Wednesday Martin's Blog, page 2

Twelve Days of Pleasure/ DAY FIVE/ JOY TOYS In Your Stocking

Bzzzzzzzzzzz. Do you have a vibrator? Or any sex toys at all? If not, why not treat yourself to one today? They bring joy and orgasms. So having one on hand/in hand is yet another way to prioritize your own pleasure during this twelve day period. I hope it becomes a habit all year long. To find a great toy, you might dash off to THE PLEASURE CHEST, or avail yourself of an internet resource like UNBOUND ("an online shop for rebellious women")

 There are many types of sex toys but today I’ll focus on vibrators. While writing my most recent book on female sexuality UNTRUE, I spoke to experts who came at female pleasure from a lot of different perspectives. Evolutionary biology, psychology, sociology, sex research. I especially enjoyed speaking to sex educators and sex workers, and when I did, I always asked about their favorite vibrators. THE MAGIC WAND was a name that came up again and again. As was THE WOMANIZER, which doesn’t vibrate but rather uses little puffs of air to simulate skillful cunnilingus. YES, IT REALLY DOES THAT!!! I know other women who swear by anything by LELO and also THE FEMME FUNN ULTRA BULLET.

Buy yourself a present that might blow your mind. Or ask your partner to. If you have a favorite toy and don’t mind sharing, let me know.

If you're interested in the history of vibrators and recent discoveries in vibrator scholarship have a look at my previous blog post THE GREAT CORRECTION

12 Days of Pleasure--Day Seven/ Free Your Mind/ Sexual Fantasies

On day seven of twelve days of pleasure, free your mind and hook into your sexual fantasies. Chances are, you have them when you're having sex, to get yourself excited and help ensure a happy ending. They're normal. They're not some referndum on your mind or your relationship...they're just an indication that, like so many humans who have sex, you like to embellish and enhance it. My friend the sex researcher Justin LeMiller has written a great book about sexual fantasies--what they are, why we have them, what they might tell us about ourselves and the culture we live in.

Do you think your sexual fantasies are too weird to even thing about? Justin disagrees. Check out Tell Me What You Want CLICK HERE and you wil be thrilled at the sheer range and wonderful weirdness of the thoughts that get people excited.

But let's talk about YOU. Nancy Friday first asserted that women have sexual fantasies, too, back in 1973 in her book My Secret Garden CLICK HERE. People were SHOCKED. Until then, it was presumed that men were more sexual and hence the fantasizers. As Friday explained it, people had assumed women didn't have a sexuality apart from men, and that's why the simple fact that women have sexual fantasies came as such a surprise.

What do people fantasize about? Lehmiller tells us the most common fantasies are group sex and multi partner sex, BDSM, new positions and places, taboo and forbidden stuff (fetishes and voyeurism, for example) and homoeroticism/gender bending fantasies. I hope you are feeling a little less weird now, if you ever did.

In fact, there's plenty of lit suggesting that fantasizing does NOT mean there's anything wrong with our relationships. Even if you're fantasizing about someone other than your partner, which over 60% of women admitted in a survey conducted in 2011. Since women especially tend to underreport this kind of potentially stigmatizing stuff, we can presume the number is at least slightly higher.  These fantasies can help women, who new reserach indicates need variety and novelty of sexual expereince even more than men do, enjoy sex more CLICK HERE Sharing your sexual fantasies with a partner can enhance sex and even improve your relationship and communication, some experts tell us. But maybe you don't want to share. It's okay to be selfish about your fantasies. Just ENJOY them.

Twelve Days of Pleasure...Days Ten and Nine

Twelve Days of Pleasure/ Days Ten and Nine: Meet Two Women Who Will Change Your Life and Get You In Touch with Your Pleasure Powers

Featuring Tiffany Dufu and Latham Thomas

So, I owe you two today, because all weekend I slept late and didn't work. That's really unusual for me...if you're a writer, there are sort of no brakes, if you will, and no hard stops. You can write and research and edit and plot your next thing all the time. But as I age I'm getting better at letting the weekends be weekends.  So I dropped the ball on posting until the work week began.

Last time, I ask you to make a list of 5 - 10 things that bring you pleasure. What's on your list? Mine were...sleeping in and NOT working and seeing friends. Today I want to introduce you to two of my most incredible friends. They will change your life... I mean that. They taught me everything I know about prioritizing feeling good--and not feeling bad about it.

