The Honest Courtesan

I have often expressed how disappointed I am that the cultural reaction of Americans to The Hite Report and other ’70s studies & surveys of female sexuality was for most women to become (sexually) more like men, in other words for their sexuality to become less about the experience and more about the relentless pursuit of orgasm.  And it’s only become worse since the ’80s; virtually nobody (and yes, women are often just as bad as men) is willing to accept any more that some of us simply aren’t very orgasmic, and that whatever new “technique” or “toy” or “process” they want to try isn’t going to make any difference.  My anorgasmia is only partly due to a recessed clitoris; the rest is due to my neuroatypicality in general and my cognitive hyperactivity in particular.  And though most people recognize that I’m really quite intelligent and have had many, many thousands of hours of practice over the last 40 years, they still refuse to grok that I already figured out long, long ago (by the mid-’80s) what will produce orgasm on a semi-regular basis, “but will probably never act on [those things] again because they either come with too much baggage or it’s much too difficult to find the right person or persons to do them with.”  Though this is considered heresy in “sex-positive” circles, I simply don’t think it’s important enough to invest my time, effort, and money in toys, books, classes, Gwyneth Paltrow gimmicks, or silly cults in a fruitless effort to pursue an experience my body and nervous system seem disinclined to undergo.

If you’ve never seen a woman write about this before, it’s probably because most women who feel as I do are afraid to admit it.  They’re afraid of being considered defective, freakish, or simply not good enough, and not only by entities who reside outside of their own skulls.  But most anorgasmic women don’t write about sex; most women writing about sex haven’t been sex workers for their entire adult lives; and most of the sex workers who both feel as I do and write about sex (probably already a rather small group) are too concerned with commercial viability to admit that no, they really can’t orgasm 17 times from some dude’s fumbling around with their genitalia, and they’re really not thinking about sex as often as their clients do.  But for me, the best thing about paid sex is, I get the reward I want regardless of whether my wiring decides to respond in a way that will feed my partner’s ego.  And sex work gave me the confidence not to be ashamed to say that I don’t give a shit if I don’t orgasm.  But I understand that I’m unusual in many respects, so I was very pleasantly surprised to see this stunningly-honest article in The Atlantic:

I am a 39-year-old woman, and I have never, to my knowledge, had an orgasm…I love sex, and I’m probably on the kinky side—there’s very little that I haven’t tried.  But no matter how much I am enjoying myself, there inevitably comes a time, both on my own and with a partner, when the physical pleasure, having built and built, either fades to nothing or becomes a sensation too uncomfortable to bear, and provides neither the rapture nor release I have imagined…In the early days of [my] relationship [with my future ex-husband], I made…an appointment with a sex therapist, therein getting a glimpse of the growing and highly lucrative female-orgasm industry.  A plump, elderly woman…advised me to eat more dark chocolate, stop taking birth control, and sign up for what she called “orgasm camp,” an immersive experience …that would have me masturbating all day long.  She also sent me home with some female-centric 1980s porn, a list of recommended herbs and vitamins, and a prescription for Viagra that the pharmacist, alarmed by my gender, initially refused to fill.  For months I dutifully followed her advice…but…eventually, exhausted and even a little bit bored by the effort, I once again resigned myself to my anorgasmic fate…

…In her 2018 book, Faking It, the sex educator Lux Alptraum denounces a culture in which, for many men, the female orgasm has become “the primary, if not entire, purpose for pursuing sex—a sentiment that suggests that anyone who isn’t able, or doesn’t want, to achieve orgasm is some kind of freak or failure.”  Alptraum lays no small amount of blame for this on She Comes First, a wildly popular cunnilingus manual by the sex therapist Ian Kerner, which…established a new paradigm in which the female orgasm, once seen as mythic, was recast as compulsory…

…I finally embraced the obvious solution: I started faking it…sex therapists…think that faking it breeds guilt and resentment…but the truth is that, for me, faking it was instantly empowering, even revelatory.  Overnight, the emphasis shifted from what I lacked to what I offered…faking it threw into relief my sexuality; for the first time since my divorce, maybe for the first time ever, men began to see me as I saw myself, and as I knew myself to be, which is to say, no less carnal than the next person, and perhaps even more so…

There’s a great deal more, and I think it’s especially worth reading if you’re anorgasmic yourself, or if you would like to understand why some women aren’t interested in catering to your emotional need to give them orgasms.  I myself have written in defense of faking orgasms on several occasions, and I’m in agreement with author Katharine Smyth about faking being a legitimate strategy to reclaim one’s sexuality from the tyranny of others’ selfishness disguised as generosity.  There’s quite a bit more after the part I’ve quoted, in which Smyth tries all sorts of other things for which I lack the patience, the credulity and the dedication; I must also point out that when I was her age, I had already been doing sex work on and off for 21 years and full-time escorting for 6.  But even so, I hope that by the time she’s my age she either finds what she’s looking for, or learns to stop caring about it.

Read Full Post »