<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  When best-selling author Naomi Wolf has a problem, a manifesto will emerge. This time she lost the ability to have the earth-shaking orgasms she&amp;#039;d been blessed with, and the result is no less than a battle cry for men to transform the way they treat women in bed\u2014and in life. On the bathroom floor of social commentator Naomi Wolf&amp;#039;s homey West Village apartment there is a spray of what, at first glance, looks like blood. A murder?! A shaving mis-hap? A foil package of Clairol Natural Instincts hair dye on the edge of the tub reveals the less piquant culprit. She&amp;#039;s graciously invited me over to discuss her eighth and latest book, Vagina: A New Biography, and this is the kind of detail that I usually wouldn&amp;#039;t mention in a story. But, as Wolf leads me to her plump sofa and my eyes fix upon an errant henna-hued spot that&amp;#039;s spurted onto her off-white leather pump, I can&amp;#039;t help but feel that the details&amp;#039; significance trumps the questionable ethics of offering the residue of private vanities for public consumption. It was Wolf herself who, in her 1991 best-seller, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, called attention to our dependence on the cosmetics industry. In that book\u2014which catapulted her into the public eye while she was still in her twenties\u2014she described a social order that kept women&amp;#039;s growing freedom in check with what she termed the &amp;quot;Iron Maiden&amp;quot; of an unrealistic standard of beauty. She wrote, &amp;quot;Aging in women is &amp;#039;unbeautiful&amp;#039; since women grow more powerful with time.&amp;quot; And with her big brunette hair, high cheekbones, glowing skin, and zaftig figure, she also got the reputation as the firebrand Jaclyn Smith of feminists (or, as my husband put it, &amp;quot;Isn&amp;#039;t she the hot feminist?&amp;quot;). Now nearing 50, Wolf has maintained that reputation, though not, it seems, without capitulating to the Iron Maiden&amp;#039;s injunction against showing your gray. Her career highlights since her splashy debut have included a stint as a consultant on Al Gore&amp;#039;s presidential campaign and a piece in New York magazine in which she revealed that as a Yale undergrad she&amp;#039;d felt inappropriately encroached upon by the eminent scholar Harold Bloom. Post-9/11, she stepped out of her feminist purview to draw parallels between fascist regimes and George W. Bush&amp;#039;s in The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, another best-seller. Recently, she got arrested at Occupy Wall Street and launched Facebook for-shames! at Katy Perry for glorifying the military in her video &amp;quot;Part of Me.&amp;quot; Through it all, Wolf has chronicled the phases of womanhood as she&amp;#039;s moved through them, tick-tock, with a book on reclaim-ing her inner slut; on her pregnancy and Western medicalized birth; and on her midlife crises. And now she&amp;#039;s returned to herself and the second sex with a book whose grand claim is a gender reversal to the clich\u00E9 that men think with their penises. Basing her findings on the latest neuroscience and physiology, Wolf writes that &amp;quot;to understand the vagina properly is to realize that it is not only coextensive with the female brain, but also is part of the female soul\u2014it is a gateway to, and medium of, female self-knowledge and female consciousness itself.&amp;quot; As she emphasizes over ordered-in arugula salad with grilled chicken, the state of the vagina\u2014whether sexually satisfied, abused, or disrespected\u2014&amp;quot;affects [women&amp;#039;s] drive, focus, goal-oriented behavior, and emotional health.&amp;quot; As Woman, we can&amp;#039;t just think with our sex organ, we have to feel with it too! It&amp;#039;s hard not to joke here, and some joking is surely permitted, but Vagina: A New Biography is brave in its way. As any Canadian child could tell you who remembers squirming next to her parents when Regina, the capital city of Saskatchewan, was uttered on the radio during the CBC morning news, it&amp;#039;s a vexed word, and, if we look at the molestations it has been subject to throughout the centuries (as Wolf does), a vexed organ. Nervous Wrecks Wolf&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;journey,&amp;quot; as she puts it, began when she should&amp;#039;ve been at the pinnacle of creative and emotional fulfillment\u2014two thriving children, a great career, a divorce well in the past, and a wonderful new love\u2014but she suffered an unexpected setback. Her orgasms became &amp;quot;just about physical pleasure,&amp;quot; lacking a poetic dimension. She used to experience a combination of clitoral sensation and an intense interior pulsing, Wolf writes, followed by a reverie in which colors would brighten and the connectedness of all life would seem to flow through her; she&amp;#039;d be at one with her partner and nature. Transcendence. Concurrent