the woman gets what she needs, above and beyond what she thinks that she wants.

This means men learning how to truly do foreplay, as well as learning how to delay ejaculation for up to an hour or more. Foreplay means so much more than just licking or fingering a woman’s so-called erogenous zones. I say so-called because a woman’s entire body becomes orgasmic once she is opened up properly. I don’t have the space to go into details about foreplay here but I think it is extremely important for men to learn how to do energy projection as well as yoni massage.

By energy projection, I mean bringing your energy field (aura) into contact with another person’s energy field or aura, and touching each other without contacting the skin. Men and women can be brought to orgasm in this way, without physically touching at all; and it is extremely healthy for the mind and body. Yoni massage is a more healing version of what is commonly called “finger fucking”. Yoni massage involves truly massaging the whole pubic region, inside and outside. It can undo damage done to the anatomy of the vagina by chronic stress from living in a world that is anti-woman in so many ways.

At least an hour of various kinds of foreplay combined with at least an hour of penetration is a good recipe for ESR and ASC. Women and men who experience the glory of truly fulfilling sex will never want to go back to the old way of doing things. It’s time for a real sexual revolution. Clitoral orgasm should be known as the “little girls” orgasm. Any person with a clitoris can orgasm from rubbing it against something. Sexual maturity comes with knowing that that is only a small fraction of what sex can and should be. It’s time to demand more from ourselves.

Why Polyamory? (Why Monogamy Is Stupid)

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poly

Soundtrack: Mtume “You, Me, and He”

Cognitive Dissonance: This is the feeling of uncomfortable tension which comes from holding two conflicting thoughts in the mind at the same time.

Dissonance increases with:

  • The importance of the subject to us.
  • How strongly the dissonant thoughts conflict.
  • Our inability to rationalize and explain away the conflict.

Dissonance is often strong when we believe something about ourselves and then do something against that belief. If I believe I am good but do something bad, then the discomfort I feel as a result is cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is a very powerful motivator which will often lead us to change one or other of the conflicting belief or action. The discomfort often feels like a tension between the two opposing thoughts. To release the tension we can take one of three actions:

  • Change our behavior.
  • Justify our behavior by changing the conflicting cognition.
  • Justify our behavior by adding new cognitions.

Monogamy is a major source of cognitive dissonance for most people. You are told from birth through various sources that you are supposed to grow up and fall in love and spend the rest of your life with one person, forsaking all others. Society spreads the idea that one man mating for life with one woman is the “natural” way. That our nature is designed to connect with this soul mate and if you can’t live up to this standard then you are less than a real man or woman and you are morally depraved. The vast majority of us either fail a little bit or we fail horribly at this. Is everybody morally bankrupt or is there something wrong with the standard? Maybe we need to grade our monogamous abilities on a curve.

As with all things, this belief has an origin. What is it? Agriculture. Around 12,000 years ago, human beings started practicing agriculture, planting crops and staying in that place long enough to harvest those crops. Prior to that time, all human beings were hunter-gatherers. They constantly moved as nomads, from place to place, foraging for whatever food they could find. Agriculture involves intensive cultivation of large tracts of land, often requiring ploughing, irrigation, fertilization and other soil improvements. As agriculture spread, arable land became more scarce – and more valuable. I’ll return to this in a second.

Scientists conservatively estimate that modern humans evolved around 200,000 years ago. Assuming that that number is true, those humans didn’t just pop up out of thin air at that time. Even those earliest humans inherited some cultural traits from their ancestors. So we can confidently say that human ancestors have been developing some kind of cultural habits for as long as we have used tools which is around 2.5 million years ago. That’s millions of years of hunter-gatherer life followed up by the past 10,000 years of agriculture.

In those early hunter-gatherer days, one of the habits that we developed was the habit of sharing everything. Human beings are not as physically strong as a lot of other animals in nature. If humans live in an environment where they don’t have the technology to bulldoze forests and kick all the animals out of their habitat, then the humans are in a vulnerable position. In that less technological state, it is also advantageous to take advantage of all the food that naturally sprouts up out of the earth. And when the food in your immediate vicinity is gone, you move onto another spot. Also, it is a natural tendency of all living beings to self-preserve, to keep yourself alive and to see to the survival of your offspring. Early humans determined that the best way for them to stay alive was to move in groups and share resources to make sure everyone had what they needed.

