Sexy Books Q&A:
'Slow Sex' author Nicole Daedone on orgasm and sexual hunger
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Nicole Daedone's new book Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm is in bookstores this week, and while it does offer a prescription for improving your life through a 15-minute daily practice Daedone calls Orgasmic Meditation (OM), it's mostly about reconnecting with our bodies and our intuitive knowledge to rebuild our relationships by stripping away a lot of the extra baggage we've attached to our sex lives. Her focus is on orgasm itself, the extraordinary experience that should be at the center of our sexual activity -- and, Daedone argues, at the center of our lives -- and how to make the most of it by making a practice of it.
I first wrote about Daedone in 2009, after her One Taste Urban Retreat Centers and the practice of OM made headlines in a feature in The New York Times titled "The Pleasure Principle," and this week had the great pleasure of catching up with her for a lengthy chat about orgasm, female power and happiness, and some extended food metaphors about sexual starvation. Hungry? Read on.
Let's start with your decision to call the book Slow Sex, with its implicit reference to the Slow Food movement.
"Slow Sex" came about as a concept as I was struggling to describe the practice of Orgasmic Meditation in a way that would translate for a bigger mainstream audience. Then I remembered hearing this great story about Alice Waters, and how she wanted to learn to cook. She didn't want to eat empty calorie foods. She didn't want to eat at McDonald's -- she wanted the opposite of fast food. But the alternatives available to her at the time were all these fancy French cooking classes, you know, with really elaborate recipes. She just wanted to cook some vegetables, and for the focus to be on stripping away all the excess, and that was a concept I could relate to. I was feeling the same way about sexuality: I didn't want empty, fast sex but I wasn't happy with many of the alternatives. I didn't want to take on some exotic notion of sexuality where you have to take on another spirituality and call your genitals by other names and get all mystical about it, and I wasn't interested in these sex manuals where you go through dozens of positions and get tips about picking out expensive lingerie and whatnot. She called it "Slow Food," and the name "Slow Sex" came to me as I was trying to describe this parallel. Everything we think we know about sex is just piling on all this extra stuff, like extra unnecessary ingredients. I wanted to focus on orgasm itself, on the center of passion: There are no extra ingredients you can pile on that make it better than what it already inherently is.
Early on in the book you write that "frequent access to the pleasure of orgasm is the key to finding joy, nourishment, and sustainable happiness." That's a powerful assertion, and it leads to the central question of your book: How do you access that transformational power?
Well, to begin with, I've struggled a lot in terms of the definition of "orgasm" itself, because the definition is so big and at the same time it's key that it still be rooted in the body and in the genitals. I think -- especially, as women -- we err in either bypassing that aspect and focusing on some more cosmic notion of orgasm or, in the other extreme, we have it fully rooted in the physical and then we miss the depth and richness that's available in the experience. Spanning both of those extremes was my challenge. A friend of mine describes orgasm as being "allergic to language": There are certain experiences that are so deeply, viscerally experienced that you can point to them but you can't accurately describe them. There's always that tension of being so close but not quite there.
There's a concept running through your book of "turning the lights back on" and getting sexual desire out in the open as something we talk about and something we do something about, rather than trying to keep it all dark and mysterious.
When we talk about "how do you access that power?" the questions that have to come first are, "How do we even talk about it?" and "What exactly are we talking about?" My background is in semantics and I remember reading this passage by Rainer Maria Rilke: "Our inability to describe the extraordinary has our ability to experience it atrophied." We have these most profound experiences that we can't communicate to anybody! If you don't articulate them in language some way then they just seem to fall away, and then what you remember is the crappy stuff, because we have a lot of language for the crappy stuff, for disappointment. I'm extremely interested in giving language to extraordinary experience. So let's turn the lights on! Let's share these extraordinary experiences together, and then let's talk about them.
The prescriptions in your book aren't rocket science: Beyond the specific stroking techniques and Orgasmic Meditation routines you outline, it all basically boils down to "pay attention to each other and to yourself." And yet there's still a need to explain that to most people, and people still seem to have some barriers to experiencing these basic, essential things in their relationships.
