by Annabeth Leong
I was going to talk about how to tell if your story idea wants to be a short story or a novel, but then I noticed that Cameron talked about dicks and it’s getting late and I think I’ll go with a sexual interpretation of our topic, too. Specifically, time to orgasm: short and long.
First, as relates to me:
I think the time it takes to orgasm alters the character of the sensation. A quickly attained orgasm can be explosive and exciting, and there can also be something satisfying about a carefully nursed and well-earned orgasm. On the other hand, there are pitfalls along the way. I not infrequently get into long masturbation sessions where I start out by having an orgasm faster than I want to, so I’m unsatisfied because I planned to spend more quality time with myself. So I keep going, but then the orgasms I get later don’t feel worth the time I put into them, so I keep going. A couple hours later, I’m still going, sweaty and frustrated, still chasing a feeling I may or may not reach.
I have a partner with a masturbation fetish who finds the fact that I do this unbearably hot and loves nothing more than discovering me desperately in the midst of this with sex toys strewn all over the bed. I have mixed feelings about it personally, though it does work the abs.
Activities that tend to make me come quickly:
Masturbation, using my hand — I can do this in under two minutes if I feel motivated enough and think the right thoughts. It is reliable, good, solid sensation. This is the thing to beat. Speaking physically (as in, leaving aside emotion), a lot of partnered sex in my experience is not as good as what I can do this way.
Me, on top, riding some sort of phallus — If my partner can handle me moving the way I like and I get the right sort of nipple stimulation, this can be really fast, too. It feels particularly good to me to come this way. I have to straighten my legs, and the key to this position is rubbing my clit on my partner’s pubic bone while gripping the phallus with internal muscles just so. Based on feedback from penis-owning partners, though, it sounds like this does not always produce the best feeling from the other perspective, so that’s a downside.
Spanking the clit with a hand or a strap — I had a partner who asked me if the thing I do in response to this is really an orgasm. I’m not 100% sure? But I do know that I start out shying away from the strap or what have you, quickly progress to pushing toward it, and soon reach a moment that is a climax of some sort in that I want the strap really intensely and then wind up feeling satisfied and finished with what we’re doing. If I was horny when we started, that feeling is taken care of after this.
Activities that take a long time:
Masturbation, using the famed Hitachi — This takes, no joke, something like 45 minutes for me. I ride the magic wand, because otherwise my wrist would hurt too much for me to type for the next 24 hours. It feels good for brief periods but then makes me go numb. I still use this thing a fair bit because the end result is powerful, but it’s a goddamn workout. I usually have to hold my breath, flex every muscle in my body, grab the edges of the mattress so hard I’m bending it nearly in half, and thrust for all I’m worth. I usually get a headache afterwards. I’m not sure why I do this as often as I do.
Receiving oral sex — I feel like if I was more comfortable with myself this could go faster. It definitely does go faster if my partner is able to put fingers inside me while using their tongue. However, when someone starts going down on me approximately 98% of my brain is occupied with feeling self-conscious as fuck. I gradually relax as they do things with their tongue, but at some point 98% of my brain gets occupied with worrying about how incredibly long I’m taking to come. There’s a sweet spot somewhere in between, but if something disrupts it the process has to start from the beginning.
Getting fingered — I’m so good with my own fingers, but nobody else does it exactly like I do it! As a result, this is an interesting way to come but it takes about a million years. Again, I struggle with self-consciousness while it is happening. I’ve had some pleasant surprises with this method, though. I usually cannot come with someone the first time we have sex, but I once had someone finger me to orgasm through extreme patience the first time we were together. I think the key was that this partner genuinely seemed to be having fun with the fingering, not like they were waiting impatiently for me to come, so I relaxed the necessary amount.
***
I think it’s interesting to note that the methods that take the longest to me are generally thought to be the most surefire, I think.
Now a few words about time to orgasm as far as my partners are concerned.
With penis owners:
Please, please, for the love of all that is holy, penis owners, do not engage in athletics and mental tricks to “last” as long as possible, at least not with me. I do not really want a phallus in me for a significantly long period of time. Things dry out and start to hurt. You are not doing me a favor. I suffered through this mostly in my early twenties. I think at this time in my life, I would at some point suggest mutual masturbation as an alternative.
