Orgasm and its Enemies: Karezza, Daoists, and other anti-orgasm crusaders

Every now and then, I get a barrage of messages from someone claiming that male ejaculation is bad, or that all orgasms are bad. Responding individually is time-consuming and unproductive, so I thought it would be worthwhile creating a general response. Perhaps this will help those of you who have run into these sorts of anti-orgasm fanatics.

How to learn to enjoy sex

For most people reading this blog, this is going to be an irrelevant question. But I was reminded today that it's a serious problem for some people whose bodies and minds have never quite gotten synched up to experience sex as something pleasurable.

The most common causes of 'sexual anhedonia' (lack of pleasure) are drugs and medications, hormonal problems, depression, dysthymia (a form of chronic depression), and religious repression. These require major lifestyle changes and/or serious medical or psychological treatment.

But what about the mysterious cases of anhedonia that don't seem to be related to any of these causes?

Modern Buddhist Tantra

At the beginning of the main "how to learn tantric sex" part of this blog, I made some highly critical comments about the way religious tantra is being marketed in the West. Ninety-nine percent of it is a blatant scam, an attempt to sell a fake, cotton candy version of Tantrism using sex as bait to get people into a cult.

Most of the ideas that are being peddled by these scammers as "spiritual truths" can be traced back to 19th century European mysticism, not to Asian religions, and especially not to Tantra. Even some of the most basic elements, like chakras, were words borrowed from the East, given totally different meanings in the West, and then exported back to Asia in an unrecognizable form. But no matter what you have been told, Tantra is NOT just another flavor of Western mysticism in Eastern clothing.

Authentic mainstream Buddhism as practiced in Asia has never interested me. It is deeply ascetic and monastic, and I have no interest in renouncing the real physical world, stifling all pleasures and desires, or becoming a monk or nun. And the watered-down, sanitized form of Buddhism taught in the West has always struck me as passive and weak – a wimpy, artificially-neutered shadow of the real thing.

I am also severely prejudiced against the typical form of Tantrism currently practiced in India, the home of my ancestors. This is an embarrassingly sleazy form of fake witchcraft and sorcery that preys on poor people, with "tantric wizards" peddling useless charms and hexes and fake cures around the edges of Hindu temples.

And, until recently, I had not given Buddhist Tantra more than a glance, because it seemed to be filled with bizarre demons and spirits and a lot of the same magical nonsense as the Hindu version.

However, at the urging of several of my friends and tantric sex preceptors, I have recently been reading David Chapman's blog Vividness and a number of related sources. And Chapman has just about convinced me that the kind of tantric sex that I have been studying, practicing, and writing about CAN live comfortably within a modernized form of Buddhist Tantra.

Since I know some of the readers of this blog are looking for something more than "just" fantastic sex, I wanted to share some of Chapman's ideas about what a truly modernized form of Buddhist Tantra would look like.

For him, Tantra is not some tacky hedge wizard selling you amulets. Nor is it some goofy crystal-brained New Age guru selling you "sacred sex" on the installment plan. And it is definitely not an ascetic, life-denying way to achieve nirvana in some far-distant future. On the contrary, it is a muscular, no-nonsense application of a pragmatic problem-solving philosophy to effective action in this world.

Bad, good, and magnificent sex

This is another in a collection of pieces that I've written elsewhere and wanted to include in this blog. I wrote it in answer to a deceptively simple sounding question:

What is the difference between bad sex, good sex, and great sex?

Bad sex is easy. It's sex that leaves one or both people feeling bad: bored, uninvolved, hurt, used, abused, violated, shamed, humiliated, neglected, ignored, and/or unsatisfied.

Describing good or great sex is a lot harder, and it might be a good idea to divide it into two kinds, because they use different biochemical pathways in the body and brain and they feel so different:

Bram & Kat & Gunter & Ann: A Tantric Foursome

As some of you know, I was traveling from July to early Sept, which is why there are no posts here for July and August.  But I want to share with you one of the most interesting stops I made on my journey, a visit with  two couples in Amsterdam who are in a committed tantric foursome.

Video tutorials for massage and oral techniques

One of the most common requests I get is for video tutorials, and I've been accumulating notes for a couple of years about videos that will help newcomers.  It has gone slowly because I don't really have time to scan a lot of videos and because there is so much bad stuff out there, which I find a turn-off.

However, a set of amateur videos by a couple of friends has inspired me to put something together for you.  One problem is that many of the videos are only reliably found on pay-sites, even though they are also frequently available on free porn-sites.  So rather than provide you with links that are highly perishable or lead only to a paywall, I will instead give a title and length for each one and leave it up to you to search for them.

The Mystery of Arousal and Vaginal Wetness

Dear Shakti,

My husband and I have been doing tantra since we found your blog a year and a half ago, and we absolutely love it!  (Thank you!)  But we’ve run into a snag lately, and I'm hoping you can help.

Here’s the situation:  We’ve done all the preliminaries and I’ve given him a really nice lingam massage.  I’m pretty turned on by that and I can feel the juices flowing.  Then I get up on the table for my turn.  He gives me a long wonderful massage, back and front.  I’m meditating and loving the feel of his hands.

Then he starts the yoni part of the massage and it feels great.  I’m doing the inside focus thing to spread the charge around, and I’m really feeling good and starting to squirm and rock my hips a little, so he starts some oral, and that feels even better, and he starts to slide his fingers into me, then STOPS, and asks me what’s wrong.

“Nothing, why?” “You’re not turned on.”  “I am too!  “No, you aren’t.  You’re still dry inside.”

…. WTF??

Escaping a Dead Bedroom

One reason I've been discussing the various overlaps and close parallels between tantric sex and sex therapy over the last few months is that Z and I found our way to tantra in the first place because we were facing a "dead bedroom" – a catastrophic drop in sexual frequency.

I've kept my own personal story mostly out of this blog, but I recently came across a question on Reddit that inspired me to write about how Z and I escaped from that trap that kills so many relationships when the passion declines after a year or two.  And an old friend read it and encouraged me to expand on the story here.  So here goes!