February 3, 2013

Stretching or yoga is valuable for our sexual health and to feel more sexual pleasure.

The penis, vulva and vagina are surrounded by muscles.

When the muscles are tight in the hips, blood can not get through the muscles as effectively.

Erection is essentially blood flowing into the penis, clitoris or vulva.

Thus the more we can melt tension from within the muscles in our pelvis, the more effectively blood can get to our parts.

Better blood flow to the pelvis can heighten the sensations of arousal.

So stretch your hips, honey, its gonna make everything feel better!

Obviously yoga classes can be great if you choose to prioritize that, but stretching in front of the television for 5 or 10 minutes is also useful.

Taking some time to release some of the long held tension in our hips is a great way to take care of our sexual selves outside of the bedroom, knowing it is beneficial for us in the bedroom later.

January 31, 2013

“You don’t have to be born beautiful to be wildly attractive”

-Diana Vreeland, fashion icon.

Soak that in fully.

January 30, 2013

There are disproportionately fewer images out there of larger women being unabashedly sexy. This tongue in cheek video has some fun, fabulous moments of bigger women enjoying their bodies.

I particularly enjoy the video at .36 where they do a slow pan over her whole lingerie clad body while she seems to enjoy being viewed, and 1.35 where we are treated to close ups of her jiggling thighs on top of the washing machine in a fabulously sexy way and 2.15 and 3.00 where the woman in the black corset and suspenders is definitely enjoying being in her own body.

It is always a joy to watch a woman have fun and feel free in her body, no matter what her size. I hope seeing images of larger women feeling sexy and free gives all of us permission to let our own sexy self come out to play, whatever size or state our body is in!

January 29, 2013

It is incredible to me that this culture does not have a good complete word to talk about our most intimate female parts.

As a culture we most often use the term vagina to refer to our lady parts. However, technically the vagina is just the internal structure, the muscular canal between the vulva and the uterus, ending at the cervix. It famously means “sheath” in latin. The problem with this term is the complete omission of the entire structure of the vulva. This means we are verbally omitting our clitoris when we speak of our genitals, making invisible where most women experience orgasmic pleasure completely.

Technically the vulva is exclusively the external genitalia,  primarily the two sets of labia and the structure of the clitoris. The labia’s also have ill-fitting names. There are two sets, the labia majora and the labia minora.  The labia majora translates as the “larger or outer lips” and the labia minora refers to the “smaller or inner lips”. There are such a huge range of vulva shapes and sizes, with many women having inner lips being larger than the outer lips and these names can set women up to feel like they have incorrect or wrong genitalia. It is not the labia that are incorrect or deviant but the words we use to describe them inadequate and incomplete.

As precious as the female body is you would think we could come up with one word to inclusively name and honor the whole genital area, as if it all matters, because it does.

We need a new term, a new word to describe the totality of the female genitals in all its pleasure-making, beautiful, diverse glory.

Any suggestions?

January 27, 2013

Yesterday I wrote about how an important aspect of becoming a better lover is to develop the skill of paying attention to our own body and our lover’s body at the same time. Before trying to hold dual attention in your own body as well as your lover’s, it is best to develop the skill of paying attention to sensation in your own body first.

Interestingly, a practice that can assist us in developing a better sex life is meditation. If we can carve out just a few minutes to pay attention to the sensation in our body we can begin to feel more, which becomes valuable during sex. There are a huge variety of meditation forms and many focus on specific practices. I recommend beginning to focus on your breath and bringing your awareness to the sensations in your body. This can be a 2 minute moment, it doesn’t have to be long unless you want it to be. Start with a short amount of time and then begin adding minutes to your “meditation moment” over time.

The idea within this focused moment is to really feel your body, to begin to shift your attention from the hundreds of thoughts in your mind into the sensations within your body. We all have thousands of thoughts a minute and if we are paying attention to the thoughts, we miss what is really happening within our body. So developing this skill is essential to cultivate so that we can feel the most pleasure during our lovemaking.

Begin lying down, sitting in a chair or on the floor. Bring your attention into your body and breathe. Do this for a minute, two or longer. Notice what you feel.

This is how we begin really paying exquisite attention to the feelings and sensations we have. Strengthening this skill set moment by moment is preparing us to be able to feel more orgasmic sensation later.

Feminist Fridays: January 25, 2013: Annie Sprinkle

I first saw Annie Sprinkle at college. All the chairs were full so I sat on the stairs in the packed auditorium. I listened, watched and had my mind blown.

I had NEVER before seen a woman embrace her sexuality with so much fun, love, play and lack of judgement. She stood there in front of us with epic sized beautiful breasts decorated in glitter, sequins, boas and effused love.