On the other hand, please do not come rapidly and promptly fall asleep. Do you enjoy watching or participating in masturbation? If so, I believe we can hang.
With vulva owners:
Perhaps this is hypocritical given what I said above, but I could do whatever thing I am doing for however long is required. I am super happy to go down and stay down, to do whatever is needed with my fingers up to and past the point when my hand feels like it may fall off, to operate the vibrator, to help you lubricate while you operate it, whatever is needed. I used to tell an ex-girlfriend, “I’m here all night,” and I meant it. This was not out of an effort to do her a favor (though I hope she benefited). It was motivated by my nearly endless desire to be between her thighs. Many women I have slept with have felt self-conscious about taking a long time to orgasm. From what I’ve written above, it’s pretty clear that I am, too. But it’s funny because I’m not remotely bothered by that when I’m on the other side of it (on the contrary—I’m really turned on by the idea of using my tongue until it hurts).
With people who don’t want their genitals touched:
The “I’m here all night” principle tends to operate here as well. I’m a foot fetishist, and I will lick a lover’s feet pretty much until they kick me away. If it takes a long time to reach the point of satisfaction, whatever that may be, I’m good—especially if I get to indulge my oral fixation in the process.
A few conclusions:
I tend to feel more awkward/limited about what is done to me. It is harder for me to deal with an extended procedure as a receiver, while I am eager to be on the giver side to the point of fetishizing it. I wonder how common this viewpoint is. I do notice a lot of people who are self-conscious about taking a long time. On the other hand, I have slept with selfish people who come and then bounce without seeing what their partner might be into. In general, as with all things sexual, talking more would be good!
I don’t think there is an ideal time to orgasm, as receiver or giver. I’ve read studies and statistics on this topic, and I notice general defensiveness around coming too quickly or not spending too long having sex. Longer is not always better, though. I think it takes however long it takes. Probably, as with most things, a middle answer will work well in general.
(Sorry to be posting so late, friends! I hope this piece still entertains!)
Showing posts with label orgasm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label orgasm. Show all posts
Thursday, March 9, 2017
Thursday, July 16, 2015
The Hite of Curiosity
by Annabeth Leong
The summer half my family fled Hawaii, my mother regained the trove of possessions she’d left behind in Denver. Among the family heirlooms and old furniture was a collection of her old books, and that was what drew most of my attention.
I was at the age where I was desperately trying to put together the facts behind the allusions people made to sex. I could say the number 69 with a knowing inflection, but I had no idea what act it signified.
That summer, I came across several books that opened my eyes.
We’d moved into a squalid apartment in a neighborhood of Atlanta marked primarily by white flight and the large empty buildings left in its wake. The previous occupants had left behind a lot of things, including a stack of paperback novels in one of the closets.
I pounced on the novels and quickly made the discovery that many of them contained “good parts.” I was supposed to be unpacking boxes and moving into my new room, but I spent hours with the lower half of my body hidden in the closet, reading and internally pulsing. I hadn’t really worked out how to masturbate to orgasm with reliability. I knew the word orgasm but wasn’t entirely sure what it represented. I’d experienced something that maybe qualified, but I wasn’t 100% confident about what I’d felt. I’d read enough to figure out that sex involved penetration, but simulating that with my fingers enough to come required acrobatic contortions and lots of uninterrupted time. (I didn’t yet have any concept of sex outside heteronormative images of the penis entering the vagina.)
Motivated as I was, it was hard to do that while eluding discovery. Inside, I boiled with plots for what I could do or get that would work better (I didn’t know what a dildo was, but I had dim ideas for how I might make one).
In a fit of shame, though, I threw away all the books. I still regret doing that.
My mother’s old collection, however, came to my rescue.
Among it was The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality (the 1976 edition—which is where I’m pinning my connection to the topic). It had a stark, unassuming cover, and I’m sure it was only the word “sexuality” that drew my attention.
I hadn’t been explicitly forbidden from reading it, but I wouldn’t touch it during the day. Instead, I waited for night to fall and snuck down to find it in its place on the shelf. Huddled there, breathing the dust lingering from the storage unit, turning pages cracked and yellowed with age, I discovered the answers to many of my questions.