with the shift in orgasmic quality Wolf reveals that she also suffered a general depression; her creative flow was blocked. She recounts desperately pleading with God for help, so acutely did she feel this loss. In one of those miracles that tend to strike the elite class of New York City dwellers, Wolf&amp;#039;s gynecologist, Deborah Coady, MD, of SoHo, also happened to be a specialist in pelvic pain. With an Our Bodies, Ourselves pragmatism, Coady assured Wolf that her diminished capacity was not all in her head and packed her off to another specialist, who readily fit the celebrity into his schedule. It transpired that an undiagnosed mild form of spinabifida, coupled with a fall in her early twenties, had compressed a branch of the pelvic nerve...&amp;quot;the one that terminated in the vaginal canal!&amp;quot; (Exclamation point mine.) Six months after back surgery, her climaxes are once again in Technicolor, and, she tells me, &amp;quot;I came out of this with an entirely new understanding and sense of dignity about myself as a woman, with new or under-reported information that is unknown to most people.&amp;quot; The Network Here&amp;#039;s a truncated version of the science upon which Wolf relies: - Women have a far more complicated pelvic neural network than men. Men&amp;#039;s are more like &amp;quot;a grid,&amp;quot; she writes (I knew it), concentrated around the penis, while a woman&amp;#039;s, as she puts it fetchingly over lunch, &amp;quot;is like a lace.&amp;quot; Branches terminate, in endless variations and bunchings depending on the woman, at the clitoris, the vagina, the perineum, and\u2014the latest finding\u2014the mouth of the cervix. These potential pleasure zones are closer to the surface at different points for different people; hence, the individualized nature of the female orgasm. - The neural networks communicate constantly with the brain via the autonomic nervous system, which controls unconscious mechanisms such as digestion, lubrication, and the flow of blood to the skin that causes blushing and vaginal pulsing. Recent experiments suggest that distinct areas of the brain, which correlate with distinct emotional states, are activated depending on which part of the pelvic network\u2014the vagina, clitoris, etc.\u2014is stimulated. - Chemicals that make us feel energized, calm, focused, loving, and loved (primarily oxytocin and dopamine) flood the brain during orgasm. The more engaged the autonomic nervous system during sex, the larger the deluge. When the system is completely &amp;quot;on&amp;quot; for a time, the chemicals induce a trance state. You become &amp;quot;biochemically a wild woman or a maenad,&amp;quot; Wolf writes. - Stress and its hormones adrenaline and cortisol keep the nervous system from sending signals that facilitate physical pleasure and altered consciousness. Females, or at least female rats, are less likely to mate when under strain than males. Verbal attacks alone, especially derogatory terms for vagina, can cause such stress, she posits. The Network Failure Here&amp;#039;s an extremely truncated version of Wolf&amp;#039;s conclusions about the continuity between the female psyche and sex organs: - American women are suffering from an epidemic of sexual dissatisfaction (she cites a common statistic that one in three women report low sexual desire); American men are shell-shocked by porn. They can begin to repair the damage by identifying us and our genitalia with the word goddess. Women who are brought to &amp;quot;high orgasm&amp;quot; are happier, more ambitious, and empowered. - Women are more sexually dependent on men than the reverse because during orgasm greater amounts of dopamine flood the female brain\u2014a pleasure chemical related to confidence (and addictive desperation when the hormone&amp;#039;s level plunges). - Our self-esteem is altered neurologically when our culture loses touch with the magic of the vagina. A woman in India fifteen hundred years ago, when &amp;quot;the vagina was portrayed as the most sacred spot in the most sacred temple in a sacred universe,&amp;quot; would have a proud brain, compared with the shame-shaped synapses of a European during the witch hunts of the medieval times, when the vagina was known as &amp;quot;the devil&amp;#039;s playground.&amp;quot; Goddess Complex &amp;quot;Some people might have a problem with the book,&amp;quot; Wolf says. &amp;quot;Because of your frequent use of the word goddess?