He Says, She Says

How about talking dirty, Dave?

2009-11-04T16:08:00.004-05:00

Dave,

Here's some advice:

Talking dirty to the one you love (or even just the one you’re with) is one of those sexual behaviors people are uncomfortable with the first time they do it, and the first time they do it with a new partner. To do it well means letting loose and exposing yourself, which always feels scary the first time. Here are some steps to getting comfortable with dirty talk, and ideas for introducing into your sex play.

Time Required: Learning to talk dirty is a labor of love, it takes time!

Here's How:

Be authentic in your dirty talk.
Dirty talk can feel silly if you expect it to be what you’ve seen in the movies. You might have this idea that dirty talk is something specific. But good dirty talk is completely what you make it, and to do it well, you have to be yourself. While you may take on a role in your dirty talk (e.g. the ravished submissive) you need to find something of yourself in the role. Make a list of different aspects of your personality you can draw on for inspiration.
Find your dirty talk voice.
You need to find your own way of talking dirty. Your dirty talk might be low rhythmic grunts, high pitched squeals, or precise whispers. It might reflect the way you talk in your daily life, or it might express a different aspect of your personality. You don’t need to pick only one voice, the element of surprise can add an extra sense of anticipation, when your partner doesn’t know what they’re going to get an earful of next!
Expand your dirty talk vocabulary.
Most of us are raised not to swear. Dirty talk is your opportunity to pull out all the stops on the foul mouth express. Unless you’re role playing calls for it, avoid clinical terms (like penis). If you’re at a loss, do some research. Both of the books recommended below have lists of words. But you can do research online, by reading some raunchy erotica, or in some cases watching porn (although the dirty talk in porn tends to be unimaginative).
Practice dirty talk when you're alone.
Carol Queen, author of the highly recommended Exhibitionism for the Shy: Show Off, Dress Up and Talk Hot, suggests starting on your own, talking dirty while you masturbate. Fantasize about having sex with your partner and talking dirty to them. You can start by doing it in your head, but eventually do it out loud.
Establish ground rules with your partner.
One of the reasons many of us don’t talk dirty is fear of sounding ridiculous, or being put down or rejected by a partner. It’s important to set some rules when you’re willing to take risks like this. Rules like no laughing at one another, and no judgment are important. In the heat of the moment anything can come out of your mouth, and you need to know that your partner is respectful of the ways that can be exposing.
Start slow the first time.
Don’t feel you have to rush right into elaborate verbal gymnastics. A great way to start with dirty talk is to describe out loud what is happening during sex. Things like “I love the way your hand feels in my….” Or “Your …feels so good on/in my…” Describe what’s happening and how it feels in your body. You can also experiment by telling your partner something you’re going to do to them, or something you want them to do to you.
Experiment with your voice.
Most of us take for granted all the different things we can do with our voice, and the impact these changes have. Experiment with speed, how fast you talk. Some things call for a staccato barrage, while some things are best said slowly. Change the volume of your voice, try whispering, try screaming, try everything in the middle. Also play with the tenor of your voice. You can sound commanding and harsh, trembling and uncertain, and everywhere in between.
Make dirty talking a two way conversation.
Once you’ve taken the risk and initiated talking dirty with your partner, ask them to do the same. It isn’t for everyone, and you might find that you like doing it more than hearing it (or vice versa). But being on the receiving and the giving end of dirty talk can give you a different perspective on it, plus you may learn a few things from your partner you didn’t already know.

Geezis Mona...

2009-10-31T14:51:00.004-04:00

Geezis Mona!

That took me forever to read. Why in the world would you think I would want to read something that friggin' long? LOL.

Meredith made some great points in that article. But I am looking for ways to make a relationship have longevity. I married you and really meant it when I said "Til' death do us part". Didn't you?

Falling into a routine seems to be the biggest downfall for most couples (including ourselves. We need to have more fun (besides in the bedroom).

How about these ideas:

Entertain friends and family at home: You are probably thinking that not only are these people crazy, but I am crazy too. And how can this be a fun activity for couples? Well, the actual event is a lot of fun because you get to meet friends/family or sometimes totally new people, there is a lot of fun actually planning the event. For instance, you could do a theme party (e.g. Mardi Gras theme party or "Dress as your favorite movie star") each month, and invite only couples (no kids allowed). The planning alone will go on for at least a week for each one. The decorations, the menu, the games, the music, etc. is complicated enough to give you enough to do. You could shop together, research all kinds of stuff, and then cook the dishes before the actual party to make sure that you can cook them the night of the party.

Spoil your partner for one day: This is how it works. Each Saturday, you could do whatever your wife wants you to do and also think of other ways to spoil her. She could do the same on Sundays. You might change the days if there is a long weekend or holiday or if something else is happening but one day a week just try to make each other feel special. And it can get pretty wild and is a lot of fun. So it is up to you how imaginative you can get (e.g. I had to learn how to put nail polish on my wife's toes since I promised to do anything that she asked me to).

Find a common interest and absorb yourself in it: Now mind you that it is not going to be easy. Even though we tend to marry people that we have so much in common with, men and women still do not like the same things. For example, while both my wife and I are passionate readers, we like very different kinds of books. But we have found a compromise. Since she tends to like more racy books (Judy Bloom, Roberta Leigh, Jennifer Campbell, etc.) while I am an avid reader of business books, we have made a decision to read one book each month that is easy on the brain. And we read it together. Sometimes she reads out loud and at other times I do. We talk about it, we share our opinions, and tell stories that come to our mind. You can do the same. Just pick what you both like (How to have fun as a couple) and are willing to make slight adjustments to make it fun for both of you.

Dave, this is a better...

2009-10-26T22:06:00.004-04:00

Dave, This is a better article on what women want than that Conservative crap you posted.

WHAT DO WOMEN REALLY WANT?

by: Meredeth Chivers

Meredith Chivers is a creator of bonobo pornography. She is a 36-year-old psychology professor at Queen’s University in the small city of Kingston, Ontario, a highly regarded scientist and a member of the editorial board of the world’s leading journal of sexual research, Archives of Sexual Behavior. The bonobo film was part of a series of related experiments she has carried out over the past several years. She found footage of bonobos, a species of ape, as they mated, and then, because the accompanying sounds were dull — “bonobos don’t seem to make much noise in sex,” she told me, “though the females give a kind of pleasure grin and make chirpy sounds” — she dubbed in some animated chimpanzee hooting and screeching. She showed the short movie to men and women, straight and gay. To the same subjects, she also showed clips of heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude.

While the subjects watched on a computer screen, Chivers, who favors high boots and fashionable rectangular glasses, measured their arousal in two ways, objectively and subjectively. The participants sat in a brown leatherette La-Z-Boy chair in her small lab at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, a prestigious psychiatric teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Toronto, where Chivers was a postdoctoral fellow and where I first talked with her about her research a few years ago. The genitals of the volunteers were connected to plethysmographs — for the men, an apparatus that fits over the penis and gauges its swelling; for the women, a little plastic probe that sits in the vagina and, by bouncing light off the vaginal walls, measures genital blood flow. An engorgement of blood spurs a lubricating process called vaginal transudation: the seeping of moisture through the walls. The participants were also given a keypad so that they could rate how aroused they felt.

