"10 Surprising Facts About Orgasms" Mini Series #1

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Googling around about female orgasm, I quickly found an online Woman's Day (of a-magazine-I may-have-flipped-through-while-waiting-to-pay-for-my-groceries fame) article called "10 Surprising Facts about Orgasm." 

As you may know, I'm lean towards the practical, particularly when speaking about orgasm, so some of the stuff on this list was way too squishy for me, but ya know that's the way of magazine lists, I guess. They gotta try to make their list seem interesting, and keep you on the page to sell advertising or whatever they do for money. That's cool. I respect the hustle, but this was a mixed bag for me. There were some parts of the list that made me rage inside my head a tad, and there were also some things that seemed just a touch progressive.

So for a fun little series, I'm going to share my thoughts on each of these 10 items - 1 for each of the next 10 days. I don't usually blog every day, but this seemed fun and do-able, so here you go, the first of ten...

"1. Orgasms can relieve pain."

Okay, yes, they are right, orgasm releases the hormone oxytocin, which, among lots of other things is associated with reduction of stress and reduction of pain, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. 

a. It's a hormone, and hormones are not so black and white about how they affect us. It would be better to describe them as usually having tendencies in most people. 

b. If you're having a migraine, I doubt an orgasm is going to fix it. If you are feeling a touch ick while getting over a cold...maybe. But then again, you might just feel better because you put your mind on something else for a few moments. 

c. Hugging, looking people in the eye while talking, petting your animal, and doing something moderately stressful with other people (like tandem skydiving) are also ways that are said to release oxytocin, so if any of those are good at relieving the kind of pain you want to relieve, then orgasms are a good bet too. Oh yeah -  and you know the other thing that releases all kinds of oxytocin - the process of childbirth. Oxytocin has real practical physical purposes there, and if it also reduces pain, let's just say it doesn't take care of it all. 

Seriously, I have nothing against speaking the positives of orgasming. Having plenty is probably generally better for you than not having them, I'd guess. I'm just saying, let's not get this whole orgasm reduces pain thing out of perspective. 

Check out the full article HERE and check back tomorrow for more.

Random Male Hite Report #6

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Yo, yo, yo! My latest Random Hite Reports have been of the female variety, and I know you've missed reading about the male side, right? Well, wait no longer. Here is another Random Male Hite Report. I would normally tell you that I randomly flip to 1 page and transcribe it directly, no more no less, onto this post. However, that's not exactly true this time. The many Hite Reports that I found on Amazon for like 10 cents a piece (although I've given away all but 1 now) and the 1 treasured Hite Report on Male Sexuality that I have are all suffering from the same affliction. They just break apart at the spine. So one book becomes many, and I have to settle for just stacking the partial book pieces in the correct order. So, what I did this time was just take one of the book pieces and use the last page, so here it is.

p. 316 The Hite Report on Male Sexuality by Shere Hite
Alfred A. Knoff. NY. 1981

Yet other men felt that the women's movement and the critique of society which it poses had improved their relationships:
    "Women's liberation is a good thing. It has opened women's and men's eyes to the fact that basic rights and needs apply to all people, and that self-sufficiency and self-love must exist before people can hope to find security and completion in a relationship. I think that humanity and relationships will benefit from the women's liberation movement-mine certainly have. I think my wife and I have gained a new respect for each other. This was a direct result of my understanding how my expecting her to still be responsible for all the household upkeep, entertaining, etc., in addition to a full time job, was unfair. Since, I have been taking as much responsibility for it myself-and it's hard. I have never done it in my life before-she seems to have opened up to me more, to like me more, and we have more fun together! We're more of a team now than we were before."
    "I like feminist women. Feminism is non-sexism to me, it frees me from being forced into the role of rough and tough , provider, insensitive male. I went with a feminist for a while, and we worked through (translation: fought through) a lot of this. I have noticed that my relationship with other women since then have been more relaxed, I don't assume what they want, I ask, and they in turn respond with a greater degree of openness and spontaneity than I used to notice. It's a question of seeing women as equal human beings, not as inferior, or out to get me."
    "Women's lib-great. My wife is more independent and more aggressive-more fun to be with."
    "It has given me more opportunities to relate positively in a nonsexual way to women."
    My relationship with my wife and family has definitely improved. Basically I was trained to 'take care of'a family, to be head of a family, and to provide for my wife and children's physical needs. Now I am working at learning how to care for others, to show my caring in small ways, to listen to them, and to share myself with them. I still think it's important for me to support them, but I certainly would listen if my wife wanted to talk about working too, or how she felt about my earning all the money. Funny, but before the last few years, we had never discussed it. I think we will probably discuss it some more, though-maybe we haven't talked about it enough. I have found it hard to believe that small things I do could matter as much to my wife as my supporting her and our home. It makes me feel more human. More loved."
    "Since I first became aware of women's liberation, a few years ago, I have been consciously, forcefully, amending the way I think and feel, trying to unlearn the subtle and not so subtle sexism of my childhood (and adulthood!), and trying to treat women as people. It all started one day in my office. I am the supervisor of the duplicating machine floor of a large corporation. Most of the people who come to use the machines are women-secretaries, etc. I always thought of them as the 'enemy' somehow, the ones who broke the machines, ran them wrong, and made me seem inadequate in maintaining the equipment (since they were always breaking it). Of course, those machines just break any-.... 