They are basic, and they are essential and... yes! The book was really written as a guide for people to find their way back to their own native wisdom. There are things that we justknow. Right? Like, intuitively, we know how to eat well, we know that exercise is good for us, we know not working too much and taking time to spend with our families and friends is good. We know what it is to have really great sex, and yet it is so difficult to get out of the momentum away from our bodies and our pleasure and intimacy and connection. This book is really a guide to how to get out of that momentum and back into that place of tapping into what you know. To use another food metaphor, I talk in the book about cooking without a recipe and learning to trust in your own intuition, learning to feel your way through. I watch so many couples who are terrified to step away from these recipes they've been using for how to have successful sexual relationships. They feel like they're going to flounder without the habits they've been using to prop up their sex lives! There's a period of discomfort before their natural intuition wakes up, but it always does wake up. And that's really why I do what I do. Your sexual intuition will wake up if you allow it to, but it may take some practice.
Throughout the book you refer to "sex practice," in the same sense that someone might say "yoga practice." It's about something more than just practicing a technique over and over to get it right. Can you define what you mean when you say "practice" and why it's important?
That's a great question! I've never been asked that question. I think the simplest answer I can give is to again speak of that momentum away from intimacy with our lives. It's really key to be deliberate in terms of designing experiences for yourself. Most of the women who come to me will take care of everyoneelse before they'll take care of themselves, sexually and otherwise, and then their giving begins to feel empty to them. They feel like they have to keep giving in order to get, and it always leads to burnout. You know how they tell you to put your own oxygen mask on first when the plane is going down? If you haven't taken care of your own needs it's going to take away from everything else you try to do. When you cordon off time for yourself, you're freer to have deeper experiences. Set aside 15 minutes a day for the practice of Orgasmic Meditation and see what it does for your life.
Why 15 minutes?
I think it's important to give some structure to those experiences: If I am going to have totally unstructured sexual time, you know, lounge around and have sex all day, it can be a little bit daunting unless I'm on vacation to do just that. I'm preoccupied, thinking, "Am I going to make it back to do the laundry and take care of the things I have to take care of?" But if there's actually a deliberate amount of structured time set aside for my orgasm, and nothing but my own orgasm, then I can go as deep as I want to go and know that I'm going to come out and be able to return to my everyday life refreshed. For me that's the idea of "sex practice," that you have this experience and experience it to the fullest, and then after you have it you go back to your every day life. You make space in your life for it. For some reason, and I do not know why this is, but the things that are best for us are the most difficult to make time for. That's why we make and break all those New Year's resolutions! It's something about not remembering that those experiences that don't necessarily fall overtly into "achievement" or "production" or "success" are important to feed those things that do.
======================================================
Nicole Daedone's new book Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm is in bookstores this week, and while it does offer a prescription for improving your life through a 15-minute daily practice Daedone calls Orgasmic Meditation (OM), it's mostly about reconnecting with our bodies and our intuitive knowledge to rebuild our relationships by stripping away a lot of the extra baggage we've attached to our sex lives. Her focus is on orgasm itself, the extraordinary experience that should be at the center of our sexual activity -- and, Daedone argues, at the center of our lives -- and how to make the most of it by making a practice of it.
I first wrote about Daedone in 2009, after her One Taste Urban Retreat Centers and the practice of OM made headlines in a feature in The New York Times titled "The Pleasure Principle," and this week had the great pleasure of catching up with her for a lengthy chat about orgasm, female power and happiness, and some extended food metaphors about sexual starvation. Hungry? Read on.
Let's start with your decision to call the book Slow Sex, with its implicit reference to the Slow Food movement.
"Slow Sex" came about as a concept as I was struggling to describe the practice of Orgasmic Meditation in a way that would translate for a bigger mainstream audience. Then I remembered hearing this great story about Alice Waters, and how she wanted to learn to cook. She didn't want to eat empty calorie foods. She didn't want to eat at McDonald's -- she wanted the opposite of fast food. But the alternatives available to her at the time were all these fancy French cooking classes, you know, with really elaborate recipes. She just wanted to cook some vegetables, and for the focus to be on stripping away all the excess, and that was a concept I could relate to. I was feeling the same way about sexuality: I didn't want empty, fast sex but I wasn't happy with many of the alternatives. I didn't want to take on some exotic notion of sexuality where you have to take on another spirituality and call your genitals by other names and get all mystical about it, and I wasn't interested in these sex manuals where you go through dozens of positions and get tips about picking out expensive lingerie and whatnot. She called it "Slow Food," and the name "Slow Sex" came to me as I was trying to describe this parallel. Everything we think we know about sex is just piling on all this extra stuff, like extra unnecessary ingredients. I wanted to focus on orgasm itself, on the center of passion: There are no extra ingredients you can pile on that make it better than what it already inherently is.
Early on in the book you write that "frequent access to the pleasure of orgasm is the key to finding joy, nourishment, and sustainable happiness." That's a powerful assertion, and it leads to the central question of your book: How do you access that transformational power?