TIFFANY DUFU is an advocate for women and girls. She is former director of the White House Project and former director of Leadership at Levo. And her newest venture is THE CRU, a resource that helps women connect...and thrive. She is also the author of a book I love, DROP THE BALL (CLICK HERE). Tiffany is a highly efficient whirlwind or Getting It Done and Making It Happen. And yet she is also one of the funnest, funniest people you could ever get girlfriendy with at a cocktail party (we met for the first time at a bar in San Francisco and talked about sex for over two hours). You can't find your PLEASURE POWERS if you are too busy to even care about them and that's where Tiffany's book comes in. Buy it now. Read it. And start dropping the ball on stuff that doesn't matter, stuff that stresses you but that you could let go. Trust me, it will improve your days and your mind. Could you buy cookies rather than bake them for the holiday thing? Could you send someone else out to buy them? Tiffany taught me about Task Rabbit CLICK HERE, people you can hire by the hour to help you out with everything from waiting on line to buying and wrapping holiday presents so you can...bake gingerbread or have a nap or meditate or get to know your vibrator better. Doing less means more time for the pursuit of pleasure.

Another goddess who has changed my life and will change yours and get you in touch with your pleasure powers is LATHAM THOMAS CLICK HERE. This is the person who taught me about the vast playground which is the internal clitoris! (More on that in the days to come). Latham is a doula, pleasure educator, and one of Oprah's Super Soul 100. She taught me the value of an evening bath ritual. As in, a bath with stuff in it that makes you feel really good. A scrub, some epsom salts, and a sexy balm to put on yourself after. She taught me dozens of other things as well and it's all in her book OWN YOUR GLOW CLICK HERE a book about luminous living. The book is full of information, suggestions, and exercises to help you improve how you  experience everything from parenting to meditation to orgasm. Latham IS luminous and alive. She is the guide you want to take you through pregnancy, motherhood, and beyond...but much of what she writes about goes far beyond, to address your soul. She wants you to ask yourself what nourishes you, makes you feel alive, gives you pleasure. Sign up for one of her workshops and be absolutely amazed. 

Latham and Tiffany both believe deeply in service. Latham is steering a group of Renegage Doulas to respond to the black maternal health crisis in our country. Tiffany is on the boards of Girls Who Code and Simmons College and active with Girls Scouts of America. You can't serve others if you don't take care of yourself, and these two know it. 

Twelve Days of Pleasure

Giving feels good, doesn't it? Baking and cooking for your family, being there for a friend, donating your time and money to a charity that matters. The holidays are all about doing for others.

So what are you giving yourself this holiday season? How about the gift of prioritizing your own pleasure?

Sounds strange, I know. As women we are socialized to to put others first to the point of depletion. We're taught that putting ourselves last is what makes us good mothers, good wives, good people.

I learned from my friends Latham Thomas and Tiffany Dufu that if you don't take care of yourself, no one else will. Is it a coincidence that so many women of color, living in a system in a system that devalues them every day, know about prioritizing themselves and doing self care? I don't think so.

Lesson borrowed, with all respect and deep admiration. What could you do today to prioritze not just your well-being, but your PLEASURE?

If you're like most women, you've internalized the idea that male pleasure is IT. That women are extensions of male desire and exist for male pleasure. We restrict our calories and exercise complusively, some of us, in order to pleasure not just individual men, but The Male Gaze. Every magazine cover and vaginal rejuvenation procedure says, "Pleasing Men matters most."

So putting your own pleasure first counts as a radical act. Whether it's delicious food with no guilt, or time with your vibrator, let's get you there. Day by day. Step by step.

Starting right now, today.

Day 1: Simply tell yourself, "My pleasure matters. It's important." Then make a list of ten things that give you pleasure. See, you just put your own pleasure first. You sent a message to yourself and the world. More tomorrow. 

