Aunt Shakti's Action Plan for Proactive Modern Virgins

In my last post we talked abut women and when they had their first orgasms, and we followed the story of a young woman who had been sexually active for most of a year and was still seeking her first one.  As a follow-up to that, an old friend has been pushing me to add an article based on something I first wrote for my nieces when they were old enough to be asking questions about how virgins can make their first time better and less painful.

Listen, I know this isn't strictly about tantra, but I bet there are a lot of girls and young women out there reading things like this on the web who have NEVER been with a guy. Or they've just done oral and stuff, and they're on the verge and they're kinda excited and kinda scared and NOBODY is helping them get ready.

My first time was horrible.  It was so painful and bloody that I pushed him off and made him stop.  It was about as bad as it could be for both of us. That thing you wrote for virgins really needs to be out there so people can stumble across it in as many places as possible.  It's a really great guide to getting ready, and I think you should at least think about putting it on your website.

Mailbag #4: First Orgasms, and How Women Vary

I've gotten a fair number of messages over the last six months from people who are struggling with the mysteries of the female orgasm.  This one showed up in early May:

Hi Shakti, my girlfriend & I came across your blog a couple of months ago and we'd really like to start learning tantra, but we've been trying to follow your advice to get "the basics" worked out first. The biggest problem is that Sara* can't have an orgasm no matter what we do. She says she enjoys having sex with me. She says she loves doing it & she loves making me come. She acts horny & rubs up against me to distract from TV or studying or the computer when she wants to do it. She takes the initiative a lot, maybe even more than I do, but I know it's bugging her that there's this other experience women are supposed to have & she can't do it.

Mailbag #3: Single Women/Meditation

Two of the letters about solo Tantra were from women, and both asked about vibrators.  I think I could have done a better, more complete job of answering them (sorry!), so I’ve rewritten and expanded on my answer for posting here:

I'm considered something of a radical pro-vibrator heretic in some circles because I refuse to condemn the use of vibrators during Tantric sex.  However, I do agree that it's a good idea for women to be cautious about using a vibrator during solo sex more than absolutely necessary, in part because a vibrator can get us used to reaching orgasm very quickly, a tempo that sex with a partner can't match.

Even if you have never managed to give yourself an orgasm manually, I urge you to give it a try and go as slowly as you can for as long as you can.  Your goal should be to s-t-r-e-t-c-h out the arousal phase as long as possible.

Mailbag #2: Tantra for Singles

One of the most common questions I have received from readers is from people who are currently single and want to get ready to learn Tantra with a partner.  Each time, I have added things to what has become my standard response, but I think this now covers most of the essentials:

Hi, ____.

I’m not sure how much help I can be, but I’ll try to answer any questions you have. If you have read this blog from the beginning, you know it’s a pretty complete course on learning Tantra, but it’s also very oriented toward couples. That's what I know, and it's what the people I interviewed know best.  

However, I did ask everyone I talked to about their experiences with things like meditation, sex, and orgasms before they learned Tantra, so I can say a bit about some things you can do now that will make the whole learning process easier when you do have a partner.

The best things single people can do to get ready to learn Tantra are: 

Mailbag #1: Tantra Videos / Stoned Tantra

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The Mystery and Magic of the Human Pair Bond

In my last post, I made a case that humans have (at least) three overlapping and competing attraction systems, and that there are styles of sex that are appropriate to each of the three. The key problem is that everyone starts out with lust and romance, but people who want to be in satisfying long-term relationships often aren’t able to make the transition to the kind of sex that can sustain a long-term relationship.

Lust, Romance, and Pair Bonding

You’ve now had a chance to read about four of the couples I interviewed.  I chose these couples to profile because they represent the range of differences I encountered fairly well.  (There was one obvious exception:  because I was also favoring the more reflective and articulate interviews, the couples I ended up choosing to describe for you were all college educated, and four of the eight individuals have at least a masters, whereas seven of the people I interviewed had some or no college.)

But as you read through this series of posts, you should have noticed a clear similarity:  all four of these couples are strongly devoted to each other.  In this, they are completely representative of all of the (now almost 60) couples I've interviewed.  To understand why, we need to take a step back and look at why this question even comes up.  Why aren’t humans, like many species, simply hardwired to be either monogamous or promiscuous?

Jack & Lita, Part 2: Tantra as Sacred Sex

Getting back to our interview with Jack and Lita...

Can you describe your usual Tantric experience?

Lita: [laughs] Oh, wow, I don’t know what’s typical! We keep mixing things up! Okay, let’s see… He flies home on Thursdays, so we have a Thursday-nighter when he gets back that’s usually just a basic body rub for him, something simple for me for a warm up, and then regular sex. It depends on how tired and sore he is.

On Friday night, we’re usually out at a restaurant, a concert, or a party or we go dancing or something like that, so we get home late-ish and don’t have time for much fancy stuff. Saturday is my biggest day at the dojo, so it’s my turn to get a good long massage before bed, but it’s usually just that, some drinks, a movie, and a cuddle, no sex, ‘cause we’re sort of saving up. Sunday, we head out to the shack, and I guess that’s what you mean by a Tantra experience, but it’s just sort of loosely woven into the whole day.

Jack & Lita: Male Orgasm and Ejaculation Control

I decided to introduce you to this next couple because my interview with them touched on two important questions:  How can couples manage if the two people feel very different about the spiritual or religious side of Tantra? And how important is the role of “sacredness” in what is often called “sacred sexuality”?

The other reason that I wanted to write up this interview for the blog is that Jack is the only man I talked to who had been able to go beyond the kegel clamp method for having multiple orgasms, to being able to trigger a complete orgasm without ejaculation by an act of will.  We’ll get to his account of what that learning process was like at the end of part one of this interview.

Cabot and Marla: Senior Tantra, Part 2

As we returned to the study, I asked Cabot & Marla to describe a typical Tantra experience.

Cabot: When we first came across Tantra, we were still really learning the basics of being better lovers. Marla has done yoga and ballroom for years, and she managed to convince me to take classes in both. In addition, we began to get quite serious about meditation. We worked on it on our own and with a local teacher, and of course Marla had been doing some basic meditation as part of yoga for years. But then we invested in a week-long meditation retreat at a Buddhist monastery in 2002, and I’m really glad we did. Among other things, everything I’ve read and heard about Tantra indicates that it’s sort of pointless to even try to learn Tantra if you don’t already have some degree of meditative control or mastery.