SPP: All right Nicole, well normally in an interview I kind of start off slow asking some very vague questions but I’m going to be honest with a topic such as sex I think the best attack is going to be straightforward. So I’m just going to dive in.
Nicole: Okay let’s go.
SPP: You have a book “Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm” and it caught, as a young male, it caught my eye because every guy out there wants to have this power right.
Nicole: Right.
SPP: The ability to give the female an orgasm. So the first thing I wanted to ask you is can you explain the idea of slow sex? I know that’s the whole basis of what you do is kind of the slow sex method.
Nicole: Right. Well I would say slow sex is actually the type of sex that works best with a woman’s body. So the best way I know to describe it is there’s fitness and there’s yoga, and so sex as we know it for the most part is harder and faster and pumping. So that’s also more like fitness and s low sex is a lot more like yoga where there’s this additional dimension that you tap into that’s more intuitive, that’s slower, that develops consciousness, like that.
SPP: Okay. It’s funny because I’m not a bashful person but talking about sex I think brings everyone into this zone of kind of being ashamed and things like that. Are you used to that in your professional in doing all of this?
Nicole: Yeah it’s funny. But it’s interesting too because I used to say, people would ask me what I did and I would tell them in some form or another. And it would be like at a dinner party or something and then no one would acknowledge me. But privately I’d be standing in line for the restroom and everyone would say “Can I talk to you about this?” Everyone has some private thing that they talk about that. And lately I will say at a dinner party, and people just bring out the conversation, so something is definitely opening in this arena.
SPP: I was a curious as to what got you into this arena? What was that first thing that led you into hey I’m going to write a book about sex?
Nicole: That’s a great question. So I was maybe I don’t it was almost 20 years ago I was a graduate teacher associate in San Francisco State and I was a budding young feminist. I was teaching sexual identities and communication and I asked the question what do you want to know about sex? And pretty much every single questionnaire came back saying some version of what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I climax? I’m doing it wrong. I can’t do it unless I’m in love. What’s wrong? And I realized that everyone who answered this questionnaire there was this underlying shame and this underlying perception that anytime we tapped into sex that something was wrong with us. And I had nothing to offer these students. I had nothing. I just had a big bunch of white paper series.
So I thought, okay I’m going to go out. And I was a Zen practitioner at the time also and so I knew that Zen was a practice that changed my life in other ways and I didn’t know if anything that existed in the sexual arena that offered something similar. So I went searching for it and low and behold I found something. And then Jacques Cousteau has this quote about once you discover something life changing there’s no way you can keep it a secret. And so I’ve been practicing for 15 years or something. I look at so many people, especially women, well actually so many women who consider themselves non- orgasmic and so many men who just do not have the instructions in terms of how to really work with a woman’s body. So I wanted both genders to have some idea of how to tap in here.
SPP: You know before I was thinking okay I want to get right in and say “So what is the art?” But before we do that something funny that I thought about was do you ever think about how you’re never going to see a book called “The Art of the Male Orgasm”. I mean is that just because it’s too easy or what.
Nicole: Well that’s really funny. Actually I think you will. There’s definitely a lot of information out there about the male orgasm, but I think it’s also we are so accustomed to the male orgasm right, build, build, build, build, tense a little bit, explode and take a nap. I mean that’s sort of like the high peak crescendo and then I just…
SPP: Yeah how did you know?
Nicole: Well much, much research. And I just think we don’t have as much information kind of about like the other side of sex. It’s like we’re in the 80s when aerobics are really big we haven’t quite opened up yoga.
SPP: Okay. I can understand that I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t a sexist thing you know.
Nicole: No I don’t know that there’s a bigger man proponent than me because I’m actually of the belief that we need men and we need smart men who can be around women whose sexuality is open. And so any man who comes into this arena and wants to know I’m so happy to give them the information.
SPP: All right. Well that’s what we are here for. So now I want to ask you, it’s going to be a broad question so just let me know what you think and we’ll kind of drill down from there.
Nicole: Okay.
SPP: Can you tell us, can you tell me and all the men out there the art and craft of the female orgasm. How do we help them achieve it and the best way possible?
Nicole: Okay good. So I’m going to start with something really simple but not easy. I would start with the idea of taking off the goal. Do you know what I mean?
SPP: I think I do.
