Is it time yet for me to tell you this? Because I’ll guess that some people won’t want to hear it. But here goes: as a sex-science-loving pragmatist, I think every adult should know how to give orgasms to other adults, regardless of their sex, gender or orientation.
The more consensual experience you have the greater your chances of achieving true sexual happiness. Only consensual sex does this, by the way. Traumatic sexual experience has the opposite effect — it builds damages and obstacles to personal growth. But, assuming it is by your own free choice, then fucking around with a wide range of different partners is both as natural and positive as any other consensual choice.
Experimentation isn’t just for college! The more adults understand how other bodies work, the better they understand their own responses. Sexual experimentation is an authentic and beneficial human experience regardless of your age or stage of life. New experiences open you up to new ways of experiencing pleasure. They nudge you outside of your comfort zone to a place where you have to summon higher resources, like tolerance, patience, kindness and generosity. Erotic variety and the empowerment of free choice in bed awaken you to authentic eroticism and helps you gain the confidence to feel and act sexy without shame. It allows the sexual side of your identity to mature and evolve in tandem with your personality. It fosters self-love and teaches you things about humanity you cannot learn from books.
We Were Born to Be Sexual Adventurers
All of us are born with an innate ability to give and receive sexual pleasure to any other adult. We are basically born to be sexual opportunists who want to have orgasms. This natural capacity is pretty much squashed by culture. We teach people that there is a binary system, that men are men and women are women. Whatever that means (yeah, I still haven’t figured it out).
We teach people there is only one kind of partner they are allowed to have and that their choice must be based on the kind of partner society expects them to have. Then the burden is on individuals to conform to those rules. If we can’t, we are blamed. We think something is wrong with us for not fitting into the culture’s rules about who can put their dick where and when they are permitted to uncross their lady-like legs. Finger-pointers say we were raised wrong or we are stubborn and defiant personalities who refuse to see the light of their reason. Cultures teach conformity and punish outsiders.
For decades, psychiatrists pondered what kind of home life made people homosexual, as if they could find the answer in how your mother dressed you or if you were raised to be selfish. They literally couldn’t understand why gay people wouldn’t ungay in treatment, no matter how much the doctors tormented them. The irony is that homosexuality seems inborn, while some heterosexuality is actually the product of pressure from family, church, and society at large. And maybe how your mother dressed you or what standards your parents imposed on you.
Diversity, differentials, and fluidity are in our genes. We are born bi or gay or lesbian or trans. It had nothing to do with whether or not mother put us in a dressing gown. We were probably also were born to be BDSM, to have fetishes, and to express a myriad of genders, also thanks to our DNA. And I do mean ALL of us. Even totally conventional people are still enormously sexually complex organisms, with potentials that go far beyond the kind of unadventurous sex they may have.
Our culture discourages sexual exploration. It takes a hostile attitude towards variation. Our culture is obsessed with reproductive sex, to the point where people think it’s the only or highest purpose of having sex. Basically, no matter where you are raised or what belief system you have, there will be a system in place that tells you what kind of sex is right and what kind of sex is wrong.
The problem is that cultures don’t know what’s right or moral for individuals. They don’t possess that kind of higher consciousness. When it comes to sexual customs and mores, it’s random. Things that are legal in some countries are outlawed in others. While in Scandinavia, gay people can live and love as they choose, in Chechnya right now, gay men are being abominably persecuted. Sex behaviors we in the U.S. consider outrageous are acceptable traditions in other countries. In Papua, Sambian men engage in sex rituals that baffle and outrage Westerners. Sambians likely would find it bizarre that our culture doesn’t have stringent initiation rituals to guide boys to manhood.
I picked extreme examples to illustrate the point: when it comes to rules about sex, well, I ignore them. Instead I look at sex as it is lived for behavior and I look to science for data. What would humans be like “in the raw” of our biological impulses and universal sexual desires? For an unflinchingly real snapshot of humans in the sexual wild, you have to imagine humanity without religion, without civilization and laws, without a developed language, and without modern technology. In other words, it’s unimaginable. And while we may have their bones, we’ll never know if ancient hominids like the Neanderthal or Denisovan preferred anal to oral or even gave two shits if someone was queer. I mean, someone had to be queer back then, because queerness is in the human gene pool.
Diversity is Normality
Pleasure-centered, consensual experiences across genders and orientations are learning experiences. You learn new things from your partners, and you learn a ton of new things about yourself. If you’ve had a lifetime of sex with only one specific type of partner, it’s possible you are missing out on experiences that would bring you more and better pleasure. It’s possible you have an artificially narrow repertoire that is unnatural for YOU (no matter whether it’s natural for your spouse, your neighbor or your pastor). It’s even possible that you don’t fully understand your own body because you constantly measure yourself against one sexist standard, according to boundaries set for you by other people.