In particular, I discovered the clitoris. The book contained a large section on the masturbation techniques women reported using, and that became my instruction manual. Compared to what I’d been doing, giving myself a clitoral orgasm was ludicrously easy. It almost felt unfair.
My other questions were answered, too. I learned about cunnilingus and fellatio and encountered for the first time the idea that turnabout in these matters is fair play. I read my first description of lesbian sex.
I read the book haphazardly, in breathless snatches, aroused by its clinical language perhaps even more than by the “good parts” of the novels I’d found earlier. But I would never have dreamed of throwing this book away. It was so obviously valuable, not only for its practical advice but also for the glimpse it gave me into the feelings women had about sex.
A phrase that, for some reason, sticks in my head to this day is, “I washed, and so should he.” I believe this was a woman lamenting that her partner wouldn’t go down on her, not even when she performed oral sex on him. In retrospect, remembered snippets like this have cropped up many times in my mind over the years.
It wasn’t only that I got a view into the forbidden details I was looking for. I was also introduced to simmering resentments, difficulties of communication, inequities between the sexes, and the idea that sex did not necessarily work like magic (as those novels had pretended it would).
Very little that I’ve read in my life remains as present in my head as The Hite Report. It gave me an education when I needed it, but it also reassured me that adults did not have this sex thing figured out either.
It also makes me wish I’d been there for the seventies. The liberation I felt pulsing in that book’s pages does not appear, to my eye, to have actually come. We may throw the word “clit” around now, and many of the collections of erotic stories may be labeled as “for women,” but in my career as an erotica writer I have to work so hard to feel free enough to say what I mean and how I feel and to present viewpoints outside the mainstream (whether that’s the mainstream of society or the mainstream of erotic literature). The Hite Report made me imagine lots of individual women telling the truth about what sex is like for them and what they want. I still want to live in the world where people can do that.
The summer half my family fled Hawaii, my mother regained the trove of possessions she’d left behind in Denver. Among the family heirlooms and old furniture was a collection of her old books, and that was what drew most of my attention.
I was at the age where I was desperately trying to put together the facts behind the allusions people made to sex. I could say the number 69 with a knowing inflection, but I had no idea what act it signified.
That summer, I came across several books that opened my eyes.
We’d moved into a squalid apartment in a neighborhood of Atlanta marked primarily by white flight and the large empty buildings left in its wake. The previous occupants had left behind a lot of things, including a stack of paperback novels in one of the closets.
I pounced on the novels and quickly made the discovery that many of them contained “good parts.” I was supposed to be unpacking boxes and moving into my new room, but I spent hours with the lower half of my body hidden in the closet, reading and internally pulsing. I hadn’t really worked out how to masturbate to orgasm with reliability. I knew the word orgasm but wasn’t entirely sure what it represented. I’d experienced something that maybe qualified, but I wasn’t 100% confident about what I’d felt. I’d read enough to figure out that sex involved penetration, but simulating that with my fingers enough to come required acrobatic contortions and lots of uninterrupted time. (I didn’t yet have any concept of sex outside heteronormative images of the penis entering the vagina.)
Motivated as I was, it was hard to do that while eluding discovery. Inside, I boiled with plots for what I could do or get that would work better (I didn’t know what a dildo was, but I had dim ideas for how I might make one).
In a fit of shame, though, I threw away all the books. I still regret doing that.
My mother’s old collection, however, came to my rescue.
Among it was The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality (the 1976 edition—which is where I’m pinning my connection to the topic). It had a stark, unassuming cover, and I’m sure it was only the word “sexuality” that drew my attention.
I hadn’t been explicitly forbidden from reading it, but I wouldn’t touch it during the day. Instead, I waited for night to fall and snuck down to find it in its place on the shelf. Huddled there, breathing the dust lingering from the storage unit, turning pages cracked and yellowed with age, I discovered the answers to many of my questions.
In particular, I discovered the clitoris. The book contained a large section on the masturbation techniques women reported using, and that became my instruction manual. Compared to what I’d been doing, giving myself a clitoral orgasm was ludicrously easy. It almost felt unfair.