Re-Naming Non-orgasms

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Okay, this will be quick cause I'm still as swamped at work as I was before Christmas, so let me just throw some thing out there that I've been thinking about.

As you know, I think it's important that when we speak about orgasms in women, we are actually meaning an orgasm; a sudden and rhythmic release of muscle tension and blood congestion that was built up through arousal. I'm talking about the Masters and Johnson defined orgasms, an actual, physical thing. We use this meaning when we, as a culture, speak of male orgasm. It's kind of a given for men. However with women, that meaning of orgasm is often casually intemixed with "orgasms" that are actually ejaculations or some other type of emotional/spiritual climax, or often the word orgasm is used interchangably with pleasure or arousal in women.

I mean, come on here, we need to be more clear so that we ladies can all start to get a more realistic understanding of our own and other women's experiences with sex and orgasms. Otherwise we'll all just continue to hang out in our own confusing, separate worlds when it comes to ladyrgasm knowledge.

That said, let's think of other names to call these non-orgasms. I mean, I'm not against these things. Enjoy, what you enjoy. I just think they should not be confused with an orgasm. So, what should we call the emotional high that some might refer to as an orgasm?...an emotigasm? giddygasm? How about the spiritual/ universe-is-one/seeing-colors-and-stars-moving-through-you sexual highs you always hear women on message boards talking about? Godgasms? unigasms? Ejacualtions, we should just call ejaculations, since that's what they are. Oh, and pleasure should not continue being used interchangeably with orgasms. Yes, orgasm can (and pretty likely will be) pleasurable, but all sexual pleasure is not orgasm - not by a long shot.

So if you hear someone talking about something like how they attain sexual pleasure, and you're not sure if they are specifically meaning orgasms, then ask, cause that's the only way we'll get people to become more clear.  Anyway, we need something to refer to these things as, because people speak about them, and it's be nice if we knew what sexperts and ladies speaking about their own experiences actually mean. Any other ideas out there?

Her - The SSL Review

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I saw the movie Her a few days ago, and strangely, I found it was eligible for an SSL review. There were, in fact, 2 depictions of a female orgasm, so here I am to critique those depictions, kind of...

Problem is, well, I don't really know if I have anything particularly insightful to say about them. The circumstances of these 2 ladygasms make it a bit hard (no pun intended). Let me start out by saying that I liked the movie, and I liked the very un-scared and sort of lovely take on the future of technology. If you don't already know, this movie is about a guy, Theodore, in the vaguely near future who falls in love with Samantha, his quite human-like Operating System (OS).

So, Samantha's just a voice. There is no body, but she does "orgasm" during -  phone-sex I guess is the best way to describe it - with Theodore.  There is also an earlier phone sex session Theodore has (before Samantha, of course), with an actual other person. This woman (SexyKitten voiced by Kristen Wiig), also has an orgasm.

We don't know what SexyKitten is doing to herself to get that 'gasm since we never see her, and their conversation does not really tell us what she is actually physically doing. However, we do know that she tells him to pick a cat up and strangle her with it, and that line of fantasy is what takes her over the edge. To each her own, right? Although, I honestly don't know how to use a cat as a strangling device. Anyway, when she comes, it's frankly just a little too long and a lot too porny. I can't critique this the way I would a normal SSL review. I can't tell you whether her physical stimulation seemed like it would actually elicit that porngasm.

