Mastering Multiple Position Sex (3 page)

Following the spirit and guidelines of PICA, this book grants you
permission
to use your physical attributes to try new things and to perfect old ones. It
informs
you on various techniques, transitions, and even technology to make sex better, and it
forgives
you for anything that you did not know or learn prior to reading these pages.

As for the
counseling piece
, the
Fine Tuning
chapter assists you in finding the right sex counselor or sex therapist and helps you become a more informed sexual health consumer. Use the recommendations in
Fine Tuning
to discover secrets for keeping your mind, heart, body, and bedroom primed for sex.

A Note on Safety

There are three general categories of safety in every sexual relationship. First, there is the physical safety of the couple. Do the positions stress the body? Is the bench going to crash under the weight of two people? Will security guards barge in on you and shout, “You can’t do that in a bakery!”? Take every precaution to ensure that your environment is safe and comfortable. If a particular position requires additional or more nuanced advice, you will find it here.

Next, I insist on sexual safety to protect the participants from sexually transmissible infections (STIs) and pregnancy. To that end, the discussion on safe sex should come long before either partner does. Talking about sex should focus on the advantages and disadvantages of sex at that particular moment and over time: One of us might get pregnant; both of us could have orgasms grand enough to float a battleship; we might regret never having tried that position; one of us entered the relationship with an infection and wants to do everything possible to prevent the other person from getting it too. Talk to a certified sex educator, counselor, or therapist about ways to make safe sex sexier. With imagination and confidence, you can discuss and have safe sex with ease.

Please note that you will not see any form of birth control or disease prevention pictured in the text or in any of the photos. This is not meant to suggest they are not important; on the contrary, we want you to follow the CDC’s guidelines. Please go to my website,
www.ericmgarrison.com
, for information on resources to make sex both safe and pleasurable.

Clients and clergy, baristas and brokers ask me what “abnormal sex” is, which leads to my final—and the most important—point on safety. The only abnormal form of sex is when coercion is present or consent is absent. Sex that is sanctioned by two people is the best sex. Minors and anyone who is intoxicated or under the influence of a mind-altering substance cannot consent. Please obtain legal consent before having sex. Consent is a coupon, which either partner can revoke at any time—even during sex. Make sex sensual and consensual, cohesive but not coercive.

Use Your Mouth for Amazing Sex

When I ask students, “What is a four-letter word for intercourse that ends in the letter K?” I listen to several of them stumble over the word
fuck
before I give the correct answer:
T-A-L-K
. The goal of intercourse is to
come together
, not to
cum together
.

While reading through this book, I want you to take breaks and put it down—to have sex, yes, but also to discuss the emotions and ideas that the words and pictures stimulate. Ask your partner to consider alternate positions and suggest ways to make a standing vaginal position work as an anal position on the couch. Discuss ways to exile monotony from the bedroom—though I admit that every now and then, vanilla ice cream tastes good—especially when it’s licked off warm skin.

So grab your baton—whether it’s a vibrating sex toy or a real-life penis—and create a sexual symphony with you as the composer, musician, conductor, and most ardent fan.

Getting Started
The Solo: Self Pleasure as Sex Education

How excited would you be if I could offer you something that would boost your immune system, reduce headaches, improve your cardiovascular health, combat stress and depression, reduce the risk of certain cancers, help you achieve better orgasms, prevent pregnancy and sexually transmissible infections, and cost you absolutely nothing? Would you be interested? Would you even believe that it’s possible? Well, it is indeed possible and the answer is in your hands, literally. It is the art of masturbation.

You may be wondering why I chose to begin a book about multiple sex positions with a chapter on self-love.

Before you can become expert at helping your partner reach orgasm, and before you can communicate with him or her about helping you reach yours, you must understand how your body derives pleasure; this chapter, in essence, prepares you for the rest of the book.

Think of yourself as a conductor, and sex as a symphony. An orchestral concert can offer a host of benefits—from pleasing the ear, to raising money for charity, to providing a social outlet for a date or family outing—but the orchestra won’t budge until the conductor raises her hands as a signal to the musicians to begin. Likewise, if you want the maximum benefit from your sex life, it is time to raise your hands, to learn—or relearn—how masturbation can help you both have unforgettable orgasms.

Question: What Is an Orgasm?
Answer: A Vacation for Your Genitals

If you’ve had houseguests overstay their visit, the moment they pull out of your driveway leaves you with a welcome sense of relief. Sexual tension is like a lingering guest. And when that tension gets released, there’s your orgasm.

When you or somebody else sexually stimulates your body or your brain—or both—it causes muscular contractions in your sexual organs. With no release, you have the sexual equivalent of the houseguest who won’t leave. Sexologists call this
involuntary vulvo-vasocongestion
(for women) and
involuntary testicular-vasocongestion
(for men). Men call this condition “blue balls,” and, despite their pleas, it is neither a national emergency nor fatal. When suffering from genital vasocongestion, women and men can relieve themselves with an orgasm or two. What a good prescription!