My other questions were answered, too. I learned about cunnilingus and fellatio and encountered for the first time the idea that turnabout in these matters is fair play. I read my first description of lesbian sex.
I read the book haphazardly, in breathless snatches, aroused by its clinical language perhaps even more than by the “good parts” of the novels I’d found earlier. But I would never have dreamed of throwing this book away. It was so obviously valuable, not only for its practical advice but also for the glimpse it gave me into the feelings women had about sex.
A phrase that, for some reason, sticks in my head to this day is, “I washed, and so should he.” I believe this was a woman lamenting that her partner wouldn’t go down on her, not even when she performed oral sex on him. In retrospect, remembered snippets like this have cropped up many times in my mind over the years.
It wasn’t only that I got a view into the forbidden details I was looking for. I was also introduced to simmering resentments, difficulties of communication, inequities between the sexes, and the idea that sex did not necessarily work like magic (as those novels had pretended it would).
Very little that I’ve read in my life remains as present in my head as The Hite Report. It gave me an education when I needed it, but it also reassured me that adults did not have this sex thing figured out either.
It also makes me wish I’d been there for the seventies. The liberation I felt pulsing in that book’s pages does not appear, to my eye, to have actually come. We may throw the word “clit” around now, and many of the collections of erotic stories may be labeled as “for women,” but in my career as an erotica writer I have to work so hard to feel free enough to say what I mean and how I feel and to present viewpoints outside the mainstream (whether that’s the mainstream of society or the mainstream of erotic literature). The Hite Report made me imagine lots of individual women telling the truth about what sex is like for them and what they want. I still want to live in the world where people can do that.
Thursday, January 30, 2014
The Pleasures of Patience
A few years ago, I was going down on my lover and he really wasn't into it. I had just come off a lover who exploded at my every touch, and my newfound incompetence was seriously hard on my ego. I started to cry, which is one of the least sexy things one can do while attempting a blow job.
The man I was with started asking questions. As uncomfortable as that made me, I realized a few things. First, I enjoyed blow jobs because I liked being good at them. A lover early on had trained me to deliver them exactly the way he liked, and when I was going down on someone, my brain buzzed with his remembered instructions (Keep your hands moving! Keep your tongue moving! Twist like this!). I was skilled, but I was performing and accomplishing something with a man's cock rather than enjoying the sensations I received inside my mouth. I was goal-oriented—focused on "making him come."
My new lover suggested I try something completely different. He was going to lie back, he said, and I should relax. Put on some nice music and do whatever I felt like doing. He told me not to worry about whether he got hard or whether he came or was close to coming. I put on The xx's self-titled album (which is one slow, sexy duet after another) and listened to the entire thing while I played with his cock with my lips and tongue. For the first time I could recall, I thought about what that felt like to me. I had never before given a blow job without worrying about how long my neck could handle the prolonged up and down motion or whether my jaw would get too sore to continue.*
That afternoon, I learned the pleasures of patience. Patience is about gentleness, about making space for not knowing the outcomes of actions and releasing the pressure to produce particular results. There is something infinitely loving and sensual about introducing that sort of patience to the bedroom, which is all too often poisoned with performance anxiety and insecurity.
There is no more certain way to render me unable to have an orgasm than to order me to have one. "Come for me, baby," has always elicited a sinking sensation in my chest, and I am bemused by the orgasms on demand that so often populate BDSM fiction, as well as by the orgasms that are held back until permission has been granted. If I want to come, I have to be patient in exactly the way I just described.
For so long, an orgasm was something I tried to grab quickly, before my lover came. Then one day, I started to wonder about this. There I was, as an adult, behaving as if my parents were about to walk in on me in the family room. I was treating my lovers like a stopwatch, trying to have an orgasm before the buzzer rang, and giving up dejectedly if I failed.**
I am a woman of many goals, but I think they might represent the antithesis of the pleasures of patience. Goals accomplished provide a sense of fierce, sharp victory, but they also spur me to race and struggle. Patience is often required in order to meet a goal, but it also requires that I accept the possibility of never reaching my destination. It is hard to be where I am, feeling good, feeling bad, or not feeling much of anything at all, and yet that is exactly what "having patience" asks me to do.
