by Betty Dodson
Next I asked if they had all examined their pussies in a mirror with a bright light while using both hands to explore inside and out. Looks of embarrassment combined with more nervous laughter. A few shook their heads. Kitty said several of them had gone to get pussy trims at a salon on 57th Street that she had recommended. They were all perfectly willing to discuss whether they had a bikini wax or they were completely nude, but when I asked if they’d seen their clitorises or knew what type of inner lips they had, no one had any idea. One woman asked, “What are inner lips?”
Out came my book. I opened it up to the pages with the vulva drawings and passed it around. Then I explained how our sex organs are like our faces, with different shapes of noses, eyes, and mouths. Every pussy is as unique as our fingerprints—a significant revelation. When I talked about different genital styles like Classical, Baroque, Renaissance, and Art Deco, several wanted to know which style guys liked the best. I said the ones that had a hole for penetration. This time I joined in the laughter that was becoming more genuine than nervous.
Brenda, who was sitting to my left, wanted to know why it was so difficult to come during intercourse. Perfect question. I asked the group how many of them could have orgasms from fucking only. A sprinkling of hands rose, including Kitty’s. When I asked her what position she used, I halfway expected her to say woman on top. Instead she said missionary position. Then I asked if she was aware of what was getting her off while they were fucking? Her explanation was clear that it was a grinding motion when she and her boyfriend pressed up against each other’s bodies. The next question was whether she thought she was getting indirect clitoral stimulation. She had no idea.
A great segue into my well-loved clitoral rap. How the clitoris is a woman’s primary sex organ, with eight thousand nerve endings, and the vagina is the birth canal. Although sisters Jennifer and Laura Berman state in their book For Women Only that 80 percent of women do not orgasm from intercourse alone, I suspected the number was closer to 90 percent if we factored in all the women faking orgasm. While a wet pussy provides ideal direct stimulation for a penis, a woman also needs some form of direct stimulation from her boyfriend’s fingers or tongue, or her fingers. If she was accustomed to using a vibrator, she could also use it during intercourse.
One of the women asked if maybe that was why she could only have an orgasm with oral sex. Several nodded in agreement. One woman asked when I was going to demonstrate how to do oral sex on a man, and several others nodded in agreement. We had just started discussing female sexual pleasure and already they wanted to know how to please a man. The female role is connected to such ancient programming that it must be encoded in our cellular structure: How can I please him so he’ll kill a wooly mammoth and bring it back to the cave to feed the children and me?
Reaching into my bag, I pulled out a Cyberskin realistic dildo with a suction cup on the bottom. Licking the base, I stuck it onto the small end table in front of me. Everyone in the room gasped at the full eight inches of dick except for one woman who said it looked just like her boyfriend’s penis. Then I explained that the average-size penis was around five and a half to six inches erect. The standard is always bigger is better when dildos are manufactured or men are cast in X-rated videos. Yet if the truth were known, most women prefer an average-size penis. It’s a shame that so many men are obsessed with penis size, believing their dicks are too small or somehow inadequate. Too bad more men don’t realize how few women can orgasm from a penis anyway.
At that point, a woman who had been continuously turning red, gasping, and covering her face finally spoke up. She admitted how embarrassed she’d been in the beginning, but now she wanted to thank me. In the last hour she’d learned more about sex than she had during her entire lifetime. Then she admitted that at twenty-eight she’d never had an orgasm. I assured her she was not alone and advised her to start masturbating so she could learn about her sexuality. Then a woman named Carol joined in, saying she’d never had an orgasm with a partner but she could give herself one. These are magic moments of freeing oneself with the truth. I recommended they both go to my website and get all the necessary information on how to proceed.
My cocksucking demo started with the information that every man is different, just like every woman. A smart lover asks what his or her partner likes. Some men prefer a very light stroke while others want a firm grip. It all depends on how he masturbates. As I spoke, I covered my hands with massage oil and started demonstrating different hand strokes. The laughter and voices talking all at once were causing quite a din in the room. Even I had to admit that watching a grandmother doing a dick with style was pretty outrageous. Yet I also knew I was a well-needed reminder that sex doesn’t end for every woman after she turns fifty, sixty, or seventy.
Continuing, I said a woman’s mouth and lips are hot to watch but most men need more stimulation to come, so it makes sense to combine hand and mouth. Of course, any woman who is skilled at doing deep throat will drive her boyfriend to untold heights of pleasure. One voice asked, “What’s ‘deep throat’?” Again I’d assumed too much; I explained that it was when a woman “swallowed” or took a man’s penis all the way down her throat. The way to learn how to do it was by accepting the gag reflex and learning to relax into it. I was willing to show them what it looked like to gag and relax, but they all thought it sounded too gross. None of them wanted to know another thing about deep throat.
Poor Linda Lovelace, the star of the porn movie Deep Throat, so famous in the seventies, was like dust on the Bible. Even the movie All the President’s Men, which used the term “deep throat” for the informant during the Watergate scandal, was not familiar to this generation. My, how times change.
