by Naomi Wolf
The very definition of what it means for a vagina to “open,” though it is the same word, has two completely different interpretations in Eastern and Western cultures. In the Eastern traditions such as the Tantra and the Tao, the man addresses, with caresses and care, the “gatekeeper,” the outer vagina and labia, and awaits permission for further entry, whether by hand, tongue, or penis; and the subsequent opening of the vagina is itself a complex, gradual, and graduated process, which develops over time and under the influence of various attentions and entreaties. In the West, the “opening” of the vagina is understood to be subject simply to a woman parting her legs, or a man’s penetration of it with his penis; the vagina opens, in the West, like a mechanism, or like a door, a curtain, or a box. The Eastern model of vaginal opening, in contrast, is more akin to an “unfolding” or an “unfurling,” a “coming alive” or an “expansion”—more like a time-lapse photograph, like a lotus expanding in the sun.
And I took away from my Tantric explorations a wonderful phrase. As my friends and I now sometimes joke—or half joke—to one another, when narrating a romantic adventure, “But what did the yoni have to say?”
14
Radical Pleasure, Radical Awakening: The Vagina as Liberator
Today I want to paint nakedness . . . I wish you . . . would take me out into the night—way out there into the dark blueness—and that the day would never come . . .
—Georgia O’Keeffe
The more I learned about both the latest brain science around female arousal, and about the ancient practice of Tantra, the more it seemed that a group of Hindu spiritual seekers centuries ago had figured out pretty fully a set of insights about the mind-body connection in sexuality with which Western science was only now beginning to catch up.
Indeed, these two traditions, the Western medical/sexological and the Eastern Tantric, are starting to inform each other. Since I first met with Lousada, he has further developed a prominent practice consulting with, and presenting methodological papers to, mainstream physicians’ groups focused on sexual health and dysfunction in women.
When Lousada was gazing deeply into a client’s eyes, he was stimulating the neurobiological response prepared in women by eye gazing as they instinctively seek, as both genders do, to gauge from dilated pupils a possible partner’s health and arousal levels.1 When he said, “Welcome, Goddess,” he was destressing her, reassuring her on the level of her autonomic nervous system (ANS) that she was sexually safe—respected and valued, and seen as uniquely lovely by a potential partner. This allowed her system to become ready: her nipples to engorge, her skin to flush, and her vagina to lubricate. Because of the stronger connections between the hemispheres in the female brain than in the male’s, when Lousada verbalized positive imagery about her vagina, her mind and body were both better prepared to start processing sexual images and thoughts.2 Because women react with a far more pronounced relaxation response to being stroked, Lousada’s non-goal-oriented, nonpressured stroking boosts the positive female cycle of heightened relaxation to heightened arousal. Tantra, seen in this light, is really not something so mysterious at all, but rather a form of applied neuroscience, intentionally activating the brain’s connection to the sex organs.
The mysticism-inducing ANS in women—along with all of a woman’s sexual and other body systems working together in ways that go far beyond what we in the West identify as “sex” but that are nonetheless vital to women’s sexual and emotional happiness—I will call “the Goddess Network.” The things that men need to do to women to engage the Goddess Network—what sex educator Liz Topp called “the things women need that men don’t need,” and for which we, revealingly, don’t have a single name—I call “the Goddess Array.” I am especially likely to identify as part of the Goddess Array an act or gesture or caress that is confirmed by the intersection of both basic Tantric practice and recent or established scientific research, though there are no doubt countless additions and variations to this brief summary of the Goddess Array.
The data from both the Eastern and the Western traditions reveal that any man or woman can give the kind of attention the Goddess Array requires to all those areas in women that should, ideally, be reached and caressed. As Lousada put it, “patience and compassion” from men in particular, in attending to women’s sexual responses are much more important in bringing women to a high state of physical ecstasy and emotional release than is any more superficial measure of physical endowment.