Being an erotica writer has made me able to talk about sex as I never could before. Now, words like "cock" and "cunt" roll easily off my tongue, and I am much more likely to come to bed with a glimmer in my eye and say, "There's something I want to try tonight." At the bottom of all my voracious desire, however, there's a foundation of patience making it possible. That afternoon curled at the foot of the bed with The xx and my lover's soft cock has made its mark. I can say there's something I want to try because I can, at least a little, be patient and set aside worries about whether anyone's going to come or how "well" I'm doing at whatever I'm trying to do. I can close my eyes and pay attention to how something actually feels to me. I can treat my own pleasure as important, even if it takes longer to emerge than I might like it to.
* This experience was the root of "Getting Something Out of It," which appeared in Rachel Kramer Bussel's Going Down: Oral Sex Stories.
** This idea became "What's Not to Come," one of my first published erotic stories. It appeared in the dearly departed Oysters and Chocolate, and one of these days I'll reprint it somewhere.
The man I was with started asking questions. As uncomfortable as that made me, I realized a few things. First, I enjoyed blow jobs because I liked being good at them. A lover early on had trained me to deliver them exactly the way he liked, and when I was going down on someone, my brain buzzed with his remembered instructions (Keep your hands moving! Keep your tongue moving! Twist like this!). I was skilled, but I was performing and accomplishing something with a man's cock rather than enjoying the sensations I received inside my mouth. I was goal-oriented—focused on "making him come."
My new lover suggested I try something completely different. He was going to lie back, he said, and I should relax. Put on some nice music and do whatever I felt like doing. He told me not to worry about whether he got hard or whether he came or was close to coming. I put on The xx's self-titled album (which is one slow, sexy duet after another) and listened to the entire thing while I played with his cock with my lips and tongue. For the first time I could recall, I thought about what that felt like to me. I had never before given a blow job without worrying about how long my neck could handle the prolonged up and down motion or whether my jaw would get too sore to continue.*
That afternoon, I learned the pleasures of patience. Patience is about gentleness, about making space for not knowing the outcomes of actions and releasing the pressure to produce particular results. There is something infinitely loving and sensual about introducing that sort of patience to the bedroom, which is all too often poisoned with performance anxiety and insecurity.
There is no more certain way to render me unable to have an orgasm than to order me to have one. "Come for me, baby," has always elicited a sinking sensation in my chest, and I am bemused by the orgasms on demand that so often populate BDSM fiction, as well as by the orgasms that are held back until permission has been granted. If I want to come, I have to be patient in exactly the way I just described.
For so long, an orgasm was something I tried to grab quickly, before my lover came. Then one day, I started to wonder about this. There I was, as an adult, behaving as if my parents were about to walk in on me in the family room. I was treating my lovers like a stopwatch, trying to have an orgasm before the buzzer rang, and giving up dejectedly if I failed.**
I am a woman of many goals, but I think they might represent the antithesis of the pleasures of patience. Goals accomplished provide a sense of fierce, sharp victory, but they also spur me to race and struggle. Patience is often required in order to meet a goal, but it also requires that I accept the possibility of never reaching my destination. It is hard to be where I am, feeling good, feeling bad, or not feeling much of anything at all, and yet that is exactly what "having patience" asks me to do.
Being an erotica writer has made me able to talk about sex as I never could before. Now, words like "cock" and "cunt" roll easily off my tongue, and I am much more likely to come to bed with a glimmer in my eye and say, "There's something I want to try tonight." At the bottom of all my voracious desire, however, there's a foundation of patience making it possible. That afternoon curled at the foot of the bed with The xx and my lover's soft cock has made its mark. I can say there's something I want to try because I can, at least a little, be patient and set aside worries about whether anyone's going to come or how "well" I'm doing at whatever I'm trying to do. I can close my eyes and pay attention to how something actually feels to me. I can treat my own pleasure as important, even if it takes longer to emerge than I might like it to.
* This experience was the root of "Getting Something Out of It," which appeared in Rachel Kramer Bussel's Going Down: Oral Sex Stories.
** This idea became "What's Not to Come," one of my first published erotic stories. It appeared in the dearly departed Oysters and Chocolate, and one of these days I'll reprint it somewhere.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)