How did you get to be so vocally
female-centric? Have you always felt this way?
Oh, where do I begin... Like a lot of adolescent
boys, I wanted to get through all the heavy petting and make
the mad rush to experience intercourse, adult sex, "real"
sex. Well, I eventually got there, and after a while, I realized
that I had a sexual problem and I wasn't satisfying women.
My struggles with premature ejaculation really bruised me
and damaged me and led me to feel like a sexual cripple. That
led me to want to pleasure women and open myself up to other
models of sexual contentment beyond just intercourse. That's
not to say that I didn't enjoy going down on women, but I
think I thought of it as something that's optional -- not
necessarily a must-have, must-do. Through analyzing my own
experience, and also through reading and studying human sexuality,
I was able to come up with an approach that led me down the
path to sexual health and contentment. My own personal shortcomings
(pun intended) really led me to become sensitive to female
pleasure.
I want men to understand, respect and appreciate
female sexuality, which I find awesome and inspiring. The
female clitoris has twice as many nerve endings as the male
penis, the innate capacity to produce multiple orgasms with
no known purpose other than to provide pleasure -- you can't
say that about the penis. But I don't think most men approach
female sexuality with that level of understanding or appreciation.
There's a lot of hype around female
ejaculation, but in the book you appear to be pretty annoyed
with that discussion. What's your gripe?
For a lot of people, from a cultural or
feminist perspective, what female ejaculation says is that
a woman can come like a man. To some extent, we all come from
the same embryonic tissue -- there are lots of similarities
in our sexual anatomy and in the way men and women deal with
sexual response. But female ejaculation has never been conclusively
linked to physiological pleasure. Research has shown that
most women don't even know whether they're ejaculating or
not. There are female ejaculation sites that enthuse about
women spouting a bucket of water across the room. Often, that
is just simply a result of bearing down on the pelvis and
-- well, peeing. Now I want to be clear here: technically,
female ejaculation is not urine. It is more similar to a male
prostatic fluid. However research has shown that if a woman
is consciously trying to ejaculate, that ejaculate is more
likely to contain elements of urine than when it's just happening
spontaneously and involuntarily.
In my opinion, one of the beautiful aspects
of sexual response is that it allows us to just sort of let
go and slip into an involuntary state. When you tell women
to focus intensely on ejaculation at the point of orgasm,
you're really introducing a voluntary element to an involuntary
process. It can end up diminishing pleasure rather than enhancing
it. That's why I prefer not to dwell on female ejaculation
and I urge my readers not to get too hung up on it, either.
Why did you decide to take such
a neutral, clinical tone and not spice things or use sexier
language that might increase the book's appeal to men?
The No. 2 reason for divorce in this country
is sexual dissatisfaction, and I take that intensely seriously.
The philosophy I put forth in the book has true value to me.
I'm not trying to turn it into entertainment. The voice in
the book is my voice. I use terms like "cunnilingus,"
"vulva," "sexual response." I had a lot
of women say to me, "Why didn't you just use the word
'pussy'? It's a cool, hip, female-centric term." My response
to that is, to you. But I guarantee that to someone else,
it's not.
These aren't the terms I use in the bedroom,
trust me. Then again, the terms I use in the bedroom are probably
different from the terms used by your boyfriend or your husband.
Everyone experiences sex differently, everyone talks about
it differently and everyone gets turned on by different things.
Turning people on wasn't my focus.
I wasn't setting out to write the great American novel. In
the end I was writing a guide that was part philosophical
and part practical. I want to change behavior. I want to improve
people's sex lives.
Did your own sex life change with
the book or afterward?
I don't think it did, but my wife says it
has. Sometimes she's like, "Is that in your book? That's
different!" Or, "You've got this down better!"
In the book you suggest that men
should be willing to go down on their partner as long as it
takes to bring her to orgasm, which can be anywhere from 15
minutes to 45 minutes. And that's even before getting to intercourse.
If you're enjoying yourself and you're stimulated,
I think you should postpone that enjoyment as long as possible.
If a guy says it's too long or it's boring, either he's not
doing something right or he's with the wrong person.
We tend to talk a lot about sex ruts and
what happens when people are together for too long and the
sex becomes boring. But what we don't focus on is that familiarity
also leads to knowing and understanding each other's sexuality.
Clinical studies have shown that women who are married are
often able to achieve orgasms much more easily than women
who are single or dating. The more committed you are to knowing
someone sexually, the more familiar you are and the less time
it potentially takes.
I think a lot of people are going to approach
the book as the definitive guide to oral sex or the definitive
guide to cunnilingus. While I do believe that the tongue is
mightier than the sword, it's not a means unto itself. It's
a means unto an end. A study of female sexuality shows us
that women require persistent clitoral stimulation in order
to reach orgasm and very often don't get that stimulation.
That's why so many women are able to achieve orgasm via masturbation
and tell themselves, "Well, when I'm with my guy, it's
not about the orgasm. Orgasms are for me and my vibrator."
I'm trying to get people to move outside of the intercourse
discourse and embrace a new model of female sexuality that
does not exclude male gratification but ensures mutual gratification.
That's why the book is called "She Comes First"
and not "Tongue Tips."
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