I heard that interview. I think she got into the woo thing a little much, but the problem with woo is that it has to start out from a point that people can agree on or understand.

Women not being able to orgasm: Bad
Women being able to orgasm: Good
Women not having any problems at all reaching orgasm: Great!

So if she’s pitching the idea that women shouldn’t have any more trouble reaching an orgasm than a man then most people are going to sign onto that because it seems right and just in our minds. And if she’s telling a woman who has orgasmed but never ejaculated that orgasms sans ejaculation aren’t really the summit then a fair number of us might sit up and say “wait, what?! There’s better?”

And the idea that pain, discomfort, etc can be linked to emotional issues surrounding sex is no joke—obviously, it’s not THE answer, but it’s there. I mean, if I went to a doctor and said “hey, it really hurts when I get aroused” and he said “hey just relax and have a good cry” without testing me for infection or hormone levels I would be tempted to sue.  But yes anxiety tends to localize in parts of the body and having anxiety about sex (for whatever reason) that anxiety can translate feelings of arousal into feelings of pain. It sucks, and fortunately, it’s surmountable.

So you’ve got a woman who is preaching 80% good stuff: that women should have better, more reliable climaxes, and that you should be aware of your body and how your emotions might be throwing a wrench in the works. It’s that last 20% (that you *have* to ejaculate or else your orgasm isn’t a real orgasm, or that an inability to reach climax can only be due to a broken psyche) that makes it hard to listen to. I think Savage, esp as someone who (as he kept pointing out in the interview) doesn’t really consider himself a man about town insofar as the vulva and its neighbors are concerned, was probably getting good stuff out of the 80%, and felt that maybe it wasn’t worth sacrificing that for the 20% bullcrap.

So I guess men with this, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrograde_ejaculation are d,isconnected somehow too? I emailed her, she hasn’t responded.

Ok, so if you don’t want to know about my sexual response, don’t read the following. Much of what Rodriguez said is true for me. I normally ejaculate. If I don’t ejaculate, I have some sort of psychological block. For instance, with a new partner it takes some time to get comfortable enough to “let go.” I can’t ejaculate when I’m with someone else in my parents’ house, also. But, I recognize that these things are true for me and not for every vagina-owner ever. The required anatomy is far from clear, as Blag Hag pointed out, and I sincerely believe that some women just don’t have that anatomy in place. Blag Hag succinctly outlines the uncertainty regarding the anatomy quite nicely. I found Rodriguez’s guilting and speculation disgusting, especially the sexual assault stuff. Beyond that, it’s counter-productive. For me, and I imagine most women who are capable of ejaculation, feeling pressured and broken would make it extremely hard to relax and feel accepted enough to achieve it.

One of the worst things Freud did was tell women they were climaxing all wrong.

It’s not any better when Heike Rodriguez does it.

Note, please, that both had rather sketchy notions of female sexual anatomy, which contributed to their errors.

I have ejaculated, and of course it feels great, but it’s not the only good part of sex.  For me at least, it feels really super good and happy the entire time, even when I don’t have an orgasm.  So when sex is all about the orgasm, it takes emphasis away from the rest of the time, and it can also make people feel like failures when they don’t or can’t reach orgasm.

I think it’s also important to note that some women may be physically unable to ejaculate, and it doesn’t do them much good to tell them that there is something wrong with them, and if they could just perform the correct ritual then they wouldn’t be failures anymore.

Also, in the cases where women can’t enjoy sex to its fullest because of psychological stress (and that doesn’t just include ejaculation), telling them that they could do it better if they just got over their mental hang-ups is basically the worst thing you could do.  The stress of trying to achieve something will only make it harder to do that.

I have to say I thought the vulva puppet was a little weird, although it still wasn’t quite the debacle his interview with Adam Carolla was. I don’t know… a lot of times when he has guests on, I just want to fast-forward to the rest of the calls anyway, but that may just be because his guests are usually talking about specialized subjects that I don’t have a whole lot of interest in.

I will say one thing: maybe I missed the woo-woo dog whistles, but as I heard it she was talking about a physiological response more than some kind of astral energy connection. Maybe I just wasn’t listening very closely—I know about halfway through I got out of the car to kill time at Starbucks, for one thing.

(Oh, and weirding the host out with puppetry of a type he does not particularly care for == great way to get blacklisted from the show.)

I am a woman, and I ejaculate fairly frequently when I orgasm (and they are often, but not always, more intense) ... except it has absolutely fuck-all to do with my g-spot, in my case. What this person would say to me, I don’t know.

