The Whole Lesbian Sex Book (9 page)

• Make sure you are well aroused before vaginal penetration. You may notice that you are slower to lubricate or that your vaginal walls are more sensitive.

• Use lube. Magazine articles aimed at women in midlife often recommend commercial products for “vaginal dryness.” Some of these may contain ingredients that “lower the pH of the vagina, which helps prevent overgrowth of bacteria in vagina,”
²⁸
but your favorite lube will do just as well.

• You can address vaginal dryness with herbal remedies. Carol Leonard, of the Feminist Women’s Health Center, recommends Vitamin E, motherwort, and natural progesterone cream made from wild yam roots. She, too, recommends lube (she offers recipes for “natural” homemade concoctions) along with drinking two quarts of water a day. She also cautions against the use of estrogen creams, which have “potentially serious risks.”
²⁹

• Exercise. Move your body, get your heart beating and your blood flowing. Along with general health benefits, the improved blood flow to the pelvic area will nourish genital tissue.
³⁰
Declining vascular flow to genital tissue, which is not uncommon in perimenopause, can impair your ability to experience sexual arousal.

• Don’t forget your Kegels. Your PC muscles need exercise, too.

• Take good care of yourself. Sexual energy is related to overall well-being. Make sure you eat well, get enough sleep (not always easy during menopause), and attend to health concerns.

• Consider that lowered libido, reduced sexual response, and inability to orgasm may be due to medication—particularly antidepressants. (See “Sex and Depression,” above.)

Just for a few days, stop thinking hormones and menopause and estrogen replacement, and instead think about how to get your sexuality back, in the sense of losing the tension, the anxiety, and feeling yourself open, really open so that people who walk by you stop and think, “Ah, she’s open!”

NANCY FRIDAY

• Many women look to herbal supplements to enhance energy and that feeling of well-being. Herbs like ginseng and ginkgo biloba can give your libido a boost. (See “Herbal Supplements,” above.)
The Wisdom of Menopause: Creating Physical and Emotional Health and Healing During the Change
, by Christiane Northrup, is a wonderful source of information on dong quai, chasteberry, and black cohosh. Also check out
New Menopausal Years the Wise Woman Way: Alternative Approaches for Women 30-90
, by Susun S. Weed.

• Low testosterone levels may be the cause of your lost libido. One study found that women with low testosterone levels were four times as likely to report low sex drive.
³¹
Testosterone deficiency may also be responsible for decreased sensitivity in nipples and clitoris and diminished orgasm—or difficulty reaching orgasm at all.
³²
Testosterone may produce the sexual urge you’re looking for. This is
very
low dose testosterone; it should not produce male secondary sexual characteristics. Some gynecologists prescribe Estratest (a combination of estrogen and testosterone). Others prescribe low-dose testosterone in the form of a topical gel or cream or as a sublingual tablet. Dr. Susan Rako, author of
The Hormone of Desire,
recommends 2 percent testosterone in petroleum jelly (prepared by a compounding pharmacist) applied directly to genital tissue “to jump-start” the libido. This is followed by low-dose orally prescribed testosterone.
³³
If you think you may have a testosterone deficiency, work with a health-care provider to determine if testosterone will be helpful for you, and in what dose and form.

• DHEA is an androgen and a precursor for testosterone; in some women, DHEA raises testosterone levels sufficiently to improve libido. Some health-care providers recommend DHEA for libido loss; others don’t. Some researchers say that DHEA strengthens the immune system, fights fatigue, and lifts depression. It is said to increase feelings of well-being and enhance libido.

• Once widely prescribed for symptoms of menopause and to reduce the risks of heart disease and osteoporosis, estrogen and estrogen-plus-progesterone have been discredited by the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) study, which found both to be ineffective and potentially dangerous.
³⁴
Still, many women weigh the risks and decide that taking estrogen is the best course of action for them.

You
can
replenish libido. In spite of physiological changes and health concerns, regardless of whether you take hormones or botanical supplements, you can maintain your erotic life force. Sexual energy needn’t be something that just happens to you—up in good times, down in bad. You can actively regenerate sexual energy, in much the same way you renew your energy overall. When you begin to think of your libido as self-generating, you have tremendous power over the course of your sexuality throughout your life.

And just how do you do that? The book you’re holding is a good start. You’ll find plenty of suggestions and sources of additional information throughout the following chapters.

Suggested Web Link

THE CLITORIS.COM

www.the-clitoris.com

SOURCE OF QUOTE

Nancy Friday, interviewed on
www.Power-Surge.com

chapter four

Orgasm

Orgasm is leaving my body and coming back anew
.

SO, ORGASMS! You can have orgasm-directed sex by yourself or with a partner. If it’s all about getting off, that’s fine. You can also have sex without orgasm, and that’s fine, too. Most of us want that release of coming.

Many women are completely happy with our orgasmic capacity. Others want to come harder, quicker, longer, more easily, more often, more transcendently, or more meaningfully. You may wonder if you’re doing it “right”—and you may have had lovers who pressured you to respond differently than was natural for you.

You
can
enhance your capacity for orgasm—and you’ll find plenty of tips and techniques throughout this book to help you do just that. In fact, here’s the first one:
You’re fine just the way you are.
Even if you’ve never had an orgasm, you’re not defective in any way. Your experience of sexual pleasure is uniquely yours and no less valid than anyone else’s. Sex is not a competitive sport.

I would love to be able to have an orgasm more easily than I do. But when I have them they are incredibly intense.

