Leave it to me to bogart the pussy.
The pussy isn’t mine, it isn’t real and it isn’t the only one I’ll be seeing in the next few days. It is a luxuriant, anatomically correct pillow about the size of a large cat (no kidding).
It belongs to Sheri Winston, sex educator, counselor, former nurse practitioner/midwife and founder of the Center for the Intimate Arts, who is here in Orlando, Fla., to teach classes on Wholistic Sexuality. It’s an approach that feels intuitive, taking broad scope of influences into account — culture, history, biology and mostly our relationship with oursevles — in helping us develop our sexual potential. Winston’s pillow has a velvety vestibule, silky lips and a pearly little clitoris that winks out from the upper center, all to better illustrate points in some of the 52 classes she feels a passionate calling to teach.
The class we’re in now, Maps of the Clitoris: Unlocking the Keys to Female Pleasure, (also the name of Winston’s book, due out in October) is, in part, a detailed lesson in anatomy, and the pillow is being passed around so we can get a 3-D appreciation for what she’s describing.
I admire and hector it just a little longer than I should, when Winston asks for it back to stress a point: women have just as much erectile tissue as men — you just can’t see it as well. By the time full arousal occurs in us, she says, holding the pillow, “You should have a handful of pussy at that point.”
The more highly aroused we are, the better sex should feel: “You should not have anything in your vagina unless it feels fabulous.” She advises us to check ourselves out with a mirror at various stages of fullness to see what she means.
Thankfully, this is homework.
Most of us have either a comic or uncomfortable image of adult sex-ed class, from Kathy Bates’ queasiness at the thought of squatting over a hand mirror in “Fried Green Tomatoes” to more explicit goings-on on late-night cable.
Winston’s class thankfully requires minimum nerve. Although I’ve written quite a lot about sex in the past few years, and have been having it even longer, this is my first sex-ed class as an adult, and Winston’s warm enthusiasm and humor is a relaxing intro. For most of the people in my first class with her — including a mom, grandma and daughter — this is a first.
“We still have … a sort of 1950s mentality — a strong religious and moral code — which says that below-the-waist and above-the-knees is something that should be disavowed,” says Dawn Jensen of Orlando, a team leader and independent consultant for Passion Parties, and founder of an interactive adult sex-ed service, the Sensual Coach.
To the cognoscenti in more sophisticated cities, adults taking classes to have better sex might be commonplace, but Winston’s visit to the Florida School of Holistic Living in Orlando presents a somewhat unique opportunity for those of us who don’t encounter this sort of thing every day to learn about sex in a nonsexual environment.
She likens great sex to a great spot for swimming out in the woods, to which you’ve either been given no map or a shitty map. When you get lost, you don’t think, “What’s wrong with this map?” you think, “What’s wrong with me?”
“I thought there was something wrong with me,” one of the women in class said of a very early experience she had with female ejaculation. She was 18 when her equally young partner freaked about it, thinking it was incontinence. That freaked her out.
From then on she held back, afraid it would happen again. She didn’t realize it was not only perfectly fine, but it was desirable enough that people would come to classes like these to learn how to do it.
Several of Winston’s classes this week center around variations on the orgasm — multiple, extended, ejaculatory or orgasms — things many people think are rare: only “special” people get these heightened sensations. Not true, Winston says.
Anyone can do it. You just need someone to help you learn how.
Doin’ What Comes Naturally
Sex is natural. Next to eating chips in front of the TV, you probably won’t come up with a more natural human function. Who needs a class when we animals do these things by instinct alone — right? Biology conquers all?
“We do know [that’s] not true for people. It’s not even true for animals,” says Dr. Marlene Zuk, professor of biology at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can’t Learn About Sex from Animals. “Not that animals have to work for simultaneous orgasms,” she jokes, but if you have weird circumstances, biology might not get the last word.
“It turns out that if you take a baby monkey, and you raise it without the companionship of other monkeys, when it grows up, physiologically it’s fine, but it won’t know what to do in terms of sex,” Zuk says, citing the landmark studies of Dr. Harry Harlow, whose controversial work in the 1950s (the famous “cloth mother / wire mother” studies) gave us an idea of the importance of affection and socialization to all facets of healthy development.
The monkeys who were raised apart from parents and peers “when [they] encountered members of the opposite sex, they just screamed and ran.” Monkeys raised around only peers their own age did better, and those raised in normal circumstances were fine.
The point is that biology alone didn’t cut it.
“Animals don’t need to see somebody else having sex to know how to have sex themselves — it’s not like they were learning, ‘Oh, that’s where that goes,’ ” Zuk says. “It’s more that if you grow up knowing how to interact socially, you know how to interact sexually.”
In other words … it’s holistic.
“We see sex as something we do with someone else,” Winston says, “we see it as something outside ourselves. But sexual energy is the life force,” and shouldn’t be compartmentalized. “It’s about our family, our friends, our community, the media,” it’s how we interact with the world.
