I get so many emails requesting advice on SexyPrime  that I have started a regular Monday column answering them:  Ask Auntie Sue.  (Think of me as your Auntie Mame of Sex; and don't expect the traditional response to your questions.)

Often someone, usually the female half of a couple, asks:  “Should we see a sex [or marital or couples or relationship] therapist?”

I tell them:  Fix the sex first.  Then, if you still want professional help, go to a therapist to hash out all that stuff about your mother, his mother and the problems with your nagging and  his dirty socks and tightie whities on the bedroom floor.  With a few exceptions, a therapist is the last  person I would trust with my  sex life.

First, consider the research on the success of couples therapy in general.  A big study reported a decade ago in the Journal of Consulting and Clincial Psychlogy  found that two years after therapy 25 percent of couples were "worse off" than they had been when starting therapy--and 38% were divorced.  Writing in The New York Times  in 2005, author Susan Gilbert also found that counseling wasn't working.  The only professionals who do make claims for astonishing success are the individual counselors and therapists themselves. Their websites make me nauseous. Generally, therapy does not work!

Second, most therapists, even sex therapists, are not well-educated on sexuality.  A prominent male sex therapist once told me that "technique isn't important; passion is what matters."  Oh, really?  And does not passion die within a woman when her man fumbles her clitoris as if it were a little part in a home repair job he's botching?  Recently a prominent female sex therapist told me that she has never used a vibrator and is "a little suspicous of them."  A vibe is a woman's sure path toward orgasm, her teaching toy for learning her own body.  Sadly, many therapists are judgmental and even prudish.  They are fixated on the model of heterosexual, monogamous "vanilla" couple.

Third, therapists talk .  They encourage you to talk.  Therapy is all about talk.

While verbal communication is certainly part of sex—it’s not the whole story.  Understanding your past histories and getting to the nitty gritty of the WHY just gives you a framework for assigning blame.  So you leave a counseling session with the satisfaction of “discovering” that his mother was “too sexual” and your parents “cold and withholding“—and yet go home to a bedroom where your orgasm rarely happens and his comes too soon.  I can tell you how to fix those technical issues—as can other talented sex writers, a few good sex therapists and the growning number of sex coaches.  Why can we do what talk therapists can’t do?

We study the science of sex—of arousal and orgasm—and we believe that technique does matter.

Past President of American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT), my friend Dr. Patti Britton, author of The Art of Sex Coaching,  invented the field of sex coaching.  In her classes, she says, "The word 'why' is banished.  We don't need to know about a client's relationship with her mother or past lovers.  I believe in the bulls eye theory:  You aim for the sex issue in the middle, fix that--and the good feelings radiate outward to the circles surrounding the center of the target."

If you have a garden variety sex problem, buy a good book; and see if you can makeover your sex life yourself.  No?  Find a sex coach, preferably one certified by Patti.

Don’t trust your sex life to a sex, marital, couples or relationship counselor unless that person is also a coach.

Do you know that female orgasm was a psychiatric problem until 1952?

Women had the vote but we still didn't have orgasms. No,  Instead, women had “hysterical crises."

An hysterical crisis could be fainting, loss of appetite, strange feelings of heaviness in the way lower "abdomen"—or a series of involuntary contractions that, in descriptions of the day, sounds suspiciously like orgasm. Yes, women's sexuality was categorized as a medical condition by The American Psychiatric Association until 1952.  

I was aware of this history, but couldn’t have told you the exact year until I had a conversation last fall with Dell Williams, founder of Eve’s Garden, a sex toy store in Manhattan that was the first of its kind in the city when she opened it in 1974.  (There is also a website.)  

"It has long been my unassailable belief that orgasmic women can change the world. By this I mean that a woman who is unfettered sexually is unfettered politically, socially and economically and is unstoppable," she writes in the introduction to her autobiography, Revolution in the Garden: Memoirs of the Gardenkeeper.

"Eve was scapegoat; I wanted to restore her good name," she says, explaining how she decided on the store’s name.  

She was born in 1922 when "Women didn't have orgasms. Not officially.” And she was thirty years old before, at last, the shrinks said we could come. Her own sexual awakening didn't happen until she was fifty. That's what led "a nice Jewish girl from the Bronx", also active in the women's movement, to open a sex toy store built on the belief that "Regular orgasm is vital to a wholesome lifestyle—it enhances our health, our appearance, our self-esteem, our ability to function effectively."

