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“Did you know that 71 percent of guys would rather have great sex occasionally than not-so-hot sex all the time?” Simone asked me, paging through the February issue of Cosmopolitan.
“Let me see that,” I said, reaching out and scanning the cover of the magazine. “I'm writing an article about how to improve our sex lives.”
Simone turned a page, “well, if anyone can write that, it's you.”
“Actually...” I started, but I trailed off. The truth is that I need a guide more than anyone.
“I have a theory that the longer we're exposed to a stimulus, the higher the tolerance, and the less able said stimulus is to engender the effect it once did,” I said, lighting a cigarette.
Simone looked at me for a moment, then smiled, “what?”
In preparation for this piece I did a little crowdsourcing on Twitter, asking over the course of several weeks what people thought was an essential component to good sex. The answer, seven times out of ten was: intimacy.
“Really?” I asked myself over and over as the direct messages and e-mails poured in. It just didn't jive.
“When I think about dynamite sex, I don't think about intimacy,” I told my friend Sugar during one of our late night discussions on the phone. “Am I stunted? Do you think about it?”
“Hell no,” she replied. “I just want to be thrown against a wall and devoured.”
BE DESIRED
Sugar and I are in line with Marta Meana, a professor of psychology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and who has been studying sexology since the 1990s. Meana also disagrees intimacy is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
In a piece on the New York Times Magazine by Daniel Bergner, author of The Other Side of Desire, Meana emphasizes the role of being desired and the inherent narcissism in women's sexuality, which she has gleaned from her laboratory and qualitative research, as well as her clinical work. Desire, she concludes, has “little to do with building better relationships,” or with fostering communication between partners.
“Female desire is not governed by the relational factors that, we like to think, rule women’s sexuality as opposed to men’s,” Meana told Bergner. “Really, women’s desire is not relational, it’s narcissistic.”
She is basically saying that women's desire is dominated by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need. That's not to say women don't want closeness and longevity—they do. But according to Meana, to imagine that these things are the catalysts of desire is incorrect.
“It’s wrong to think that because relationships are what women choose they’re the primary source of women’s desire,” Meana said. For women, “being desired is the orgasm.”
“How do you make yourself desired?” I asked my friends the following night over drinks at The Standard Downtown.
“Can I tell you?” my friend Tess asked, leaning in. “I like to dress up like a hooker and walk by construction sites. Instant desire.”
“Ew!” Sabrina exclaimed, laughing. “Girl, you're a freak.”
“What? You leave your windows open when you change in case your hot neighbor is home!”
“Mmm,” Sabrina said. “He's so hot.”
“Does he watch you?” I asked.
“Sometimes.”
“I like to dress myself in the sluttiest lingerie when no one is home,” I confessed. “There's stuff I have that my husband has never even seen—not because he wouldn't like it, but because it's for me. I wear these things while I work. I love taking a client's call in nothing but garters, a hat and stilettos.”
“Does desire require an audience?” Sabrina mused.
“You can be your own audience,” Tess said. “And if not, there's always the internet.”
DO SOME RESEARCH
The next day, I contacted the one woman whom I knew would have something to say about sex: Viviane Tang, of Viviane's Sex Carnival.
“Read, read, read,” she wrote me in her e-mail response. “When I was getting back into the dating game after being married, I read up. I think people assume there's a basic level of sexual knowledge—there's not. I was encouraged by a 60-year-old reader who told me she learned how to roll a condom by reading my site.”
Tang suggested the minds at the forefront of sex: Violet Blue, Susie Bright, Cory Silverberg, and Ducky Doolittle. As well as the blogs Sugasm, Sexoteri'sc blog news, and Pleasurists.
She's right. Before you can get what you want, you have to understand what it is that you want. Her comment that we tend to assume there is a basic knowledge of sex is dead on—the same is true for