Let’s Give Masturbation a Hand

Self-pleasure—which feels amazing to many and carries with it numerous health benefits—was once considered shameful, and worse. To understand why, and to have cause to celebrate it even more today, we must travel back a few centuries to a less enlightened time in our sexual history.

Almost two decades before the Declaration of Independence was signed, a Swiss physician named Tissot published his theory on masturbation and disease, based in part on his visit to an insane asylum, where he saw people with mental illness masturbating. This visit came long before iPhones and Wii, when asylums did not have activities coordinators on staff. To make things worse for us today, Tissot titled his “medical work”
On Onanism
, forever linking masturbation with the Bible’s Onan, a man whom the Judeo-Christian God struck down because he refused to ejaculate inside his wife’s vagina (and his wife was the widow of his dead brother, and Onan had to marry her by law). Does that sound anything like masturbation? No! It’s time to embrace masturbation as a source of pleasure and knowledge. Everyone in favor, raise your hand! (And get ready to use it.)

Too Much?

My clients ask me if it’s possible to masturbate too much. If touching yourself affects your day-to-day life in a negative way, then the answer is yes. If you show up late for work because you were fantasizing about the hot photos in this book, that’s a problem. If you forgot to meet your mother-in-law at the airport because you were test-driving your new vibrator, that’s a problem. But for the majority of us, we like how it feels, we know when and where it is appropriate, and we know from science that if we don’t use it, we’ll lose it. Hell, a few of us even know how to leverage it as Olympic training for the bedroom. By choosing to read this book, the rest of you are on your way there, so get ready to go for the gold. Or at least the cream.

“Though masturbation ranks high on the pleasure index, it also provides time for both self-discovery and building skills for dynamite sex.”

“Great news: Masturbation can be like a superhero’s power that we harness for the betterment of the world, and by
world
, I mean our private sexual world.”

Too Harmful?

Forget Onan the Barbarian. Masturbation can be harmful only in the sense that done improperly, we can set ourselves up for bad sex through bad masturbation. Teenage boys and fraternity brothers masturbate their way to a sexual conclusion too quickly, and fifteen years later, they seek out sex counseling because they are frustrated, rapid ejaculators who blame everyone and everything for their problems in the bedroom. Here follows a typical situation: A healthy, happy adolescent has completed his Latin homework and decides to enjoy himself in the privacy of a locked bathroom. Standing in front of the mirror, he discovers his body, its responses, his physical likes, dislikes, and perhaps new parts of his body that feel good to touch. His mind wanders off to an exciting fantasy, just as a sibling knocks on the door, desperate to use the bathroom. The young man shouts back, “I’m coming!” The time from arousal to double entendre was quicker than a good “quickie.” If he continues a race to orgasm, his haste will lay the groundwork for rapid ejaculation and sex counseling. A crystal ball—or, better yet, proper sex education that includes masturbation—would inform him that the solution is not to stop masturbating, but rather to engage in mindful masturbation, a form of intuitive self-love whose main purpose is the enjoyment, discovery, and celebration of the human being as a sexual being. And that Latin student should not follow Caesar’s motto of
veni, vidi, vici
unless, like the emperor, he is destined always to come before seeing and conquering.

Every time we masturbate in the same position, we are telling our body, “This is how to have an orgasm.” For some of us who are pre-orgasmic (we have never had one) or secondary anorgasmic (we had orgasms but not anymore), we are teaching ourselves, “This is just one more way that I am not having an orgasm.”

If we always have orgasms in the same position, perhaps with a pillow behind our head, the lights on, the air set to a certain temperature, and the television playing our favorite game show, we are adding necessary stimuli into the orgasm equation. If we always masturbate from a trapeze and reach incredible orgasms, and our new partner says, “Let’s have sex in a four-poster bed,” our body will respond with confusion. Though we might have an orgasm, it could be difficult because we are unaccustomed to lying on a foam mattress and letting somebody bounce up and down on us like a supermarket pony ride that costs a quarter. So if you plan to try the positions in this book with a partner, it is both permissible and smart to try them on your own as practice.

Here are three ways that masturbation can turn us into sexual athletes.

Masturbation as Self-Pleasure—and Self-Ownership

Unlike certain things that give pleasure but carry risks, masturbation is healthy, so if you can touch yourself without guilt and without its interfering with your daily obligations, you will benefit from this chapter, from this book, and from jerking off. A primary concern of mine that runs throughout these pages is the importance of owning your orgasm. Our partner is there to lend a hand. Instead of roadside assistance, our lover shows up for “bedside assistance.”

Your orgasms belong to you alone, and masturbation teaches you how to take matters into your own hands. When you learn how to please yourself, you take control of your sexual encounters. If things aren’t working, you’re able to take over—politely, of course—and achieve the orgasms you want. Take a tip from the airline safety videos when they instruct you in the proper use of oxygen masks: Help yourself before helping those next to you.