What I can do is ever so gingerly comment on what this SexyKitten orgasm contributed to the larger cultural understanding of female orgasm. And to that I say that SexyKitten's orgasm was so status quo porn, that it probably just more heavily cemented the all to common assumption that women come like women do in porn, and that's certainly not a great thing to insinuate. I know the scene is just there for laughs, weirdness and to show the bad dating possibilities out there for Theodore, so it's not like the movie makers were intending any statement at all about female orgasm. However, I think that depicting female orgasm without putting any thought into what it might insinuate just goes to show that our culture doesn't realize there is a problem with ladygasm depictions, and that means we have a long way to go.

Now, Samantha has no body at all, so she literally is not doing anything to her body when she orgasms, so - can't critique that. There is physical talk though. Her and Theodore are talking about him being inside of her as part of their fantasizing, but then it sort of goes beyond his dick in her vag, because they start talking about being everywhere in a one-with-the-universe sort of way (unfortunately, there was no discussion of clit stimulation at all). Outside of the confusing factor that Samantha is actually a sort of cosmic entity, the cosmic depiction of her orgasm could also be critiqued as the tired, magical, "anything you want it to be" kind of orgasms that are attributed regularly to women. It's one of the many ways that realistic female orgasms are ignored in favor of vague mysticism which helps cover up our cultural ignorance of the the very real and physical qualities of female orgasms. Or don't read that much into it. A viewer might even make the argument that Theodore, a male, hit that cosmic state too. It was an artsier than normal, phone-sex scene.

I would like to point out, though, that her orgasm was still as long and porny as SexyKittens, so I do think that right there further shows that the people making this movie were thinking quite simply about female orgasm in terms of how we normally see them in media. Wait though - factor in that the only thing she knows of being a human (including what an orgasm is) was obviously learned from media she ingested, and you might find the depiction even more confusing to critique. You might say that the porniness of her orgasm comes from the fact that this is all she has learned of it...hmmm, a statement about the fakeness of female orgasms in the media by the makers of Her? Nah, probably not. They just think ladygasms sound like that.

So, like I said, a weird one to SSL review. I'm gonna give it 2 stars. It clearly was not progressive in the depiction of ladygasms department. Plus, its porny style I think would affect cultural understanding of female orgasm negatively if at all, but I did like the movie, and I don't think there was any bad intent, only lack of intent, and that's just status quo.

(!)(!)

Science, Sex and the Ladies Doesn't Fit IMDB's Idea of Docs, But Whatevs

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Okay, since this blog is about both ladygasms and making movies (particularly making Science, Sex and the Ladies, of course), I'd like to just take a minute and speak about a tiny something I've been dealing with in relation to the movie. It involves IMDB and how Science, Sex and the Ladies just doesn't fit quite right.

Here's the deal. I added SSL to IMDB (check it here) a while ago, and I go in and update it every now and then. Well, one time I was looking around and went to one of the 3 actors in our movie who have their own IMD pages, and found that they were listed under the category "Self" for their part in SSL - as if they were just talking heads giving the audience expert information or something. After more research than I really wanted to do, I learned from another person on the IMDB message/Q&A boards that if a movie is marked as a documentary, then the default is for all people in the cast to be categorized as if they are appearing in the movie as themselves, and the only way to change that is to add the keyword "Reenactment" to your movie. Long story short, I did it, and after about 2 weeks of waiting for approval, it worked. Ellie Church, Bryan Patrick McCulley, and Joshua Ramsey, are all properly listed as Ensemble Cast Members under the Actor section on their pages.

However, I just want to point out that although I added reenactment as a keyword, I only did it to get our actors categorized properly. There are no reenactments in this movie. Honestly, SSL is not like any documentary I've ever seen, and because of that, it doesn't fit into the mold that is created for docs in IMDB or really anywhere. There are no expert talking heads. There are instead citations to back up the things said in the movie, and there's a full bibliography in the credits. The whole movie is completely scripted and the arguments are made within a series of vignettes using on-screen narrators, voice over narrators and actors. We call this style a "Visual Essay." Barnaby's sister Kora came up with that phrase for a short we did in 2005 called "Ladies and Gentleman We Assume." It was a test short for this movie. We thought she was a genius, and we've been using it ever since. Anyway, the whole ordeal was slightly annoying for me, as is most interactions I have with IMDB. However, I thought you might be very slightly interested, and I'm not sure when I last talked about what Science, Sex, and the Ladies is actually like.

