Slow the Fuck Down

In a state of genuine, sustained, full-body arousal, the inner lips transform. They extend and thin until they are as delicate as fine porcelain, as translucent as a pressed flower. I call them Bing and Bong.

In their fully aroused state, they form an O, like the top of a crystal goblet — the same geometry, the same resonant potential. Touch them with the barest possible contact at the outermost edge of the petal, and they sing.

We are not tapping a goblet with a spoon, not striking a bell with a clapper. A wine glass does not need to be struck to sound — a wet fingertip circling the rim, and it begins to sing its own pure tone. This is Anahata — the heart chakra; the word means unstruck, unhurt. Treated with that same delicacy, circled and invited rather than struck, her inner lips produce the most intimate vibration in the whole catalogue.

She has to trust you thoroughly. Bing and Bong don't come out for someone they don't trust.

If you take one thing from this book, let it be this: if she's not having cervical orgasms, she's missing the main course.

Cervical orgasms are not like other orgasms. Not the sharp electrical spark of the clit or the throbbing pulse of the G. They are seismic. They begin deep in the pelvic floor and spread upward through the abdomen, the chest, sometimes the throat. They produce sounds from women that they have never made before and don't entirely recognize as their own.

The cervix responds to medium pressure and medium speed — both lower than your instinct will suggest. Work around the root, the place where the cervix meets the vaginal wall, more than at the very tip. The tip is the obvious target; the root is where the real conversation happens.

Go slow getting here. Once you've arrived, go slower and make sure your seat belt is on.

Combinations are not about stimulating multiple areas at once for the mechanical fact of adding more stimulation. They are about finding the moments when two instruments are in the same register — when the G-sponge has built to the same pitch as the clit, when the cervix is trembling on the same frequency as the lips — and bringing them into convergence.

This is composition. What happens when two waveforms of equal amplitude meet in phase is not addition. It is multiplication.

The triple combination — thumb on the clit, forefinger on the G, middle finger on the cervix — is the most complex piece I have tuned in this repertoire. When you get it right, the result is total system overload. Her brain, her nervous system, her default mode network, her identity, all of it briefly reboots. What remains, in the moment after, is something clean and wondrous, and luminous.

The body keeps a ledger. It records every embrace it did not receive, every hand that was not held, every night of sleeping alone in a skin that wanted company. The ledger is not metaphorical — the body stores this information in cortisol levels, in immune function, in the baseline activation of the threat response.

Harry Harlow's infant monkeys chose the cloth mother over the wire mother who provided food. Given the choice between nutrition and contact, they chose contact. Nourishment, the body seems to know, is not only caloric.

A twenty-second hug — held long enough for the nervous system to register it as genuine contact rather than social formality — releases a measurable pulse of oxytocin in both parties. Twenty seconds. The length of a slow breath. An eternity by the standards of most embraces, which are over in four.

Start there. Before technique, before subtlety, before any of what follows — start with the willingness to be held and to hold. Everything else is built on this.

Erica Jong gave us the phrase in her 1973 novel Fear of Flying — a stranger on a train, no names, no histories, the zippers falling away as if by magic. What made it zipless was the absence of everything that usually comes attached: power, ulterior motive, the quiet ledger of who owes whom. She called it "as rare as a unicorn," and half-suspected it didn't exist at all.

I want to take her word somewhere she didn't take it. What Jong located in the absence of history, I locate in the fullness of presence. The zippers still come undone by themselves — but not because the two people are nothing to each other. Because, for the length of the encounter, they are nothing but each other.

And I hear a second meaning in her word, one she may not have intended. Zip-less: not only without zippers, but touch-less — a meeting conducted at a distance, feeling across the gap, no contact required. The clothes were never really the point. Neither, it turns out, is the touch.

An encounter entire in itself, the way a piece of music is entire in itself. It begins, it unfolds, it resolves, and it is over. And it was enough. It was more than enough. It was everything.