There’s not really that much more laundry, just a few extra towels

I’ll second what @twg_ said, also

Fwiw, Savage has linked to Jen’s critique on his blog today, along with an invitation for her to come on the air with him to rebut/rebuke/discuss. He agrees “Not my finest hour.”

The vaginal orgasm has been oppressing women for centuries now. Jesus this shit needs to stop.

Yeah, it was a bizarre interview.  Dan usually seems to be enjoying his interviewees, here he was uncomfortable and awkward.  Seems like Rodriguez is fairly small time, just local, so I can imagine how she got past any screening - the show can be a little slapdash sometimes, anyway.

Dilan, I think you need to take a moment and wipe the foam off of your mouth.

The G-Spot, when it is prominent in a woman, is reached vaginally. As Blag Hag pointed out, we’re not sure what that thing is. It is located inside the vagina, but is not “part” of the vagina.

That is not the same thing as the “vaginal orgasm,” which is the idea that women should have sensors on their vaginal wall that will respond to a penis and without anything further required from a man, the simple act of him thrusting away should be able to to cause her to reach climax.

She was not declaring that. She was offering a road map to someone who wants to locate the G-spot, which a normally-shaped penis is not going to be able to stimulate.

Mighty:

The G-spot is very controversial. It isn’t as though if you conduct an autopsy of a dead human female you can find an actual spot where all the nerves are and which bears a physiological connection to the female sexual response. In contrast, with the clitoris, you actually CAN identify this.

Female ejaculation is also very controversial. Scientists have had a hard time measuring it, determining its causes, and determining where the fluid comes from.

What you have is a bunch of women who say that this or that portion of their vaginal wall, for them, is extraordinarily sensitive. And that’s fine. And that it further produces a fluid, which they claim is not urine (but which sometimes turns out to be urine when subjected to chemical analysis). I’m not going to get into a debate about false consciousness and “Our Bodies, Ourselves” and whether sometimes women report vaginal stimulation that actually physiologically originates from the clitoris or any of that, nor am I going to get into a debate about what female ejaculation really “is”. I will, however, note that these debates exist and that a lot of feminists in the medical community have contested these claims and have produced some evidence to back their position up.

The problem is exactly when the issue moves from the physiological response women have to sexual stimulation—a perfectly good topic for sex advice columnists like Savage and sex educators such as his guest—to the issue of what constitutes a “normal” or “full” or “ideal” sexual experience for women. That’s the vaginal orgasm stuff repackaged. It really is. For hundreds of years women have been told that if they don’t do this or that or the other thing in the bedroom, there’s something wrong with them. And I’m sorry but my experience from hearing a lot of these people is that it actually is very easy for people to move from “this is something that I enjoy and works great for me” to “every woman must experience this and if they don’t, there’s something wrong with them”. Like many antifeminists, witting and unwitting, they essentialize their own experience and assume that whatever is right for them is right for all women.

Other than the fact that it is now often women telling women what they must experience rather than men, I really don’t think this issue has evolved much at all from the days when women were told that they were disfunctional if they didn’t orgasm during PIV intercourse.

Lord. I wonder what this dipshit would think of women who don’t *want* to ejaculate. Or have any kind of orgasms. Those bitches must be CRAZY.

Sidenote - great podcast as usual, Amanda. By the by, do you know of other good ones on the same subjects (repro rights/feminism/etc)?

bananacat, that’s like the old cartoon in the British magazine Punch where a soldier tells the military doctor, “It hurts when I do this”.

Military Doctor:  “Well, goddammit, soldier, DON’T DO THAT!”

I think that’s why women in their 60s and 70s are talking more about being sexually satisfied than when they were younger, after a while the combination of experience and wisdom flakes off the patina of sexual hangups.

Jesus this shit needs to stop.

I dunno, it seems to get worse:

Achieving orgasm, brain imaging studies show, involves more than heightened arousal. It requires a release of inhibitions engineered by shutdown of the brain’s center of vigilance in both sexes and a widespread neural power failure in females.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-orgasmic-mind

I can tell you from observation and experience that a lot of sex seems to take place because of ‘wide-spread neural power failure’ in both sexes.

ben, link?

The G-spot is Absolutely In No Way Like Vaginal Orgasm.

