A Summer School Course in Sex

We have received several emails asking Jimmy and me what sex act brings a woman the greatest pleasure? We've agree on an answer that we will post just after September 1, but we're delaying until then because, with so readers on vacation in August, this is an ideal moment for a self-taught summer school course in sexual pleasure. As the theory goes, give a man and woman a fish and they won't be hungry for a day; teach them how to fish and they won't be hungry for the rest of their lives. We're starting with the woman in a three part course: a lecture, a homeward assignment, and finally our answer to the question. That might surprise you and change your definition of a woman's sexual ecstasy--or you might disagree completely. The point is that by the time you've read the lecture and done your homework, you should be well on the way to answering the question for yourselves.

One note before beginning. What follows is quite technical. It addresses issues that can be embarrassing to speak about. However, a woman shouldn't be embarrassed about her body. She should celebrate, it realizing that the more she knows about how it works, the more pleasure she will get from sex. Great sexual experiences do not fall out of the sky. They are the result of knowing your body and how it is aroused. They are also the by product of trust, love, and commitment between two people. The frankness that follows will be relatively worthless is these qualities do not exist between you and your lover.

The lecture

A disclaimer: Every woman is wired differently. What turns me (Celeste) on, may not do a thing for you. When Jimmy sticks his tongue in my ear, or sucks on my toe next to the pinky on my right foot, or presses gently at the point where my carotid artery passes over my chin line, I see stars. In addition to what follows, every woman should take an inventory of her body to discover you own individual pleasure points.

That having been said, There are three major pleasure points in all women's bodies, located within inches of each other below the navel: your anus, your g-spot, and your clitoris. It's important that you understand them and how they work together. Your first homework assignment this summer is to learn to appreciate your body and how you can make it happy. Read this lesson and follow its instructions. Use plenty of lube when doing this exploring, making sure your fingernails are trimmed and filed, or covered

1. Your anus (asshole). Most of these pleasure sensors are located in the little furrow between your outer and inner sphincters. Take your finger and slowly, gently insert it into your ass. Touch along the wall for something that feels like a rubber band. That is your outer sphincter. Push forward unit you meet resistance. That is your inner sphincter. The outer is a voluntary muscle that you can control; the inner is an involuntary muscle that needs to be trained to relax. It is pushing through the inner without training or practice that causes pain, sometimes extreme pain. There are several suggestions in the Guide for this training. The use of toys is particularly helpful.

Remaining outside the inner sphincter, run your pointer finger around the furrow, first clockwise and then counterclockwise. Welcome to a surge of pleasure you may not have known existed. If your inner is trained or if your willing to endure the temporary pain, push through into the rectum. There are no pleasure points beyond the sphincters; it's all smooth, form fitting tissue, but it gives you, and your lover, that feeling of fullness when his penis is in it. If you're truly brave, or have trained over the summer, insert your middle finger as well. Slowly scissor open your anus using the two fingers to experience the pleasure an erect penis brings to this area.

Before leaving your hole, insert your thumb into your vagina and your pointer finger into your anus. Trying rubbing them together and you will find that your can't. What separates them is a thin but extremely tough membrane through which nothing passes. When you're enjoying anal sex, there's nothing in the rectum itself that brings pleasure. It's the angle of penetration that permits the penis to press against your g-spot with this membrane between that brings pleasure.

2. Your g-spot. This can be hard to find, but it's probably the most important spot in your body to locate. It's a rough, uneven little patch that feels a little bit like corduroy when you rub your finger across it. It's located two or three inches into your vagina on the outer wall, the one closest to your surface skin. To find it, take your middle finger or your middle and pointer fingers and insert it/them into your vagina. Make a "come here" sign with them, moving them toward the palm of your hand. Move your fingers around until you find your g-spot. It may take time, but your patience will be rewarded with a lifetime of pleasure. I remember when I made contact with mine for the first time. If you've ever touched a short-circuited appliance or received a shock when changing a light bulb, think of that feeling and reduce it by maybe three quarters. That's what I felt. Once you've found your g-spot, show your lover exactly where it is and have him touch it as well. Pressing against it with his penis should be the Holy Grail for him and he needs to know exactly where he should aim.

