The V-Word

The orgasm gap is built into our different male and female physiology. 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. In truth, the sexiest part of our body is housed in the limbic brain, where memory, sexuality, and emotion awaken. The neurological circuitry for male arousal is more direct and faster than it is for women, and female arousal is a more interior process.

Mastering the Mystery of Orgasm Series – Week 3 Voltaire once said, “Pleasure is the object, duty and the goal of all rational creatures.” And truly, regardless of the many...

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 an 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. It turns out that two-thirds of our sexual power is internal. I was close to 40 years old before I understood the connection between what was happening inside and outside my vagina in sex.

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. Anais Nin once described her orgasm like this: “Electric flesh-arrows ... traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eyelids. A foam of music falls over the ears….” 

There might not be a more powerful way to transform your life right now than by learning to receive love. Especially in these days of quarantine, when we are confined not only with our intimate others, but even more so with ourselves. All of our tricks of distraction and avoidance are no longer available in this present. The secret we have guarded so well, that has been buried so long, is now butting its head through the cracks that this new COVID-19 reality has generated.

Your arousal response is your body’s natural mechanism for accessing pleasure. Although often confused with the genital swelling that accompanies being turned on, the source and ignition for becoming aroused lives in the sexiest organ of your body - your brain. More specifically in the limbic area of the brain, which is also responsible for generating our emotions and developing memory. Conveniently the limbic brain is co-located with our olfactory bulb, which explains why our sense of smell both heightens our emotional experience and connects us to our memories so powerfully.

The benefits of using a personal lubricant for sex are numerous. Lubricants can deepen your pleasure, since they increase the natural slip and slide that go with the best sex, and they can also be helpful in combating conditions like vaginal dryness or pain with sex that often accompany normal hormonal shifts, medical conditions, and age-related changes.

When we consider the efforts that women have made over generations for equality, it humbles you. Today while interviewing the president of Planned Parenthood of Southwestern Oregon, I learned that the early beginnings of the organization began with women sewing diaphragms that they procured in Italy and Japan into their petticoats. Many women were arrested when they were handing them out on the streets in New York. 

Expanding the language of your nose and thinking through your sense of smell is mind expanding, first and foremost because concentrating on the scents around you brings you fully into the moment you are in. Because smell, more than any of our other senses, is processed alongside our emotional center with our arousal mechanism a close cousin.