Friday, April 22, 2005

The real C-word

A new sex manual is taking America by storm and its message is simple: cunnilingus is the best way to please a woman. Susanna Forrest reports...

Ladies and gentlemen, a new sex manual has just sauntered into town. Punning title, check, cover image of sliced fruit, check, sexologist author with PhD, check. So far, so standard, but Dr Ian Kerner's She Comes First: The Thinking Man's Guide to Pleasuring a Woman is beginning to have an impact beyond the usual scope of a glossy paperback sex manual. It is rising steadily up the US bestseller lists, having been named a book of 2004 by Amazon.com and the book superstore Borders. The author is getting kudos from the New York Times and Relate, and the book is recommended by both feminist websites and swingers' clubs.

Its message is simple: the clitoris is an astonishing piece of anatomy, dedicated to pleasure, and therefore cunnilingus is the best way to please women, and pleased women mean good relationships. Kerner is evangelical about the good practice and "coreplay" of skilled oral sex, which he believes can revolutionise relationships, as "the number-two reason for divorce in the US is sexual dissatisfaction". He jokingly quotes Lorena Bobbitt, who, after lopping off her husband's penis, told police: "He always has an orgasm and doesn't wait for me. It's unfair." But Bobbitt was not alone - Kerner pins his theory on two sets of figures: first, that less than one third of US women achieve a climax on a regular basis when making love to a partner; and second, that if that partner spent just 21 minutes on foreplay, 92.3% of the women were guaranteed an orgasm.

Perhaps Mr Bobbitt thought it would be "unmanly" to stoop to cunnilingus - the taboo on the practice has had a powerful hold on some. Until recently, even if it was performed in private, it certainly hasn't had the same kind of public fetishism as fellatio. It has, however, progressively reemerged, and now Kerner's book is just one sign that times have changed. Hollywood megastar Meg Ryan was shown receiving "oral pleasure" in the 2003 film In the Cut, while conscientious young men can invest in a T-shirt declaring "M.U.F.F. Diving School" from the upmarket menswear chain, the Duffer of St George. Erotic emporium Coco de Mer says one of its bestsellers is Ruby Sunrise Klitoris Climax Cream, a honey-flavoured lotion that it mainly sells to men, and Sex and the City regularly depicted cunnilingual activity barely an hour after the watershed.

Those 20 extra minutes of foreplay nigh-on guarantee a woman an orgasm that Kerner describes as a "bird in the hand" for her male lover - any further orgasm she has through penetrative sex (which results in the man's orgasm) is a bonus. His theory is based partly on a small survey group and partly on personal experience: Kerner admits that as a young man he suffered badly from premature ejaculation, which satisfied neither his partner's nor his own libido. He saved his sex life by becoming skilled at cunnilingus.

The book is his passionate polemic on oral sex, a dense 200-plus pages of instruction with some clear line drawings to illustrate and quotations from Aristotle, Karl Marx, Harold Pinter and EB White, among others. It is full of slogans and puns ("The tongue is mightier than the sword", "Avoid Freud") and incorporates his Cunnilinguist Manifesto: "To her according to your abilities, from you according to her needs."

Sometimes the "thinking man's" angle feels a little overdone - do you really want your significant other to perform Hamlet's soliloquy on your clitoris? - but the book is readable and friendly, and resolutely womancentric. Kerner says his aim was to produce a "manifesto of sexual contentment", as, despite all our protestations of openness and liberation, it becomes rapidly clear that men and women, while prepared to commit all manner of intimate acts on one another, display a reticence about communicating their sexual needs that would put a Cistercian monk to shame.

And this is the crux of the matter. Kerner says he receives most letters and emails from women who want to buy the book for their partners but who need advice on how to make a gift of it without upsetting them.

And why this supersensitivity on the part of men? Kerner thinks men, particularly those in their 30s and 40s, already think they know it all. "I've been at cocktail parties where a woman has edged up to me to ask how she can get her husband to read the book, only to have him bowl up and tell me that he could have written it himself." It's not their fault, says Kerner, who blames lack of education and distorted ideas about "normal sex" derived from pornography, where cunnilingus resembles a bull attacking a salt lick, and couples have spontaneous orgasms after marathon sessions of coitus.

Jonathan Margolis, British author of O: The Intimate History of the Orgasm, agrees with Kerner that porn and "locker-room boasting" have created a "conspiracy of nonsense in which we are all complicit. The idea that 'Hollywood sex' is achievable and desirable. The idea that men should perform in some spectacular fashion. I was 47 before I realised that the wild claims about masturbation that my friends made as teenagers were totally untrue." Margolis doesn't believe that women should be expected to climax from intercourse, and thinks that Kerner's approach is timely and well targeted. "I think it's a huge breakthrough that he has made cunnilingus into a macho act. Blokes need to move their paradigm - they shouldn't see intercourse as 'good sex' by definition. They should see cunnilingus as an end in itself."

Kerner reckons that American men live in a state of permanent sexual anxiety, fuelled further by what he calls the "cult of Viagra". "Ten million men in America use it. It is advertised on television constantly, showing a happy man and woman wandering hand in hand, smiling at one another. It's as though your whole relationship hung on your erection. We almost need to liberate men from their penises." I don't think he had Lorena Bobbitt's method in mind. "They can use hands, tongues, bodies, their minds and souls. It's not just technique, they have no understanding of female sexuality, because there isn't a true depiction of it in the mass culture surrounding them."

Cosmopolitan's agony aunt, Irma Kurtz, has received plenty of letters from men worried about performing oral sex and takes a more sympathetic stance. "They are terrified of offending their girlfriends, terrified of hurting them, terrified of not satisfying them. Sex goes in fashions, and it's a good thing that this book is bringing oral sex to the fore. Maybe women should buy it for their men and give it to them with a glass of red. And they should certainly return the favour."

Sam Roddick of Coco de Mer also thinks men are scared: "When they buy things for their girlfriends or wives they are so worried they'll offend them with their purchase."

London-based sex psychologist Dr Petra Boynton is more sceptical about the book's message. "It is placing even more pressure on men. It is still advocating a sort of 'procession': he gives head, she has an orgasm, intercourse happens, and the man's orgasm crowns it all. It would have been more radical to call it 'She Comes Last' or 'She Comes When She Happens to Come' or even 'She Doesn't Come This Time'. There needn't be such emphasis on either sex having orgasms all the time - it just heightens the pressure and imposes a formula."

She also points out that oral sex is just not culturally acceptable for some, and that it is pretty dogmatic to prescribe it as a cure all: "Some people don't like oral sex all the time, and some don't like it at all. They're entitled not to. There are still some big, underlying problems that this book doesn't begin to address and that aren't covered by men's or women's magazines. A lot of women still see their genitals as 'dirty' or shameful, and aren't comfortable with the idea of having a man go down on them."

So 21st-century man and woman are just as tongue-tied and bashful and troubled as ever; maybe we haven't made all that much progress after all. Perhaps it's time we paid more than lip service to the idea of true sexual liberation, and perhaps She Comes First is just the sort of talking point we need to get us started.