The problem with the g-spot is that it is difficult to access from any man-on-top position. A g-spot stimulator looks a little bit like a fish hook. There probably aren't many penises with that shape. That's why the approach from the rear, doggie style, is so popular. That at least allows for incidental contact between the penis and the g-spot. Anal entry is even better. Look at a cross-section rendering of a woman's anatomy and you'll see that penis contact with the g-spot is just a question of angles and vectors, simple physics.

3. Your clitoris. Maybe the most misunderstood organ in a woman's body. Every woman knows where the nub of her clitoris is. It's the little protrusion at the apex of your vagina tha, when stroked, helps to produce an orgasm. Between 70 and 80 percent of women say that they can't experience an orgasm without this stimulation. What many couples don't know is that 85% of the clitoris lies beneath the skin and is shaped somewhat like a turkey or chicken wishbone. Its arms extend down the rims of your vagina ending near your anus. Stroking the arms produce a a gentle, wave like pleasure for a woman that is often overlooked.

Sadly, the pleasure of stimulating the arms of the clitoris are not available to every woman. You don't have to be skinny to find them, but a woman who is seriously overweight won't be able to as two of the first places fatty tissue accumulates are around the lips of the vagina and the anus. If you want a good reason to eat fruits and vegetable and exercise regularly, remember this. Not only will you feel better and probably live longer, but the pleasure you get from sex will ramp up significantly. This, incidentally, is the answer to the old question of why thin women seem to enjoy sex more: the arms of their clits are being stimulated during insertion.

For a guy to be a great lover, he has to master the complexities his penis, which can be a misunderstood as a woman's clit. From a sensual--not psychological--point of view, its length doesn't matter. As a matter of, the longer you are, the more careful you have to be about bruising your partner. This is especially true if you "bottom out" in either her vagina or rectum. You're not going to touch anything in a woman's body that give her pleasure beyond her g-spot and that is located only two or three inches inside her vagina. Thickness, on the other hand, girth, matters a great deal as a thick dick stimulates either the arms of the clitoris or the anal ring during intercourse. There probably is no such thing as too thick a dick. Don't despair if you haven't been gifted with one. One of the great toys available to men is a condom with little nubs extending out from it if you're practicing safe sex or a ribbed sleeve with both ends open if you're not. Wear it once and you'll wear it all the time. Remember, however, that slamming in and out of either the vagina or anus with it on produces only incidental contact with either the arms or ring and that isn't what drives a woman to distraction. That happens when you S-L-O-W-L-Y AND SHALLOWLY insert yourself, withdraw, and repeat.

The shape of your penis is also important. Does your penis stick straight out or is it curved pointing back to your belly button or down toward your knees? One of the keys to great sex is your ability to massage your lover's g-spot with your penis and it's shape should determine your position. If you stick straight out and are flexible you can adopt any position you want. If you're rigidly curved toward you belly button, woman on top works best. If you're rigidly curved toward the floor, reverse cowgirl (the woman sitting on top but facing away from you) might be best.

In addition to girth and shape, the you need to come to grips (!) with the pleasure centers on your penis and your ability to control your ejaculation. A man's pleasure points are just as concentrated as a woman's. If you doubt this, grab your penis at its base and jerk it. Nothing will happen because there are no pleasure points beneath the two key ones: some in the head, but particularly the frenulum, which is the hinge located just below the head on the underside. Grab the skin covering it between your thumb and forefinger, massage there, and you'll understand. Deep throating may produce an orgasm just as bottoming out may, but that is only because of incidental contact of the throat with these pleasure points. A throw your head back and scream blow job is the result you lover nibbling at the frenulum, very gently scraping her teeth across it, or massaging it with her tongue.

It's also important for a guy to understand how to control the timing of his ejaculation. To learn about this, research "Kegels for men." This involves the training the muscle that controls you ability to stop and go when urinating. Like any muscle, training strengthens it. With a little effort on your part, you can delay your ejaculation and cum at the same time as your partner. Be sure, however, to put the brakes on early. If you don't, you'll experience the unpleasantness of penile "dry heaves" where the muscles that control your ejaculation spasm but nothing comes out. That's the end of your interest in sex for a while.