But as easily as many of us interact with the world, we’re not always eager to bring it our sexual questions.
“(Women are) programmed from an early age to accept Cosmo’s version of mind-blowing sex, and most men and women don’t understand that on average most women don’t orgasm during sex,” or that it takes women an average of 20 minutes to get fully aroused, Jensen says. Women “often don’t know how to please themselves, and if they don’t know what they want, they don’t know how to ask for what they want.”
What everyone wants most, she says, is permission — to be playful, to relax and to ask.
“Men are receptive and as inquisitive as the women are,” she says. When she hears, “Men don’t know what they’re doing,” she thinks “Yeah, they were never informed by our gym teacher,” about our anatomy. “Men are cause-and-effect oriented … if you tell them that you can put two fingers in the inner vaginal wall and make this motion, like ‘Come hither,’ then you’ll be creating a sensation for her G-spot, it’s like, ‘Ooooooooh!’ The look on their face is priceless. It’s like they need permission to be boys again,” to enjoy the intimacy of play.
One gentleman came to her after his wife had left a party, which was unusual because, usually it’s women who stay to order toys. He just seemed lost and didn’t know what to do for his wife, a beautiful woman who refused to have sex with the lights on and to whom he’d give 30 minute massages before intercourse.
“I’d just love for her to be OK with herself,” he told Jensen, a key problem for a lot of people and a reiteration of Winston’s point: That our relationship with ourselves is key to our sexual development
“We have to accept ourselves for what we are and what we’re not,” Jensen says. “We always think we’re distinct and separate, but we all have the same fears and need for love and acceptance.”
Back in Winston’s Maps class, our commonality is clear, but how much we all differ is brought squarely home when she shows a series of photos of vulvas.
Sounds funny, but despite ownership, most women don’t really see tons of vaginas — even for a good look at our own we need a mirror and a miner’s helmet.
If we see them in porn, they’re either manicured or busy — not quite the comparison we need in the real world.
This vulva gallery therefore is so simple yet so inspired — an art show we carry around and never look at.
The differences are profound and lovely — some are drapey and flowerlike, some have bigger labia, some are spare and simple, and frankly there are more hair variations than at the Westminster dog show.
I’ve never put this much abstract thought into the subject before, and like much of Winston’s teaching, the impact of it won’t hit me for a while, but when it does it will be big. While it’s steeping, however, I’m just doing the things she advises. Like breathing.
Not that I really need instructions to breathe, but this typically thoughtless, carefree act feels like a performance at Lincoln Center when you’re supposed to do it loudly in a group of nine strangers.
It’s my first exercise in my first class with Winston, called “SexCraft,” which promises some insight into several orgasm-enhancing techniques, including “hands-off self-arousal” (which I cynically think would be very helpful when boring people are talking, not to mention a real time saver).
After she gives us some introductory thoughts (many of which I’ve shared in earlier places in this story), we start doing our first breathing exercises. We’re spread out across the room, sort of like gingerbread people on a baking sheet. There are two men and seven women in the class — both of the men are there with a partner.
Most of us are sitting cross-legged on the floor, but some lie down on cushions with their knees bent, like you would if you were looking at cloud pictures. With our eyes closed (partly to keep us focused on ourselves, partly to keep from making eye contact, which could be weird), Winston asks us to breathe deeply, and on the exhale to give it some volume — her own exhale is a long, loud and languorous, a breath with vibrations you can feel.
“If you don’t make the sound, you won’t have the full experience,” Winston says, adding that it will encourage our shy classmates who will feel free to vocalize if they hear others doing it.
This little aural nudge definitely helps, and somehow knowing other people are shy makes me feel more brave and able to make my exhales a bit louder — not much, but a little bit helps. After a while, we add elements like flexing our pelvic-floor muscles as we breathe.
Soon I’m as relaxed as I’ve only ever been after hypnosis. I don’t feel very aroused, but I resolve to try it at home and see if privacy (I’m a solo act) doesn’t produce the desired effect.
Not to put too fine a point on it: Holy. Cow. It works. It took some time to really get a bigger effect but eventually … well, think the difference between winning a spider ring at skee ball and winning the slots jackpot in Monte Carlo.
I’m still a novice. I haven’t mastered the “hands-off” thing, but education is a process, and this is some pretty fun homework, so much so I’m content to dwell right where I am for a while.
It’s hard to remember all the elements, like learning to drive a stick shift, but even just a few deep breaths and the vocalizations makes a difference to me now. It’s like opening a door in your house and discovering a set of rooms you never knew you had. I’m so glad I didn’t think I knew it all.
You can’t turn a light on in one corner without it casting some illumination on nearby spaces, though, and the foundation of Wholistic Sexuality — the relationship to one’s self — had just as much impact as the physical tips.
The things Winston’s curriculum prompted me to look at in my life were just as important as the physical exercises — it’s amazing how dropping emotional baggage can make you physically light and sparkly. I supposed I could have learned it some other way. But it made a big difference to have a light that talked back to me.
Source: alternet.org