Simple Pleasures

Female pleasure isn’t a puzzle. But you could be forgiven for thinking it was based on most popular coverage of the topic. Every day articles proliferate introducing “new” sex positions that will guarantee orgasms or offering mold defying ways to channel female sexuality. But as smart sex writers have been pointing out, they distract us from an important reality: clitoral stimulation is a really reliable way for most women to orgasm. To acknowledge this reality would be to acknowledge that much of our conception of sex fails to center or even take seriously female pleasure. Instead we dissemble, suggesting that women just need to contort their bodies or arguing that the clitoris is difficult to find. UNTRUE. Thanks to educator Sheri Winston and others, we know know quite a bit about the "female erectile network." And all signs point to it being perfectly designed for its job. It turns out that women have as much erectile tissue as men! And that we wake up with wood, and get hard ons when we're turned on, not unlike men. What we have come to know as the clitoris is actually connected to a large system of inner structures or internal clitoris, which when fully stimulated “becomes like a snug and stretchy cuff of delightfully responsive equipment.” This contradicts the common understanding that women aren’t “built” for sexual pleasure. Hopefully, as more women (and men) become aware of this, we can begin to reconceptualize our ideas around sex and stop calling the things that get women off as “foreplay.” Some educators and entrepreneurs are already pointing the way forward, offering tools to increase our collective cliteracy. And why not, pleasure is serious business. As Cunni co-founder Alison Tan Ka-kei puts it “one of the greatest acts of sexual empowerment we could do as [women] is to not sleep with people who don’t care about our pleasure.” Seconded, it’s time to close the orgasm gap!

To learn more and raise your own cliteracy, order a copy of UNTRUE!

Women of America, Take Off Your Wedding Rings

The notion that women’s bodies exist for others is a spectrum. Killing off this sinister idea begins at home.

The past week’s passion play of amped up masculinity and privilege—Kavanaugh’s Yalie frat bro entitlement melding into Lindsey Graham’s southern good old boy BS—was a performance of white male entitlement in crisis. The long and short of it was that Kavanaugh and his ideological foot soldiers were outraged—outraged—that he was being called on to answer questions about sexual violence he had allegedly committed several decades ago.

Consider, for a moment, what it means to be outraged at learning that, if you wanted a position that would sway the ideological and judicial tenor of the country for years to come, you would have to answer questions about whether you had, in fact, assaulted her. Imagine being infuriated by that requirement. Imagine being contemptuous, dismissive, and hostile toward those who were asking you questions about your past conduct toward women. Imagine feeling so contemptuous, in fact, that you turned the questions onto them. “Have you ever blacked out?” Imagine acting as if you were being persecuted unfairly, rather than called to account for what you had or had not done. Imagine asserting over and over, in an explicit dog whistle to men across the country, that you like beer, that you love beer, that you drink beer, that you always drank beer, that you will continue to drink beer—as a way of saying, F*ck you, I have no regrets and will offer no apologies and I will not make the slightest effort to comport myself in a seemly way before this body of senators because you are illegitimate, because no one should be questioning me.

The undergirding of Kavanaugh’s angry attacks and Graham’s performative tantrum is the idea that it doesn’t matter so much what men have done; the real thing is what they have become. And the corollary to that notion is that what happens to women in that process matters less than the fact that the man has come out on top.

Women of America, it’s time to take off your wedding rings. Re-education about female autonomy begins at home. Telling women that their selves and their bodies are things for men is a spectrum. It lives in the space between being married, compulsory monogamy, the wage gap, and getting away with harassment at work, and assault and rape. But wait, what does your wedding ring have to do with it?

What happens when you marry?

You become his, and he yours, ideally, in the companionate model of marriage we believe in here. And yet. What happens on the ground? You take his name, subsuming your identity into his. You might even still be called, in some contexts, Mrs. John Jones, rather than Alice Smith. If you keep your maiden name, things get complicated—letters and packages don’t get delivered, there may be jokes about your independence, people are confused, or people call you by his last name because it’s easier (that’s a code for “it makes more sense”). Small things. Microaggressions against your autonomy. Containment strategies that make it easier to just take his name. And all that it implies about belonging and ownership.

Should you divorce, returning to using your very own last name (actually your father’s), if you took your husband’s, can be hell, as Deborah Copaken wrote about when she attempted the audacious act of getting her back once her marriage was over. This, too, is a coercive tactic, and not a subtle one.

What else happens when you marry? You put on a ring, in most cases, and so does he. But the asymmetrical nature of your obligations becomes clear when you take your wedding and engagement ring—semaphores that you belong to someone—off. When men remove their wedding rings in our culture and in the popular imagination, it primes them for sexual adventure. And it’s meaningful that they wear no diamond engagement ring, presumed to telegraph with its size not only that a woman is possessed, but the wealth of the man taking possession of her.