Smart Orgasm Equality Advice from Blogging Behavioral

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Women deserve better when it comes to our sexuality and particularly when it comes to our orgasms.  We just plain don't get enough of them in our sexual encounters. Women can orgasm. We can. When we masturbate, we can orgasm as quickly, easily and as reliably as men can. We often don't when we're with a partner, though. Somehow, women going through their sexual lives having very few orgasms compared to their male partners has just become a matter of course, a sort of unspoken accepted reality. It's actually quite an appalling and over arching problem, yet very rarely do I ever hear sex experts speak of this orgasm inequity in any real way.

Dr. Sandy Andrews, a psychologist in Austin, TX, in a September of 2010 blog post at Blogging Behavioral did though, and since I love to highlight anything I see as contributing positively to the ol' Orgasm Equality Movement, I thought I'd write about it. The post is aptly called Please Sir, I Want More because at its heart, it's about women in need of more when it comes to our orgasms...more understanding, more listening, more discussion, more truthfulness, more trying, more cultural acknowledgement, and more...well, more orgasms.

I needed to add a picture, so I just chose this one. It just says "orgasm" to me.

What I really appreciated about her post is that she is addressing the problem of women not orgasming with their partners, but she focuses not on the emotional baggage or possible medical issues that most sexperts seem to immediately go to. Instead, she focuses on the the very simple fact that women are not getting the physical stimulation they want and need in order to orgasm.

When I assess an individual’s or a couple’s sexual intimacy, one of the most common problems I see in heterosexual women is believing that their sexual preferences are neglected, ignored, or in some way not prioritized.

I further love that she grasps the complexity and depth of this problem. A resolution is not as easy as a woman's decision to boldly ask for what she wants or for a man to simply listen. Andrews acknowledges that there is more to it and that this basic problem with lack of female orgasm is a basis for larger, long-term sexual issues within a relationship.

For too many women, too much untapped potential remains. Which may help explain why so many long-term couples report the bed-dead syndrome. No sex at all. For years. Or near dead. Sex that occurs along the order of once or twice a year. A sex life in need of resuscitation.

With this in mind, I frequently encourage women to let their partners know what they want. Simple enough, right? Not at all, as it turns out. Many women report finding it difficult to approach their mates with sexual requests or to give honest feedback when their needs are not met. When, in short, they don't reach orgasm. Many women report feeling shy, awkward, and inhibited.

She goes on to tell us that even when a woman does speak up, it doesn't always work. The follow through is often short lived, or not enough. There are complications because of what her partner has learned from her past faked orgasms or from media expectations, and because of his own insecurities and feelings of awkwardness. It's a messy affair, and Andrews gives no perfect answer, but she does say something that truly needs to be said more, something I would call revolutionary, "You are not alone." Because in my opinion, we women too often think of our "problem" with lack of orgasm as an individual problem/malfunction, but it's not. It's a larger cultural problem with how we understand, teach, and depict the female orgasm, and one way or another we all , men and women alike, share in the suffering.

There are many avenues this post can take, but my main point is to inform women and men of something I don't think we hear often enough: You are not alone. Forget what so many magazines say. Sexual surveys are some of the most inaccurate -- this has been studied, too -- with people consistently over reporting their sexual frequency and satisfaction.

Don't go by what you read, or what you see in the movies or pornography (never) and certainly not what he hears in the locker room. Go by what you feel. Take an honest accounting of your sexual experience. If you're feeling dissatisfied, if you realize that your partner is not responding to your needs, don't give up on yourself.

Work on it. Read about it. Talk to your partner about it. Explain that you want to have good orgasms too, and yes, maybe even multiple orgasms. And that you want to bat closer to 1000 like he does (maybe). It's an entirely doable goal to reach orgasm close to 100% of the time.

Halle-effin'-lujah. Andrews is quite rightly pointing out that there is a clear disjunction between what we are supposed to know about ladygasms from media and cultural "speak," and what we know from our actual feelings and experiences. She is telling us to listen to those feelings and experiences honestly. She is telling us that other women are in the same boat, and she is telling us that we ladies deserve better, to be batting close to 1000 just like our men, and that it is very possible. That, my friends, shouldn't be revolutionary speak, but it is, and I'm glad she feels the need to say it.