Hard-wired “binary heterosexuals” who feel utterly completed by missionary position binary sex with an opposite sex partner are so few and far between, they deserve to be studied as the minority they are. Conversely, statistics on “how many people are gay” are info-drek. Those numbers only tell me the number of people who identify as gay and are willing to admit it to a researcher. In cultures like ours, it’s impossible to gauge the true number of gay, lesbian, asexual, bi and trans people because so many are either closeted or have been brainwashed into leading binary het lives even when they’re looking at gay porn every night. And then there’s kink and fetish and other sexual interests that stray from the paradigm.
If we weren’t told it was “sick” or perverted, and if we weren’t continually shamed for stepping outside of our label box, well, we don’t know what we’d look like sexually. Labels and categories are inadequate. People who hide behind labels and never venture out of their boxes also tend to assign labels to others and try to keep them in boxes as well. They choke off their natural sexual exuberance and they poison their lives with ideology.
Perhaps it’s precisely because of the awakening to that understanding — that labels are never adequate to describe sexual behaviors except as a clinical convenience for research purposes — that many people have defiantly gone the other way. They create new language and nuanced labels that arrange their preferences into mini-categories, as you can see in this Asexual Identity guide. In our culture, that may be a necessity. How else to assert some power and reclaim dignity in a binary hetero-chauvinistic world that wants to stick your sexual identity in a coffin?
The more you understand other people’s genitals, the more you understand your own
The main reason people don’t have orgasms is because they don’t understand where orgasms really come from or what kind of mindset and physical feelings they need to have them. That’s why I think that more genital awareness and genital love in our culture is an advantage. The more you understand other people’s bodies, the more you will understand your own. The more you understand the how’s and why’s of their orgasms, the better skills you can develop in having own orgasms.
Most people don’t even know that male genitals and female genitals have a lot of similarities. They treat the genitals of an opposite sex as if it was a new and foreign sort of creature. That comes out of our binary way of thinking. The visible appearance of male genitals and female genitals are totally different, and one set may appeal to you while the other does not, that’s all true. There are also huge differentials in how male, female and trans reproductive systems work, depending on which reproductive role their equipment allows them to play in the fertility process. But despite all the old white male doctors who harp on the differences between male and female gender many of the fundamental mechanics of human sexuality are common to ALL adults.
Straight up, every embryo starts out with a vagina (called a primordial slit) which then develops into either a penis or a penis-like structure, the clitoris. The clit has a shaft (stem), a head (glans) and the clitoral hood is, in essence, a foreskin. These organs are the powerful source of orgasm for most adults (though there are folks with exceptional and varied talents for deriving orgasms from other body parts).
Regardless of your sex/gender, your sex organs are biologically connected to every major organ in your body. That means deep inside you — liver, lungs, heart, etc. — your inner organs have the same relationship to sexual function, regardless of your sex or gender. Your sexual function is dependent on hormone levels, brain function (the chemical signals our brains send out when we’re aroused) and psychology (we all need to feel interested and “be in the mood” in order to become fully aroused). We also all share a vital mechanism: blood flow must increase into our groins and then pool (or congest) there to keep us aroused.
And all that adds up to the reality that, regardless of gender, all adults share the same 8 characteristics:
- our brain wants orgasms
- we need mental focus to enjoy sex
- stress kills sex drive
- lack of consent kills sex drive and causes trauma
- positive erotic re-enforcements (touches and/or verbal encouragements) stoke sexual energy
- intimacy (kissing, compliments, emotional warmth) enhance sexual energy
- blood flow to the genitals increases arousal
- sex chemicals enhance personal happiness, feelings of security and emotional bonding
If you know how to stoke the energy, how to relax your partner’s mind so they trust you, how to stroke and stim the penis or clit, and can recognize signs of arousal by observing their bodies warm with blood and their genitals swell with arousal, you can give orgasms to anyone. The question is who you permit yourself to have sex with.
By no means is this any kind of call to action — I don’t advocate sleeping with people outside your comfort zone, period. Lust has to be organic or it will bomb. Some of us are just the way we are (gay, straight, asexual) and always will be, because it feels most organic to us. We feel totally fulfilled in our comfort zones.
But if you are someone who struggles with orgasms or feels ambivalent about the value of experimentation, take my word for it: there is no such thing as learning too much about sexual pleasure. There is no harm in pursuing the variety you crave. And the more fun you have, the more orgasmic joy you can discover with other joyous adults, the happier, richer and more fulfilling your life will be. In fact, some of the happiest people I know are swingers and orgiasts who have lived out their fantasies in full and become wise and astute about sex to exceptional degrees.
[note: parts of this blog were excerpted from The Truth about Sex, volumes I and II]
