Okay, ONE more thing about vaginas. Then I'm done. Possibly.

I was recently dog sitting at a friend's house and, to my credit/surprise, I didn't swim naked in her pool, find her dog using my favorite vibrator as a chew toy or have an inadvertent fellatio experience with her dog (on me, it was...complicated).  

However I did tart up her Apple TV by putting THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES on her "recently watched" queue, there for anyone to see.  

(In related news, I am available for dog sitting! I don't charge much, but on the other hand, I am not that good at it.)  

It was actually the first time I'd seen The Vagina Monologues performed, but it reminded me of this post on the book from waaaaay back in 2012, a time when young, innocent us knew little of what complete assholes some of our fellow humans were.  

Take my hand, will you, and travel back to that sweeter time when we could just hang out and talk vaginas.  

(And if you're wondering, I still have a weird prudishness with the word "vagina."  It's okay. I don't feel that bad about it. Even Eve Ensler, Little Miss Vagina Monologues, wrote "Doesn't matter how many times you say it, it never sounds like a word you want to say." Which, yeah.  I'm tentatively testing out "pussy" but it feels weird and obvious every time I say it, like "I am saying 'pussy' and we are all uncomfortable now.")

*******

Today I'll tell you a quick story from the book I just read which is--this will come as no surprise to you--The Vagina Monologues.

I'm telling you the story because it's just so fucking heartbreaking but also to remind us (me) why it's important to talk about this $%$# even though some people (well, this one dude on reddit who said I'm like a 12 year old boy) think it's unladylike. (Motherfucker calling me unladylike! What the fuckity fuck?....oh...yeah...I see.)

In the story, Eve Ensler interviews an old lady from Queens who was extremely hesitant about talking about her "down-there." "What's a smart girl like you talking to old ladies about their down-theres for?" she barks. After much prodding, she finally tells about the last time she ventured down there, in 1953. The woman--let's call her, oh, Agnes--tells about a date she had with Andy Leftkov, a real catch, a cute tall boy who asked her to take a drive in his new Chevy.

She and Andy were sitting in the car, recalled Agnes when "he just kissed me in this surprisingly 'Take me by control like they do in the movies' kind of way. And I got excited, so excited, and, well, there was a flood down there. I couldn't control it. It was like this force of passion, this river of life just flooded out of me, right through my panties, right onto the car seat of his new white Chevy BelAir."

Instead of realizing he'd found himself one hot little number, Andy was horrified. He said she'd stained the car seat and that she was a "weird, smelly girl." Agnes tried to explain that the kiss had caught her off guard and that she normally wasn't like this, but Andy drove her home in silence and never spoke to her again. "When I got out and closed his car door, I closed the whole store. Locked it. Never opened for business again. I dated some after that, but the idea of flooding made me too nervous. I never even got close again," said Agnes.

Years later Agnes got cancer and the surgeons pretty much cleared out her reproductive system, thus ending any worries about flooding ever again.

When Ensler asks Agnes a typically squirm-inducing Vagina Monologues-esque question, "If your vagina wore something, what would it wear?" Agnes replies, "It would wear a big sign: 'Closed Due to Flooding.'"

As the interview ends, Agnes says, "You happy? You made me talk--you got it out of me. You got an old lady to talk about her down-there. You feel better now?" [Turns away; turns back.] "You know, actually, you're the first person I ever talked to about this, and I feel a little better."

Knowledge is power, brothers and sisters.

xoxox
jill

(photo source)

A Lover's Moan and Other Sounds of Sex

Jesus, that was good.

Really amazing sex gets you from every direction. Besides the whole crazy love/spiritual intoxicating chemical dump that's happening in your brain, truly great fuckery involves all your senses as well. I think that's why it's all so damn heady. I mean, all these completely intense inputs are hammering you at once. The particular delicious smell of your lover's neck, the sight of a body part swelling with desire for you, the taste of their upper thigh...oh god.  Plus the wild array of touches-- the slow sliding, out-of-control violent thrusting, fierce whole body throbbing ride that marks a really good fuck.

What I've been thinking about lately, though, are the sounds of sex. The sighs, the wet smack of a woman's arousal, a rasped plea, a lover's moan (is there anything better than the sound of your lover's moan?*), a primitive growl of lust, a passionate whisper or shout of your name**--all these sounds convey sublime feelings and pleasures that are literally unspeakable.

I once had a lover leave me a phone message of his orgasm. (If you are as into sound as I am, do this. Do this at once. God, it would kill me to listen to it even today!) He started off talking me through it, explaining what he was looking at (picture of my boobs, you nosy motherfucker) and how close he was to coming. But the catch in his voice told me how aroused he was much more than what he was saying. He described riding the edge of almost coming, as his voice became raspier and his breathing more ragged. His words grew incoherent, as he went toward, then through his orgasm, completely conveying the experience through sound alone. I could hear (and almost feel) the tension, the inevitability, the blinding orgasm, then the strong aftershocks. It was pretty fucking amazing.

Sex sounds are a whole other language, made of groans and gasps and breath patterns and non-verbal...I don't know...emoting. We might "mmm" a bit over food, or grunt as we hit a tennis ball, but it's nothing like the extended, intricate, primal aural communication we have during sex.

So why do we make these sounds during sex?

The science on the sounds of sex is pretty scant. British primatologist Stuart Semple recorded 550 baboon female "copulation calls"--which is not at all a weird way to spend one's time--analyzed their acoustic structure and found that the calls contained information about what point the female was in her reproductive cycle and the status of her partner. Humans might be subconsciously exchanging similar information. A 2008 study found that women's voices--as judged by impartial listeners--changed during their cycle, becoming "more attractive" during ovulation and "less attractive" during menstruation. (Insert bitchy period joke here.)

A 2011 study found that women often made "copulatory vocalizations" (this is really what they called them) to accompany their partner's orgasm. Why? Politeness and/or trying to get it over with. Reports Salon's Lucy McKeon in A Nation of Moaners:

Sixty-six percent reported making noise to accelerate their partner’s ejaculation. Ninety-two percent believed these vocalizations upped their partner’s self-esteem (87 percent reported vocalizing for this purpose). Other reported reasons included speeding things up, “to relieve discomfort/pain, boredom, and fatigue in equal proportion, as well as because of time limitations.”

I don't particularly care for this study because 1). they only used 71 women, and just asked them questions instead of measuring them during real sex with sort of scientific Copulatory Vocalizationometer. 2). Those results are depressing.

I dislike the idea of calculated sounds, designed to spur someone to orgasm or worse "relieve boredom." I much prefer the unbidden moan, the deep rich moan that rises spontaneously from some primitive place of dark-red wanting.

I'll leave you today with these words from a lawyer-turned-dominitrix describing her love of "finding" this moan in her lovers. Or as she puts it in The Vagina Monologues "Discovering the key, unlocking this voice, this wild song."

"I made love to quiet women and I found this place inside them and they shocked themselves in their moaning. I made love to moaners and they found a deeper, more penetrating moan...It was a kind of surgery, a kind of delicate science, finding the tempo, the exact location or home or the moan."
 
xoxoxo,
jill

*answer: no, there is not.
**Why is it so delightful to hear your name on your lover's lips during the throes of passion? Egotism, pretty much. From Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends and Influence People: Principle #6 –Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.

(Alfred Noyer, Paris 1920s)