by Betty Dodson
My counsel was the following: As a mature woman, she didn’t have to wait any mandatory length of time before having sex. Receiving oral sex would be safe for her partner, but she would need to know a lot more about him to fully reciprocate. Manual sex would be totally safe. When it came to intercourse, she was not to rely on a man having condoms or to assume he would know how to correctly use one. A whole session was devoted to her learning how to put a condom on a dildo and practicing until she could do it with ease. She had an affair with a married man that lasted a year. As it turned out, they never had sexual intercourse. The guy was Catholic and didn’t want to cheat on his wife. So they did everything else, which worked fine for her. She found the affair very exciting and looked forward to each of her business trips to Europe until it ended.
Although Suzanne never told her husband about the affair, she did tell him she’d recently learned how to have orgasms with an electric vibrator and wanted to use one when they had sex together. She’d actually been using a vibrator for ten years while hiding it from her husband, convinced he’d be devastated if he found out. Instead, he was thrilled with his newly orgasmic wife, and they had a sexual renaissance.
Even an affair that’s kept secret can bring a couple closer together—contrary to what moralists will tell you. We often appreciate our spouses even more after we’ve been sexual with someone else. The idea or fantasy of having sex with someone new is usually better than the actual experience.
There have been a few groups that have tried to get away from the troubling aspect of owning another person in the name of love. The Oneida community was a religious group whose members were encouraged not to form permanent attachments because it divided the group. Eventually people paired off and it failed. The sixties and seventies had communes that were intentional communities where the members made an effort to get beyond monogamy and to initiate more sexual freedom. Married couples called “swingers” continue to share sex with other couples. More recently there are people who identify themselves as polyamorous. They believe it’s possible to sexually love more than one person. Jealousy is still a factor in all of these alternatives.
Nowadays, many people claim the threat of disease is too great a risk and they use the fear of contracting AIDS as a reason or an excuse to be monogamous. Some men and women feel insecure when faced with the idea of having sex with another person for the first time—they like monogamy. Others suspect they are lousy in bed and sex outside the marriage is too threatening—they prefer monogamy. One man said he was monogamous out of laziness.
Since jealousy appears to be as inevitable as war, most couples maintain a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. This is probably the easiest solution for partners who stray. A girlfriend of mine has a weekend lover and he thinks she’s monogamous. He has no idea she’s enjoying the occasional sexual fling during the week. Many wives have said they suspect their husband has been unfaithful, but they don’t want to know about it. Some women say they don’t care if their husband fools around as long as he comes home to them. Other married couples are so angry at each other that neither cares what the other is doing sexually. It’s the rare couple that excites each other by describing their extramarital sex in detail, but they do exist.
Whether women control, deny, or express their jealous feelings, my hope is that we will learn to stop glorifying the emotion like it is justified and take an honest look at what we are doing. We have been programmed to cling to jealousy and nurture these devastating feelings of loss and abandonment. Sexual possessiveness and jealousy are not natural, as many assume. Jealousy is a learned response that grows out of the myth of romantic love. We are promised passionate sex with one person who will be exclusively devoted to us throughout our lifetime. Today the only alternative to monogamy is the acceptance of serial monogamy, where people have several or many marriages.
It is my firm belief that jealousy turns into a cancerous growth that eats away at our self-esteem, inner strength, and creativity. For anyone who might be interested in managing the devastating feelings of sexual possessiveness and the ensuing fear of loss, here are a few actions I have taken to heal myself.
1. When jealousy is so intense that it makes me feel physically ill, I masturbate to orgasm and reaffirm my sexual worth with more self-loving.
2. Whenever I feel hurt because I think I’m being left out, I tell my partner how I feel without expressing anger or blame.
3. When my partner’s behavior hurts my feelings, instead of upping the ante by hurting back, I remember that revenge, retribution, and getting even is like spitting into a fan and getting it back in my face.
4. When we are walking down the street and my partner ogles a movie-star type, I start cruising others while making comments on how great they look.
5. When I imagine being left for someone else, instead of actually rehearsing the death of our relationship, I return to the present moment and appreciate the joy we are currently sharing.
6. If I think my partner is having more fun than I am, I take a closer look at how I can improve the quality of my life and enjoy myself more.
In view of the fact that the ideal of monogamy will most likely continue to endure or only very gradually change, at the very least, we need to find a way to forgive our loved ones for the occasional sexual transgression. Love has the capacity to let go. Loving others is not about restricting their behavior and then punishing them if they break a moralistic rule that is for the most part unrealistic. That’s not about loving someone, it’s about controlling them. Maybe the day will come when people’s self-love will be sufficient to eliminate sexual pairbondage. Until then, I choose to remain optimistic as I practice nonpossessive sex.
6
DID YOU COME?
The Mystery of the Female Orgasm
Female orgasm has been described in countless romantic ballads as well as measured under the bright lights of scientific scrutiny, yet it still remains a mystery. The sexual orgasm is one of my favorite metaphors for life: I have often experienced these heightened moments of pleasure in my body, mind, and soul, yet I can never fully describe what happens with words. I’ve had some orgasms that are barely perceptible, others felt as good as a sneeze, and then there are those orgasms that have turned me into a quivering mass of utter delight as I transcend space and time, soaring through a star-filled universe. But there I go with another description of orgasm that feeds into the already existing romantic myths.
