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.

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.