Dell is one of my heroines; and she will be yours too if you read her book. I was thrilled to meet her at a small gathering at her shop; and I am sharing a bit of our conversaiton with you today for two reasons:  It’s Gay Pride week in New York City and we owe a sex life debt to the lesbian women, like Dell, who brought toys out of the back rooms of porn shops and into the lovely light and gently put orgasm power into our own hands.  Also, we are approaching the Fourth of July, the Independence Day holiday; and, Babes, you are not a free woman if you aren’t in charge of your orgasms.

"When I was active in the women's movement, I forgot about sex, until I helped co-ordinate the first Women's Sexuality Conference for N.O.W. [National Organization for Women],” Dell says “I took Betty Dodson's workshop on self love. I saw that the vibrator was a liberating tool for women."

A friend of Dell’s, sitting with us, in the art-filled conference room at Eve’s, added, "In 1974, I was married with three children and had never had an orgasm.  I had my first orgasm in bed with my husband after a group of couples got together to smoke pot and watch porn. I was so stimulated from the pot, the porn, the sexual energy in the room."

Shortly after that, Dell told one of her own orgasm stories:

"When I masturbate, I say I am going to the goddess. Sometimes I worry about being too loud when I come. What must the neighbors think? I live in a Manhattan apartment! Recently, I was visiting upstate; and I heard a woman's scream coming clear across the lake. I knew she was having an orgasm. The sound sailed proudly and joyously across the water. A woman's orgasm is life-affirming."

I was on one side of Dell, a pretty young woman on the other side. As Dell described the sailing orgasm, the young woman and I exchanged delighted smiles. We need more of this—talking about sex across the generations. The conversation brings us together, all goddesses in our own lives, each, no matter her age, having to overcome some obstacle in claiming her sexuality.

Orgasm. "Partake of it daily," Dell says. Yes!

If you visit me at SexyPrime  you know that I believe every woman should own a wardrobe of vibes and use one to reach orgasm daily whether she's in a relationship or not.

How important is orgasm?

Aside from the documented medical, emotional and psychological benefits, it has the power to change your life.  Orgasm is that important.  Never say it doesn’t matter.

Twice I have watched Richard Anton Diaz work his touch magic on a lovely naked model gracing his massage table in a demonstration of Orgasmic Providing. Both were extraordinary events, so above anything I've ever witnessed as a peripatetic sex journalist that I cannot put them into one of the usual categories, like Tantra/WooWoo and Relationship Yada, Yada, Yada. Anton operates from a place of great integrity and intelligence, attracts like-minded people--and takes everyone in the room on a spiritual sexual journey at Sexy Spirits  a not-for-profit sex education center in midtown Manhattan.

Each time the audience was composed mainly of men who watched in rapt and respectful silence as he massaged all the woman's body before moving, at last, to her vulva. The first model seemed to go quietly and deeply within herself during genital massage, gently pulsating beneath Anton's fingers, her being defined by her sweet, bare little pussy. The second goddess, a little hair covering her mons, writhed and throbbed, wailed and moaned as she came—and even talked to the audience at times. Her prominent proud clitoris and her full juicy lips, purple in their passion, claimed pleasure. She made frequent eye contact with Anton in a power gaze of charged energies exchanged.

And she ejaculated. Copiously. Towels were placed around to catch the overflow.

Her pussy was positioned away from the audience, but a camera focused exactly on her so that we could see (almost as if they were 6 inches away) every detail of her, as well as how Anton stroked her, on the screen above them.

"The camera gives her more privacy because her pussy is not fully exposed," he says. "The audience is not focusing on her but on the image on the screen. They can see the orgasmic pulsing. And I want their attention on the strokes as that is happening."

Yes, our attention was on the strokes—and, in this case, the generous squirts of fluid shooting out.

Some women are squirters, at least occasionally, most likely with G spot stimulation—which this goddess did not have. (Though Anton's Orgasmic Providing strokes include internal ones, his fingers did not leave her clit and labia.) Many Western sex experts dismiss the "ejaculate" as merely a gush of fluid composed of urine and copious vaginal secretions. Others believe it is fluid from the Skene's glands, a string of several masses of tissue, embedded in the urethra, which when stimulated sexually in some women, releases the fluids into the urethral canal. Devotees of Amrita, the "nectar of the goddess", base their cult on ancient Tantric writings. Men ejaculate sperm from the testicles via tubes that go through the prostate gland where the sperm mixes with seminal fluid—a very clear process that everyone understands.. There is no question that whatever this fluid that some women "ejaculate" or squirt, upon orgasm is—it is not the female equivalent of seminal fluid. Strictly speaking, there is no female ejaculate or ejaculation.

If not ejaculate, what? Something does happen for many women though no one [Sorry, Amritas.] has answered definitively the question: Pee or nectar? I lean toward the Skeen's glands theory because it makes the most sense to me.