After four decades of observing women’s orgasms socially and professionally, even I have resorted to asking the dreaded question, “Did you come?” No wonder the same question rests on so many men’s lips. One of the reasons women dislike being asked is because many of us do not have orgasm during partner sex. Sometimes the woman herself may not know if she came or, in some cases, she is deliberately faking orgasm. Since men often measure their sexual ability by a woman’s response, women who are not orgasmic worry that their lovers might stray. So whether we lie to protect his ego or admit the truth, we feel sexually inadequate.
There is no law that says all women must be orgasmic. Many say they enjoy the affection and closeness of sexual intercourse without a climax. While it’s true that an orgasmic woman doesn’t have to come every time she has partner sex, if she isn’t coming some of the time, she will eventually see intercourse as a tiresome routine. Why is it that something as fundamental as an orgasm continues to elude so many women or become such a long painful process to learn? I believe the answer lies somewhere between the romantic misinformation that falling in love will automatically include orgasmic partner sex, the repression of female masturbation, and women not being taught sexual skills.
The greatest tragedy for women in recent history came about when Dr. Sigmund Freud formulated his theory that the clitoris was an infantile source of pleasure and that once a woman fully submitted to the sexual act, the excitement she once felt in her clitoris would be transferred to the vagina. One might ask how he arrived at this conclusion s
ince he didn’t have a clitoris or a vagina. Perhaps Mrs. Freud was faking a few to keep hubby happy. Although he was a brilliant and brave man, Freud’s infamous theory has kept countless numbers of women from becoming orgasmic. Despite ample evidence that the clitoris is the source of orgasm for most women, vaginal orgasm as a result of intercourse remains the preferred kind of partner sex to this day.
When I came of age in the fifties, I was desperate to be “sexually mature.” That meant phasing out masturbation and going through the tedious process of learning how to come from a man’s penis moving inside my vagina. It was no easy matter. After much trial and error and many missed climaxes, I discovered that if I got on top during intercourse and established a rhythm, I could climax some of the time. When I found a lover who could sustain an erection for at least fifteen minutes (which wasn’t easy), it would still take weeks before I felt secure enough to get on top. At that point he became the source of all of my orgasms. Within a year of two, one of us would fall out of love and we would break up. Once again I would be back to doing “immature” clitoral masturbation.
By the time William Masters and Virginia Johnson hailed the primacy of the clitoris in the sixties, I was already divorced and enjoying intercourse combined with direct manual clitoral stimulation. Masters and Johnson claimed that clitoral and vaginal orgasms were not separate biological entities—regardless of the source of stimulation, all orgasms centered in the clitoris. Then later, amazingly enough, they contradicted their own findings with a description of indirect clitoral stimulation that was so utterly bizarre it degenerated into a modified version of vaginal orgasm. They stated that the thrusting action of the penis exerted traction on the vaginal opening, specifically the inner lips, which caused the hood covering the clitoris to move back and forth, stimulating the head of the clitoris. In the end, Mr. Penis retained the crown as the most legitimate source of a woman’s orgasm.
In the sixties, I also discovered the writings of Wilhelm Reich, who had been a student of Freud. In his book The Function of the Orgasm, Reich not only describes the process of orgasm but also the necessity of experiencing consistent sexual release. Like Freud, he believed a woman could climax from intercourse if she had a man who was potent. Freud and Reich never got to read the Kinsey report, which put America’s national average time of thrusting with full erection after penetration at two and a half minutes. That’s barely enough time to get me interested in sex, let alone have an orgasm.
ORGASMS FOR TWO
Although I differed with Reich on the function of the clitoris, I agreed with him on many of his other ideas about orgasm and partner sex. In another one of his books, The Sexual Revolution, Reich spoke about “compulsory heterosexuality” and “compulsory monogamous marriage” as problems rather than sacred cows—a very radical concept that totally intrigued me, since I had been questioning both in terms of my own life.
In 1970, the President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography recommended the repeal of all laws prohibiting the distribution of sexually explicit materials to consenting adults. The floodgates opened as feminist articles and books started breaking down traditional notions of female sexuality that had been formulated by male researchers. The first article to inspire me to action was “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” written by Anne Koedt. I was so impressed that I made an appointment to see her and get reprints of her article to pass out to all the women in my CR group.
In 1971, my art and sexual views appeared in an interview in Evergreen, an avant-garde magazine published by Grove Press. The article was accompanied by a large sampling of my sex drawings, along with positive statements about the importance of masturbation to women’s sexual liberation. That led to an editor from the recently formed Ms. magazine requesting an article from me on masturbation. When I submitted seventeen pages titled “Liberating Masturbation,” the editors feared my views would cause women to cancel their subscriptions. They said they might publish the article at a later date, when they felt the time was right. Infuriated to think feminists had censored me, I published several thousand copies and began distributing the information myself.