Next Brenda asked what female ejaculation was all about. No longer making assumptions, I asked if anyone had read The G-Spot. None of them had even heard of it. Kitty said she’d read in a woman’s magazine, Glamour or Cosmo, that female ejaculation was definitely not urine. It was more like the fluid that came from a man’s prostate gland.
Most young women today are getting their sex misinformation from women’s magazines, in articles written by young, sexually inexperienced writers who get their information from experts who are basically talking about what they have read in books or tested with a Ph.D. thesis that relied on a questionnaire. As one of those sex experts, I am constantly being misunderstood and misquoted in magazine articles. Is it any wonder that sexual myths and out-dated information is so rampant?
When I asked how many women had ever experienced ejaculation, two out of twenty raised their hands. Brenda was convinced ejaculation came from her vagina. The other one said her former boyfriend loved it, but she thought it was weird, so with her new lover she didn’t do it. Before launching into an explanation, I asked both of them what kind of sex they were having when they squirted.
Brenda said she had to stimulate a pinpoint spot and it only happened during masturbation. At first I thought she was using some G-spot toy, but it turned out she only stimulated her clitoris with a battery-operated vibrator. The pinpoint spot was on her clit, not inside her vagina. It had only happened a few times.
Mary, the other woman, said she ejaculated when her ex-boyfriend used his fingers to rub really hard inside her vagina. When I asked how often ejaculation had occurred, she said it happened all the time with her ex, but now her new lover only uses his fingers to stimulate her clitoris. The final question was if wet orgasms were any better than dry orgasms? They both said no, not necessarily.
Getting out the diagrams from A New View of a Woman’s Body, I showed them the internal structure of the clitoris and the drawing that showed a model’s finger inside her vagina pressing up on the ceiling into the urethral sponge. The sponge protected the urinary tract from getting irritated from the friction of a penis moving in and out of the vagina. Inside the sponge is a small paraurethral gland, which led some to speculate that’s where the fluid came from. It had been established that the fluid exits the ureth
ra, not the vagina. One study in which female ejaculators were catheterized concluded the fluid was dilute urine and it came from the bladder.
The whole room went crazy over the thought that female ejaculation might be urine. That was disgusting! However, when they thought it was prostatic fluid similar to male ejaculate, it was desirable because it demonstrated that a woman’s level of sexual arousal was so high that it made her “come” like a man. That’s why “female ejaculators” repeatedly state, “It doesn’t smell or taste like urine.” The idea of enjoying urinating during sex was a filthy, dirty, nasty idea, while ejaculation sounded sexy.
To allow for the few women who might have fluid emission during orgasm, I explained as long as a woman has a strong PC muscle, and she isn’t bearing down, forcing it to happen, squirting is simply a part of her orgasm. I added that there are also some couples who enjoy peeing for fun and there was no need to judge them for their sexual preference.
By then the Barbell had made the rounds, so I discussed the importance of exercising the PC, or pubococcygeal, muscle. First I described how to locate the muscle by stopping the flow of urine or inserting a finger inside the vagina and squeezing the muscle on it. Then I had everyone do several rounds of squeeze and release, telling them that a strong PC muscle would enhance their orgasms. Their boyfriends would also feel them gripping his penis with their muscular vaginas during partner sex. They liked that idea a lot.
We took a break to refill our drinks while Kitty served cake. Ellen, the bride to be, began opening all her presents. It was the usual fare, with sexy lingerie, a few gag gifts, a couple of feather boas, and a book for her wedding photos. I told her she could choose any one of the toys I’d brought as a wedding present from me. She chose the Cyberskin dildo. When I asked if she intended to fuck her husband on their wedding night, we all broke up laughing, including Ellen, and we made good eye contact for the first time. Later on, she changed her mind and decided to take the small battery vibrator instead. Of course, I thought that was a much better choice. I told her clitoral stimulation rather than vaginal penetration takes most of us a lot farther, sexually speaking. Best of all is the combination of both.
As we sat around talking informally, I discovered that Ellen and her boyfriend had been living together for the past four years. They had made a decision not to have sex for a whole month just before they got married to make their wedding night special. One married woman reminded her that they would be too tired to have sex after the wedding ceremony. They’d probably wait and make love the next day.
Since I’d been writing about marriage and monogamy, out of curiosity, I asked Ellen what she’d do if she ever caught her husband cheating. She said she’d get a divorce immediately. It had already happened once since they’d been together, and he’d vowed it would never happen again. Here were two adorable twenty-something kids with a minimum of experience with other people, yet monogamy was an ironclad rule.
Again, out of curiosity, I asked the women what was the favorite kind of birth control these days. There were only two—the pill and condoms. Several of the women who were living with their boyfriends were still using condoms. They had no idea they were missing the exquisite sensation of a bare penis moving inside a slippery vagina, but what you haven’t experienced you can’t miss. I told them that as a sex educator, I was dedicated to safe sex, but believe me, if I had a choice, condoms would be at the bottom of my list. The pill fucks around with our hormones, so I’d use a diaphragm and agree to be fluid-bonded. The diaphragm was now a birth control fossil and no one knew the term “fluid-bonded.”