Andrews doesn't go much into the physical details of how women can begin batting toward 1000, but she does clearly point out an important fact - that even if women tend to take longer than men to orgasm with a partner, women also tend to orgasm much quicker during masturbation. That in itself is important to know since it means that the very simple and doable act of diddling one's own clit during intercourse could serve as a reliable and quick means for achieving orgasm during most if not all sexual encounters - and, added bonus, it leaves the woman in charge of her own stimulation - which is pretty useful given that, as Andrews has already pointed out, getting the kind of stimulation one needs is not often as simple and easy as just telling one's partner. Hey, if you ask me, sometimes it's much easier to take matters into your own hands (although actually discussing it with your partner and working together to position the sex acts for the diddling could be a bit complicated, of course...)

So, I'd just like to thank Dr. Sandy Andrews. In her post she acknowledged an important problem; that we can orgasm, but yet we aren't orgasming. She also doesn't bury the injustice of this situation under vague possibilities of hormonal problems, mental blocks, or emotional barricades.  I see too much sex advice that skirt around this basic problem, and so I applaud Dr. Andrew's simple act of pointing out that women don't orgasm nearly as much as men during sexual acts, but that they can and that they deserve to. The insanity of this situation is shocking, important, and complicated, but like Dr. Andrews tells us, don't give up!

Happy New Year - We Got Our Final Sound for the Movie!

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Uh, that's right. On New Years Eve, we downloaded our final sound from our sound mixer. It's a little insane to me that this has happened, but I don't think it'll quite sink in until other people start watching it. Then, I'm not sure how I'll feel - hopefully not like people want to kill me for wasting an hour and 40 minutes of their lives.

Okay, there is just a touch left to do. We do have to watch and give any final notes about tweaks or changes to the mixer. We've actually already done that. We watched it on good speakers, with head phones, and with our bedroom TV, which for some reason has the worst, most terrible sound of any TV I've ever heard. It's really bad, I have to really concentrate to make out what people are saying in most TV shows.  So, we're giving him some minimal notes. We've gone over a lot of stuff already, so this is just icing. Point being, it shouldn't take too long to get it back. From that point, we slap it on the video, make some DVD's, send them to our cast and our Kickstarter backers, and have cast party viewing...and then a lot of marketing and stuff like that, but no need to speak too much about that now. For now, an actual finished movie is becoming a reality, and I'm just gonna enjoy that for a minute.

Oh- and even though we've watched this movie a million times, and we've spent numerous hours proof reading and watching for mistakes, somehow, we saw for the first time last night that we spelled "urethra" as "uretha" - twice on screen. So that needs to be fixed - cause it's pretty dumb. But that should get done before we have the music back, so don't worry - no delays.

I feel like 2014 is gonna be a good one for me. I hope all of you out there feel like your 2014 is gonna be a good one, and if you don't, I hope you're wrong. Thanks for reading my weird lady-gasm themed blog. I don't know who most of you are, but I sure have a lot of love for you, and that's a fact....jack.

Random Hite Report #5

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Hello there all! I know you want some more RANDOM HITE REPORT, ya'll! I've been heavy on the RANDOM MALE HITE REPORT's lately, and it's been a while since I gave you a randomly flipped to page out of the ol' Orgasm Equality Movement must-read, The Hite Report. If you want more info on this 1976 book that allowed women to tell the world about their own orgasms, feelings and sexual experiences - in their own words, then please head HERE. 

The following is from the chapter "The Future of Intercourse?" 

Pg. 534 The Hite Report Dell. 1976.

One woman explained in a long answer how disappointed she was in her husband's lack of interest in anything but intercourse. 
    "I have viewed married love as a growing together in the ability to express love and pleasure, but I haven't seen this growth in my marriage. My husband really doesn't seem to enjoy anything besides intercourse, and that very briefly, and I don't know what to do to change him. I've tried hard.
    "Masturbation is very important for me and I am really sorry I didn't know about it a lot sooner (I started doing it less than a year ago, at the age of 27.) I was interested in my sexuality, but my husband wasn't, so I decided to do something about it. Three years ago I came across the idea of masturbation for adult women in The Sensuous Woman. I cried and cried and cried because I had this romantic idea of having my husband care about and develop my sexuality - a feat for which I would be forever grateful and therefore endeared and close to him. (I had never had sex until marriage.) This was really important to me, so for the next two years I openly expressed my desire to have good sex and to develop my sensuality. Nothing much happened. So I finally said, well, if you don't care about my sexuality, I do! Then I asked him what he thought about masturbation. I found to my surprise that he did it! And that he thought that it would be great if I did it! It relieves him of that responsibility(?) of having to touch, caress, and learn about my genitals(?) Now I've learned to masturbate. And I do enjoy masturbating, but I feel sad that I can't develop my sexuality with my husband. For many women, sex is a union with another person and the cosmic universe. It is a leaving of the body and a disillusion of the self - so that isolation can end. Somehow I can't help but feel that my aloneness is intensified by the fact that my sexual partner hasn't shown the care of my sexuality. In that sense I really wish that I had learned about my own sexuality on my own a lot - being a teenager and learning about your body is different from being a married adult...