Do you start coming as the first drop of moisture hits your panties? Perhaps you come ten seconds after the vibrator touches your clit, and you don’t feel complete until you’ve come nonstop for an hour. Good for you.

I orgasm and cum very easily. Just the brush of a woman’s wet tongue on my clitoris causes me to orgasm.

I can come every few minutes for several hours.

Does the term
Pillow Princess
ring a bell? Or
Do-Me Queen
? So what if you don’t consider one or two (or three or four or five) orgasms sufficient? Even if every dyke you’ve ever loved has had to seek medical intervention for repetitive stress injury, there’s nothing wrong with you. How much pleasure is too much? It’s
your
call. (You can enjoy yourself indefinitely without stressing your partner—see below.)

This Is Taking Too Long

Perhaps your partners have complained that you’re a “hard come,” taking too long to reach orgasm. Too long for whom? If it takes 30 minutes of perfect clit stimulation, with just the right touch in just the right spot, for you to reach orgasm, you’re fine. Enjoy the attention.

If you’d like to come more quickly or reliably, however, here are six specific techniques you might try:

• Experiment with different positions or activities. Switch from oral sex to penetration or clitoral stimulation. Get on top. Find out what works for you.

• Make sure you’re really turned on before you even
think
of attempting to come. Human sexual response isn’t linear. Back off, do something else, and then come back to your arousal.

• Buy a vibrator. Many women find the strong, consistent stimulation of a vibrator to be the surefire aid to achieving orgasm.

• Touch yourself. Play with your clit while your girl’s going down on you, while she’s penetrating you, even while she’s touching you.

• Breathe into your pelvis, move your pelvis, don’t clench—let go.

• Fantasize. What are the images or scenarios that make you sizzle? It’s OK to fantasize during partner sex. You can invite your partner into your fantasy, too—tell her a story as she reaches for your clit.

If you come only by your own hand or vibrator, you’re no less a sexual partner. You can incorporate masturbation into partner sex in a way that will be incredibly hot for both you and your partner. You’ll find suggestions throughout the book for what to do when your lover’s tongue or hands—or even her strap-on—get tired. (These will also help out with your partner’s fatigue and that pesky repetitive stress problem.)

I need my vibrator; it’s very difficult for me to come by any other method. I can have an orgasm from oral sex, but it’s hard for my girlfriend to keep up the constant, unchanging stimulation that I need. I need repetitive movements, and it takes a while.

If you don’t happen to have an earth-shattering orgasm every time your girlfriend makes love to you, it doesn’t mean that she’s a bad lover or that you’ve fallen out of love. It may be that you’re just not getting the right stimulation to send you over the edge. You may be too stressed. You may not know your partner well enough, trust her enough, trust
yourself
enough, or feel safe enough to give it up in that moment. Just how vulnerable you care to be varies from day to day.

I don’t always have the most intense orgasms that I know I can have. It depends on my psychological readiness to be thoroughly opened.

Orgasm is about pleasure. It’s not about your girlfriend’s reputation or bedpost notches—that’s
her
problem. That she may be gratified by your coming is great—but it’s not the point for you.

However you come, how easily, how hard, how often, you have a sexuality that’s yours and yours alone. You’re not broken, gluttonous, selfish, oversexed, defective, or perverted (unless thinking of yourself in these terms turns you on). You needn’t compare yourself to some mythic example of sapphic perfection.

If You Can’t Have an Orgasm

If you’ve never had an orgasm, or aren’t sure if you’ve had an orgasm, you may be preorgasmic, a term that presumes that you
can
become orgasmic. (See chapter 6, Masturbation, for suggestions on learning to orgasm.) There are many reasons why you may never have had an orgasm or may find it very difficult to reach orgasm. Chief among them are lack of information about your body and sexual response, dissociation, and trauma from sexual abuse.

You may be
anorgasmic
(not having orgasms) for physiological reasons. These include a range of health conditions—and the medications used to treat them. Depression and antidepressants are notorious for wreaking havoc on one’s ability to come. Even the hormonal changes of pregnancy and menopause can affect orgasm. (See chapter 3, Anatomy and Sexual Response.)

You may wonder if you’ll ever get your sexual response back.

Most likely you
will
regain your capacity for pleasure and orgasm. In the meantime, take the advice given to the woman who has never had an orgasm. Go back to the beginning. Grab your lube, your favorite vibrator, unplug the phone, prop your beautiful self up on some pillows, and pretend you are masturbating for your very first time.

Does Viagra Work for Women?

In short, yes—for
some
women and
one
specific sexual function: physiological arousal. Drugs like Viagra, Levitra, and Cialis will not make you think sexy thoughts. You can take Viagra before the Big Date, but it won’t restore the ongoing flow of erotic energy in your life.

Many women have tried Viagra and other drugs with much success. While Viagra (sildenafil) was developed to help men overcome erectile dysfunction, it’s increasingly being taken by women.

Viagra works by increasing vasoactivity—that’s blood flow. Blood flow leads to engorged tissues, which leads to clitoral erection, and voilà: physical arousal.

I was so hot. I didn’t realize I was that turned on, and then suddenly, my cunt was so open my partner fit her whole hand inside me right away. Then she put a huge butt plug up my ass. And this was without much in the way of a warm-up.

I hadn’t had a real orgasm in months (I’m on Effexor), but I found myself coming and coming and I couldn’t stop.

This is pure physiology in action.

Should you try Viagra? Naturally there is a raging debate on this one, with medical researchers, sex educators, women’s health activists, and pharmaceutical companies all taking positions on whether or not female sexuality can (or should) be aided by the little blue pill.