The men, on average, responded genitally in what Chivers terms “category specific” ways. Males who identified themselves as straight swelled while gazing at heterosexual or lesbian sex and while watching the masturbating and exercising women. They were mostly unmoved when the screen displayed only men. Gay males were aroused in the opposite categorical pattern. Any expectation that the animal sex would speak to something primitive within the men seemed to be mistaken; neither straights nor gays were stirred by the bonobos. And for the male participants, the subjective ratings on the keypad matched the readings of the plethysmograph. The men’s minds and genitals were in agreement.

All was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly — and markedly, though to a lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the footage of the ambling, strapping man — as they watched the apes. And with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren’t in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos.

“I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest,” Chivers said, describing her ambition to understand the workings of women’s arousal and desire. “There’s a path leading in, but it isn’t much.” She sees herself, she explained, as part of an emerging “critical mass” of female sexologists starting to make their way into those woods. These researchers and clinicians are consumed by the sexual problem Sigmund Freud posed to one of his female disciples almost a century ago: “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?”

Full of scientific exuberance, Chivers has struggled to make sense of her data. She struggled when we first spoke in Toronto, and she struggled, unflagging, as we sat last October in her university office in Kingston, a room she keeps spare to help her mind stay clear to contemplate the intricacies of the erotic. The cinder-block walls are unadorned except for three photographs she took of a temple in India featuring carvings of an entwined couple, an orgy and a man copulating with a horse. She has been pondering sexuality, she recalled, since the age of 5 or 6, when she ruminated over a particular kiss, one she still remembers vividly, between her parents. And she has been discussing sex without much restraint, she said, laughing, at least since the age of 15 or 16, when, for a few male classmates who hoped to please their girlfriends, she drew a picture and clarified the location of the clitoris.

In 1996, when she worked as an assistant to a sexologist at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, then called the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, she found herself the only woman on a floor of researchers investigating male sexual preferences and what are known as paraphilias — erotic desires that fall far outside the norm. She told me that when she asked Kurt Freund, a scientist on that floor who had developed a type of penile plethysmograph and who had been studying male homosexuality and pedophilia since the 1950s, why he never turned his attention to women, he replied: “How am I to know what it is to be a woman? Who am I to study women, when I am a man?”

Freund’s words helped to focus her investigations, work that has made her a central figure among the small force of female sexologists devoted to comprehending female desire. John Bancroft, a former director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, traces sexological studies by women at least as far back as 1929, to a survey of the sexual experiences of 2,200 women carried out by Katharine Bement Davis, a prison reformer who once served as New York City’s first female commissioner of corrections. But the discipline remains male-dominated. In the International Academy of Sex Research, the 35-year-old institution that publishes Archives of Sexual Behavior and that can claim, Bancroft said, most of the field’s leading researchers among its 300 or so members, women make up just over a quarter of the organization. Yet in recent years, he continued, in the long wake of the surveys of Alfred Kinsey, the studies of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the sexual liberation movement and the rise of feminism, there has been a surge of scientific attention, paid by women, to illuminating the realm of women’s desire.

It’s important to distinguish, Julia Heiman, the Kinsey Institute’s current director, said as she elaborated on Bancroft’s history, between behavior and what underlies it. Kinsey’s data on sexuality, published in the late 1940s and early ’50s in his best-selling books “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” and “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,” didn’t reveal much about the depths of desire; Kinsey started his scientific career by cataloging species of wasps and may, Heiman went on, have been suspicious of examining emotion. Masters and Johnson, who filmed hundreds of subjects having sex in their lab, drew conclusions in their books of the late ’60s and early ’70s that concentrated on sexual function, not lust. Female desire, and the reasons some women feel little in the way of lust, became a focal point for sexologists, Heiman said, in the ’70s, through the writing of Helen Singer Kaplan, a sex therapist who used psychoanalytic methods — though sexologists prefer to etch a line between what they see as their scientific approach to the subject and the theories of psychoanalysis. Heiman herself, whom Chivers views as one of sexology’s venerable investigators, conducted, as a doctoral candidate in the ’70s, some of the earliest research using the vaginal plethysmograph. But soon the AIDS epidemic engulfed the attention of the field, putting a priority on prevention and making desire not an emotion to explore but an element to be feared, a source of epidemiological disaster.

To account partly for the recent flourishing of research like Chivers’s, Heiman pointed to the arrival of VIAGRA in the late ’90s. Though aimed at men, the drug, which transformed the treatment of impotence, has dispersed a kind of collateral electric current into the area of women’s sexuality, not only generating an effort — mostly futile so far — to find drugs that can foster female desire as reliably as Viagra and its chemical relatives have facilitated erections, but also helping, indirectly, to inspire the search for a full understanding of women’s lust. This search may reflect, as well, a cultural and scientific trend, a stress on the deterministic role of biology, on nature’s dominance over nurture — and, because of this, on innate differences between the sexes, particularly in the primal domain of sex. “Masters and Johnson saw men and women as extremely similar,” Heiman said. “Now it’s research on differences that gets funded, that gets published, that the public is interested in.” She wondered aloud whether the trend will eventually run its course and reverse itself, but these days it may be among the factors that infuse sexology’s interest in the giant forest.

“No one right now has a unifying theory,” Heiman told me; the interest has brought scattered sightlines, glimpses from all sorts of angles. One study, for instance, published this month in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior by the Kinsey Institute psychologist Heather Rupp, uses magnetic resonance imaging to show that, during the hormonal shifts of ovulation, certain brain regions in heterosexual women are more intensely activated by male faces with especially masculine features. Intriguing glimmers have come not only from female scientists. Richard Lippa, a psychologist at California State University, Fullerton, has employed surveys of thousands of subjects to demonstrate over the past few years that while men with high sex drives report an even more polarized pattern of attraction than most males (to women for heterosexuals and to men for homosexuals), in women the opposite is generally true: the higher the drive, the greater the attraction to both sexes, though this may not be so for lesbians.

Investigating the culmination of female desire, Barry Komisaruk, a neuroscientist at Rutgers University, has subjects bring themselves to orgasm while lying with their heads in an fM.R.I. scanner — he aims to chart the activity of the female brain as subjects near and reach four types of climax: orgasms attained by touching the clitoris; by stimulating the anterior wall of the vagina or, more specifically, the G spot; by stimulating the cervix; and by “thinking off,” Komisaruk said, without any touch at all. While the possibility of a purely cervical orgasm may be in considerable doubt, in 1992 Komisaruk, collaborating with the Rutgers sexologist Beverly Whipple (who established, more or less, the existence of the G spot in the ’80s), carried out one of the most interesting experiments in female sexuality: by measuringheart rate, perspiration, pupil dilation and pain threshold, they proved that some rare women can think themselves to climax. And meanwhile, at the Sexual Psychophysiology Laboratory of the University of Texas, Austin, the psychologist Cindy Meston and her graduate students deliver studies with names like “Short- and long-term effects of ginkgo biloba extract on sexual dysfunction in women” and “The roles of testosterone and alpha-amylase in exercise-induced sexual arousal in women” and “Sex differences in memory for sexually relevant information” and — an Internet survey of 3,000 participants — “Why humans have sex.”

Heiman questions whether the insights of science, whether they come through high-tech pictures of the hypothalamus, through Internet questionnaires or through intimate interviews, can ever produce an all-encompassing map of terrain as complex as women’s desire. But Chivers, with plenty of self-doubting humor, told me that she hopes one day to develop a scientifically supported model to explain female sexual response, though she wrestles, for the moment, with the preliminary bits of perplexing evidence she has collected — with the question, first, of why women are aroused physiologically by such a wider range of stimuli than men. Are men simply more inhibited, more constrained by the bounds of culture? Chivers has tried to eliminate this explanation by including male-to-female transsexuals as subjects in one of her series of experiments (one that showed only human sex). These trans women, both those who were heterosexual and those who were homosexual, responded genitally and subjectively in categorical ways. They responded like men. This seemed to point to an inborn system of arousal. Yet it wasn’t hard to argue that cultural lessons had taken permanent hold within these subjects long before their emergence as females could have altered the culture’s influence. “The horrible reality of psychological research,” Chivers said, “is that you can’t pull apart the cultural from the biological.”