A Good Christmas

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Okay, I'm not gonna lie. I'm neglecting this blog a bit. We're in a busy cycle at work; we're doing a lot of home repairs right now; it's Christmas time and I got family and all that, and we're trying to get everything prepared for when the final sound for Sciences, Sex and the Ladies is delivered.

As far as the movie goes, we'll just have to lay the sound over our video and bada-boom, badda-bang, we got a finished movie. However, we still have to create the DVDs for our Kickstarter backers and for our cast and crew. We have to plan the cast showing, send out press kits, etc., etc. It's a whole big thing once the movie is for realz finished, and we really want to have as much done as possible beforehand so we are as prepared to spring into action once we get that sound....which looks like it's going to be really, really soon now. The day before Christmas Eve, we got word that all the music had been mixed and sent over to our re-recording mixer who was already 75% done at that point. So, it was the best Christmas present I got this yeas - the movie that I've been working on my whole adult life, actually fully coming to life. Now that's a good holiday.

I hope the holidays so far have allowed all of you some rest and relaxations, some fun, some friendly faces, and some good food. I'll be back in the swing of things soon, and I have some fun stuff prepared for the blog, so stay tuned.

Since I don't have any pictures of me from this year's Christmas readily available yet, below is a picture of me Christmas 2009 in a sweatshirt I think I stole from my best friend and still wear quite often. anyway, this was about 5 months after we finished shooting the majority of Science, Sex and the Ladies. (April -July 2009). Little did I know it'd be Christmas 2013 before that bitch was finished.


Trisha

Me, Christmas 2009

Betty Dodson Quotes I Love for a Friday

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It's Friday. I'm crazy busy at work, and you're probably busy too. So, I figure you need something quick and fun for this Friday before Christmas. So here you go.

Frankly, my dears, Betty Dodson just don't give a damn about what you think. I love it. She's funny, caring, and as I've mentioned before, she's got the right idea about what we need to do to make things better for women's orgasms. On that note, I've come across a couple quotes that I've compiles here for your reading pleasure. I actually think this might be a fun series. I know there are a million more quotes, I just don't have time to find more now, but when I do, you'll be happy I did. For now, enjoy the few below. They all are funny and rang true to me in some way, so let this 83 year old women tell it.

Betty Dodson taken form DodsonRoss website

"When friends ask if I'm going to have another love affair, my recent answer has been, "I'd love to have someone hold my dildo while I masturbate."- Betty Dodson/Carlin Ross Vlog 

I mean, right?..cause your hands are working on your clit and all, and if you want to stick a dildo up there while you're doin' it, you kinda got your hands full at that point. So yeah, that would be super sweet and relaxing to just have a human dildo holder. Seriously, I'm with her on this...not so much a "lover" as much as someone to assist your masturbation...I'm actually serious about this, it would be kinda awesome.

"Your Sleeping Beauty was awakened by an electric vibrator not by a kiss from a Prince!" - As part of an answer on DobsonRoss website

She was right on when she said this, but it's not just a quippy part of an answer. It's also probably so true for a lot of women. Falling in love with some dude and getting a kiss is easy in this world for women. However, a first orgasm after a lifetime without...now that will wake a lady up for real.

"I consider the 70s to be the youth of old age. So all you women out there who are afraid of getting older, just keep your orgasms in place, eat a lot of vegetables, take exercise, and you'll be fine." - I just found this on a quote website, and it sounds just like something she would say, so i'm going to believe it is a real quote.

If that ain't good advice, then I don't know good advice. Here's to the older ladies!

Another one about that show

Trisha's crushed at work this week so you get me instead. I've been watching Masters of Sex the Showtime show about the pioneering research of Master and Johnson. If you don't know who that is google it. It will be worth your while.

What I keep thinking is if fictional sex and sexuality in media shapes our cultural sexual norms what effect could this show that is supposedly about how we came to understand sex going to have? Contemplate that while you look at this lovely photo of the real Masters and Johnson and their hollywood counterparts.