Here’s how you know the difference:

The Vaginal Orgasm required nothing further from a man that he do what he does to get off: Namely, thrust away in a vagina. The Vaginal Orgasm was something that was *invented by Freud in order to shame women into having more ladylike sex.* The vaginal wall empirically does not have the sort of sensors in it that would be required for vaginal orgasm to be accomplished. This is why we don’t get off when we’re wearing a tampon.

The G-Spot requires that a man actually get in there with his hand and stimulate her manually in a way that might be a little physically uncomfortable with him. The G-spot was something that women reported for themselves that yes, there is a little bit of tissue at the front of the vaginal wall that, when pressed/stimulated, results in intense sexual pleasure. It may have been co-opted by men early on as a way of getting out of clitoral stimulation but this was before enough material had come out on the subject and it became clear that if a G-spot was going to get stimulated, it wasn’t likely to be through PIV sex. Men can certainly still bully uneducated women that they should be able to get off on G-spot orgasm, but that’s not the fault of people like Rodriguez, who are actually helping people locate the little bugger.

When a woman is able to experience orgasm through PIV sex, it is not because she is having a “vaginal orgasm.” It is because either a) her clitoris is being stimulated as a result of PIV sex, or b) the sex-making is happening in a position that allows the stimulation of the G-spot, which is going to require a perfect storm of anatomy and flexibility.

Saying that there is a sensitive area inside of the vagina that can be a very important part of sexual release (and here’s how you find it) is not no way no how the same thing as declaring that women should transfer their feelings of sexual arousal from their clitoris to the walls of their vagina.

Amanda, here’s the link.

Not much there by way of a blog post, I’m afraid. The comments are fun, tho.

Mighty Ponygirl:

When a woman is able to experience orgasm through PIV sex, it is not because she is having a “vaginal orgasm.” It is because either a) her clitoris is being stimulated as a result of PIV sex, or b) the sex-making is happening in a position that allows the stimulation of the G-spot, which is going to require a perfect storm of anatomy and flexibility.

In my experience, once the G is engorged, it isn’t nearly so difficult to hit. 

YMMV of course, and it poses a bit of a chicken and egg problem for men who don’t want to bother with anything but PIV.

#18:

As I said, your discussion assumes the g-spot actually exists as a physiological feature of all women, which is very much a contested assumption.

But you are also missing my point. My point is cultural, not anatomical. I am not in a position to either comment on women’s experiences during sex or what the medical community (including a lot of feminists who disagree with your description) say. Rather, I am talking about how the legend of the g-spot and female ejaculation is USED to define a form of “better” or “ideal” female sexuality, when in fact, just like in days of yore when many women didn’t orgasm from vaginal intercourse and were told there was something wrong with them, now many women don’t feel stimulation from the alleged g-spot and don’t squirt, and are told there is something wrong with them.

This is a cultural problem. It has nothing to do with any individual’s sexual response. People should celebrate the sexual pleasure they experience whatever the source without assuming that however they experience such pleasure is the benchmark for how everyone else must experience it.

oldfeminist—right. And no one here is arguing against personal differences (I sort of suspect that the height of the “ridgeline” that the G-spot is just beyond is a big factor in how easy or hard it is to stimulate). And I definitely agree that anyone who can’t locate the G-spot or who doesn’t shoot sparks out their ass when it’s stimulated shouldn’t be bullied or told they’re broken.

Here’s my thing, and I keep coming back to it in the sex talks: We have a whole generation of kids who grew up on abstinence-only education (combined with pornification in our culture). I am ALL for trying to undo the damage of this: whether it’s vulva puppets that help a girl look for the G-spot, and DEFINITELY for addressing the fact that if you’ve been given a bunch of anxieties around sex that you can feel discomfort, pain, etc, during thoughts of arousal, and that you should maybe work on unboxing those feelings because it is *worth it.* I mean all around… not just because the orgasms are great and promote regularity. Having a healthier, less stressful/anxiety-riddled mind is a good thing in general.

Look, I believe some women have G-spot orgasms, and that’s fucking great and they should be happy with that. This isn’t about who is “right”—-the ejaculators or the non-ejaculators.  In fact, that was my problem with her.  She characterized every woman who doesn’t ejaculate, which is the majority of women by a long shot by the way, as a broken person with emotional blockage that needs to be released.  I’m surprised she refrained from saying “yoni” a lot. 

TMI, but I am NOT broken, out of touch with my sexuality, or unable to achieve intimacy.  And she can fuck the fuck right off for denying that.

