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"In just fifteen minutes every woman can become orgasmic," the PDF promised. It was part of a press kit for a new book about sex called Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm by Nicole Daedone. That the PDF told me all kinds of other things about the book, its philosophy and practice and its author, didn't matter, all I could do was groan.
I've become weary over the years of advice writers, self-help gurus, and authors who capitalize on sex by perpetuating messages that further hinder the enjoyment of our bodies instead of helping us. You’ve seen me rail against the lie-detector techniques perpetuated by AskMen.com, GQ's sex-for-chores barter system and even this new craze with the 40 beads. I worry because these suggestions focus on sex in a way that makes it about everything but sex.
They make it a goal-oriented exercise. Or they make it a bargaining tool. Or they make it an obligation. None of them address the real issue many of us face: that we are dissatisfied with our sex lives. None of them equip us with tools or even ideas as to how to begin making sex more satisfactory.
The last thing I needed was someone else promising women they could become orgasmic in 15 minutes, so we can feel like we're broken if, after said time, We find no orgasm is forthcoming. But, with the exclusion of the bead thing, I am not one to jump to conclusions without giving anything some serious thought, so I scheduled an interview for the next day, downloaded Daedone's book and sat down to read.
This is slightly unusual in a person, but I really like being wrong. Unlike the press materials I'd skimmed, Slow Sex refused to let me skim. Any sex educator who can stand up to a publisher and get them to approve -- in what is essentially a sex manual -- a first chapter that talks about cooking with grandma is a force to be reckoned with.
When she was a teenager, Daedone's grandmother taught her how to cook. It didn't come easy -- in fact, it all started with Daedone's grandmother flat out rejecting a dish Daedone had cooked for her during home ec. Her reason? That young Daedone had killed the meal with the recipe. Thus her grandmother undertook the task of teaching her granddaughter how to cook, really cook, not by following instructions, but by going with instinct. Cooking as an art. This, Daedone says, is what sex should be about.
"When I went to the publisher," Daedone would recall later when we were speaking on the phone. "One of my tasks was to make sure this was one that'd understand that I didn't want to write a recipe book: I wanted to teach people how to actually cook good sex. There are so many recipe books out there for sex, with all these weird positions and necessary ingredients, and that's fine to enjoy, but no one tells people the basics, and they need to know the basics before they get to the variations. There are all kinds of things you can include in sex, but all these elements are really high-level and we need to handle the fundamental thing first, which is 'do I really know how to feel?'"
What happens, for example, if the recipe calls for toys and sexy movies and lingerie, to be mixed to taste until they result in two orgasms, but only one is had?
What happens, she says, is that sex starts looking like a problem.
"Because we're human and we exist in a paradigm of wrong, we are trigger-happy when it comes to identifying problems," Daedone writes in Slow Sex. "We are always on the lookout for someone or something to blame. We think there is something wrong with us, or with our relationship, or with our partner. The artsy-ness of sex, its frustrating refusal to abide by the laws of mechanics, puts us into the difficult position of wondering why things aren't going the way they’re 'supposed' to be going."
Men often go at like they're fixing something, she says. Women, on the other hand, tend to become concerned with making their sexual encounters look the way they think they're supposed to look, as dictated by Hollywood, or Porn Valley, or vampire fiction novels, or the stories shared by their girlfriends. Much of the time, when we think this way, we get stuck on the destination