The way that our bodies and brains have evolved since the beginning of our history is a direct result of the environments we have had to adapt to. We have perfectly fashioned ourselves to handle the particular conditions that we have found ourselves in. This is how evolution works. It becomes very difficult to get any living being to live in a way that contradicts its millions of years of evolution. It’s possible, but it’s very difficult. It’s difficult to get lions and bears and elephants to perform tricks in the circus. That behavior is not what they have been evolved to do. And even if you successfully circus train a lion, you never know when its nature is going to come out and the circus gets a rude awakening.

Our early human habit of sharing, which I like to call fierce egalitarianism, included sharing sex. Sexual pleasure was a resource to be shared among the people just like food, clothing, and shelter. There weren’t yet any rules about who sex should happen with and for what reason or how often. They were able to use it much like how modern western people use pills. Need to relax? Have sex. Need to perk up? Have sex. Need to mourn? Have sex. Need to celebrate? Have sex.

Human beings are evolutionarily accustomed to being polyamorous. Monogamy goes against our nature. Polyamory means “many loves”, it denotes the practice of forming sexual and romantic relationships with multiple people. This is how we have conducted ourselves for most of our existence. The practice of one woman and one man forsaking all others is a very recent development.

It is important to point out that our Ancestors weren’t going around sleeping with a bunch of people they didn’t know or didn’t love. It wasn’t like that at all. They lived in small, close-knit groups of 100-150 people. Their sexual partners couldn’t have possibly been strangers or one night stands. Everyone they came in contact with was someone who they were around all the time.

Our closest relatives in nature are chimpanzees and bonobos, even more close than gorillas, gibbons, and orangutans. The behavior of our cousins provides clues of what comes natural for us. Ovulating female chimps have sex with all males who are willing. Bonobos, our closest relative of all primates, enjoy group sex as a way to appease conflict between members of the clan and promote social bonding.

The human body itself shows us that we are evolved for polyamory and sexual promiscuity. Body-size dimorphism (the difference in body size between males and females) is about 10-20% for humans. That is a very small number when compared with many other members of the animal kingdom. Body-size dimorphism reflects male competition for females, so that if the males are significantly larger than the females, this indicates that the males of that species have evolved to have fierce competition for females. They need to be big in order to compete. The 10-20% body-size dimorphism of humans is the same figure as that of chimps and bonobos, who are promiscuous. Moderate body-size dimorphism is therefore an indicator that our ancestors weren’t fighting for attention. They were sharing

Small testes, which gorillas, orangutans and gibbons have, are a sign of limited sexual activity. Larger testes are associated with more promiscuous behavior, since species that copulate more will need larger testes in order to house more sperm for ejaculations. Chimps and bonobos have the largest testes, which is unsurprising considering how much they get it on, while humans have moderately sized testes, although not anywhere near as small as a gorilla’s. Our sperm volume is still far beyond what is needed for monogamous mating.

Within the adult testicle, there is 700 feet of tubing, termed seminiferous tubules, within which sperm is made. Sperm is made from precursor cells termed germ cells that give rise to approximately 120 million sperm daily in a process termed spermatogenesis that takes approximately 64 days in humans. This is equivalent to making about 1200 sperm per heartbeat. That’s a lot.

Even the shape of the human penis has evolved in response to the fact that females will have multiple sexual partners. The glans of the penis (the head) are shaped as they are to remove any previously deposited sperm. It functions like a scoop. During ejaculation the man’s glans will then shrink to ensure that his own sperm are not removed by the same process. Sperm also contains chemicals that defend against and attack sperm from other males. Semen has built-in spermicide, the same stuff they put on condoms. Also, the large ejaculate that men have (the largest of all the Great Apes) is a sign of sperm competition. When we skeet skeet, we skeet a whole lot. All of this sperm competition evolved as a way for males to do the natural job of trying to keep themselves and their lineage alive. They were evolutionarily trying to increase their chances of paternity certainty (being the father of the child which is eventually born).