Evan Rachel Wood, Movie Oral, and the Damn MPAA

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A quick update on the oral-sex-performed-on-women-in-the-movies front. As you may know the MPAA are the people giving the movies you watch G's, PG's, R's, and sometimes NC-17's - you know if they have any lady-lickin' going on. Cause for real, they do have a history of tacking the box-office killing NC-17 rating on movies that include cunnilingus. Check out the Blue Valentine oral scandal (which eventually got remedied), and if you have about 2 hours, check out the film about how ridiculously subjective and biased the MPAA is in the doc This Film Is Not Yet Rated.

Anyway, this problem of NC-17ing cunnilingus is unfortunate since there's barely any represented in mainstream movies as it is. Penises seem to get a fair amount of oral attention in movies, and straight up P in V sex doesn't seem to have much trouble finding its way onto the big screen without an NC-17 rating, which I guess makes sense if you only really see sex acts that are orgasmic to men as normal and civilized enough for a wide audience.

However, we're a modern society, so this kind of problem with women receiving oral sex is a little stupid. I mean this shouldn't still be a problem actors, actresses and directors still have to speak out about, but it is, and I give Evan Rachel Wood credit for doing so. Her upcoming movie Charlie Countryman got the lady-oral-NC-17 -slap, which prompted the movie makers to cut the cunnilingus out, so she tweeted a rant, which I thought was pretty good. Go Evan Rachel Wood - and I hope you and others raise enough stink that the MPAA starts giving it a second thought before continuing to rate ladies-receiving-oral right out of our mainstream media.

After seeing the new cut of #CharlieCountryman I would like 2 share my disappointment with the MPAA, who thought it was necessary to censor a woman's sexuality once again. The scene where the two main characters make 'love' was altered because someone felt that seeing a man give a woman oral sex made people 'uncomfortable' but the scenes in which people are murdered by having their heads blown off remained intact and unaltered.

This is a symptom of a society that wants to shame women and put them down for enjoying sex, especially when (gasp) the man isn't getting off as well! It's hard for me to believe that had the roles been reversed it still would have been cut. OR had the female character been raped it would have been cut. It's time for people to GROW UP.

Accept that woman are sexual beings … Accept that some men like pleasuring women. Accept that women don't have to just be fucked and say thank you. We are allowed and entitled to enjoy ourselves. It's time we put our foot down …

Female Masturbation in Cw's Reign!

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Reign is a historical fiction series set in the time of Mary, Queen of Scots. It's a new CW series that has just begun in this 2013-2014 season. Now, I don't watch the show, but I know people who do, and I've been filled in on the basics of the plot line. Mary is awaiting her marriage in the French court, and given that she and her ladies in waiting are quite young for our standards of marrying age - it centers around teenagers. It sounds like a fun drama-rific show. However, no one happened to mention to me anything about the whole masturbation scandal I stumbled upon while searching around the internet recently.

Apparently in the show a bunch of the young gals watch through a keyhole as a newly married couple consummate their marriage (apparently a group of elders are watching from inside the room also - as was the custom of the day), and then the girls split up and deal with what they saw. One goes off, pulls up her skirt and starts using her hand to rub around down there - which according to Kate Aurtur on the Buzzfeed staff - was the first teen soap girl masturbation scene since Blair Waldorf in Gossip Girl a few years ago. So it's a fairly big deal, if I might say so myself. I mean we're always hearing about teen dudes masturbating - (you know even in pies and stuff), but it's just not that common to hear about in our media with girls.

However, the scene was cut down a bit between the pilot sent out to critics in the spring and the actual airing in the fall. It's still there but the masturbation part is shorter. And here's the weird part. The King of France happens upon her and takes over for her - replacing his hand for hers. I do like that he took over with the manual clit stim instead of going straight to doing her - which is what one might expect.

Truly, I don't watch the show, so I can't really interpret this scene in context with the characters, so I'm just gonna simply give the show props for even insinuating that masturbation is one way a young gal might react to the exciting situation of secretly watching a sexual act. The scene as aired is reportedly so short one would have to just assume about what is happening before the king arrives, but hey, it's something. I say the more girls feel that masturbation is a normal thing that others girls might do, the better. Show creators Stephanie SenGupta and Laurie McCarthy, I give you a tip of the hat.