Still, she spoke about a recent study by one of her mentors, Michael Bailey, a sexologist at Northwestern University: while fM.R.I. scans were taken of their brains, gay and straight men were shown pornographic pictures featuring men alone, women alone, men having sex with men and women with women. In straights, brain regions associated with inhibition were not triggered by images of men; in gays, such regions weren’t activated by pictures of women. Inhibition, in Bailey’s experiment, didn’t appear to be an explanation for men’s narrowly focused desires. Early results from a similar Bailey study with female subjects suggest the same absence of suppression. For Chivers, this bolsters the possibility that the distinctions in her data between men and women — including the divergence in women between objective and subjective responses, between body and mind — arise from innate factors rather than forces of culture.

Chivers has scrutinized, in a paper soon to be published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, the split between women’s bodies and minds in 130 studies by other scientists demonstrating, in one way or another, the same enigmatic discord. One manifestation of this split has come in experimental attempts to use Viagra-like drugs to treat women who complain of deficient desire.

By some estimates, 30 percent of women fall into this category, though plenty of sexologists argue that pharmaceutical companies have managed to drive up the figures as a way of generating awareness and demand. It’s a demand, in any event, that hasn’t been met. In men who have trouble getting erect, the genital engorgement aided by Viagra and its rivals is often all that’s needed. The pills target genital capillaries; they don’t aim at the mind. The medications may enhance male desire somewhat by granting men a feeling of power and control, but they don’t, for the most part, manufacture wanting. And for men, they don’t need to. Desire, it seems, is usually in steady supply. In women, though, the main difficulty appears to be in the mind, not the body, so the physiological effects of the drugs have proved irrelevant. The pills can promote blood flow and lubrication, but this doesn’t do much to create a conscious sense of desire.

Chivers isn’t especially interested at this point, she said, in pharmaceutical efforts in her field, though she has done a bit of consulting for Boehringer Ingelheim, a German company in the late stages of testing a female-desire drug named Flibanserin. She can’t, contractually, discuss what she describes as her negligible involvement in the development of the drug, and the company isn’t prepared to say much about the workings of its chemical, which it says it hopes to have approved by the Food and Drug Administration next year. The medication was originally meant to treat depression — it singles out the brain’s receptors for the neurotransmitter serotonin. As with other such drugs, one worry was that it would dull the libido. Yet in early trials, while it showed little promise for relieving depression, it left female — but not male — subjects feeling increased lust. In a way that Boehringer Ingelheim either doesn’t understand or doesn’t yet want to explain, the chemical, which the company is currently trying out in 5,000 North American and European women, may catalyze sources of desire in the female brain.

Testosterone, so vital to male libido, appears crucial to females as well, and in drug trials involving postmenopausal women, testosterone patches have increased sexual activity. But worries about a possibly heightened risk of cancer, along with uncertainty about the extent of the treatment’s advantages, have been among the reasons that the approach hasn’t yet been sanctioned by the F.D.A.

Thinking not of the search for chemical aphrodisiacs but of her own quest for comprehension, Chivers said that she hopes her research and thinking will eventually have some benefit for women’s sexuality. “I wanted everybody to have great sex,” she told me, recalling one of her reasons for choosing her career, and laughing as she did when she recounted the lessons she once gave on the position of the clitoris. But mostly it’s the aim of understanding in itself that compels her. For the discord, in women, between the body and the mind, she has deliberated over all sorts of explanations, the simplest being anatomy. The penis is external, its reactions more readily perceived and pressing upon consciousness. Women might more likely have grown up, for reasons of both bodily architecture and culture — and here was culture again, undercutting clarity — with a dimmer awareness of the erotic messages of their genitals. Chivers said she has considered, too, research suggesting that men are better able than women to perceive increases in heart rate at moments of heightened stress and that men may rely more on such physiological signals to define their emotional states, while women depend more on situational cues. So there are hints, she told me, that the disparity between the objective and the subjective might exist, for women, in areas other than sex. And this disconnection, according to yet another study she mentioned, is accentuated in women with acutely negative feelings about their own bodies.

Ultimately, though, Chivers spoke — always with a scientist’s caution, a scientist’s uncertainty and acknowledgment of conjecture — about female sexuality as divided between two truly separate, if inscrutably overlapping, systems, the physiological and the subjective. Lust, in this formulation, resides in the subjective, the cognitive; physiological arousal reveals little about desire. Otherwise, she said, half joking, “I would have to believe that women want to have sex with bonobos.”

Besides the bonobos, a body of evidence involving rape has influenced her construction of separate systems. She has confronted clinical research reporting not only genital arousal but also the occasional occurrence of orgasm during sexual assault. And she has recalled her own experience as a therapist with victims who recounted these physical responses. She is familiar, as well, with the preliminary results of a laboratory study showing surges of vaginal blood flow as subjects listen to descriptions of rape scenes. So, in an attempt to understand arousal in the context of unwanted sex, Chivers, like a handful of other sexologists, has arrived at an evolutionary hypothesis that stresses the difference between reflexive sexual readiness and desire. Genital lubrication, she writes in her upcoming paper in Archives of Sexual Behavior, is necessary “to reduce discomfort, and the possibility of injury, during vaginal penetration. . . . Ancestral women who did not show an automatic vaginal response to sexual cues may have been more likely to experience injuries during unwanted vaginal penetration that resulted in illness, infertility or even death, and thus would be less likely to have passed on this trait to their offspring.”

Evolution’s legacy, according to this theory, is that women are prone to lubricate, if only protectively, to hints of sex in their surroundings. Thinking of her own data, Chivers speculated that bonobo coupling, or perhaps simply the sight of a male ape’s erection, stimulated this reaction because apes bear a resemblance to humans — she joked about including, for comparison, a movie of mating chickens in a future study. And she wondered if the theory explained why heterosexual women responded genitally more to the exercising woman than to the ambling man. Possibly, she said, the exposure and tilt of the woman’s vulva during her calisthenics was processed as a sexual signal while the man’s unerect penis registered in the opposite way.

When she peers into the giant forest, Chivers told me, she considers the possibility that along with what she called a “rudderless” system of reflexive physiological arousal, women’s system of desire, the cognitive domain of lust, is more receptive than aggressive. “One of the things I think about,” she said, “is the dyad formed by men and women. Certainly women are very sexual and have the capacity to be even more sexual than men, but one possibility is that instead of it being a go-out-there-and-get-it kind of sexuality, it’s more of a reactive process. If you have this dyad, and one part is pumped full of testosterone, is more interested in risk taking, is probably more aggressive, you’ve got a very strong motivational force. It wouldn’t make sense to have another similar force. You need something complementary. And I’ve often thought that there is something really powerful for women’s sexuality about being desired. That receptivity element. At some point I’d love to do a study that would look at that.”