Before we go through “the Goddess Array,” though, I just want to note a caveat: women are often encouraged to see public discussion of their sexuality as setting some new goal, or as being proscriptive or prescriptive. This is not my intention at all. I cannot stress enough: every woman is different. I wish to make clear that I offer these only as information—based on what works in Tantric practice, and specifically on what works in that practice that turns out to have a basis in recent science.
Some women may like all aspects of “the Goddess Array” all the time. Some will want a little of what follows, some may want a great deal; or what the same woman wants will vary at different times (including, neurobiologically, at different times of the month). Other women will never respond to this set of gestures and approaches. Still others may like these gestures and approaches often but, at other times, will prefer fast anonymous sex in dark alleyways. These gestures and approaches are points of exploration, and my discussion of them is to elucidate the mind-body connection in female sexual response.
FIRST, VALUE HER AND HELP HER
Dr. Helen Fisher pointed out, in The Anatomy of Love, that women’s evolutionary need to have a partner to help her during the vulnerable first two years of a child’s life predisposes women to value behavior from men that indicates that they are cherished and being committed to. I call this “investment behavior.” This is different, as Dr. Fisher herself points out, from the old canard of evolutionary biologists who insist that fertile young women will respond sexually to older men with money and power.3
Dr. Fisher’s persuasive theory about women benefiting in evolutionary terms by responding sexually to men who demonstrate that they can partner effectively for the baby’s vulnerable years, and who show that they can keep mother and baby safe, led me to wonder—given that this was so valuable evolutionarily to women, their bodies, indeed their vaginas—if it might prompt them to “notice” or register such actions in potential mates before their minds had paid attention, in the same way that recent science has established a biological basis for the “gut response” to others.
Both Tantra and contemporary science confirm that there is a pulse in the vagina. Indeed, several recent Western studies of female sexual response measure it. Most women are raised to pay no attention at all to this pulse outside of a sexual context. When you draw women’s attention to the delicate, ever-present, distinctive pulse in the vagina, they can note it in most circumstances, and certainly often in nonsexual contexts as well.
It seems plausible that this pulse tells a woman a great deal about how safe her emotional setting is, and how valued and safe she is sexually within it.
No one with whom I spoke, either in person or online, had ever heard of the concept of the vaginal pulse. (Neither had I before I did the research for this book.) Researchers of female sexual response actually measure it now in standardized units, in a unit of measurement called “VPA”—vaginal pulse amplitude—which is measured in turn by a “vaginal photometer,” a device that sends a light signal to track vaginal blood flow. Researchers are finding important connections between the VPA and female sexual response.4 But once women did hear the concept, and I had told them about the brain-vagina connection, none of the women with whom I spoke had any trouble at all identifying her own vaginal pulse and answering my questions.
I asked women respondents to my online survey to note when the vaginal pulse gave a particularly noticeable thump or beat in a nonsexual context. What was happening?
Some wome
n confirmed that the “thump” or “stronger than usual beat” of the vaginal pulse, as two respondents put it, resulted from some behavior by a partner or husband that was kind, or that showed an ability to protect effectively, or that demonstrated “investment behavior.” (Unfortunately, I did not receive answers from women who identified themselves as lesbian or bisexual to this informal survey; a quantitative study that would show whether women of all sexualities experience the pulse in the same ways when their lovers do similar things, or whether different things trigger the pulse in women of different sexualities, would be fascinating, of course.)
“I felt the vaginal pulse when my boyfriend and I were grocery shopping in a supermarket and he remembered—I had forgotten—that we needed cat food for my cat.”
“I felt the pulse when my husband took me out to dinner on my birthday and he drew out my chair for me.”
“We were camping and I realized my pillow smelled moldy. My husband gave me his pillow, so he didn’t have one; he used his coat. I felt it then. Sometimes the pulse is so hard it is almost uncomfortable. I definitely wanted to make love then, to relieve the tension.”