My explanation was that any woman on the pill, using a diaphragm, or who was postmenopausal made an agreement with her partner not to exchange any bodily fluids (especially semen) with another person. If either of them ever had sex outside their pairbond, they promised to always use a condom. I emphasized that this arrangement required total trust and honesty. These young women saw monogamy as a fact of life, so the possibility that either they or their boyfriend might want to have sex outside the relationship didn’t exist.
Looking back, I remember feeling exactly the same way when I was in my twenties, but neither I nor my partner was ever totally successful at being faithful. Cheating was an excuse to break up to find a new, more exciting lover.
After saying good-bye with hugs and kisses, I walked home thinking about how these women’s lives were different from mine at the same age. In the fifties as well as the sixties, a woman had to choose between having a career and raising a family. During the seventies and eighties, women were told they could have it all, which meant holding down two full-time jobs—a career and motherhood. The “have it all” generation waited until they were well into their thirties to have babies.
The two women who were pregnant at the shower planned on going back to work eventually, but they intended to spend some quality time raising one or more children. Was honoring motherhood a new trend for generation-X? I certainly hoped so. Raising a child well just might be one of the most creative of all art forms, and it needed to be a conscious commitment not an accident.
Another thing different from my generation was that many of us married our high school sweethearts because serial monogamy wasn’t an option. When I moved to New York City at twenty, everyone back home assumed I would end up a prostitute if I didn’t get married the first year. Back in the fifties, any woman who had more than one or two sex partners was considered a whore, and living with a man before marriage was living in sin. The married women at the party had all lived with their boyfriends before they made it official, and several of the single women were currently living with their boyfriends. That was one of the big differences.
However, many of the old sexual myths prevailed—women having their orgasms from penis/vagina sex, men keeping their promises to be monogamous, and living happily ever after in marital bliss. Although these women were all computer literate and they lived in one of the most sophisticated cities in the world, traditional romance, love, and marriage was still everyone’s favorite sexual fantasy.
All those college courses, books, videos, movies, and the Internet hadn’t made much of a dent in female sexuality since the fifties. At least growing up in Kansas I saw dogs, cats, rabbits, and horses fucking. That alone gave me some awareness of the raw power of sex. These city girls had access to a lot more sexual information than I did, but in terms of developing sexual skills and being knowledgeable about their own bodies and orgasms, they were not that much farther along.
In other words, we hadn’t come a long way, baby. Our so-called new information age wasn’t getting through on the sexual level. Each new generation still has to rediscover the wheel all over again. We wonder why there is so much violence in America, yet so few have the courage to embrace its opposite—sexual pleasure.
Still, I had to give these young women credit. Having a sex educator at a bridal shower was one of the smartest ideas I’d ever heard of. Two of Kitty’s friends wanted to hire me for an upcoming shower, so I have a new career if I want one. Just about the time I think I’m ready to chill out with a little time to putter, the phone starts ringing off the hook again. Since oversexed grannies are fairly rare these days, it looks as if I’m going to continue to be in great demand. Although I’m always complaining about having so many projects to complete, I’d rather be busy than bored.
5
LOVING OTHERS
Defusing the Power Struggle
The day I got married, the minister asked my husband if he would promise to love, honor, and cherish me. I was then asked if I would love, honor, and obey him. The ceremony ended with, “I now pronounce you man and wife.” He was still himself while I had the new title of “wife,” a role that would change my very identity, complete with a new last name. When two people fall in love they become one—the problem is which one.
This ongoing power struggle exists in most marriages unless one partner or the other takes the traditional role of the dutiful wife. While
it’s true that some women are happy with a subordinate position, that doesn’t mean this dynamic will work for all of us. A few couples have a role reversal where the husband defers to his wife—a widespread but rarely mentioned marital dynamic that society pretends doesn’t exist because it’s not considered appropriate behavior. A relatively recent role for a man is househusband. A few men are happy staying at home caring for the children while their wife goes off to the office. Some couples both bring in an income and they share household chores and child care, but it’s never completely equal, so they still have their power struggles, maybe just a little bit less.
I will never forget, after we were married, the early stage of playing the role of “His Wife.” One day I’d spent hours cleaning every inch of the apartment. That evening, my husband came home to a beautifully set table with dinner simmering on the stove à la Good Housekeeping. He didn’t seem to notice, so I joyfully pointed out my domestic masterpiece. He went over to a window and ran his finger over the top of the sash and showed me the dirt I’d missed. A white-hot rage shot through me. I’d seen some jackass of a man do that in a movie. Something snapped inside me and I was awakened from my “Happily Married” dream.
After many arguments about the housework being my responsibility because he earned the money, I finally said, “Bullshit!” I worked every day in my art studio, and from now on we would be sharing the housework. His annoying habit of leaving his shoes on the living room floor ended when I put them in the freezer. By the end of our first year, any resemblance to a traditional marriage had vanished. My demands for equality didn’t help our already troubled sex life, which eventually disappeared, too. Ours was a marriage doomed to fail when I scratched my seven-year itch.