Once both of you understand your bodies, the next question is how to stimulate the three pleasure centers in a woman: with your fingers, tongue, penis, or a toy. Some combinations are clearly impossible, such as his tongue on your g-spot. Most, however, present several options for pleasure. You need to experiment to see what combinations bring pleasure, which maximize this pleasure, and which are so stimulating that they create shock rather that pleasure. Everyone's tastes will differ, but Celeste and I find that stimulating two pleasure spots at the same time triples or quadruples the pleasure of exciting just one while stimulating all three is often over the top, provoking shock rather than pleasure. There is one exception to this rule but we are saving it for part two, by which time you will hopefully have discovered it on your own. Remember that 70-80% of woman cannot orgasm without clitoral stimulation so that should always be one of the pleasure points involved.

August is a great month to try various combinations. Keep mental notes on what works best for you, remember how different we all are. Here's an example of what Jimmy and I discovered from our lives together. When we first partnered, Jimmy (who does have a magical tongue) used to eat me out regularly. I would orgasm and thought it was a great experience, but that changed for two reasons. First it was only a one (only my clit was involved) and he was doing the stimulating. As talented and kind a lover as he is, that didn't work for me in the long run. He was telling my body how and when to orgasm when I was the only person who really knew what I wanted and when I wanted it. So then we changed to rimming, the magic tongue in my anal furrow as I stroked first the arms and then the nub of my clit. That is a perfect two for me. In fact, we debated whether this should be the answer to the readers' question. In the end, we agreed that there was something even better, but that rimming should be foreplay to it. Having enjoyed a two so much, we decided to try a three--and that wasn't a great idea. After stroking my clit's arms, I put my thumb on its nub and hooked my middle finger into my vagina, finding my g-spot. Pressing my thumb and middle finger together and rotating them was awkward, but certainly produced an intense orgasm. That just wasn't a pleasant sensation. It was a raw, shocking one that we've never repeated. In great sex, less is frequently more.

After you've mastered the physical realities of great sex, the last thing you have to do is train the largest muscle in your body: your brain. Guys have to unlearn the concept that it's about the working out of their pleasure or that they are responsible for delivering pleasure to women. If the object of having sex is to deliver pleasure to a woman, he should play a fairly passive role many times. (It's an entirely different story if the purpose is to deliver pleasure to a man.) His job is to supply an erect penis and hands and a tongue that know where and how to touch a woman. Get over the idea that the harder you fuck or the faster you rub a clit, the better lover you'll be. It's just about the opposite for me (but may not be for you). Gentle, slow, and shallow drive me to distraction.

Ladies, your brain training is just as important. It's your body and you're in charge of it. No mysterious force put you in bed with your lover; you're there because you want to be there. Don't leave your partner guessing about what you want. You've taught him about your body, now it's time to show him how to bring you the greatest pleasure. If you're embarrassed to use words, use non-verbal communications: a touch, a change of position, etc. There's all the difference in the world between your fucking yourself on his penis and he fucking you. Both have a place, but it's your call, not his. If he wants to make you happy, he'll appreciate not having to guess at what to do.

Your homework assignment

For women:

1. Precisely locate your g-spot. Then guide your lover's finger(s) to it so that he can know where it is.

2. Explore your anus and the arms of your clit to see how they respond to various forms of stimulation. Talk frankly about this with your partner, accepting the fact that your body is a marvelous instrument for pleasure and that understanding it is the key to unlocking that pleasure.

3. Experiment with various forms of stimulation of your g-spot, anus, and clit. See how you respond to the arousal of one, two, or three of them.

4. While you are doing this, make a mental note of points of arousal in your body beyond the three major pleasure points.

5. Learn to take control of the sex act. You're not a passive recipient of what a man thinks gives you pleasure. It's your body and your in charge of it. If you have a great lover as a partner, he will recognize and appreciate this.

For men:

1. Explore your penis and the precise location of pleasure points on it.

2. Do Kegels for men exercises, learning to control the timing of your ejaculations. A great homework assignment is to have your lover nibble at your frenulum trying to extract and ejaculation while you practice your Kegels trying to prevent it. You're eventually going to lose, but a loss never felt so good and the longer you can hold out, the stronger the muscle.

3. Come to grips with the fact that a great lover isn't always a forceful one. If your partner wants to be dominated, all well and good. If, on the other hand, she wants you to play a passive role while she is active you need to respect that desire. If you can visualize making love in extremely slow motion, you've taken a giant step toward success.

Come back in September having done your homework. It should be a fun August. Class dismissed.

Celeste