No one is objecting to that, Mighty, except maybe Dilan.  You’re fighting a strawman.  I’m objecting to telling women they’re broken or emotionally blocked or unable to experience intimacy because they don’t orgasm in precisely the way this woman prefers.  That’s it.

Thanks for the link, Mighty!

I’m surprised she refrained from saying “yoni” a lot. 

And stuff like this is why I keep coming back to this blog. Amanda is funnier than at least 98 percent of the blogosphere.

And now for some comic relief:

Oh bugger off with the new-age hippy bullshit.

No one is objecting to that, Mighty, except maybe Dilan.

And for the record, I am not objecting to it either. I don’t have the qualifications or the personal experience to opine on female sexual response. The most I can say about it is that some feminists who do have such qualifications are skeptical.

But Dilan—there is a huge difference between telling women that they need to orgasm based on made-up physiology vs. telling women that they can orgasm based on physiology that a LOT of women can locate that always happens to be in the same place.

The latest studies are less concerned with “if it’s there or not” and rather are looking into why it expresses in some women and not others—that there may be vaginal wall surrounding the G-spot that have to draw away when aroused, or that when the G-spot becomes engorged it can actually push beyond the wall. yes, we’ve had this argument on Pandagon already.

But Dilan—there is a huge difference between telling women that they need to orgasm based on made-up physiology vs. telling women that they can orgasm based on physiology that a LOT of women can locate that always happens to be in the same place.

There may be a difference, but there’s also similarities. In both cases, a woman whose sexual function might be perfectly fine is being told that there may be “something wrong with her”. And in both cases, you do have some women reporting that they really do have the experience. (Bear in mind, whatever the physiological cause, there’s no doubt that women have over the years reported an experience that felt to them like a “vaginal orgasm”.)

And as I adverted to, there is unfortunately a very sorry history of women being made to feel inadequate because some other women claim to have some sort of super-duper-orgasm that they can’t have.

I’m objecting to telling women they’re broken or emotionally blocked or unable to experience intimacy because they don’t orgasm in precisely the way this woman prefers.  That’s it

I can totally understand that, but I think I keep getting hung up on the fact that a lot of women do have really crippling anxieties surrounding sex, and a whole generation of Abstinence-Only Education has probably made that worse, not better. What this woman said about pain and discomfort being linked to emotional “blockage” is really important, even if she takes it a few too many steps after that to declare that if you don’t spray a waterfall over the bed when you climax you’re broken (or that it’s the ONLY reason you might have trouble).

I would have called it anxiety and not blockage. When I was having pain I knew exactly that it was an anxiety response, but it didn’t change the reality that I was equating arousal with pain.

Dilan, if a woman has an orgasm and is told that she’s doing it wrong, she’s going to laugh it off. It’s like the people who protest outside of mosques thinking they’re going to win converts if they say “you’re going to Hell!” enough at the muslims. That shit just doesn’t fly to people who have a healthy sex life.

Now, I am not at all arguing (I mean for shit’s sake, look at COMMENT #1) that she’s right and just to say “my way or the highway”, or that she’s the first person I would send someone who was having difficulty orgasming to for help. But there is still a lot of truth to what she was saying, even if she fell off the cliff while taking the scenic tour of Truth Highway 1.

Also, Amanda, I think we’ve discovered what trumps The Dan Savage Litany of Asshole Accomplishments blog sandtrap.

Dilan, if a woman has an orgasm and is told that she’s doing it wrong, she’s going to laugh it off.

Are you sure about this as a general, categorical statement? Not only have I read enough feminist history about the vaginal orgasm to doubt this, but I’ve personally known women who expressed anxieties because they couldn’t have orgasms during intercourse even though they could go to town with a vibrator or during cunnilingus.

Either you have orgasms, or you don’t.

If you don’t know if you had an orgasm, you didn’t have one.

If someone tells you you didn’t have an orgasm and you know that you did, who are you going to believe? Them or your own lying clit?

“I think she got into the woo thing a little much, but the problem with woo is that it has to start out from a point that people can agree on or understand.

Women not being able to orgasm: Bad
Women being able to orgasm: Good
Women not having any problems at all reaching orgasm: Great!”

I don’t even really consider this a point to agree on. Maybe for the majority. But for me orgasm is so underwhelming (being aroused itself is a better feeling for me) and requires doing finicky shit that can’t be done at the same time as the acts that turn me on, so I would rather buttfuck someone for a while and not orgasm than lie down for a while with a vibrator and reach a boring old orgasm.