The study Chivers is working on now tries to re-examine the results of her earlier research, to investigate, with audiotaped stories rather than filmed scenes, the apparent rudderlessness of female arousal. But it will offer too a glimpse into the role of relationships in female eros. Some of the scripts she wrote involve sex with a longtime lover, some with a friend, some with a stranger: “You meet the real estate agent outside the building. . . .” From early glances at her data, Chivers said, she guesses she will find that women are most turned on, subjectively if not objectively, by scenarios of sex with strangers.

Chivers is perpetually devising experiments to perform in the future, and one would test how tightly linked the system of arousal is to the mechanisms of desire. She would like to follow the sexual behavior of women in the days after they are exposed to stimuli in her lab. If stimuli that cause physiological response — but that do not elicit a positive rating on the keypad — lead to increased erotic fantasies, masturbation or sexual activity with a partner, then she could deduce a tight link. Though women may not want, in reality, what such stimuli present, Chivers could begin to infer that what is judged unappealing does, nevertheless, turn women on.

Lisa Diamond, a newly prominent sexologist of Chivers’s generation, looks at women’s erotic drives in a different way. An associate professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah, with short, dark hair that seems to explode anarchically around her head, Diamond has done much of her research outside any lab, has focused a good deal of her attention outside the heterosexual dyad and has drawn conclusions that seem at odds with Chivers’s data about sex with strangers.

“In 1997, the actress Anne Heche began a widely publicized romantic relationship with the openly lesbian comedian Ellen DeGeneres after having had no prior same-sex attractions or relationships. The relationship with DeGeneres ended after two years, and Heche went on to marry a man.” So begins Diamond’s book, “Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire,” published by Harvard University Press last winter. She continues: “Julie Cypher left a heterosexual marriage for the musician Melissa Etheridge in 1988. After 12 years together, the pair separated and Cypher — like Heche — has returned to heterosexual relationships.” She catalogs the shifting sexual directions of several other somewhat notable women, then asks, “What’s going on?” Among her answers, based partly on her own research and on her analysis of animal mating and women’s sexuality, is that female desire may be dictated — even more than popular perception would have it — by intimacy, by emotional connection.

Diamond is a tireless researcher. The study that led to her book has been going on for more than 10 years. During that time, she has followed the erotic attractions of nearly 100 young women who, at the start of her work, identified themselves as either lesbian or bisexual or refused a label. From her analysis of the many shifts they made between sexual identities and from their detailed descriptions of their erotic lives, Diamond argues that for her participants, and quite possibly for women on the whole, desire is malleable, that it cannot be captured by asking women to categorize their attractions at any single point, that to do so is to apply a male paradigm of more fixed sexual orientation. Among the women in her group who called themselves lesbian, to take one bit of the evidence she assembles to back her ideas, just one-third reported attraction solely to women as her research unfolded. And with the other two-thirds, the explanation for their periodic attraction to men was not a cultural pressure to conform but rather a genuine desire.

“Fluidity is not a fluke,” Diamond declared, when I called her, after we first met before a guest lecture she gave at Chivers’s university, to ask whether it really made sense to extrapolate from the experiences of her subjects to women in general. Slightly more than half of her participants began her study in the bisexual or unlabeled categories — wasn’t it to be expected that she would find a great deal of sexual flux? She acknowledged this. But she emphasized that the pattern for her group over the years, both in the changing categories they chose and in the stories they told, was toward an increased sense of malleability. If female eros found its true expression over the course of her long research, then flexibility is embedded in the nature of female desire.

Diamond doesn’t claim that women are without innate sexual orientations. But she sees significance in the fact that many of her subjects agreed with the statement “I’m the kind of person who becomes physically attracted to the person rather than their gender.” For her participants, for the well-known women she lists at the start of her book and for women on average, she stresses that desire often emerges so compellingly from emotional closeness that innate orientations can be overridden. This may not always affect women’s behavior — the overriding may not frequently impel heterosexual women into lesbian relationships — but it can redirect erotic attraction. One reason for this phenomenon, she suggests, may be found in oxytocin, a neurotransmitter unique to mammalian brains. The chemical’s release has been shown, in humans, to facilitate feelings of trust and well-being, and in female prairie voles, a monogamous species of rodent, to connect the act of sex to the formation of faithful attachments. Judging by experiments in animals, and by the transmitter’s importance in human childbirth and breast feeding, the oxytocin system, which relies on estrogen, is much more extensive in the female brain. For Diamond, all of this helps to explain why, in women, the link between intimacy and desire is especially potent.

Intimacy isn’t much of an aphrodisiac in the thinking of Marta Meana, a professor of psychology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Meana, who serves with Chivers on the board of Archives of Sexual Behavior, entered the field of sexology in the late 1990s and began by working clinically and carrying out research on dyspareunia — women’s genital pain during intercourse. She is now formulating an explanatory model of female desire that will appear later this year in Annual Review of Sex Research. Before discussing her overarching ideas, though, we went together to a Cirque du Soleil show called “Zumanity,” a performance of very soft-core pornography that Meana mentioned to me before my visit.

On the stage of the casino’s theater, a pair of dark-haired, bare-breasted women in G-strings dove backward into a giant glass bowl and swam underwater, arching their spines as they slid up the walls. Soon a lithe blonde took over the stage wearing a pleated and extremely short schoolgirl’s skirt. She spun numerous Hula-Hoops around her minimal waist and was hoisted by a cable high above the audience, where she spread her legs wider than seemed humanly possible. The crowd consisted of men and women about equally, yet women far outnumbered men onstage, and when at last the show’s platinum-wigged M.C. cried out, “Where’s the beef?” the six-packed, long-haired man who climbed up through a trapdoor and started to strip was surrounded by 8 or 10 already almost-bare women.

A compact 51-year-old woman in a shirtdress, Meana explained the gender imbalance onstage in a way that complemented Chivers’s thinking. “The female body,” she said, “looks the same whether aroused or not. The male, without an erection, is announcing a lack of arousal. The female body always holds the promise, the suggestion of sex” — a suggestion that sends a charge through both men and women. And there was another way, Meana argued, by which the Cirque du Soleil’s offering of more female than male acrobats helped to rivet both genders in the crowd. She, even more than Chivers, emphasized the role of being desired — and of narcissism — in women’s desiring.

The critical part played by being desired, Julia Heiman observed, is an emerging theme in the current study of female sexuality. Three or four decades ago, with the sense of sexual independence brought by the birth-control pill and the women’s liberation movement, she said, the predominant cultural and sexological assumption was that female lust was fueled from within, that it didn’t depend on another’s initiation. One reason for the shift in perspective, she speculated, is a depth of insight gathered, in recent times, through a booming of qualitative research in sexology, an embrace of analyses built on personal, detailed interviews or on clinical experience, an approach that has gained attention as a way to counter the field’s infatuation with statistical surveys and laboratory measurements.

Meana made clear, during our conversations in a casino bar and on the U.N.L.V. campus, that she was speaking in general terms, that, when it comes to desire, “the variability within genders may be greater than the differences between genders,” that lust is infinitely complex and idiosyncratic.

She pronounced, as well, “I consider myself a feminist.” Then she added, “But political correctness isn’t sexy at all.” For women, “being desired is the orgasm,” Meana said somewhat metaphorically — it is, in her vision, at once the thing craved and the spark of craving. About the dynamic at “Zumanity” between the audience and the acrobats, Meana said the women in the crowd gazed at the women onstage, excitedly imagining that their bodies were as desperately wanted as those of the performers.