“My husband was teaching our son to fix his bike. I felt it.”
Some women reported feeling a vaginal pulse when their partner showed physical strength, artistic creativity, or certain kinds of skill or self-mastery or emotional openness:
“I felt it when we were at the dump! He knelt and lifted up an old couch we were getting rid of, and threw it off the back of the truck.”
“When we were at a family event, and I noticed him spending time talking to my elderly grandmother, which takes a lot of patience.”
“When we were first dating, and I watched him drive really skillfully on a rainy road.”
“When I heard him sing for the first time.”
“When he cooked breakfast for me.”
Many of the women’s responses to these questions showed that while a man’s ability to offer emotional security and caring can have erotic effects on straight women, so, too, can the promise of a man’s capacity for creativity and for adventure or risk. Dr. Pfaus explains this seeming contradiction with the dual nature of the female ANS—it likes to be relaxed and then it likes to be activated. This certainly helps explain why in generation after generation, adolescent girls and young women scream with sexual excitement after being sung to by male rock stars and balladeers; the singing activates the ANS. He also noted that the female ANS relaxes best when free from “bad stress,” but that “good stress,” like dangerously exciting scenarios that the woman still controls, can be sexually compelling, especially to those women with low baseline ANS activation.
But what I certainly did not expect to see were answers revealing that women experienced the vaginal beat more strongly in entirely nonsexual and even nonrelationship contexts—settings in which they encountered aesthetic beauty or natural beauty, in which they were being creative, or in which they asserted their own power or identity. This would suggest that a woman’s relationship to her own mind and body is erotic first; that her existential excitement at being alive and responsive to the world around her is erotic first; and that this eros comes before any erotic awakening triggered by an “other”:
“I felt it beat one night when I was filling my car at a gas station. I was facing a state park mountain range, and I noticed a mass of fog coming in over the tops of the mountains. I felt the thump when I realized how beautiful and majestic the scene was.”
“I was listening to a Mozart Requiem, and in a section with cascading notes, I felt the pulse.”
And a man reported: “I had a female friend who had an orgasm while we were hiking, just from the beauty of the trees and the riverbank on which we were standing.”
The vaginal beat even showed up stronger in contexts of competition, winning, or ego validation: “I felt the pulse when a coworker who had done something unethical—which I had known about, but no one had believed me—was found out. I am not proud of that but it is true. I felt powerful.”
“I felt it when I crossed the finish line in a marathon.”
“I felt the pulse at my first art show when I listened to people praising my work.”
“At the racetrack.”
The vaginal pulse is evidently not just a way for a woman to discern her own sexual arousal: it also seems to be a way for the vagina continually to inform the woman about herself on many other levels.
BRING HER FLOWERS; DIM THE LIGHTS; RELAX HER
In Spike Lee’s 1986 film She’s Gotta Have It, the following dialogue takes place between a man and a woman who have just begun kissing.
“Where are you going?” the man asks, surprised, as the young woman, Nola, gets up out of bed.
“To get the candles,” she replies seductively.
“Are you sure you have enough?” He gestures at the dozens of candles behind them, sarcastically.
“Don’t you smell them? The candles, they’re scented,” she replies, still low-voiced.
“Yeah, they smell good,” he replies abruptly. “Now, why don’t you undress?”
This is a classic gender miscommunication. Nola isn’t just trying to “get the candles”; she is trying to get into an altered, heightened ANS state that will affect the intensity of her orgasm. But her male lover thinks she is just wasting time on pointless atmospherics that could be better spent cutting to the chase.