Since ~I hear~ other people find orgasms to be the best part of sex I guess it’s inevitable and good that there is a lot of literature on helping people to have them, but universal statements about such things don’t help anyone. What continually disappoints me about a lot of sex positive people is that they claim to be empowering a wider range of sexualities but still feel the need to generalize and erase certain people’s experience (not that this is directed at you, Mighty Ponygirl, your post was simply the jumping off point). You know you’re doing your job wrong when some people feel that their sexual response is more accepted by the people you call “anti-sex” (by this I mean leftists and feminists who don’t id as sex-pos, not conservatives).

Treefinger—You just said that your orgasms are problematic. Would you REALLY turn down a non-woo partner/expert/whatevs who was like “hey, I bet we could turn your orgasms up to 11 if we tried this and not make it such a fucking chore to get such a meh result.” ?

And yeah, if that didn’t work, and the person left it at that and was like “well, it was worth a try,” would you really be so fucking scandalized that someone tried to give you a better orgasm?

@MP: whoa there,

if a woman has an orgasm and is told that she’s doing it wrong, she’s going to laugh it off

Several thousand therapists throughout the United States are laughing their asses off at you right now. I’m sorry, but while what you say might apply to a woman with
• sufficient and accurate sexual education
• high levels of self esteem, and
• high levels of personal sexual comfort,

that ain’t that many women. As you have said yourself, like 12 times just in this thread, a lot of people are growing up right now being epically mindfucked about sex. Which means, in addition to other things, that they do indeed doubt their own lived experience in favor of the stupid constructs that have been built around them by our ridonkulous culture. 

(In other words, yes, like Dilan said, you’re projecting your experience onto womanhood as a whole, and not coming off so great for it. If Treefinger says she ain’t too crazy about orgasms, the correct response is, I’m glad if that’s working out for you, and then you stop talking at her about it. Yeah?)

What this woman said about pain and discomfort being linked to emotional “blockage” is really important, even if she takes it a few too many steps after that

Is that what people are going to be taking away from it, though?  She takes it to a personally critical place; I’m more inclined to believe “You’re broken and that’s bad,” is what’s going to be remembered, rather than, “Broken-ness is bad.”

Well, what?

I think that sexual release is something that people can understand if it happened or not. You might have a big O orgasm or a little o orgasm. And it’s possible that there is such a thing as an OOOOOOOOOrgasm out there that I myself have not experienced and Rodruiguez is shaking her head sadly at my poor, OOOOOOOOOrgasm-less state because I didn’t ejaculate. But it doesn’t change the fact that once you have one, of either capitalization, you know what happened.

I don’t think a person is going to second-guess whether or not they experienced sexual release if they have indeed experienced it. It might be the little-o variety, they might think “that’s all I can do” or “this isn’t what it’s cracked up to be” or even “I must be broken.” But I kind of doubt that the very primal fact of sexual release is going to be ignored, even if it doesn’t leave you entirely satisfied.

Treefinger sounds like someone who has little-o orgasms. Finnicky, fussy orgasms that aren’t worth it (and I *GET THAT*). But I think, all things being equal, if someone (especially someone who knows what they’re talking about) offers a technique or a suggestion to get a better orgasm, and it’s something you haven’t tried before (or tried but had weird information or something and this person is being more clear about it), is it really so oppressive to give it a shot?

Is that what people are going to be taking away from it, though?

No, but it still doesn’t change the fact that what she said about emotional issues inhibiting sexual function is important.

A person can be a vegetarian or a vegan and still be sane. It’s when they start equating chickens with holocaust victims and suggesting that people can feed their family grass when people start giving them side-eye. But the holocaust-chickens and the family-grass-dinner is the 20% crazy, when 80% of their beliefs (in humane treatment of animals) isn’t particularly controversial (unless you’re a troll).

So if we turn this around and say that I, as a guy, claimed to have an orgasm.  You can say, “No you didn’t” and expect me to accept *your* word for it?

Or are the ideas and mystiques around a woman’s orgams so profound that reading comprehension flies out the window when they’re talked about?

If someone tells you you didn’t have an orgasm and you know that you did, who are you going to believe? Them or your own lying clit?

Comment #35: Mighty Ponygirl

Let me repeat that since people are getting confused by the prepositions:

If someone tells you you didn’t have an orgasm and you know that you did, who are you going to believe?

Jeebus people, it’s a simple if/then statement.  MP has already admitted that there are social and physiological issues that aren’t covered by that.
If my girlfiend has an orgasm because we have PiV sex, I’m not going to yell at her and scream that there is no way it’s possible.

