Many people don’t like being touched if they are angry, but women seem to have more trouble than men with arousal if they are upset.
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Vagina
Paperback. Pub Date :2013-12-12 Language: English Publisher: Virago Press One of our bestselling and most respected cultural critics. Naomi Wolf. acclaimed author of The Beauty Myth and The End of America. brings us an astonishing work of cutting- edge sc
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The difference in our bodies’ responses may make male-female connection especially tricky in such moments: this one simple difference in female reaction to different ways of being spoken to is one enormously significant reason that so many sexual approaches from men to women in long-term relationshi…
The woman literally often can’t take an intimate touch if her lover has recently been verbally disrespectful, or has failed verbally to soothe 'the Goddess in her' at some point beforehand, priming the release of oxytocin and vasopressin in her body and preparing the parasympathetic nervous system t…
Just as being valued and relaxed can heighten female sexual response, “bad stress” can dramatically interfere with all of women’s sexual processes.
To enter the transcendental state that takes the female brain into “high” orgasm, you absolutely need to feel safe; safe from “bad stress,” in the sense of knowing you are entering a trance state in the presence of someone who will protect you if necessary at the very least, and not endanger you or…
One could say that she actually becomes, biochemically, a wild woman or a maenad. She becomes so disinhibited and impervious to pain that it is as if she is in a state of altered consciousness. Women in “high” orgasm go more deeply into this trance state than at any other time. Judgment is suspended…
The full melting response or “high orgasm” in women—which I would define (though our language around female sexual response is so inadequate) as that kind of orgasm that most intensely induces the most complete possible trance state and that most involves all the body systems, so that afterward the…
The autonomic nervous system also responds to a woman’s sense of safety or danger. It sends the signals to the brain and then to the body that one is safe, so one can relax, eat, and digest; or relax and sleep; or relax and make love.
Gradually, I reexperienced the sense of deep emotional union, of postcoital creative euphoria, of joy with one’s self and with one’s lover, of confidence and volubility and the sense that all was well in some existential way, that I thought I had lost forever.
That’s what explained vaginal versus clitoral orgasms? Neural wiring? Not culture, not upbringing, not patriarchy, not feminism, not Freud?
So it was not just that orgasm might heighten creativity in women; maybe creativity also heightened orgasm.
This biological, evolutionary connection for women of possible ecstasy to emotional security has implications that cannot be overstressed. Relaxing allows for female arousal.
Many of the signals that either stoke or diminish female desire have to do with the female brain’s question: Is it safe for her?
The female body reacts in the same way to “bad stress” whether the context is the birthing room or the university or the workplace. If the female brain senses that an environment is not safe, its stress response inhibits all the same organs and systems, regardless of setting.
Female sexual pleasure, rightly understood, is not just about sexuality, or just about pleasure. It serves, also, as a medium of female self-knowledge and hopefulness; female creativity and courage; female focus and initiative; female bliss and transcendence; and as medium of a sensibility that feel…