&amp;quot; I ask. &amp;quot;Because of its essentialism,&amp;quot; she says, referencing a concept verboten to certain feminist strongholds and liberal arts academics steeped in post-structuralist theory and identity politics. That tribe holds to the notion that gender is amorphous, plastic, and largely crafted by and through the culture. I&amp;#039;ve always wiggled out of the question of essentialism by calling myself a relative essentialist (forgive my oxymoronic humor). My own brand of feminism is a reverse sexism; I carry around a vague, floaty sense that men need to improve, and that women are fundamentally just sort of the better sex. Although Wolf gives lip service to men being wonderful in their own (limited) ways, her underlying view is in line with my own, namely, that women have more interesting bodies than their male counterparts, which give them closer ties to both nature and God (in whatever form the latter might take). So why does this book sound such a siren song for me\u2014as scary as it is alluring? Why do I chafe, even as I furtively nod my head? I&amp;#039;m in the odd position of being an inadvertent case study for some of Wolf&amp;#039;s claims. She finds confirmation of her discoveries about female anatomy in Tantra, the medieval Indian philosophy known for its erotic teachings. Wolf cites ancient Asian texts that articulate the assiduous devotion our better halves once gave to the vagina\u2014naming different internal locations (a fore- shadowing of the elusive G-spot) and delineating techniques for when to enter, when to be still, how to move\u2014all with the aim of bringing women to a climax that releases the largest dose of life-giving fluid, which men believed would amp up their own life-force quotient. While I haven&amp;#039;t joined any of the tantric communities Wolf investigates (couples workshops teach men to give hour-and-a-half long &amp;quot;sacred spot&amp;quot; massages), I practice a form of yoga, kundalini, that incorporates elements of tantra but considers the sexual aspect only one part of a greater goal of focusing the mind to live in God. (It&amp;#039;s the one Elizabeth Gilbert tries in Eat, Pray, Love.) Giving my practice particular resonance with Wolf&amp;#039;s theories, kundalini teaches hundreds of exercises that are supposed to strengthen the nervous system, such as holding your arms high overhead, squeezed against your ears, with fingers interlaced and palms turned up, rapidly breathing in and out through the belly\u2014which can cause the body to shake. There is also lots of &amp;quot;engaging the root lock,&amp;quot; which includes squeezing the pelvic floor. Quite by chance, I began to notice that a side effect of all the shaking and breathing was that my body was responding differently during intercourse. I&amp;#039;d done lots of kegels (clenching the pelvic floor muscles) in the past and nothing like this had happened. I began to feel what I&amp;#039;d later read Wolf describe as oceanic bliss and greater pulsing, more sensation in more areas. On days when I&amp;#039;d taken a class with deep relaxation exercises, the fascinating pleasures were even more enhanced. It&amp;#039;s noteworthy, though, that the change had nothing to do with my husband. He has sublime haptic intuition and we have fantastic chemistry. I&amp;#039;ve always felt lucky and happy, at least in bed. But he wasn&amp;#039;t doing anything different. I&amp;#039;d changed on my own. Doing It For Ourselves The Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning New York Times science journalist Natalie Angier published a book called Woman: An Intimate Geography in 1999. Although not as anatomically narrow in focus, it also examines the female human as a singular biological entity. Some of her science is echoed in Wolf&amp;#039;s book, but Angier is more pragmatic. She points out that &amp;quot;sex researchers have found that women who are easily and multiply orgasmic have one trait in common: They don&amp;#039;t depend on the skillfulness or mind-reading abilities of their lovers to get what they want...they negotiate said postures verbally or kinesthetically.&amp;quot; Wolf has found a study (granted, a small one) indicating that the right kind of G-spot stimulation brings success to almost 90 percent of women. She concludes: &amp;quot;The low levels of satisfaction and desire that American and Western European women report are a sign of a major schism between the levels of pleasure and orgasmic capacity that women are capable of in the right conditions and their actual experience; it is a sign they are not being treated in an ideal way, physically or emotionally.&amp;quot; She visits a tantric sex masseur who tells her that the average man climaxes in four minutes, the average woman in 16. He says that men need to hang out longer in their lovers&amp;#039; erogenous zones, without making women feel anxious about the extra consideration, since stress would defeat the point of it. And he insists that the clitoris and G-spot need to be ministered to. (If you want to find out for yourself what he&amp;#039;s talking about, his name is Mike Lousada. Alas for U.S. women, he performs his gentle handiwork in London.) Wolf&amp;#039;s list of what men must do to create the ideal conditions for women, which she calls the &amp;quot;Goddess Array,&amp;quot; goes further. Women need to be stroked on the neck and shoulders like cats throughout the day (this preps the autonomic nervous system). They can&amp;#039;t be snapped at and be expected to want sex later. Depending on the stage of their hormonal