I’m sorry, but while what you say might apply to a woman with
• sufficient and accurate sexual education
• high levels of self esteem, and
• high levels of personal sexual comfort,

that ain’t that many women.

Talk about the Bigotry of Low Expectations.

I’ve had female partners who had emotional problems/low self esteem or low levels of sexual education and they’ve been able to orgasm.  I’ve never told them that they hadn’t.

No, but it still doesn’t change the fact that what she said about emotional issues inhibiting sexual function is important.

Of course it is.  I have my own issues to be sure.  But what I understood Amanda to be saying is that couching that important message in woo-woo language is counterproductive (and I agree).  Having emotional issues impeding sexual satisfaction is a legitimate issue.  Not experiencing a certain, specific kind of sexual satisfaction, on the other hand, does not automatically mean a person has emotional issues.

I’ve had someone tell me that the type of orgasms I’ve had are not the “right” kind (apparently, the only *real* orgasms are ones that peak and ebb cyclically).  Even though at the time I was like “dude, I know my own body” I was also young enough and inexperienced enough to wonder if maybe this dude had been right and what I thought were orgasms really weren’t or if I was somehow missing out. 

So it isn’t always as simple as knowing your own experience.  When others tell you that you are mistaken or that your orgasms are an inferior sort it can cause a lot of anxiety around achieving orgasm thereafter.  There does seem to be this weird notion that if your orgasms are earth-shattering and ejaculatory then you are repressed, as though everyone is built the same and experiences pleasure in the same way.  Me?  At some point the stimulation becomes painful in itself and sometimes orgasm is less pleasurable than being really aroused and close to climax.

that should be “aren’t earth shattering and ejaculatory”.  sigh.

This is why males rule the world, you know - all we have to argue about is length and distance, and both can be resolved with a ruler.

Exactly, Piator.  Because otherwise, why is the G-spot still such a damned mystery?  I mean, it’s been decades now that we’ve suspected its existence, but we still can’t definitely prove or locate it.  This is not Loch Ness, folks, it’s the human body.

If there was a new, rumored spot on men’s bodies that boosted/improved orgasms*, it would be covered on CNN and they’d have everyone from the NSF to NASA involved if necessary to track that puppy down. 

Instead we get this “Women’s bodies.  Mysterious.  Whatcha gonna do?” [shrug]

* prostate doesn’t count—not a rumor, apparently

I’m surprised she refrained from saying “yoni” a lot.

Wait, I like the word “yoni” just because to me it sounds like what it is. Not for use in an educational setting but instead of using pussy or something. Is it associated with woo? Because, crap, that would be another word woo pushers will have ruined like “nutritionist”.

Link to Dan’s reference:
http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/05/16/advice-cop

“I’m in no position to be ejaculating stones after this debacle” (he links to the Blag Hag post)

Sounds like there’s going to be some crow eaten…

Wait, I like the word “yoni” just because to me it sounds like what it is. Not for use in an educational setting but instead of using pussy or something. Is it associated with woo? Because, crap, that would be another word woo pushers will have ruined like “nutritionist”

I’m gonna violate the rule that says if you explain a good joke, it isn’t funny anymore, but the reason at least I giggled at Amanda’s “yoni” reference is because all of this terminology associated with tantric yoga has become cliche thanks to the “spiritual sexuality” movements who want to make it sound like every orgasm is some sort of communion with the supernatural world rather than a response of your central nervous system to sexual stimulation. And Ms. Rodriguez certainly sounds like the type of person who would use the word “yoni” in that sort of context, even though she managed to get through the interview without going there.

I don’t even really consider this a point to agree on. Maybe for the majority. But for me orgasm is so underwhelming (being aroused itself is a better feeling for me) and requires doing finicky shit that can’t be done at the same time as the acts that turn me on, so I would rather buttfuck someone for a while and not orgasm than lie down for a while with a vibrator and reach a boring old orgasm.

I have to (kind of) second this. Mind you, I like my orgasms and they’re quite good, but I can achieve those in 5-10 by myself, and the inclusion of a partner rarely improves on the effect. OTOH, certain kinds of partnered sex provide me with a “high” that nothing else can provide, but rarely result in orgasms. So, for partnered sex, I prefer the heady hormone-cocktail over sex that leads to orgasms; because those I can produce myself

hell, I even produce orgasms in my sleep, without having to do anything.

