No, My Body Isn't Weird

Men just don't know what most women like.

It’s election day, which means that you, like me, are probably panicking, which means that we should definitely distract ourselves with talk about sex.

My A/C repairman has been out of town for FOUR INTOLERABLE WEEKS but he arrived back in town last night and I promptly ravaged him twice. Both times, I got out my vibrator. “I feel bad,” he said the second time, implying that my desire to use a sex toy reflected poorly on him. Ah yes, that old trope: Women should be able to orgasm through intercourse alone. We know that this is not the way women’s bodies work, and we’ve known it for a long time, and yet, here we are. I didn’t want to have to reassure him of his sexual prowess. I just wanted a goddamn orgasm.

Yet what’s been worse than having to stroke a man’s ego in this kind of situation is having to shrug off the implication that my body — and what gives it pleasure — is somehow abnormal. High maintenance. Annoying.

For the past 25 years, I’ve been convinced I have a finicky body. And it’s largely been men who have made me feel this way. Whenever I have taken a long time to orgasm, have asked partners to be more gentle, or have requested specific things in bed, guys — not all! but many — have responded as if I were being unreasonable. As if I were nothing like the other women they’d been with. They always seemed to be saying: What’s wrong with you, lady? You’re not like all the others, and your weirdo needs are inconveniencing me.

During my marriage, I’d forgotten about this shame, because my ex learned my body (well, to a point) and sex became routine. But it all came flooding back the first time I had sex post-divorce. I had trouble orgasming (probably because I also felt like I was going to vomit the whole time?) and the guy I was with grew frustrated. At one point he said something along the lines of “I just don’t know what to do with you.”

In that moment, I felt so ashamed. What the fuck was wrong with my body? I hated that it didn’t respond like everyone else’s.

But this whole narrative, I’m realizing, is wrong. There is absolutely nothing wrong with my body. What I like and respond to are actually quite common. (Not that there is anything wrong with having a body that works or responds differently to others — that’s actually a beautiful thing, though it’s taken me a long time to realize it.)

To be fair, I don’t think we can place the blame squarely on men for being ignorant. I think a big part of the problem is that women don’t tell men what they like (and we often fake orgasms). How can we expect men to understand what we enjoy if we never actually tell them, and even mislead them into believing that the things we don’t like are getting us off? I totally understand why women fake orgasms, but in the long run, it works against us.

But I didn’t write this newsletter to let men off the hook — or make women feel bad about how they’ve been socialized. I wrote it to help free you of any shame you may hold about what gives you pleasure and what doesn’t.

In recent years, researchers have conducted numerous surveys to understand more about what gives women pleasure. Many of their findings have been published in peer-reviewed journal articles. Some of their findings have been incorporated into the new educational website OMGYES, which translates the research into detailed suggestions (complete with instructional videos). I have been digging into all this literature and have found it immensely validating. It has helped me recognize that what I enjoy — and don’t enjoy — is absolutely OK.

Maybe you’re wondering: Like what? So I’m going to share four things about my body that I’ve learned are actually quite common.

1. I rarely come from intercourse alone. Yes, I have come this way — but it’s been rare. Research suggests that only about 18 percent of women orgasm solely through intercourse, and in a recent study involving more than 3,000 women, 70 percent said that they get more pleasure when their clitoris is also stimulated with fingers or a sex toy. Will someone please forward this to my A/C repairman?

2. I prefer when men stay all the way inside me and move in circular motions rather than thrusting in and out. The term for this technique is “rocking,” and in that same study involving 3,000 women, 76 percent said they preferred rocking to thrusting. Rocking is the reason I’ve been able to (albeit rarely) come via intercourse alone, and I think it has to do with the stimulation the rocking provides to my G-spot. Yet of all the men I’ve slept with, only one or two have ever done this on their own, and lots of men have looked at me like I’m nuts when I’ve asked for it. (And very few have actually done it for more than about 10 seconds, even when I’ve asked repeatedly.)

3. When I am getting close to an orgasm, and I tell men something feels good, I need them to keep doing the exact same thing. This is a scene that repeats itself so often in my bed: A guy will start doing something that feels amazing, and I’ll say “that’s so good, keep doing that,” and then four seconds later he will start doing something different. When that happens, everything he built up disappears — poof! — and we have to start from square one again. It drives me insane. I get that their muscles may tire, but I think that’s not what’s happening a lot of the time. OMGYES discusses importance of consistency in building orgasms. It’s a common need rooted in female physiology.

4. I prefer soft and indirect touch on my clit, and downward swipes rather than upward ones. Even when I warn guys that I’m “sensitive” (though I’m not sure I am any more sensitive than other women are!) they almost always come in too strong. They’ll use the tip of their tongue or the tips of their fingers, which exert too much pressure. They’ll move their fingers across my clit, creating too much friction. And they’ll swipe my clit from bottom to top (from the direction of my vulva towards my clit), which is painful (and is often intensely disliked by women!!!) because the clit is not as protected by the hood that way. Interestingly, according to OMGYES, two out of three women prefer indirect clitoral touch, and more than 60 percent of women enjoy keeping a layer of fabric between their clitoris and their vibrator, because it softens the stimulation.

Okay, now it’s your turn. What sex things have men made you feel weird about? Please share in the comments! Let’s normalize the shit out of what gives us pleasure.