Meana’s ideas have arisen from both laboratory and qualitative research. With her graduate student Amy Lykins, she published, in Archives of Sexual Behavior last year, a study of visual attention in heterosexual men and women. Wearing goggles that track eye movement, her subjects looked at pictures of heterosexual foreplay. The men stared far more at the females, their faces and bodies, than at the males. The women gazed equally at the two genders, their eyes drawn to the faces of the men and to the bodies of the women — to the facial expressions, perhaps, of men in states of wanting, and to the sexual allure embodied in the female figures.

Meana has learned too from her attempts as a clinician to help patients with dyspareunia. Though she explained that the condition, which can make intercourse excruciating, is not in itself a disorder of low desire, she said that her patients reported reduced genital pain as their desire increased. The problem was how to augment desire, and despite prevailing wisdom, the answer, she told me, had “little to do with building better relationships,” with fostering communication between patients and their partners. She rolled her eyes at such niceties. She recalled a patient whose lover was thoroughly empathetic and asked frequently during lovemaking, “ ‘Is this O.K.?’ Which was very unarousing to her. It was loving, but there was no oomph” — no urgency emanating from the man, no sign that his craving of the patient was beyond control.

“Female desire,” Meana said, speaking broadly and not only about her dyspareunic patients, “is not governed by the relational factors that, we like to think, rule women’s sexuality as opposed to men’s.” She finished a small qualitative study last year consisting of long interviews with 20 women in marriages that were sexually troubled. Although bad relationships often kill desire, she argued, good ones don’t guarantee it. She quoted from one participant’s representative response: “We kiss. We hug. I tell him, ‘I don’t know what it is.’ We have a great relationship. It’s just that one area” — the area of her bed, the place desolated by her loss of lust.

The generally accepted therapeutic notion that, for women, incubating intimacy leads to better sex is, Meana told me, often misguided. “Really,” she said, “women’s desire is not relational, it’s narcissistic” — it is dominated by the yearnings of “self-love,” by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need. Still on the subject of narcissism, she talked about research indicating that, in comparison with men, women’s erotic fantasies center less on giving pleasure and more on getting it. “When it comes to desire,” she added, “women may be far less relational than men.”

Like Chivers, Meana thinks of female sexuality as divided into two systems. But Meana conceives of those systems in a different way than her colleague. On the one hand, as Meana constructs things, there is the drive of sheer lust, and on the other the impetus of value. For evolutionary and cultural reasons, she said, women might set a high value on the closeness and longevity of relationships: “But it’s wrong to think that because relationships are what women choose they’re the primary source of women’s desire.”

Meana spoke about two elements that contribute to her thinking: first, a great deal of data showing that, as measured by the frequency of fantasy, masturbation and sexual activity, women have a lower sex drive than men, and second, research suggesting that within long-term relationships, women are more likely than men to lose interest in sex. Meana posits that it takes a greater jolt, a more significant stimulus, to switch on a woman’s libido than a man’s. “If I don’t love cake as much as you,” she told me, “my cake better be kick-butt to get me excited to eat it.” And within a committed relationship, the crucial stimulus of being desired decreases considerably, not only because the woman’s partner loses a degree of interest but also, more important, because the woman feels that her partner is trapped, that a choice — the choosing of her — is no longer being carried out.

A symbolic scene ran through Meana’s talk of female lust: a woman pinned against an alley wall, being ravished. Here, in Meana’s vision, was an emblem of female heat. The ravisher is so overcome by a craving focused on this particular woman that he cannot contain himself; he transgresses societal codes in order to seize her, and she, feeling herself to be the unique object of his desire, is electrified by her own reactive charge and surrenders. Meana apologized for the regressive, anti-feminist sound of the scene.

Yet while Meana minimized the role of relationships in stoking desire, she didn’t dispense with the sexual relevance, for women, of being cared for and protected. “What women want is a real dilemma,” she said. Earlier, she showed me, as a joke, a photograph of two control panels, one representing the workings of male desire, the second, female, the first with only a simple on-off switch, the second with countless knobs. “Women want to be thrown up against a wall but not truly endangered. Women want a caveman and caring. If I had to pick an actor who embodies all the qualities, all the contradictions, it would be Denzel Washington. He communicates that kind of power and that he is a good man.”

After our discussion of the alley encounter, we talked about erotic — as opposed to aversive — fantasies of rape. According to an analysis of relevant studies published last year in The Journal of Sex Research, an analysis that defines rape as involving “the use of physical force, threat of force, or incapacitation through, for example, sleep or intoxication, to coerce a woman into sexual activity against her will,” between one-third and more than one-half of women have entertained such fantasies, often during intercourse, with at least 1 in 10 women fantasizing about sexual assault at least once per month in a pleasurable way.

The appeal is, above all, paradoxical, Meana pointed out: rape means having no control, while fantasy is a domain manipulated by the self. She stressed the vast difference between the pleasures of the imagined and the terrors of the real. “I hate the term ‘rape fantasies,’ ” she went on. “They’re really fantasies of submission.” She spoke about the thrill of being wanted so much that the aggressor is willing to overpower, to take. “But ‘aggression,’ ‘dominance,’ I have to find better words. ‘Submission’ isn’t even a good word” — it didn’t reflect the woman’s imagining of an ultimately willing surrender.

Chivers, too, struggled over language about this subject. The topic arose because I had been drawn into her ceaseless puzzling, as could easily happen when we spent time together. I had been thinking about three ideas from our many talks: the power, for women, in being desired; the keen excitement stoked by descriptions of sex with strangers; and her positing of distinct systems of arousal and desire. This last concept seemed to confound a simpler truth, that women associate lubrication with being turned on. The idea of dual systems appeared, possibly, to be the product of an unscientific impulse, a wish to make comforting sense of the unsettling evidence of women’s arousal during rape and during depictions of sexual assault in the lab.

As soon as I asked about rape fantasies, Chivers took my pen and wrote “semantics” in the margin of my notes before she said, “The word ‘rape’ comes with gargantuan amounts of baggage.” She continued: “I walk a fine line, politically and personally, talking frankly about this subject. I would never, never want to deliver the message to anyone that they have the right to take away a woman’s autonomy over her body. I hammer home with my students, ‘Arousal is not consent.’ ”

We spoke, then, about the way sexual fantasies strip away the prospect of repercussions, of physical or psychological harm, and allow for unencumbered excitement, about the way they offer, in this sense, a pure glimpse into desire, without meaning — especially in the case of sexual assault — that the actual experiences are wanted.

“It’s the wish to be beyond will, beyond thought,” Chivers said about rape fantasies. “To be all in the midbrain.”

One morning in the fall, Chivers hunched over her laptop in her sparsely decorated office. She was sifting through data from her study of genital and subjective responses to audiotaped sex scenes. She peered at a jagged red line that ran across the computer’s screen, a line that traced one subject’s vaginal blood flow, second by second. Before Chivers could use a computer program to analyze her data, she needed to “clean” it, as the process is called — she had to eliminate errant readings, moments when a subject’s shifting in her chair caused a slight pelvic contaction that might have jarred the plethysmograph, which could generate a spike in the readings and distort the overall results. Meticulously, she scanned the line, with all its tight zigs and zags, searching for spots where the inordinate height of a peak and the pattern that surrounded it told her that arousal wasn’t at work, that this particular instant was irrelevant to her experiment. She highlighted and deleted one aberrant moment, then continued peering. She would search in this way for about two hours in preparing the data of a single subject. “I’m going blind,” she said, as she stared at another suspicious crest.