While many feminists struggled with my ideas about women’s sexual liberation, sex professionals were interested; Ed Brecher, a noted author and sex researcher, was extremely supportive. He agreed that most women could learn to have orgasms through masturbation, and then use that knowledge to become orgasmic with a partner. Wardell Pomeroy, who worked with Alfred Kinsey, and Albert Ellis, who has written hundreds of books on sex, also supported my views on the importance of female masturbation. Alex Comfort was heartbroken when I didn’t do the line illustrations for The Joy of Sex. However, I did illustrate Helen Kaplan’s The New Sex Therapy. At the time, Dr. Kaplan headed the sex therapy program at the Payne Whitney Clinic of New York Hospital.
Kaplan came to my studio the day I’d hired a photographer to shoot the sex positions we had discussed. While Grant and I took the poses naked, Helen directed us to do this and that. After showing her my favorite right-angle position, where I did my own clitoral simulation during intercourse, I gave an impassioned plea for her to include a drawing of it in her book. The drawing appeared, but a disclaimer went with it saying a woman stimulates herself to a point just prior to orgasm and stops. She then has her climax from his penis “thrusting vigorously,” thereby having a “coital orgasm.” Kaplan said a woman who needed clitoral stimulation all the way to orgasm during intercourse didn’t necessarily represent a treatment failure, but her bias was crystal clear.
My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday came out in 1973, and although the content of women’s sexual fantasies shocked many, her book sold millions of copies. Her many informants made it obvious that women not only masturbated, but they did it with images that were bawdy and very unladylike. Ms. magazine wouldn’t even review Nancy’s book, but they finally published a couple of pages from my original article after having shelved it for over two years. In response to their heavily edited version, thousands of women wrote in wanting more information about female masturbation and orgasm.
Unable to find a publisher that would consider doing an entire book on female masturbation, I published and began distributing Liberating Masturbation in 1974. Best of all were the sixteen full-page pen-and-ink “pussy portraits” I did of my friends showing the differences among individual genitals as well as the beauty of women’s sex organs in general. Although my book was considered part of a feminist underground, I was selling it through the U.S. Post Office. I claimed that masturbation forever put an end to the concept of frigidity. If a woman can stimulate herself to orgasm, she is sexually healthy. “Frigid” is a man’s word for a woman who can’t have an orgasm in the missionary position in a few minutes with only the kind of stimulation that’s good for him.
Lonnie Barbach followed in 1975 with her book For Yourself. At one of my early workshops in 1973, she stood in the doorway taking notes. Since Lonnie was a Ph.D. psychologist, her book helped to legitimize masturbation, but we differed on one important point: I felt masturbation could be an end in itself, and she saw it only as a way for women to learn about orgasm to improve partner sex. She, too, believed in the coital orgasm, or teaching women how to retire a vibrator so they could at least orgasm from a lover’s fingers.
The Hite Report, which entered the picture in 1976, was a remarkable though not scientific survey of female sexuality. When Shere Hite showed me her involved and complex questionnaire, I urged her to simplify it, saying there was no way women would take the time to write out essay-type answers. I was wrong. The women she contacted through NOW chapters and several magazines couldn’t wait to tell the details of their sex lives. Her conclusion that any woman could easily masturbate to orgasm is not true for all women then or now. She did not take into account the built-in bias of her survey. Middle- or upper-class white women who liked sex or were interested in the subject were the ones who took the time and trouble to fill out her questionnaire.
Any sex research
er who has the commitment and patience to gather information, run statistics, and then crunch numbers has my undying admiration. However, when it comes to presenting their findings, it’s only human that some end up proving their own subjective bias in the name of objective science.
Since my Ph.D. in sexology came much later—at the age of sixty-two—my understanding of female sexuality is primarily experiential and very subjective, with a little objectivity thrown in. Throughout all the years I’ve taught sex by doing sex, I continue to think of myself as an artist rather than an academic bound by traditional methods of statistical analysis. My strength lies in the respectable research called “working in the field.” As a self-proclaimed sexual anthropologist, I’ve been having sex with the natives in most of the major cities here and abroad. In 1966, when I first began attending sex parties, I was shocked to see how many women were accommodating men and faking orgasms.
Without the need to please a partner, it seems obvious to me that masturbation is a more direct route for women to enjoy pleasurable sensation and orgasms. Therefore how a woman masturbates needs to be translated into partner sex, not the other way around. I know there are some women who do not like direct clitoral stimulation. They start and end with vaginal stimulation, masturbating with a dildo. However, in all my years of observing female sexuality, I never once saw a woman doing clitoral stimulation until she was about to come, then grab a dildo and fuck herself to orgasm.
Although no two orgasms from self-stimulation are exactly alike, most women use some form of direct or indirect clitoral stimulation with or without penetration. The body responds with movement, no movement, and different breathing patterns from panting to holding the breath. Some women remain silent, while others make a variety of sounds. The mind can be paying attention to what a woman is feeling in her body or focused on her sexual thoughts or fantasies. During my workshops, a handful of women looked around the room, while most kept their eyes closed, listening to the sounds. Later I designed a process that allowed them to look at what was happening so they could have images of different women being sexual.