What happens when a woman removes her engagement ring and wedding ring? She is likely to feel not a dizzying sense of possibility, but something bad about herself. Go out into the world without that band and that diamond, those semaphores of belonging to a man, and the world feels like a very different place indeed. Instead of a bracing whiff of freedom, you are just as likely to feel the cold wind of being unprotected by alliance with a male. There will be a subtle sense that you are not worthy of male attention, perhaps. That no man wanted you. Depending on where you live, there will be a bump down in your status.  You are available, for good and for bad, but unlike men, what you telegraph is that you are unprotected by what the great science writer and theorist of gender Natalie Angier calls the Greater Male Coalition. You are up for grabs, which could be fun, but you are up for grabs nonetheless.

And what about sex? And what about pleasure? Female bodily autonomy is at once the most basic and the most radical version of female autonomy. Sure, we dispensed with head and master laws—which gave men final say on decisions involving joint property without his wife’s consent—in 1979. But marriage is coercive of women in America in other, equally basic and equally objectionable ways. Is your body your own? If it were, if our culture believed that, a man would not dream of raising his hand against you for any reason, including if you had sex with another person. He certainly would not dare to assault you.

Female sexual autonomy, like female autonomy, is under assault. The Greater Male Coalition must die, and the Kavanaugh hearings tell us it is not going down easily. Tell men that your husband doesn’t own you, and that no one does. Because women are not objects for barter or for sale or for possession. Not anymore. Tell them.

Upcoming UNTRUE Fall 2018 Events

We have some exciting #UNTRUEthebook events coming up in the next few weeks where we hope to see you!

Corner Book Store Reading/Q&A

Book Signing and Wine and Cheese Reception

1313 Madison Avenue NYC

September 26th at 6pm

RSVP at cornerbook@aol.com

Book Hampton

41 Main Street East Hampton, NY

September 29 at 4pm

https://www.bookhampton.com/event/wednesday-martin-phd-untrue

Cosmopolitan Club w/Amy Cuddy

October 2nd 

Ripped Bodice LA

Main Street, Culver City, CA

October 5th at 7pm

122 E 66th St, New York

https://www.therippedbodicela.com/events-and-tickets

KGB Last Taboo Series

85 E 4th Street NYC

October 17th at 7pm

Enjoy burlesque, cocktails, and an interview with the author.

The Great Correction

Scholarship and research might sound boring, but they’re very dynamic and alive— always changing. The presumptions that undergird entire disciplines have shifted over the last few decades due to who is conducting research. For example, because female primatologists have brought new forms of empathy, curiosity, and identification to their studies, the science in this field has improved markedly. We now know much more about the social and sexual behaviors of non-human female primates. We have learned that maternal and sexual strategizing were huge selection pressures in evolution! Female monkeys and apes aren’t just passive players in the game of sex, “being mounted” by males—they’re soliciting copulations, building support networks, evading male control, and much more.  

Meanwhile, the field of sex research has seen an influx of female scientists over the last few years, and our concept of human female sexuality is shifting alongside this influx. One important recent shift is that the criteria in the DSM has changed. No longer will the diagnosis hypoactive desire disorder be used. Now we’re going to call it sexual interest arousal disorder. It might not seem like much, but it’s a shift that grows out of new research on how women get turned on. We are creatures who more tend to experience triggered or responsive desire, rather than spontaneous desire. I recently wrote about what I call “The Great Correction,” in which everyone from female standup comics to primatologists and anthropologists, sex researchers to #metoo activists, and artists from Beyonce to Roxane Gay are changing the way we think about female sexuality and femaleness more generally.

In other news, some vibrator scholarship has been recently challenged! Dr. Rachel Maines, in her book The Technology of Orgasm, wrote what she now describes as hypotheses but which many scholars did not consider provisional. Her work received numerous prestigious science awards and was cited by dozens of respected scholars. (There was a even a popular play about her findings!) But recently, a graduate student and her advisor did a deep dive into primary sources to shore up Maines’s assertions . . . and came up empty-handed. These revelations only crossed over into the mainstream earlier this month, after my new book UNTRUE had already gone to print. The exciting news here is that there is now enough focus on female sexuality that the scholarship is morphing and changing. And what remains unchanged is that vibrators are awesome playthings. Here’s to ever more insights on the topic of what women want and why we want it!