Female ejaculation isn't exactly a technique. If you want to try to make it happen, use G spot stimulation and don't hold back when you feel the urge to urinate. Bear down. Anton's goddess of the Amrita drinks water before the demonstration. Some women empty their bladders before trying to squirt because they want to be absolutely sure they aren't peeing. Whatever soaks your towels!

I have squirted on rare occasion, always involving a lot of oral and manual play, a large dick and too much wine. One time was particularly memorable—a hottest ever sex adventure, a Friend with Benefits in Soho two days before Christmas some years ago.

Anton’s next demonstration is Monday June 1.  Check the Sexy Spirits website for more information and registration.

Come visit me at SexyPrime   If you haven't been there in a while, you've missed a lot.

Jamie Cat Callan's new book, French Women Don't Sleep Alone:  Pleasurable Secrets to Finding Love  has many answers (but for the graphic sex techniques, you need to go to my books listed on SexyPrime  :)

I caught up with Jamie a few weeks ago at her book party in Soho, a gala affair hosted by mediabistro.  She looked smashing and very French—as well she should since her grandmother was a French woman.  The first line of the book is, in fact, “My grandmother was French.”

Jamie Cat’s grandmother occupied a special place in her imagination as well as her life.  To inspire a girl’s imagination is a wonderful thing—a gift that grandmothers and aunts and older sisters can bestow more often than mothers, who, alas, have to slug it out in the trenchs of child-rearing where glamour is in short supply.  My late sister Ellen, almost twenty when I was born, inspired my own imagination.  I can still remember the clear red polish on her fingernails, her impeccable lipstick, her lush and wavy dark hair and many of her dresses, because she always wore dresses.  She was my role model for sophisticated womanhood; and I completely identified with Jamie Cat’s admiration for her elegant grandmother who always wore sheer stockings and heels.

As a girl, Jamie Cat sensed that her grandparents had an intense, erotic relationship.  There were “disagreements” marked by shouting that ended in whispers behind a closed bedroom door—followed by grandmother’s purchase of a new hat the next day.  Grandmother had a lot of hats.

“It didn’t take long for me to realize that these quarrels were not simply about disagreeing, but that rather an intricate and sensual dance was taking place,” Jamie Cat writes.

What a wonderful life lesson for a girl to learn—and certainly not the typical experience of an American girl.  Socially, we are just acknowledging that, yes, perhaps some Moms can be hot.  But Grammies?  Oh, my!

French women don’t sleep alone (unless they prefer seperate beds) because they are sexy when young and older—and even “old.”  Jamie Cat went to France to learn their secrets, but, I am guessing, she knew most of them already.  The research was simply back-up for what she had already intuited at home.

French women, she tells us, know how to flirt, love men and sex, retain a sense of erotic mystery, wear elegant matching lingerie at all times, wouldn’t be caught in bed in worn “grammy panties” and an old t-shirt—and enjoy cooking.  There is a fun chapter with recipes, including a basic coq au vin, which even I could make and is quite delicious.

Yes, she shares a lot of secrets.

I love it when she says, “I have come to believe it is possible for any American girl or woman to rediscover her own French self—that version of herself that is eleant and discreet, sexy, mysterious, intriguing, charismatic and charming.”

Is there a better time for finding your inner French woman than midlife when you have the confidence to find your own style?  What stops us?  Fear.

Jamie Cat writes of the “fear of disappearing.”  She says, “Often in America, especially as we get older, we start to feel as if we are beginning to fade away, back into the distance and out of the spotlight.  And so we think we need more mascara, more lipstick.  More.  More.  More, because we look in the mirror and feel this terrible sense of invisibility.  We‘re living in a country that doesn’t especially appreciate la femme d‘un certain age, or a woman who is not blond, preternaturally busty, with the body of a skinny fourteen year old.”

We don’t need more mascara and more lipstick.  What do we need to do?  Take back our beauty.  Find our own style.  Indulge ourselves in sensual pleasures, from chocolates and flowers to daily orgasms, achieved perhaps with the aide of our beautiful vibes.  Open our minds to potential lovers who are not a few years older, a few inches taller and likely richer.

And, for the goddess sake, stop yammering on about The Relationship, the one you have or the one you seek.

Read Jamie Cat’s book.  Let me know how much you enjoyed it and what are your favorite parts.  Maybe we can get her to create a Find Your Inner French Woman group for us.

When the economy picks up, we can plan a trip to Paris together.

"Why does he masturbate when he's in a relationship?"  

I get this question at SexyPrime  several times a week from women all over the world.  (I am happy to say that my blog is read in over 100 countries!)  A  girlfriend discovers that her "wonderful new boyfriend" jerks off to porn" when they aren't together.  Like Charlotte in a "Sex and the City" episode, a wife catches her man pleasuring himself.  She's appalled.