cycle, women need to be thrilled with surprise Caribbean vacations, or even motorcycle rides (when their chemicals are demanding the bad boy), or they need languid, eye-locked emotional conversation. When a man forgets to pick up his socks or perpetrates other domestic infractions, it&amp;#039;s not merely irritating, it goes to the core of a woman&amp;#039;s nervous system and ruins her for happy sex later. (See?! See?!) It&amp;#039;s a righteous vision. Wolf refused to tell me whether her boy- friend meets these needs\u2014 though she notes in her book that he&amp;#039;s begun stroking her neck during conflict\u2014 but I liked the image of her with a male concubine of sorts. Yet a general malaise set in as I read Wolf; the well of rage I carry around with me about my husband and men in general dripped its bitter poison into my veins. Now that I have a taste of these new physical sensations via kundalini and have absorbed the information in this book, I&amp;#039;m thinking, Wouldn&amp;#039;t it be incredible, wouldn&amp;#039;t it be transcendent, wouldn&amp;#039;t I write those six books I have on the back burner, if he kowtowed to my goddess array? Many of the women I know have it relatively good with their lovers, but how far, how far these men are from being such empathic creatures. &amp;quot;This book,&amp;quot; I say, &amp;quot;is going to be hard on relationships.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yes,&amp;quot; says Wolf. &amp;quot;People have broken up after reading it.&amp;quot; I laugh. &amp;quot;Because a man isn&amp;#039;t tending her goddess array?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I wouldn&amp;#039;t put it superficially,&amp;quot; she chides. &amp;quot;They realize that there is something deeper that they can&amp;#039;t live without that is not about sex, but about an acknowledgement of themselves.&amp;quot; I talk to a friend about Wolf&amp;#039;s ideas, and a look of sadness crosses her face, contemplating the thought that profound sexual satisfaction may be the crux of contentment and creativity. It&amp;#039;s a lot to put on a marriage\u2014with its ebbs and flows of desire and intimacy. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t want to be treated like a goddess,&amp;quot; she says, with a sigh. &amp;quot;I want to be treated like a human being.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s more than a clever comment. For one thing, why should we assume that men are any less subject to their biology than women are, and if that&amp;#039;s true, isn&amp;#039;t it self-defeating for women to expect men to handle them like goddesses? In one telling anecdote, Wolf describes a young woman complaining that when she watches pornography with her boyfriend he insists on fast-forwarding to the penetration. She also tells how her college roommate fantasized about locking her boy- friend in a room and not letting him out until he says she&amp;#039;s pretty. (According to the book, women need to hear not just that they&amp;#039;re beautiful, but that they&amp;#039;re the most beautiful, so as not to worry that their man is going to hunt females outside the cave.) Problems that begin with purblind men lead to understandably frustrated women. And while I don&amp;#039;t doubt that it could be helpful for couples to force themselves to overcome sheepishness and try some female- friendly candlelit gazing, adoring touching, and tender name-calling, as Wolf suggests, do women even really want to be put on the proverbial pedestal, treated as high-maintenance deities who require perpetual offerings to reach their sexual potential? The sexes will always be more or less at loggerheads. (Now that I&amp;#039;m married, I often think ruefully back to that comic strip I read as a child about the fighting couple called &amp;quot;The Lockhorns.&amp;quot;) Another, perhaps more useful interpretation of Wolf&amp;#039;s research: The more men and women accept their misaligned urges as we bungle our way through love and lust, the less stressed-out we&amp;#039;ll be, and thus better equipped to enjoy sex when things do gel. The intention of kundalini, and many imported Eastern traditions, is to harness sexual energy to heighten creative focus, without need- ing actual sex to get there. And whether it&amp;#039;s due to chakras, meridians, or pelvic neural stimulation, something&amp;#039;s working for me. These days my relationship with life itself is more erotic: the feeling of my children&amp;#039;s skin on mine, the sense that I could\u2014given half a chance\u2014fall in love with my alcoholic, aged, acne-ridden next-door neighbor who used to make me shudder, the wind, the rain, the sun, the trees, even dilapidated buildings. Even horrible new buildings. Knowing that your body and mind have a greater capacity for pleasure is invaluable. And great enduring love with an enduringly great lover is an incomparable bonus in life. But the argument that our empowerment and self- esteem depend on it is\u2014ironically for all