It was painstaking work — and difficult to watch, not only because it might be destroying Chivers’s eyesight but also because it seemed so dwarfed by the vastness and intricacy of the terrain she hoped to understand. Chivers was constantly conjuring studies she wanted to carry out, but with numberless aberrant spikes to detect and cleanse, how many could she possibly complete in one lifetime? How many could be done by all the sexologists in the world who focus on female desire, whether they were wiring women with plethysmographs or mapping the activity of their brains in fM.R.I. scanners or fitting them with goggles or giving them questionnaires or following their erotic lives for years? What more could sexologists ever provide than intriguing hints and fragmented insights and contradictory conclusions? Could any conclusion encompass the erotic drives of even one woman? Didn’t the sexual power of intimacy, so stressed by Diamond, commingle with Meana’s forces of narcissism? Didn’t a longing for erotic tenderness coexist with a yearning for alley ravishing? Weren’t these but two examples of the myriad conflicting elements that create women’s lust? Had Freud’s question gone unanswered for nearly a century not because science had taken so long to address it but because it is unanswerable?

Chivers, perhaps precisely because her investigations are incisive and her thinking so relentless, sometimes seemed on the verge of contradicting her own provisional conclusions. Talking about how her research might help women, she said that it could “shift the way women perceive their capacity to get turned on,” that as her lab results make their way into public consciousness, the noncategorical physiological responses of her subjects might get women to realize that they can be turned on by a wide array of stimuli, that the state of desire is much more easily reached than some women might think. She spoke about helping women bring their subjective sense of lust into agreement with their genital arousal as an approach to aiding those who complain that desire eludes them. But didn’t such thinking, I asked, conflict with her theory of the physiological and the subjective as separate systems? She allowed that it might. The giant forest seemed, so often, too complex for comprehension.

And sometimes Chivers talked as if the actual forest wasn’t visible at all, as if its complexities were an indication less of inherent intricacy than of societal efforts to regulate female eros, of cultural constraints that have left women’s lust dampened, distorted, inaccessible to understanding. “So many cultures have quite strict codes governing female sexuality,” she said. “If that sexuality is relatively passive, then why so many rules to control it? Why is it so frightening?” There was the implication, in her words, that she might never illuminate her subject because she could not even see it, that the data she and her colleagues collect might be deceptive, might represent only the creations of culture, and that her interpretations might be leading away from underlying truth. There was the intimation that, at its core, women’s sexuality might not be passive at all. There was the chance that the long history of fear might have buried the nature of women’s lust too deeply to unearth, to view.

It was possible to imagine, then, that a scientist blinded by staring at red lines on her computer screen, or blinded by peering at any accumulation of data — a scientist contemplating, in darkness, the paradoxes of female desire — would see just as well.

The Differences Between Men's & Women's Fantasies

2009-10-23T22:28:00.003-04:00

Mona,

I found this article by: Robert W. Birch, Ph.D. Sexologist & Adult Sexuality Educator

Have you ever given any thought to the differences between the sexual fantasies typically conjured up by man and women. Men tend to have more sexual fantasies than women and are more likely to pair them with masturbation. Men, being visual beings, are likely create a visual image of a woman's sexual body and imagine watching her or seducing her or, quite often, being seduced by her. Women, on the other hand, are typically less visual in their sexual fantasies, are usually less focused on genitals, and usually focus more on the emotional feelings of a romantic encounter. Women also tend to involve more olfactory and auditory memories... memories of smells and sounds.

Many women have difficulty imagining an explicit sexual encounter, but readily acknowledge the stirring of sexual feelings while engrossed in a romantic novel or movie. Erotic fantasies, PG-13 through the X rated ones, can serve several sexual functions. Fantasies can induce sexual desire, maintain sexual arousal, enhance the sexual experience, trigger an orgasm, and preserve a memory.

The desire to be sexual is not controlled by a switch that can be turned on following the eleven o'clock news. Many people, particularly as they age or as a relationship matures, find that the easy turn ons are less and less likely to occur, particularly late at night. At times when time is limited, fantasies can serve to focus attention on the anticipated erotic event and help induce a desire for sexual intimacy.

More than one person has told me, "I'm not able to get excited on a moment's notice - I need time to psych myself up." To induce desire, you can think ahead about what you would like to experience and what you wish to both give and receive. Imagine the sexual encounter is your very first, but without those initial anxieties, and let it be, in your mind, a new and exciting adventure. Recall the good sexual feelings you have experienced and mentally reminisce about memorable past encounters. Conjure up the memory of a partner's warmth, softness, and gentle touch. See your partner's face in your mind's eye and recall that person's sounds of pleasure and the aroma of their excitement.

Desire can be induced mutually throughout the day, with, for example, a phone call to say, "I've been thinking of your wonderful body." The mid-day message, "You won't believe what I want to do to you tonight," can stir the imagination of both partners, spending the day thinking of the possibilities in store for that night.

For those without a partner, fantasies during the day can become the prelude for an episode of self-loving that evening. Self-stimulation, the normal, natural way of experiencing solitary pleasure, is a healthy outlet for many who are alone. Fantasy during the day can certainly prepare you for the quiet celebration of your own sexual response.

Most of us have had the experience of beginning a sexual encounter, only to find our minds wandering off to the worries of the day or the pressing issues of tomorrow. By pushing away the intrusive nonsexual thoughts, erotic fantasy can maintain arousal. When distractions hit, we need only focus on a pleasant sexual memory or project an exciting visual image on our mental movie screen. Fantasies can be of our current sexual partner, but often they will revolve around persons from the past, coworkers, movie stars, or attractive strangers. Bringing others into fantasies is normal and is justified if it serves the current relationship by eliminating distractions that would otherwise dampen or destroy the passion. Obviously, if someone feels guilty about including others in his or her fantasy script, they should be left out. Some people like a cast of thousands, while others want to focus exclusively on their current partner.

Many people worry about their fantasies being "kinky", but such fantasies are common. Unusual fantasies can help maintain arousal and are harmless if there is no compulsion to actually experience an act that would be emotionally or physically harmful to oneself or to others. Whereas honesty is usually the best policy, discretion must be used in the sharing of some unusual fantasies or fantasies involving other people. It is rare that a couple can share such private thoughts without, at best, a little discomfort. Too often the reaction to hearing a partner's most kinky fantasy is one of jealousy and distrust, if not anger and disgust.

One woman playfully imagined that her partner's penis was enormous, and reported how she would visualize engulfing this gigantic imaginary erection into her body... and she would privately marveled at her vagina's ability to swallow up this massive tool. She quickly acknowledged, however, that she had no desire to experience anything that large in real life, but she did enjoy embellishing her fantasy with the thoughts of dressing this impressive male member in doll's clothing and taking it for walks in the park. During her sexual encounters, this fantasy helped rivet her attention on the pleasure she was feeling from the very adequate reasonably-sized penis of her partner.

One night, this woman decided that it would be fun to share her fantasy with her partner. To her utter surprise, the man was devastated upon hearing her playful musings! He began worrying that she had been with men who had larger penises than his, fearing that these well-endowed men must have please her more than he could ever hope to. He erroneously assumed that she could not enjoy his average-sized penis, and began to feel totally inadequate as her lover. Fearing he could not satisfy this woman, he backed off sexually. When he did try, he felt self-conscious and, as a result, often failed to become erect. This, of course, led to more avoidance and self-degradation.

In couples therapy, this man worked on understanding that his partner's fantasy had nothing to do with his genital size or sexual performance, but made their shared intimacy more exciting for her. In our last therapy session he began laughing and, when questioned, shared his own "pet" fantasy. He had for many years fantasized he was making love to a virgin and that her vagina was the town's tightest. Both agreed that they loved each other, loved the sexuality they shared, and would never again ask about the private fantasies each used to dispel the occasional intruding distractions. The also learned that virginity and penis size are immaterial when there is love.

