During times of uncertainty and anxiety, we believe that leaning into your innate capacity for pleasure is healing and sustaining. With that in mind, we want to share our reader favorites on the best ways to enhance and deepen your capacity for pleasure. We feel confident that this reading list will not disappoint as you explore the most reliable steps to enhance your arousal and find a gateway to orgasm.
The place to begin in the mysterious journey to orgasm begins with a better understanding of our anatomy. The French call the orgasm la petite mort, or small death, because the moment of orgasm creates such a complete letting go. Orgasms literally switch off the brain center that controls anxiety and fear. Understanding your magical physiology that makes orgasm happen can bring you to pleasure with more curiosity and openness.
With all that feels out of our control, what better time to find the source of deep pleasure within? Give these tips a try, slow sex down, and you'll be even closer to mastering the mysterious “O”.
5 Reader Favorites on All Things Pleasure & Orgasm
#1: Naming the Feeling of Orgasm
What is an orgasm and what does it feel like? What happens when the body takes over in ecstatic release? How do we live in that body and conjure the moments that resemble a kind of grace that is bestowed? We know we didn’t make something happen so much as let something happen in us. Read More.
#2: Learning the Anatomy of Pleasure
The place to begin in the mysterious journey to orgasm begins with a better understanding of our anatomy. For people with vaginas, the discovery of the complex and powerful organ system of the clitoris wasn’t revealed until 1998 when Australian urologist Helen O’Connell completed a series of MRI studies and named 18 different parts of the clitoral structure which previously had only been known as the external glans. Read More.
#3: How Foreplay Changes Everything
During this great pandemic slowdown, recent statistics show that our sex lives are also slowing down – from both a ban on new sex partners and the ways that surging anxiety and depression impacts our libido and ability to connect. And yet, for all kinds of health reasons, there might be no better time to focus on our ability to both give and receive pleasure from our partner than right now. Read More.
#4: 7 Steps to Pleasure – A Guide to Reaching Your Orgasmic Potential
The good news is that the more orgasms you have, the more orgasms you’re likely to have in the future. Learning about your own sexual response and developing your orgasmic potential will bring both immediate gratification and long-term satisfaction. All bodies come equipped with the tools for orgasm and can develop the courage to surrender to the wisdom of your body’s capacity for release. Read More.
#5: Bridging the Orgasm Gap
The orgasm gap is built into our different male and female physiology – the neurological circuitry for male arousal is more direct and faster than it is for women, and female arousal is a more interior process. Learning to awaken our arousal mechanism is a required first step for both men and women, and we often mistakenly believe that our genital response is where arousal begins. Read More.