Hey Girl Ryan Gosling - The Orgasm Equality Set

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Honestly, I didn't think much about Ryan Gosling a couple years back. He popped up on my radar though, strangely, when the Super Bowl was going on here in Indianapolis. I'm not into football really or the Super Bowl, but it was actually really fun watching everyone here in Indy on blogs and Facebook and stuff having fun hanging around downtown. So, while I was stalking my fun-having friends and acquaintances, I noticed someone shared a bunch of Boyfriend Ryan Gosling memes -Indianapolis Super Bowl edition. Now, I hadn't really even heard of the Hey Girl Ryan Gosling Meme or the Feminist Ryan Gosling memes, but something about these Hey Girl, Indy ones were just plain enjoyable to me. They are very specifically Indianapolis-centric and you probably won't find them amusing at all if you aren't from here - For instance "Hey Girl, You're so hot Paul Poteet gets confused." or "Hey Girl, There's more than corn in Indiana, but all I see is you."

From then I started noticing Ryan Gosling more in movies. I loved him in Drive and in the recently SSL reviewed Only God Forgives. Anyway, he also has a reputation for being a feminist including speaking out on the NC17 rating for Blue Valentine - about how ridiculous it is that we see violent sexual acts done to women all the time on the big screen, but as soon as someone shows an explicit scene with a woman receiving a pleasurable sex act, everyone gets their panties in a bunch.

So with all that, I thought I would do a twist on Hey Girl Ryan Gosling. I present to you - Orgasm Equality Hey Girl Ryan Gosling. Enjoy.

Only God Forgives - The SSL Review

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Okay, this is a slippery SSL Review here, folks. I can say that Only God Forgives  is clearly eligible for an SSL Review. It certainly has a depiction or discussion of female sexual release or female masturbation, so that's why we're here. The tricky part, though, is what to make of it. In this type of review I'm really just trying to asses the impact and significance of said depiction/discussion on our cultural understanding of physical female sexual response.

However, this movie is not straightforward, and critiquing the culture impact of the scenes from within the context of the movie is also not straightforward. So, let me just describe the scenes. They are both basically the same, just at different times in the movie. Julian (Ryan Gosling - who has a pretty good Orgasm Equality History) is seated and he watches Mai (Yayaying Rhatha Phongam), a fully dressed woman, doing what one could only assume is masturbating herself under her skirt. We don't see much of what's going on below the waist, but from arm movement/placement we could, ya know, reasonably assume she is masturbating. It looks as realistic as one could expect. She is putting on a little bit of a show with the whole tilted back open lipped I'm-clearly-pleasuring-myself facial expression, but it's not over the top. I wouldn't call it pornish or anything. The hand seems as if it's making circles on the clit/vulva area, which is certainly a realistic way one might masturbate - I mean it doesn't look like she's doing any of the not-so-orgasmic-but too-often-depicted-ladybation-movements we sometimes see in movies like  ramming anything in and out of her vagina, so it's a good, realistic depiction.

Julian (Ryan Gosling) and Mai (Yayaying Rhatha Phongam) - not one of the scenes I'm describing btw

You might be saying, "Hey Trish, why's this so hard to SSL Review? It's a depiction of Ryan Gosling in a hot suit paying (we assume since it's pretty clear in the movie that she's a prostitute) a lady to masturbate while he watches and doesn't touch (she actually ties his hands to the chair in the first scene)."

And I'd have to say, "You're right, my friend. This is actually the perfect scenario - a man (a hot one too) valuing genuine, realistic, and independent pursuit of sexual release in a woman. I mean that's great. Plus, it's my perfect prostitution job. I could be way into that, but, like I said, the movie ain't so clear cut." There's perspective switches and cuts between reality and fantasy. In fact it's open to interpretation what parts of these scenes are even really happening. There's also issues with the larger context of these two character's relationship - there's a bit of a power dynamic which could taint how you see these scenes. Plus, the movie is super "artsy" and violent and somewhat confusing depending on how you look at it, so I think this lady-bation scene could feel very different to different viewers, and I don't want to get too deep into that.

So, here's my final SSL Review conclusion. While acknowledging all the complications involved with the movie's context, I willingly take these scenes at face value and hereby declare that they are realistic depictions of how a female might physically masturbates, and that's more than most movies who either ignore it (more so than male masturbation) or depict it in an unrealistic way, so I give it 4 out of 5 vulvas!
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P.S. I actually really liked this movie. It's of a certain taste, but if you like to try out varied styles of cinema, I'd give it a chance. There's some crazy shit in this, and it was so strangely pretty...