Unlearning the Untrue: A New Sexual Revolution

I began researching and writing Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free  nearly three years ago. I didn't quite know what I was getting myself into. Infidelity holds a unique force as a taboo in our culture. It’s not discussed very often and, when it is, it usually happens under a cloud of scandal or in hushed tones, with moralizing language. But as I worked on this project, I got to hear stories of women who confounded all the clichés—they sought out sex, not emotional connection; they were sexually adventurous to an extent that we don't usually associate with women; they had libidos that were strong; or they were wilting in monogamous relationships and looking for a solution. I found myself exploring topics like polyamory and hotwifing and Skirt Club and more, all of which afford a glimpse into larger tectonic shifts in our sexual beliefs. In the wake of the #MeToo movement and other global activism, more stories from women’s own perspectives are finding their way into the public square. When we decouple female sexuality from male desire, we begin to see that female sexuality is more surprising, weird, and powerful than we've imagined. And now, on Untrue's publication day (!!!), it is clearer than ever that we are overdue for a revolution in how we approach infidelity and female sexuality. New research from Dr. Alicia Walker shows yet more evidence that infidelity, contrary to conventional wisdom, can increase desire between spouses and improve overall contentment (even after the affair has ended). Another heartening sign: Kristen Stewart, who was embroiled in hysterical scandal after an affair, is experiencing a renaissance. In fact, she is not only staging a comeback but taking new thrills in asserting the importance of female sexuality and autonomy in her public comments. Meredith Chivers continues to challenge the notion that women are the less sexed sex, with plenty of strong data from her lab. These developments make Untrue seem as timely as could be. All of which is to say, I am excited to share this book with readers and start building a world where women have total sexual autonomy and receive the pleasure we all deserve. And where monogamy really is your choice, rather than something foisted upon you. I hope you'll grab a copy and join me in this revolution!

Meet the Experts of UNTRUE: A conversation with Mischa Lin

When I began writing Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free, the focus was primarily on female infidelity and popular mis/representations of female sexuality. But in the course of doing research and discussing the project with friends, I came to realize that I also needed to explore another topic: polyamory. Many signs suggested that the practice was growing. And several experts had observed that anecdotal data indicated this growth was being driven primarily by women, making it a good subject to discuss in the book. One of the first people I reached out to in my effort to educate myself about the modern poly scene was Mischa Lin. Mischa is one of the cofounders of Open Love NY, a leading organization run for and by the polyamorous community. Over the course of a fascinating interview, she walked me through some of the history of modern polyamory, the current polyamorous landscape, and what the culture at large could learn from her community. As Mischa was quick to note, “nonmonogamy has been around since the beginning of time,” with examples throughout ancient societies like the Greeks. But what is new in modern polyamory is the introduction of ethics, agency, and consent norms in pursuing nonmonogamy that is “joyful and fulfilling” as monogamy. (Scholar Elisabeth Sheff places contemporary polyamory in the third wave of consensual nonmonogamy, which she traces back to 19th century transcendentalists.) People have found many different ways into this community. Mischa in our interview shared with me that she was in a monogamous marriage for many years prior to becoming polyamorous. The marriage ended after she made a gender transition and fell in love with another person who was married and living with an 'intentional family.' Mischa moved from Texas to New Jersey to be closer to them, although at the time they did not call it "polyamory”.

Her crucial epiphany following transitioning and entering this new type of relationship was, “We can create our own version of happiness for ourselves, without having to compare it someone’s idealized version of happiness.” This was a throughline of our conversation: polyamory as a way to explore and define pleasure, partnership, and love on one’s own terms—part of what Mischa described as an increasing “individuation” of society. And the appeal of these new norms for women is obvious. Traditional heterosexual relationships have often been foisted on women or entered into out of material necessity. It is also important to think about the ways relationships to self are affected by partners. Looked at from a certain vantage, Mischa argues we are all polyamorous, because we have a relationship with our partner(s) and a relationship with ourselves. The latter is often ignored or under engaged in heteronormative relationships. In what Mischa terms “toxic monogamy,” a person loses connection with their relationship with themselves, and I would argue women experience this effect especially acutely because we often find ourselves cast into constraining, ill-fitting molds by cultural expectations and social roles. The irony here is, as Mischa explained, that in our society monogamy and ethics are treated as synonymous. As an activist and member of the polyamorous community, she has worked hard to pushback against this assumption, “decoupling ethics from monogamy.” The key elements of successful polyamory are consent and agency, which allow people to be empowered and intentional in “creating an agreement that actually works” for them. As Mischa quips, “What defines poly is you!” I think we could all learn a thing or two from this embrace of curiosity, honesty, and openness with ourselves our partners and our communities.