The consequences of disclosure were more serious for another couple. The man fantasized about having sex with his wife's younger married sister. While he found the sister attractive, he had no illusions about her commitment to her husband and would never, in reality, make a pass at her. When he shared his fantasy, however, his wife expressed anger and disbelief. She became extremely uncomfortable whenever her sister was around and believed that she had to watch them both closely for any signs of subtle flirtation. Angry that she now felt distrusting, not only of her husband, but of her sister as well, she chose to end her marriage with the man rather than further damaging her relationship with her sister. The fantasy proved to be too close, too personal, and too threatening.

Many shared fantasies, however, enhance desire and maintain arousal. One night a man entered a singles bar, propped himself up on a bar stool and slowly rotated, carefully surveying the women around him. Apparently no one caught his eye, so he turned his back on the scene and sipped quietly on his drink. About fifteen minutes later, a woman walked in. As her eyes adjusted to the darkened room, she also scrutinized the crowd. She wandered around a bit, being careful not to make eye contact with any of the men scattered around the room. After a few minutes of aimless wandering, she moved up beside the man who was seemingly intent on nursing his drink. Sliding between him and the person sitting next to him, she leaned toward the bar to catch the bartender's attention. As she did, the man felt her breast brush lightly across his arm, but he did not look her way.

After being served, the woman stepped back, drink in hand, and stood behind the man. Aware of her presence, the man turned and looked into her eyes. His unoriginal inquiry, "Do you come her very often?" was met with an abrupt, "No!" As he turned toward her, his leg came to rest against her thigh. She made no attempt to avoid the contact, but waited for him to continue his attempt to initiate conversation. Awkwardly he asked, "What do you do for fun?" Both grinned at her response, "I pick up strange men in singles bars." At this point the drink he had been nursing so patiently was gulped down in record time and he asked her to dance. She played at being reluctant, but allowed him to convince her. On the dance floor, they danced as though each was covered by porcupine quills and a large man on a Harley-Davidson could have driven between them. As they continued to dance, however, they moved closer until, from a distance, it looked as though their bodies had blended into one.

As they left together he asked, "Shall we take your car or mine?" Again giggling, they took his car to the nearest motel, where he produced a bottle of wine from an ice bucket on the back seat. Ralph and Mary, who had been married for three years, were acting out their shared fantasy. Once in the room, Mary enticed Ralph into seducing her slowly, pretending uncertainty "I really don't know if I should!" as he pretended clumsiness, fumbling to unbutton her blouse and acting bewildered by the complexities of the one-handed unsnapping of a push-up bra.

During their lovemaking, Mary intentionally cried out, "Oh Bill, you make me feel so good," and in the morning, Ralph pretended to have completely forgotten her name. It was a night not soon forgotten, providing the erotic content for many fantasies that followed.

Novelty can get lost in long-term relationships. When a couple becomes comfortable and familiar with each other sexually, they often forget to be romantic. The entire sexual scenario might become routine, taking place at the same time of the day and in the same location - and all too often hurried. While it might be impractical for most of us to make love on a beach, in fantasy we can imagine the sound of the ocean, the warmth of the sand beneath our body, and the excitement of making love under the stars. Perhaps yours will be a fantasy of making love in the woods, or in an old barn, or in the backseat of a car you had as a teenager.

Some fantasies can be acted out, e.g., a pick up in a grocery store. But most fantasies are just private thoughts that need not have a complex storyline, or a cast of hundreds. Working too hard at building a sexual fantasy can become a distraction, defeating one of its purposes. The best fantasies are often quite simple and tied in with pleasant memories. Often it is visual, creating a mental image of a part of the partner's body that is pleasing to look at, but impossible to see in the dark or in a particular position. At times words can be added to the fantasy while forming the mental image "I love your buns."

Special fantasies can be saved for those times when an orgasm is a bit elusive. These favorites can often add the final bit of excitement needed to trigger a powerful climax.

Fantasies serve many functions from getting started to getting finished. Remember, sexual fantasies before, during and after a sexual encounter are normal, natural and often helpful in changing a routine experience into a new and exciting event.

Robert W. Birch, Ph.D. is retired after 35 years of clinical experience, university teaching and public lecturing in the specialized area of relationships and sexuality. No longer a sex therapist, he now identifies himself as a sexologist and an adult sexuality educator, and lives and writes in rural Ohio with Susan and their four dogs. For much more on this topic, read Dr. Birch's illustrated book titled Male Sexual Endurance: A Man's Book About Ejaculatory Control. A shorter bare-bones outline of the start-start exercises are available in his manual titled Introduction To The Management Of Premature Ejaculation: A Short Book About Lasting Longer. For a short illustrated brochure on the use of vibrators, including their use during intercourse, read Dr. Birch's Your Vibrator: Using It, Enjoying It, and Sharing It. Men wanting to learn more about orally satisfying a woman should read the book written by Dr. Birch titled Oral Caress: A Loving Guide to Exciting a Woman. All these books and much more can be found on his website at http://www.oralcaress.com

There goes...

2009-10-21T15:50:00.003-04:00

There goes my ULTRA CONSERVATIVE husband kaboshing yet another one of my exploratory ideas! As for our neighbor, the priest, well where do you think I came up with that idea in the first place?

I just don't think that your cousins farm will work for me. Although the neighing of the horses and mooing of the cows could be quite the aphrodisiac, I just draw the line at the grunting of the pigs!

OK Honey, how about you take the Harley out of the garage, put on that old leather jacket and let me feel the power of 1000 pounds of steal between my legs. At least this time, I will get mine!

I knew I should have...

2009-10-21T12:59:00.002-04:00

I knew I should have cut that damn tree down a long time ago! LOL. As usual, my little sexually liberated wife offers up some voyeuristic options.

I'm not really sure whether the neighbors would take too kindly to us dancing and sexing it up around the bar-b-que pit, since we have no privacy fence and our closest neighbors are a preacher, an elementary school teacher and a Judge with four small children.

However, if you want to act out this harbored fantasy of yours, we could always go out to Cousin Sara's farm in Bumfrig' Egypt. I don't think the cows and horses would mind.

Well honey...

2009-10-20T20:48:00.006-04:00

Well honey, since you mention fantasies! As for staying away from the bed, how about when we put the kids to bed tonight, we go to the backyard, light a fire in the pit and have a glass of wine? Oh, and I have always had this fantasy about you taking me under the big oak tree! In fact, when we were laying sod the other day, I kept looking at that tree, imagining you slamming me against it and just taking me! While we are on the subject of sharing fantasies, I have always had this one particular fantasy. I know how much you love sushi. How about I serve your favorite pieces placed on my naked body? Yum! Now that should put the bang back into our sex life! Now how about you tell me some of your fantasies?

WTF?

2009-10-18T18:38:00.001-04:00

Okay, I have no idea what that was about. I simply asked what we could do to "spice up our love life".

I was hoping you would come up with some ideas honey that would be beneficial to both of us. But as usual, you seem to want to walk away from the issues rather than address them.

But let's not fight. I really want to know some ideas. I have a few that I found on the internet. Let me know if you like any of them.

Make a date night - Pick a time and consider it a treat -- not one more thing on our to-do list. Think it's a downer to plan for sex, honey? News flash: You basically always did. "A lot of what seemed like spontaneous sex, really wasn't. We had it on dates, weekends, vacation -- times we knew it would happen. Planned sex can still be hot sex."