She told us about how she had done public cervix announcements where she put a speculum into her vaginal canal and had people come by and take a look. She told us stories about when she had been a porn star and showed us pictures of her various sexual encounters, including one porn she made with a little person and another with an amputee where she was having sex with their stump. She talked about how lovely the person was and how fun it had been. She was happy to share with us how she had shared her body, she didn’t have all this shame, guilt, and judgement about having had sex with lots of people. She wasn’t upset or ashamed about having been a whore, she was so very fine with it.

Whatever you think about her professional choices, what really stayed with me about her was the total lack of judgement about sexuality. In my early 20’s, she changed my world view. At that time I had honestly never heard of, met or seen a woman who was living without the fundamental idea that being highly sexual with many people was bad or shameful. She expanded my sense of what was possible in terms of being a woman, of having a sexuality that didn’t have as a foundational belief that sharing your sexuality was bad, evil, slutty and ultimately diminished and dissolved your worth is as a woman. That, my friends, was a game changer for me. Annie Sprinkle showed me that one could choose who you have sex with, enjoy it and still be a loving, good person and have self-worth fully intact, and that was a revelation to me at that time.

She brought such fun to it all. She covered her breasts in paint and made tit prints. I LOVED them. Inspired by her I made bright blue prints of my own breasts and gave them to my college boyfriend as a christmas card that year and put others on my fridge. They made me so very happy and sparked lots of fabulous college girl conversations around our kitchen table.

Over the years she has professionally moved away from sex and into performance art. Annie and her partner (Beth) Elizabeth Stephens, an art professor at University of Santa Cruz, did a 7 year art project called the Love Art Lab where they had a public wedding ceremony each year to celebrate each different chakra. The first year, Annie got breast cancer, so they included that in their art project and dressed up in costumes for chemotherapy and shaved both their heads in a hairotica piece. She said their motto was to “eroticize everything.” Annie and Beth’s spirit of bringing so much fun and play to some of the hardest moments in life is clearly inspiring.

Now they both are focusing their art projects on being ecosexuals, being lovers to the earth. They aim to be part of shifting the idea of the earth as mother to the earth as lover. Their hope is because that is so much sexier, perhaps people will be more motivated to care for the earth. Annie and Beth’s artistic adventure continues.

Annie Sprinkle is like a fairy godmother of sex, art and love. I am ever grateful for the impact Annie Sprinkle had on my young life, showing me there was a playful way to be a woman, be sexual, live without shame and talk to and impact thousands of people’s experience of sexuality in a lifetime.

January 24, 2013

To be able to surrender fully to a lover requires trust.

I once met a wonderful man that I was entirely attracted to. I did not have a sense of where we stood emotionally at all and my body stopped being able to feel pleasure. It just switched off and froze because I didn’t have the words or courage to find out where we stood, to ask for clarity or to adjust the boundaries of the situation. I wasted a potentially far more beautiful encounter.

We have to feel safe emotionally before our body can fully relax and we can surrender to pleasure, or else we are always holding back.

What would it take to trust your lover more, what might you need and request to be able to surrender more fully?

January 23, 2013

As a culture we are obsessed with breasts.

Breasts are essentially a mass of fat.

Thus, we actually love fat in “correct” places but loathe it as soon as it moves location a wee bit.

Weird, no?

January 22, 2013

There was this great article in the Wall St Journal about conquering fear.

There is evidence that when feeling any sort of upset or fear about your body or sexuality that taking a mindfulness based strategy is effective.

“It holds that simply observing your critical thoughts without judging them is a more effective way to tame them than pressuring yourself to change or denying their validity…Mindfulness also involves paying attention to your breathing and other physical sensations while observing your thoughts.”

So basically the strategy is when you feel insecure, upset or concerned, just notice those feelings and do not try to change them or ignore them but just bring your attention back into your body, breathe, acknowledge your feelings and then continue with life.

“These feelings are going to come. What are you going to do about them?…You don’t have to react to them at all. Just allowing them to exist takes away their power.”

This is what we have been suggesting to people over at the Pleasure Mechanics for years, but it is always so lovely to get “research based evidence” to support what we know and have seen work.

This approach is incredibly simple, powerful and and effective.

It just involves remembering and implementing next time you are in an emotional pickle.

Nothing to do, just notice and let the thoughts and fears move on by.

Try it next time you feel any sort of fear or upset about your body, within a sexual encounter or otherwise.

Let me know if it helps!

All quotes from the article Conquering Fear by Melinda Beck in the online Wall St Journal on Jan 2, 2011

January 21, 2013

In the end, we are each entirely responsible for our own happiness, fulfillment and sexual satisfaction.

A sobering newsflash.

But if we can accept this as truth, we can all of a sudden become aware of all the choices we have available to us, all of the time.

Do you act like you are 100% responsible for your sexual confidence and satisfaction?

What would happen if you did?