Well, to begin with, I've struggled a lot in terms of the definition of "orgasm" itself, because the definition is so big and at the same time it's key that it still be rooted in the body and in the genitals. I think -- especially, as women -- we err in either bypassing that aspect and focusing on some more cosmic notion of orgasm or, in the other extreme, we have it fully rooted in the physical and then we miss the depth and richness that's available in the experience. Spanning both of those extremes was my challenge. A friend of mine describes orgasm as being "allergic to language": There are certain experiences that are so deeply, viscerally experienced that you can point to them but you can't accurately describe them. There's always that tension of being so close but not quite there.
There's a concept running through your book of "turning the lights back on" and getting sexual desire out in the open as something we talk about and something we do something about, rather than trying to keep it all dark and mysterious.
When we talk about "how do you access that power?" the questions that have to come first are, "How do we even talk about it?" and "What exactly are we talking about?" My background is in semantics and I remember reading this passage by Rainer Maria Rilke: "Our inability to describe the extraordinary has our ability to experience it atrophied." We have these most profound experiences that we can't communicate to anybody! If you don't articulate them in language some way then they just seem to fall away, and then what you remember is the crappy stuff, because we have a lot of language for the crappy stuff, for disappointment. I'm extremely interested in giving language to extraordinary experience. So let's turn the lights on! Let's share these extraordinary experiences together, and then let's talk about them.
The prescriptions in your book aren't rocket science: Beyond the specific stroking techniques and Orgasmic Meditation routines you outline, it all basically boils down to "pay attention to each other and to yourself." And yet there's still a need to explain that to most people, and people still seem to have some barriers to experiencing these basic, essential things in their relationships.
They are basic, and they are essential and... yes! The book was really written as a guide for people to find their way back to their own native wisdom. There are things that we justknow. Right? Like, intuitively, we know how to eat well, we know that exercise is good for us, we know not working too much and taking time to spend with our families and friends is good. We know what it is to have really great sex, and yet it is so difficult to get out of the momentum away from our bodies and our pleasure and intimacy and connection. This book is really a guide to how to get out of that momentum and back into that place of tapping into what you know. To use another food metaphor, I talk in the book about cooking without a recipe and learning to trust in your own intuition, learning to feel your way through. I watch so many couples who are terrified to step away from these recipes they've been using for how to have successful sexual relationships. They feel like they're going to flounder without the habits they've been using to prop up their sex lives! There's a period of discomfort before their natural intuition wakes up, but it always does wake up. And that's really why I do what I do. Your sexual intuition will wake up if you allow it to, but it may take some practice.
Throughout the book you refer to "sex practice," in the same sense that someone might say "yoga practice." It's about something more than just practicing a technique over and over to get it right. Can you define what you mean when you say "practice" and why it's important?
That's a great question! I've never been asked that question. I think the simplest answer I can give is to again speak of that momentum away from intimacy with our lives. It's really key to be deliberate in terms of designing experiences for yourself. Most of the women who come to me will take care of everyoneelse before they'll take care of themselves, sexually and otherwise, and then their giving begins to feel empty to them. They feel like they have to keep giving in order to get, and it always leads to burnout. You know how they tell you to put your own oxygen mask on first when the plane is going down? If you haven't taken care of your own needs it's going to take away from everything else you try to do. When you cordon off time for yourself, you're freer to have deeper experiences. Set aside 15 minutes a day for the practice of Orgasmic Meditation and see what it does for your life.
Why 15 minutes?
I think it's important to give some structure to those experiences: If I am going to have totally unstructured sexual time, you know, lounge around and have sex all day, it can be a little bit daunting unless I'm on vacation to do just that. I'm preoccupied, thinking, "Am I going to make it back to do the laundry and take care of the things I have to take care of?" But if there's actually a deliberate amount of structured time set aside for my orgasm, and nothing but my own orgasm, then I can go as deep as I want to go and know that I'm going to come out and be able to return to my everyday life refreshed. For me that's the idea of "sex practice," that you have this experience and experience it to the fullest, and then after you have it you go back to your every day life. You make space in your life for it. For some reason, and I do not know why this is, but the things that are best for us are the most difficult to make time for. That's why we make and break all those New Year's resolutions! It's something about not remembering that those experiences that don't necessarily fall overtly into "achievement" or "production" or "success" are important to feed those things that do.
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(source:.examiner.com/sex-relationships-in-national/sexy-books-q-a-slow-sex-author-nicole-daedone-on-orgasm-)
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