"What does it mean if he masturbates to ugly porn?"  

It means he is a guy.  They masturbate.  Mostly in the modern age, they masturbate to cyberporn, a lot of which is ugly and not to our tastes.  

Women often believe that a couple in a relationship should not masturbate.  They view self-pleasuring as a failure of “intimacy“—even “cheating.”  Sometimes wives issue the  ultimatum:  “Hand or me.”  So he is forced into the role of lying, cheating husband now—with his own hand.

Ladies, masturbation is normal and healthy—and you should be doing it too.

Masturbating to porn is only a relationship issue when:

Masturbating to porn takes up most of a man's sexlife time .  His partner is frustrated beause they aren't having sex very often.  She feels neglected and sexually abandoned.

The man is getting all his sex education from porn .  Thus they believe that all women orgasm from intercoure alone.  And anal sex is something he can "slip in."  (Real life behind the anal porn flick scene:  The girls had enemas the night before the shoot, wore a butt plug for hours to open their anal sphnicter muscles, squirted syringes full of lube up their anuses.  But it still hurts when a large cock rams hard and fast into her.)

He expects you to become the actress in his porn fantasies.  

Being in a relationship doesn’t mean you own one another’s sexuality.  You should complain if your needs aren’t being met, if he masturbates to the point where he has little or no interest in having sex with you, if he tries to act out porn fantasies you find distatsteful in your bed.

You don’t have to look, dress, behave or fake like a porn star.

BUT you can’t tell him he isn’t allowed to masturbate as long as he’s in a relationship with you.  Let him have his porn.  You have great vibes.  Play on your own now and then.  

Some women say they are willing to accept a man masturbating to his “imagination“, preferably memories of them, rather than porn.

Think about it.  Where does he get the images in his “imagination?”  Sometimes from memory, sometimes from fantasizing sex with your best friend or even your mother, sometimes from his inner porn file.

Women like the idea of him using his imagination vs. porn because they can pretend his mental images are more romantic than they probably are.  Some women and a few therapists/researchers have concluded that men who watch a lot of porn require increasingly harder material to become aroused and ejaculate.  That may be true.  Or not.  I am searching for reliable porn studies and will get back to you on that.

Why do some other women "endorse masturbation" but feel angry and resentful about men masturbating to porn?  

Two reasons:  

1.  The desire many women have to control sex in the relationship.  

Historically in nearly every culture, women have controlled men through the withholding or dispensing of sex and men have controlled women through the withholding or dispensing of money.  The Sex/Money status quo has been shaken up rather a lot in our time, but the mentality still persists even in empowered women.  The belief that he should not be doing anything with his dick that you don’t approve is endorsed by The Relationship/Therapy Industrial Complex—all those therapists and workshop leaders and relationship coaches and authors and their emphasis on “working on the relationship.”  (Yech.  One of my least favorite terms.)

So.  You will let him masturbate but only in the approved way.

2.  A lot of porn is truly degrading to women.

Who wants to believe that her wonderful BF is turned on by double anal penetration or several men jerking off on a woman’s face?  That is the inherent conflict in his porn/her relationship.  The porn makes you angry because you personalize it; and your resent its powerful effect on him.

A woman in her thirties recently told me that she and her girlfriends are turned off to sex and find men in their age group both “flat and lacking passion and oddly misogynistic.”  She asks:  Does porn make them hate women or do they watch that porn because they hate women?

Most men don’t hate women.  

A feminist against porn lectured me on the subject recently.  (We were at a cocktail party; and she kept following me around until I was rescued by a gorgeous boy.)  “Doesn’t Western culture construct female sexuality—and isn’t porn part of the construct?” she asked.

Doesn’t every culture construct and constrict female sexuality?  And male sexuality, though in different ways?

Yes, porn does seem to play a part in how women define their sexuality now.  The “girls gone wild” phenomenon—young women dressing provocatively and acting out sexually—was likely inspired in part by porn and fueled by x-rated imagery on the web.  You, however, are smart enough to make your own choices about your sex life.  You might decide it would be fun to have sex in your stilettos because you saw it in a film, but you don’t have to do that or anything else.  

I would assert that organized religion has constructed and constricted female sexuality more than porn has (or ever could.)

And to answer my quetion to you:  No, he isn’t cheting on you when he masturbates to porn.  But what do you think?

As requested, the ultimate chakra trick from my book The New Tantra:  Simple and Sexy:

http://sexyprime.typepad.com/sexyprime/2009/02/the-ultimate-chakra-trick.html

Let me know how it works for you!