Get busy anywhere but in our bed - Using the dining room table for something other than dining would add variety, but there's another reason to ditch our bedroom: "One of my friends said that he was always so tired that anytime he hit the mattress, he just wanted to sleep!"

How about spontaneous hugging - Try this hug hint: Sneak up behind me and wrap your arms around me. "I have 'breast receptors' all over my body. Your chest feels great against my back -- it's a big turn-on."

Use the past as an aphrodisiac - I know you are not a huge fan of talking dirty. So why not take a stroll down our shared sexual memory lane with me instead. "All it has to be is, 'Remember when you did X?'". It's likely to get you a repeat performance :-)

Stop focusing on the big O - "Rediscover the bases!" Take the pressure off by seeing how good we can make each other feel without any "goal" in mind.

Surprise me in the shower - The kids are unlikely to be suspicious of us being in the bathroom together in the morning.

Dip into our kids' toy chest - We paid for all those board games -- why don't we borrow them and play strip versions?

Share a fantasy - Not only is curiosity sexy, it also has the power to shift our relationship. "Too many people have 'psychic' sex. We all tend to think we know what the other person wants, when often we may be hiding the same desires."

Type up a turn-on - Sending a racy e-mail or text message to me only takes a few seconds.

Build anticipation - As I'm walking out the door in the morning, tell me what you can't wait to do to me that night. (Use code words so the kids won't understand.) We could feel excited all day.

Recreate our first dates - Bring back the initial lust we felt by revisiting the spots we went to in the beginning of our relationship.

Break our patterns - Since we do moves in a certain order in bed, we should change it up! Or set rules, like 'hands' or 'mouth only' tonight.

Get book smart - We could buy a book of new sexual positions, curl up on the couch together and ask if there are some things we'd like to try. "I used to being the one who has to approach you, and I never forget the sting of rejection. "I'd love it if you took the initiative."

Ignore the clock - We should stop viewing sex as a nighttime activity. We may be too tired to do it then anyway! Fooling around on a Saturday afternoon, while the kids are out, could be very steamy.

Get me in a liplock - Everyday intimate gestures are key to a sizzling sex life and kissing is the number one thing that turns you on. "Pull me close and say, 'I adore kissing you.'"

A Better Idea for You Dave

2009-10-17T21:35:00.002-04:00

You only ridiculed my thoughts Dave, so I have a better one for you.

You go with your idea.

I'll go with mine somewhere else.

So much for communication in marriage. (Shrugs shoulders, walks out, and slams the door)

Mona my Dear...

2009-10-17T18:21:00.002-04:00

I was being sarcastic about the outfits. But do you think that old Superman one will still fit me?

I actually recently read an article on another blog ("Are You Friggen' Kidding Me?") that said most women are bored with sex. It was about some new book written about why women have sex or something like that. I remember mostly that it says that women have sex because they can't think of a reason not too. Is this true? Is that why you are bored? Are you bored with our sex life? Humpf!

I kinda like it - well, at least when you are awake too. Maybe we should explore some ways to spice up the love life!?!? Maybe talk about some great ideas to make the bedroom a little less "boring".

Any ideas?

Okay Dave

2009-10-17T17:49:00.002-04:00

So why bring up your costumes? If all you are interested in is naked sex, then perhaps it would be better for both of us if you just stated it that way. I guess you just did though. Not to worry Dave. There's no need to put anything on. The uniform was not the actual attraction for me anyway. You missed the entire point.

*sigh* That divorce might come quicker than Dave's pal thinks. Dave is bored with teddys and I'm bored period.

I thought you would say that...

2009-10-17T16:49:00.003-04:00

I figured you would say to wear a Cop uniform, being how you love cops so much! LOL.

I just don't understand the appeal to "Role playing". It hardly seems worth the time to put all that crap on. It's not sexy. It's kinda juvenile actually.

We seem to be the only species on the planet that thinks we should "put something on" before sex. Why don't we just do it like whales do - we could just rub on each other (naked of course), do the nasty and then swim away!

I went to a nudist colony many years ago (before I met you - when I attended Berkeley) and people walked around naked a jaybirds all day. It didn't matter if they we playing ping pong, swimming, sunbathing or even dining. It seemed so natural (after the initial reservations).

And contrary to popular belief, men didn't walk around with erections all day. There was the occasional one, but usually there was some sort of physical stimulation (like during the naked tackle football games).

Why are we so repressed about sex in this country? Isn't it supposed to be a good thing? Can't we all just live "Nakedly-Ever-After"?

P.S. - See Mona, I had my days when I wasn't so conservative. ;-)

Football at Berkeley

Your Choice Dave

2009-10-17T01:07:00.005-04:00

Dave is so conservative that he refers to The Adult Toy Shoppe as "that other one." Don't you love it? I wouldn't want him to be any other way. Who needs a V.S. charge card when I can hijack your cash whenever I want anyway? (that is a joke of course hehehe).

Why don't you open the account at The Red Door Store and pick out what you want to see me in Dave? You know how much I dislike wearing undies anyway so there's not much worry about removing babes. Maybe something like this that I could actually wear out:

Or this for when we are at home:

Can I make a suggestion on your outfit Dave? Skip the Julius Ceasar and the Superman outfits and let's try something different, okay? Wear a cop uniform, and don't forget the cuffs… ;-)

Maybe you are right...

2009-10-16T09:02:00.000-04:00

Very well Mona. I think I might like to see you in some of those outfits. It probably was the Victoria Secret crap that turned me off. Don't worry, I already went into your purse, got the V.S. charge card back and cut it up!

Now, if you bring that toy and that nakedness over here, we can talk about a new charge account at The Red Door Store and that other one! ;-)

I am wondering what I could do to balance out the foreplay though. Should I wear my Julius Caesar Halloween costume or the Superman one?

We Would Hope Not Dave

2009-10-15T21:51:00.000-04:00

From a woman's perspective I hope that lingerie isn't necessary dear. When a woman emerges from the bathroom in a sexy negligee, she is at least thinking that it provokes excitement. Why bother to fumble with it? Did you ever consider ripping it off of me? If it's not your thing anyway, then we sure won't be making further use of it, now will we?

Maybe it's the Victoria's Secret stuff that is part of the issue too. Boring! How about if I show up in something erotic from The Red Door Store instead? Can I bring a bag with play toys from The Adult Toy Shoppe along for the ride? Would that stir your blood Dave? The anticipation of wondering what I'll do next should be an important part of our relationship also. I detest being predictable.

Communication is important here too love. I've never been a mind-reader, but now that you've brought it up, I admit that I'm over the mall lingerie as well. Maybe we are thinking the same thing and don't even realize it... (stated enticingly as I lean on the bathroom door-frame completely nude in an immodest postion playing with one of my new toys...)

Is Lingerie Really Necessary?

2009-10-15T20:36:00.000-04:00

As pretty as lingerie looks on the mannequins in the Victoria Secret store, I find it to be kind of a waste at home.

By the time you see her come out of the bathroom with some skimpy little "nothing" on and then fumble to get it off of her, the mood can fizzle out. It's kinda' like getting that present at Christmas or buying yourself a new gadget from Best Buy. Even a few seconds (or minutes for those vacuum sealed electronics) seems like too long. I wanna play now!

Why not just come out from the bathroom naked and lean on the door-frame for a second to entice me. I guarantee that will get my blood stirring better than a teddy.