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Dr. Carol
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Selected Excerpts from Women's SexualitiesFaking Orgasm - an excerpt from Chapter 10Have you ever faked orgasm? If you have, think about all of the reasons you had for doing that. If you have never faked orgasm, why not? Approximately 70 percent ofÔ the 2,311 women who provided Survey information about faking orgasm had done so at least once. About three-quarters of those who had ever faked had done so no more than fifty times, but some had done it a lot. Nearly one in ten of those who had ever faked either entered a number between 150 and 10,000 times or wrote in another answer such as countless or a bazillion. One drew in an infinity sign. What is it that motivates these women to fake orgasms? They offered a variety of reasons, which you will find in Chapter 10. Facilitating and Enhancing Orgasms - excerpt from Chapter 11Think for a moment: If you're orgasmic, what - if anything - do you do to facilitate the release of your orgasms? In the Survey, 2,371 women marked one or more items as applying to them from a list of fourteen we provided. So many women, born between 1916 and 1974, wrote in additional information about how they reach orgasm that in Chapter 11. I am able to present you with a smorgasbord of suggestions for increasing erotic pleasure and enhancing your orgasmic potential. I have put their comments in four categories: focus of attention; physical stimulation and techniques; the setting and other sensory enhancements; and communication and interaction with your partner. Creating Erotic Pleasure - excerpt from Chapter 13 Erotic pleasure is a composition of sensations. We can experience scents, tastes, visual images, the varying qualities of the touches we give and receive, feelings emanating from our muscles and internal organs, and the voluntary and involuntary sounds made by ourselves and our partners. Using our bodies and breath we can create and experience sexual energy, pleasure, erotic feelings and sensations, feelings of love,feelings of joy and the experience of oneness with another. During sexual activity, your attention may shift between your sensations, breathing, fantasies, mental impressions, and a variety of emotional feelings. You can sense physical tension developing, expanding, and releasing; you may notice sexual energy intensifying, moving and releasing. You also may be aware of memories, judgments, performance expectations and other mental images. An erotic experience is a process in which one thing leads to another. Descriptions of aspects of this process are included in Chapter 13 (Sexual Choreography), together with specific suggestions you can use to enhance your lovemaking. Self Discovery and Shame and Guilt - excerpts from Chapter 2What are your earliest memories of body awareness and self-stimulation for pleasure?ÔFor some girls, the first awareness of down there - of having wonderful, magical, special genital feelings - involved totally innocent discovery uncolored by any parental or social prohibitions. Connie said: "The first crush on a man I ever had was on Moe of the Three Stooges. I saw him on TV and was just in love with him and his long hair with the bangs. I had this big teddy bear, almost as big as me, and I remember humping this teddy bear at night thinking it was Moe. I remember rubbing my genitals against it. I don't recall if I had orgasms, but it felt great. That's a very clear memory. I couldn't have been more than three years old." Without words to label the experience, there is no judgment, only curiosity and acceptance. The typical girl, however, develops a sense of privacy around sensuality/sexuality at an early age. Doors are closed, and sometimes impulses are inhibited; she becomes aware that the adults around her aren't always comfortable with her explorations of pleasure.
Finding Our Way Through Shame And GuiltWhat do you remember of feeling shame, embarrassment and guilt in your early childhood? It is likely that these feelings were important in the formation and emerging of your sexual self. Emotions are body reactions that we perceive and label with meaning. Our emotions prepare us to act, or keep us from acting, and they provide us with vital information for our survival and development. Shame and guilt are social emotions. They serve to provide us with awareness of social limits and reticence to act outside of them. Feelings of shame and of embarrassment, a related feeling, play a significant role in our socialization as we are growing up. Self-AcceptanceAs adults, when we experience shame or guilt, we can understand that these emotions mean that we are breaking some internalized rule. As adults we can consider: Whose rule is it? Where did I get it? Does it make sense for me to follow it? The young child is too limited in experience to have this vantage point. Consider how Roberta changed her view over time: "When I was real young - we were between four and seven - my brother and some neighborhood kids played doctor and stuff, explored each other's bodies. When I did it, it was just exploratory, but, over time, I was ashamed of it. Now, I think it's just part of growing up." In this brief description, Roberta leads us through the critically important process of finding one's way to self-acceptance. From the young girl's perspective, she engaged in innocent exploration. Later, she became aware of social prohibitions and felt shame. Still later she understood that it's just part of growing up and felt okay about what occurred: That's just how it was. Many of us grow up with a sense of shame about our curiosity-driven early experiences of sexual exploration and experimentation, because we have no way of knowing that so many others are having these experiences, too. The many, many examples inÔ Ôthis chapter demonstrate how typical ©© Ì ÌnormalÄ Ä - most of these experiences are. Self-Acceptance
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