TMN: There was an article
in Talk a few years ago by Martin Amis where he interviewed
a porn director, and the director said, ‘pussy is bullshit.’
Which is a sad way to view sex. IK: I’m very interested in this next
generation of female-centric porn – made by women for
women. And stuff like Suicide Girls, Sweet Action, and CAKE,
which is not porn, but celebrates female sexuality, they’re
all great influencers. I think there’s a difference
– this is from John Berger, who wrote Ways of Seeing
– between a naked woman and a nude. To be naked is to
be yourself; nudity is on display. And with Suicide Girls,
the photos capture something about the girls’ personalities.
They’re nudes, yes, but naked first. They’re in
control.There’s no need to quibble over semantics when
it comes to identifying orgasms. The clitoris encompasses
them all. The tongue is far better used to produce orgasms
than waste time naming them.
TMN: I often wonder what
it would be like to be a 13-year-old today, getting constant
spam about women sucking horse cock. If I’d had email
at 13, there’s no way I wouldn’t have looked,
and it would have completely given me the wrong signal about
women, and about horses. IK: I agree, there’s a lot of crap
on the web, but there’s also a lot of real information.
I can’t tell you how many emails I get from guys about
PE – and these guys would never be comfortable talking
out loud about the issue.
TMN: So what do you do?
What did you do? IK: Getting older helps, for obvious reasons.
There are also exercises you can do, on your own or with a
partner, to help you become more attuned to your process of
sexual response and pull back before the point of ejaculatory
inevitability. But it takes time. I remember one girlfriend
wanted to try the ‘stop-start method’ and soon
rued her suggestion – what with so much stopping and
so little starting, not to mention all my directions –
‘slow down, easy, easy, go ahead, stop, stop’
– sex was, in her words, more like parking a car than
making love.
TMN: This is extraordinarily
frustrating for her, and for you. IK: Yes. What I’ve learned is, the
most important thing is to learn to focus on your partner.
By committing to oral sex you’re committing to female
sexual response. It forces you to slow down, to appreciate
your partner. So, for me, basically, I let my tongue became
the mentor to my penis. I used my tongue to learn about what
made my partner tick, to figure out how sex worked, and then,
when I did have intercourse, I brought that understanding
into play – it was an education that I’d never
allowed myself to have as a teenager in the mad adolescent
rush to intercourse.
TMN: Back to ‘parking
the car,’ men and women often talk about sex in different
ways. IK: In the locker room you say, ‘I
gave it to her good, fucked her senseless. I was like an animal.’
But you don’t ram an orgasm out of a woman. If men were
serious about pleasing women, you’d never hear anything
like that. But it’s hard to imagine a guy coming out
of the showers, ‘I was like a delicate butterfly, like
a hummingbird, and I gently brushed her vulva, teasing and
playing, until she had a terrific orgasm.’ One of my
goals in writing the book is to get men to discuss the orgasm
with more acknowledgement of what it really is, for the woman,
not what it means to the man.
TMN: There’s that
scene in Manhattan, where a woman says to Woody Allen, ‘I
finally had an orgasm, and my doctor said it was the wrong
kind.’ IK: And Woody says he’s never had the
wrong kind. But that’s true for women too, not just
men. There isn’t a wrong kind, because it’s all
one big collection of nerves. The clitoris has 8,000 nerve
fibers and interacts with 15,000 more nerve fibers that service
the entire pelvic area. It’s not a bump, or a –
TMN: I like ‘the
little man in the boat.’ IK: But it’s not. It’s the pleasure
dome. You set one nerve moving and they all start moving.
The clitoris has 18 separate parts that contribute to the
experience of pleasure, twice as many nerve fibers as the
penis (over 8,000), the uncanny ability to produce multiple
orgasms and no known purpose other than pleasure. [Sex therapists
William Howell] Masters and [Virginia Eshelman] Johnson called
the clitoris a unique organ in the total of humanity. But
alas, during intercourse, the clitoris is often neglected
entirely. Most women know this, but are reluctant to speak
out on their own behalf.
TMN: What’s your
favorite part? IK: They’re all wonderful in their
own unique way.
TMN: You know, they really
are. Who can choose just one? IK: But…if I had to pick one I’d
say the front commissure. The smooth area just above the clitoral
head and protective hood, this area contains nerve fibers
and covers the clitoral shaft, a sensitive cord-like structure
that can be seen protruding from the skin of the front commissure
when aroused. Like the clitoral head, the front commissure/shaft
responds at first to tongue strokes, but, once aroused, craves
the firmer pressure of the upper lip and gum, or a fingertip
massage. But getting back to the ‘kind of orgasm’
question, the idea of the vaginal versus the clitoral orgasm
is nonsense. It’s the same orgasm. A lot of this comes
out of Freudian theory, which is crap. I titled a chapter
of the book ‘Avoid Freud,’ because he single-handedly
set the precedent for annihilating the clit. He ignored the
science of the era, which was figuring out quite a bit about
the orgasm, and more or less invented the vaginal orgasm and
made it the ‘real’ orgasm. The no. 1 question
Cosmo gets from its readers, still, is ‘What can I do
to have an orgasm during intercourse,’ because women
feel that the ‘other’ orgasms are somehow inferior,
or they aren’t having orgasms at all. But the question
really should be, why doesn’t intercourse lead to orgasm?