Another thing to consider is the fact that women are capable of having multiple orgasms with little to no refractory period (the recovery phase after orgasm before being able to go back at it) whereas men lose interest in sex after ejaculation. There is also the fact that men generally cum quicker than women unless they have some tantric training on how to make it last forever like Keith Sweat. Naturally, women who haven’t developed social taboos about having multiple partners aren’t gonna stay sexually frustrated after their partner rolls over and goes to sleep. She’s gonna kick that first dude out the bed and call another one over. Which leads to my next point.

What also runs counter to the standard narrative of human sexuality is the fact of female copulatory vocalization (FCV), which basically means that females vocalize (make loud noises) during sex. If humans were meant to be monogamous, then why would females draw attention to themselves by making these vocalizations? The answer is that the groans and moans are invitations for other males to come along. This is exactly the same evolutionary phenomenon as what female cats and dogs do when they are in heat. They make all kinds of noise so all the males in the area know that it’s time to come handle business. Our less promiscuous primate relatives don’t have any FCV going on. FCV is therefore associated with promiscuous mating, not monogamy.

It is helpful to observe societies that live today much like how our pre-agriculture ancestors lived. So-called primitive societies are the best example we have of how things used to be. There are societies all over the world who still have value systems based on fierce egalitarianism which includes the sharing of their sexual resources. Among the Siriono of the Amazon, jealousy tends to arise not because one’s spouse has lovers, but because he or she is spending so much time with other lovers that the home becomes neglected. Among the Canela people of Brazil, husbands encourage their wives to participate in rituals that involve having sex with twenty or more men in front of the whole community. Among the Mosuo people of China, children are raised by their mothers’ and the mothers’ family because no one can be sure who the fathers are. Women choose men for the night and those men go back home in the morning. Men take more responsibility for their nieces and nephews than any children they might have sired.

Agriculture changed all of this because it led to the development of the idea of private property. When no one individually owns anything, there is no motivation to develop ways to pass things on after you die. With the advent of people staying in one place, claiming ownership to tracts of land and homes and animals, the question of paternity became very important. Mama’s maybe-Daddy’s maybe is not something that can be tolerated when a man wants his possessions to somehow stay in his possession after he dies. That happens by him passing on his genetics to his offspring.

This interesting turn in the course of human history had a huge impact on our sexuality. A woman has no question about who her children are. A father can always question until and unless he gets a DNA test. It became advantageous for men to use their physical dominance to regulate female sexuality. If a man can ensure that his woman is having sex with no one but him then he can be sure that her children are his and he can confidently allow those children to inherit his cows and his crops. This was the origin of monogamy as well as slut shaming.

Women and men had to be told that women are not supposed to want sex, not supposed to think about sex, definitely not supposed to have sex with anyone other than her husband. The extreme power of female sexuality with her ability to choose any man she wants as a sexual partner and her ability to have sex all day long without stopping had to be shut down by the force of muscle and false teachings.

The language that we speak reflects the deep-seated negative attitudes about sex arising from this need to control female sexuality. Sexual jokes are “dirty” jokes. An older man who is interested in sex is a “dirty” old man. A woman or girl who has sex for the first time has “lost” her virginity, she is “deflowered”. We insult people by calling them a “pussy” or telling them to “fuck off”. Nearly always, where sex is concerned, the language used is the language of loss, dirtiness, pollution, or destruction.

The greatest thing that we can do to restore the equality of the sexes is to let go of our ridiculous demands for sexual fidelity. Women who are set free from the horrors of sexual taboos find themselves developing sexual cravings in ways that many of them never thought possible. It’s amazing what your body will ask for once your mind believes that it’s ok to ask.

Why polyamory? Because monogamy is in violation of our entire history as a species. Because sharing sexual pleasure bonds human beings on a level that not many other things can compare to. Because there are other ways to pass things on from generation to generation besides artificially shutting down female sexuality. Because countless lives and careers are ruined everyday by trying and failing to live up to the monogamous standard. We can choose to just stop it with the cognitive dissonance. We can choose to change the conflicting cognition. The truth is, that monogamy doesn’t work because monogamy doesn’t work. We can choose polyamory because monogamy is stupid.