For Nola’s brain, the candlelight is part of her physical desire, not just some random decor. In Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain, she explains the neurochemistry of this:
Finally, everything was in place. Her mind was calm. The massage did the trick. Vacation was always the best place. No work, no worries, no phone, no email. No place else for Marcie’s brain to run. . . . She could let go and let it happen. Her brain’s anxiety center was shutting down. The area for conscious decision making wasn’t lighting up so intensely. The neurochemical and neurological constellations were aligning for orgasm. . . . Female sexual turn-on begins, ironically, with a brain turn-off. The impulses can rush to the pleasure centers and trigger an orgasm only if the amygdala—the fear and anxiety center of the brain—has been deactivated. Before the amygdala has been turned off, any last-minute worry . . . can interrupt the march toward orgasm. The fact that a woman requires this extra neurologiocal step may account for why it takes her an average three to ten times longer than the typical man to reach orgasm. . . . Nerves in the tip of the clitoris connect straight to the pleasure center in the female brain . . . if fear, stress or guilt interfere with stimulation, the clitoris is stopped dead in its tracks. . . . The clitoris really is the brain below the waist.5
The quality of women’s orgasms is measurably affected by lighting and by the “coziness” and beauty of the surroundings in which they are making love. Lousada had started his session by seating the “Goddess,” whomever she might be, next to an altar filled with flowers, and before a beautiful tangka, or embroidered sacred tapestry. He also lit candles. In Charles and Caroline Muir’s Tantric “sacred spot” weekend workshops, the men are carefully instructed to prepare by drawing a bath in the hotel suite for the woman in the couple. Tantric texts always advise couples to make certain that lovemaking takes place in a setting in which there is beauty and order: to put a lotus or other flowers in water near the bed, and burn incense in front of an elegantly appointed shrine full of lovely pictures or statues. The ancient goddesses of female sexuality and fertility, from Inanna to Astarte to Aphrodite, were associated not just with sex but also with flowers, the decorative arts, adornment, and aesthetic beauty.
While this kind of aesthetic preparation may seem extreme and cumbersomely lengthy to a Western reader, and is certainly not practicable at an hour-and-a-half minimum on an everyday basis, it should never be dismissed as trivial. This Tantric advice is grounded in neuroscience: soft lights, flowers, preparation gestures in tribute to her comfort such as running her a bath, are all far more likely to put a woman into t
he state of deep relaxation that will prepare her ANS for much higher levels of arousal than sex without these preparatory gestures.
This set of preparation gestures is also often erotic to women even when they engage in them alone. When a woman puts on soft lingerie and perfume or lights candles and fills her room with flowers, it often makes her feel aroused and capable of arousing. This transitional preparation changes a woman’s body’s responses, and her relaxation allows for the play of her imagination.
Is the Tantric (and Sumerian, Phoenician, Cretan, Hellenic, and so on) association of female sexuality with flowers and adornment, in this hard-core age of ours, a kind of Ganges-via-Northern-California hooey? Or is there in fact something deep in feminine neurobiology that these ancients clearly understood? Why do men who are courting bring flowers—especially lushly petalled, vulval flowers such as red roses—and why will any control group of heterosexual women instinctively agree that they don’t want the guy who brings chrysanthemums, or carnations? Why does it seem to matter, erotically, if the flowers were ordered thoughtfully in advance, or picked up hastily at the deli down the street, and offered in their plastic wrapping?
Why does it come to really matter to many women who have been in long relationships if their husbands stop bringing flowers altogether—and certainly if they forget to send flowers on Valentine’s Day? Why are women so sensitive—why is it such a big deal?
Could it be because there is something about this thing—so often forgotten, or overlooked—that women need, in order to protect and maintain a strong sexual response to their mates? The answer is yes. Not every woman will want candles, flowers, or music; some will want other kinds of more provocative focus, but virtually every woman will want some unique preparatory tributes or gestures. Even if she just wants a hot fast physical encounter, she will want it more if he has made some gesture that she experiences as romantic, or as communicating his desire, at another point in the day. When men over time “forget” to do these things or think that they don’t matter anymore—the woman is married to him now, for instance, so why actually “seduce” her each time sex is on the agenda?—they inadvertently virtually guarantee that their wives will have more trouble wanting them passionately, over a period of time.