FWIW, when I was in my teens/early 20s, I ejaculated like a queen, could even pretty much do it at will, but very, very rarely actually “felt” orgasms.  I would feel the uterine contractions, even, but not the feeling of pleasure.  Now that I’m in my 30s, I don’t ejaculate as a matter of course, guess I could still if I wanted to, but I FEEL the orgasms.  Any guesses as to which one I prefer over the other?  Hell, I haven’t bothered trying to ejaculate in a good decade.  And I used to feel pretty crappy about not feeling the pleasure part, don’t give even half a damn about the ejaculation.

I’m sure the details are just me and my mileage, and everyone else’s will vary, but the bit about being much happier feeling the pleasure part than letting out random body fluids, I’m guessing no one seriously thought I might prefer that part to the pleasure part.

Word @ history mom. But apparently we’re “bigots” now.

But I think, all things being equal, if someone (especially someone who knows what they’re talking about) offers a technique or a suggestion to get a better orgasm, and it’s something you haven’t tried before (or tried but had weird information or something and this person is being more clear about it), is it really so oppressive to give it a shot?

Um, what if you don’t give enough of a fuck to give it a shot? Phrased like that, you make it sound like everyone is obligated to strive for optimal sexual experience, and that is just a load of bullshit.

Or is that also bigotry of low expectations, to accept that some people might for whatever reason not want to knock themselves out seeking orgasms and that might be okay?

This thread is just inviting TMI, and I can’t resist.  My g-spot is very easy to find, according to multiple men who had now knowledge of what the previous men found.  My fingers are frustratingly just a little too short to reach it myself, but several men have put their fingers in there and were surprised at how easy it is to find because it sticks out and hangs down a little, and I can definitely tell when they are touching it.  I know it’s just anecdotal, but maybe I’ll donate my body to science when I die, because there’s definitely something there.  And FWIW, fingers are much better at finding it than penises are, because they can curve in the right direction.  I’ve only had an orgasm from a penis one time, but with fingers, it’s sooo easy.  I actually started with fingering because oral doesn’t do a whole lot for me (I need more pressure on my clitoris than a tongue can provide), so it might be something that some of you out there want to try if you’re looking for a g-spot.

Oh also, @cynickal

I’ve had female partners who had emotional problems/low self esteem or low levels of sexual education and they’ve been able to orgasm.  I’ve never told them that they hadn’t.

These are for you.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/22789525@N00/sets/72157616944737345/

Roving @48 and argument at large:

It’s because what we call the g-spot is actually more a close-cluster of nerve endings near or around the vaginal walls and it’s not one specific spot or even present in all women. Some women have them right around the expected area one-inch inside the vagina. Others have multiple zones of sensitivity along the vaginal wall. Some have greater clumps near the anus, leading anal orgasms to be much stronger than vaginal ones. Some lack any real additional clump aside from the clitoris (this doesn’t necessarily mean they can’t internally orgasm).

It’s a rather large variety.

And the ability to internally orgasm has a number of factors as well. Some find it easy and practically the only form of orgasm, others find it impossible (and not just because they are broken). Some can find it occurring even in time of stress, some find it affected by stress or worry, some just can’t make it.

And the earlier notes about sensitivity come into play as well. A nice sensitive patch might be great for reaching a climax, but can also make it really hard to sustain a good internal climax, a long rolling external or internal climax, or sustain multiple climaxes, because of problems of it becoming “too sensitive” even in the midst of the orgasm.

And yes, on all this, we have the toxic soup of culture where women have all this pressure about sex, the right type of sex, how they don’t really have attraction, don’t really have orgasms, and so on, but it’s plenty complex when we’re just talking about healthy sexuality.

I think it’s also a problem of false comparison. We assume it is easy and universal because we assume that male orgasms are easy and universal. And they’re not. Sure, there can be what looks like a consistent example in ejaculation, but the mere act of producing ejaculate says nothing about the intensity, overall duration, emotional resonance (like the clear happy feeling many women get after a good cum), and so on. The act of orgasming goes far deeper than the mere ejaculation which is just a biological reflex.

And the same assumption of ease also ignores that penii have a wide range of complexity to them as well. Like with women, there are assumed areas of high senstivity, but like women, the remaining “sweet spots” vary wildly and the technique that works with one partner, may not work with another, because of a lack of the same erogenous zones and sensitive clusters.

It’s part of being diverse. Hard and fast rules about the “correct” way to ejaculate or touch tend to fall apart outside of universal and widely recognized pleasure centers.

