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?

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