Doing it for ourselves

MORE sex!" The request, courtesy of an avid 80-year-old reader who feels this column's been extremely tardy in that department of late.

MORE sex!" The request, courtesy of an avid 80-year-old reader who feels this column's been extremely tardy in that department of late.

So babes, this one's for you. My friend embodies the carnality of yearning, her appetites huge, life-affirming. "If I had a man now I'd crush him!" - with her desire, her lust, her want.

In fact, why not go the whole hog and talk about the one thing we chicks are extremely reluctant to wax lyrical about - with each other, let alone the blokes. A practice that conveys spark and vividness and joy and deliciousness - but you'd never guess from the label we slap on it. Those enlightened Greeks had the right idea: anaphlan, they named it, which loosely translates as "up-fire". By the early modern age it was being sternly rebuked as "self-pollution" and now, of course it's bleakly known as masturbation (Latin derivation: "to defile by hand.") The female variety of said defilement is always, intriguingly, considered more of a taboo than the male. But perhaps the tide's turning. The most arresting scene in a new French film, Elles, is a lingering close-up of Juliette Binoche's face as she pleasures herself.

But why the historical hesitation in discussing the female variety? Is there an innate delicacy at work here, a sense of protectiveness - towards men? Because, after all, it's often a safer bet, so to speak, in terms of a woman achieving orgasm. We can achieve it multiple times by doing it ourselves, be guaranteed it - not always the case with sex involving men (and they, of course, may be unaware of this absence at the heart of the female experience, because we may not be inclined to tell them). "The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin," Balzac declared. And believe me, every woman who's experienced the explosive power of the clitoris dreams of finding her concert violinist - the man, or woman, who'll bring her body alive.

Sex therapists often say that the number-one complaint they hear is from women who can't orgasm during intercourse. We do not always get the man who knows what he's doing, who's assured, gentle, confident. But we can vividly imagine him. Our complaints: that our sexual partners can be too rough, impatient, off target, talkative. That they can alter the rhythm at the crucial moment - interrupting the female thought pattern, the scenario in her head which may have little to do with him, actually. Remember, gentlemen: Persistence, and Patience. It takes a woman an average 15 minutes to orgasm. Distraction will kill the moment as swiftly as a power cut in a nightclub. A woman who wants an orgasm needs to concentrate because they can be so darned elusive, so difficult to nudge out.

No one's born a lover; it has to be learnt. Women are ingenious at navigating little ways to their own, private pleasure. A century ago, Havelock Ellis reported that turn-of-the-century seamstresses were using treadle-operated sewing machines to achieve orgasms by sitting on their chair edges. A girlfriend, as a teenager, discovered the good old backyard Aussie swimming pool. "I'd swim to the edge and find a filter hole the size of a 50c coin with water coming out at high pressure. I'd hang my feet up on the edge of the pool and the magic feeling would come within minutes." Another mate swears by the hand-held power shower. "The soft yet forceful jets find the right place without having to lay a finger on it. It brings a whole new meaning to going to the gym."

Sexual pleasure is all about letting go, loosening, relaxing. "Sex seemed to me all surrender - not the woman's to the man but the person's to the body," Alice Munro wrote. Female masturbation doesn't strike me as bleak or sex-starved or despairingly lonely. It's just another form of surrendering; an adjunct to a healthy sex life.

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