Wolf&amp;#039;s goddess talk\u2014cynical and bleak (not to mention that by her logic, multiorgasmic women are more creative and harder to boss around than the less prodigiously climactic among us). What about the woman who is grateful for &amp;quot;merely physical&amp;quot; orgasms, after years of experiencing only intermittent sexual gratification\u2014is she to feel lacking, less of a goddess than the next girl? What about the benefits of being single, or the achievements of women who eschew sex altogether? I think of the French philosopher Simone Weil, who destroyed her body through anorexia brought on by a terror of being locked into the limits of her sex but lived her ecstasies fighting for workers&amp;#039; rights and wrote sentences that would intoxicate generations to come. Mind the Gap Wolf tells me that her goal with this book is &amp;quot;not to tell women what to do, but give them information that they can use how they want.&amp;quot; She does, in fact, repeatedly tell women what to do (her reaction to my statement that I might prefer a certain degree of retrograde virgin/ whore sex to yoni massages is that I could be unconsciously warped by pornography). It&amp;#039;s annoying that she won&amp;#039;t fess up to her biased perspective on good-versus-bad sexual behavior. More annoying is how unaware she seems about the downsides of her claims that women are more connected to nature than men and more able to reach the sublime through their bodies. We are &amp;quot;more like animals&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;mystics,&amp;quot; she writes at one point; and, later, standing in Greece appreciating the beauty of nature, she proclaims, &amp;quot;I saw...unsullied feminine energy, creating and giving...doing nothing less than nurturing...the entire world.&amp;quot; Yes, I know I already expressed an affinity for Wolf&amp;#039;s effusions about the &amp;quot;sacred feminine&amp;quot; (versus the ho-hum masculine), but her claustrophobic portrait of women as a combo of higher being/ nurturer/needy nymphomaniac ended up convincing me that we were both a bit cracked. Ultimately, I&amp;#039;m more moved by poet and academic Adrienne Rich, whose Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, published in 1976, is still the definitive book on the meaning behind our ability to bear children. Like Wolf, Rich reads into history to goddess-centered cultures, which we know only from remnants of art and text. But she reveals how this history has been used to construct meaning out of nature where none inherently lies, thus separating women and men, with woman wielding the private power of fertility and child rearing, and man the public power of lawmaker. Devout feminist and lefty that she is, Wolf fails to truly grapple with essentialism&amp;#039;s shadow side, thereby bolstering a conservative agenda that would have us barefoot and pregnant. And, in fact, on the home front, I&amp;#039;ve been rebelliously appreciating how much my husband and I intersect: Look, he&amp;#039;s as weak and needy as I am! Men and Women are both animals; this fact is not a metaphor. And maybe the neurons fire differently, but I bet men are just as capable as we are of reaching sexual nirvana, given the right situation. There&amp;#039;s really only one goddess I want to be affiliated with: Athena, rocking the halls of justice in hip sandals and guiding the desultory Odysseus home. Though Wolf might profess otherwise, I suspect it&amp;#039;s the same for her. There&amp;#039;s an Oxford student and world debating champ staying at her apartment whom I meet during our interview. He&amp;#039;s just made a how-to-debate video that Wolf plans to post on Dailycloudt.com, the for-profit &amp;quot;globally scalable democracy-building website&amp;quot; she cofounded with, among others, former Clif Bar CEO Lisa Thomas and PR guru David Fenton. Wolf wants to be a mover and shaker. She&amp;#039;s not hanging out at yoga class and having hours of tantric sex. Mentioning that Naomi Wolf hides her gray hair isn&amp;#039;t an effort to out her or accuse her of hypocrisy. It&amp;#039;s to point out that reality is always more ambiguous than reductive statements of the sort that get you publicity and book deals. (She&amp;#039;s currently selling a 2010 lecture series on how to package nonfiction ideas to land fat book contracts.) Like the vagina through the ages, this book will be put in its place. But I can&amp;#039;t help thinking that I wish it wouldn&amp;#039;t. Read it, and try to get your lover to do the same. (Good luck!) There is a load of useful information here. If only Wolf had pushed herself beyond her aesthetic limits to go a little deeper into the true complexities of these issues so she\u2014and they\u2014would be easier to take seriously. If only she had more balls\u2014like a man who is confident that his gray hair is a sign of dignity and wisdom "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/life-love/sex-relationships/advice/a26303/naomi-wolf-sex-machine/>