Sadly, as I’ve found from being the go-to girl for sexual questions in my group of friends, a lot of women don’t know what orgasms or, have been convinced they didn’t have orgasms when they did because someone told them they were doing it wrong, or have been convinced they must have by sexual partners of both genders. 

On to the TMI part, I’m multi-orgasmic and have never ejaculated, even though I’ve had orgasms intense enough to trigger an asthma attack or make me burst into tears because I was so overwhelmed by the pleasure.  I really don’t think I’m missing anything by not ejaculating, and as most women DON’T ejaculate, I think holding that up as a grail they should strive for (thereby adding another layer of sexual anxiety for most women) is misguided at best. 

If you don’t know if you had an orgasm, you didn’t have one.

Ha, no.  When I was young and inexperienced, and having sex for the first time, I distinctly remember several conversations with friends wherein we discussed this strange intense sensation we were having that we weren’t quite sure about but could it be this orgasm thing we’d read about a bit in magazines but didn’t know much about and hadn’t been told about in the few desultory sex education classes we’d had.

Orgasm isn’t something that comes naturally to a lot of women/young women, like a bolt out of the blue, and hallelujah.  And yes, it plenty easy to be anxious about whether you’re having them enough, big enough, well enough, loudly enough, and “the right kind”.

Misguided?  GGR, you are way too kind.

On further review: Heike Rodriguez is involved in “breathwork”. Um… nuff said.

@BrianX,
I kinda loved the Corolla interview, because Savage didn’t let him off the hook about refusing to answer the question, but kept after him and pointed it out after Corolla hung up.

For some reason, Pandagon’s HTML formatting or something will *not* let me cut and paste from the page anymore.

Anyway, Mighty Ponygirl @ 32, “if a woman has an orgasm and is told she’s doing it wrong, she’ll laugh it off.” I totally call bullshit on this, based on my personal experience. As a 20 something, I was well aware that I couldn’t actually orgasm without clitoral stimulation, and that it worked best for me to have both clitoral and vaginal going on at once, and that clitoral only took forever and wasn’t even that good. My boyfriend at the time would try to get me off by going down on me. It took forever, because he didn’t do vaginal stimulation at the same time. If we tried me rubbing my own clitoris during intercourse or manual penetration, he would get upset because he wasn’t doing everything for me, but he couldn’t seem to do what I needed in the rhythm it needed to be done in. And I totally felt that this was *my* fault, that *I* was broken somehow, because even though I knew that most women can’t get off with vaginal, the fact that most women *can* get off with just clitoral, combined with the hangups of the only man I’d ever slept with, made me think I was wired funny, I was damaged, I was weird, I was selfish (yes, selfish, because what I needed to get off was stimulation in two places and that was so haaaaard to do).

And *I* was someone who declared myself a feminist at the age of 3, whose philosophy of life was generally “I’m ok, but you suck”, who was aggressively *uninterested* in being an object for the pleasure of men (my opinion of sex was that if I did not get an orgasm the whole thing was a complete waste of my time, and I wasn’t shy about saying so.) I also studied the biology of sexuality, extensively. So if anyone should have been capable of saying “This is how I need to come, and if you don’t like it, I don’t need to fuck you,” it should have been me. But it wasn’t.

Women are really, really, really vulnerable to being told “sex, you’re doing it wrong.” We have so few accurate models for how to do it right, we have wide variation in how our biology actually works and we’re told that if we experiment to find out what works for us, we’re sick or weird or disgusting or “sluts”, whatever that means. Sex isn’t for our pleasure, it’s for our men, and us getting off is just so the guys feel good about how they “did that” for us, and if it’s hard for us to get off, that’s us being “high maintenance” and being hard for our men to deal with. Even those of us who don’t believe any of that bullshit get it fed to us so often it’s hard to escape all parts of it; the outer corona of bullshit usually touches us even if we get away from the toxic core. I came very close to giving up on *men* (I’m bi, but I couldn’t figure out how to meet women, so it might have resulted in giving up on partnered sex) because I thought that, if I couldn’t do it right in a way a man would tolerate, I’d rather not put up with doing it with a man at all. Other women might approach the same emotional problem by giving up on feeling pleasure or giving up on orgasms.

So no, you’re pretty much completely wrong. Women who have orgasms and are told “you’re orgasming wrong” are *very* likely to take it to heart and feel bad about themselves as a result. If you never had that experience, then you’re luckier than many women.