Nicole: Yeah. So we have this goal toward climax and the total towards climax has it be that we’re like running, running, running, not noticing anything that’s happening, and then we have the explosion and then we’re out of it. And that’s just not the way a woman’s body works. Our bodies are much slower, we like to sink in more, and we like to actually feel what’s happening in the moment. And it’s also a great relief when guys discover like oh I don’t have to bring her to climax, first of all immediately. But secondly in a session it can actually be that a woman has tremendous pleasure just having attention on her, having a light pleasurable stroke, and she doesn’t necessarily have to climax. As women we are not as – how shall I put it – driven toward climax.
SPP: You know I’m going to be honest I don’t understand that. As a I man I don’t get it.
Nicole: I bet you do though. I bet you that there’s some kind of practice or something that you do that you do solely for the pleasure of it. Like maybe playing an instrument where you weren’t like playing the instrument to hurry up and get to the last note of the song.
SPP: Okay.
Nicole: You actually might enjoy playing the instrument.
SPP: Yeah I was just going to bring up. I was going to say – oh you actually just took my thunder. I watched this video on YouTube the other day where it was talking about life and how music composition doesn’t focus on the last note where…
Nicole: Are you serious?
SPP: Yeah where the musicians are rushing to get to that last note and it’s like Boom, oh hoorah. Nicole: Yeah.
SPP: And it’s more everything in between and they were relating it back to life saying that if you get into your 30s, 40s, 50s and you’re trying to chase that idea of success and when you finally think that you get to it and you look back and you realize that there was nothing in between and that really isn’t like the success. So I was drawing the parallels between that and then how it can relate to sex as well. So that’s pretty cool.
Nicole: Exactly. And you know we call it it’s like the leaning forward syndrome where you’re like so leaning forward toward that climax that you don’t notice anything now. Now all of a sudden your whole sex act is gone. It’s like wait a minute I did that. And it’s actually kind of hard work you get sweaty, there’s rubbing, there’s all kinds of stuff right, so all of that hard work in three seconds rather than sinking in and enjoying every single moment.
SPP: Okay. That’s fantastic advice. Nicole: Are you skeptical?
SPP: I am not.
Nicole: Yeah I mean I don’t know if you’ve read the book “Flow” but there’s this idea of pleasure and an idea of enjoyment. So pleasure is something that we experience that retrends us back to our homeostatic state, meaning I’m stressed out, I have a lot of tension. Or even I have a lot of turn-on I do something and I get returned back to comfort or returned back to normal. I don’t necessarily become a better person, a more complex person, a smarter person for the experience, but I don’t feel as much tension. So that’s pleasure.
There’s another experience of enjoyment and enjoyment is where you do something that makes you more complex. Like really being absorbed into a chest game or mountain climbing, something where all of your attention is needed in order to execute that thing. And when you do that you get out of your head in this really pleasurable way. In fact he believes that happiness is based on not being self-conscious, or being so absorbed in something like an Olympic skier even right, being so absorbed in something that you aren’t thinking about yourself. Because it seems that when we think about ourselves we think pretty yuck things.
And that’s the idea. And so sex as we know it has really been pleasured based it’s been more like oh I’m feeling kind of turned on to you but it’s uncomfortable. I have to hurry up and get this feeling out of my body or I had a hard day at work I want to feel better and I need some release. That’s how we’ve known it’s returned to comfort. But I think there’s a way that we can experience it that actually has us be deeper and richer. So rather than having these diminishing returns, you know how most people say “Like yeah our sex life was great when we first got together and now we sleep on the opposite sides of the bed.” And we take that as a norm right.
SPP: Yeah.
Nicole: That’s how most people – but it can actually be if you’re taking your sex life on as an actual practice it can be that it gets exponentially better with time. It’s get more and more complex. You actually build, deliberately build an intimacy together.
SPP: I’m glad because I got to say when it comes to that I’m just slightly skeptical just because of the whole after awhile same person, same thing. And I’m talking like I have no idea what it’s like after 20 years of marriage.
Nicole: Right.
SPP: But to me that would seem difficult I don’t know.
Nicole: Well imagine going back to playing an instrument and I think playing an instrument if you take it on as a practice it actually gets more pleasurable with time. And it’s a similar concept when you take it on as a practice there’s all of these different elements to taking this on as a practice, but when you take it on as a practice it actually gets like far, far more interesting the deeper you get than at the very beginning.
SPP: You know relating back to an instrument is a great way to put it because you’re going to sit there and you’re going to try to get better at your craft.
Nicole: Right.
SPP: You’re going to try to master that instrument. So I understand exactly what you’re talking about. And then I kind of understand what Chris is talking about too as well because just as males we kind of have that sex driven I guess motivation, especially at this age where we’re in our late 20s and that’s one of the things that we’re always thinking about.
Nicole: Right.
SPP: So when you mentioned taking the goal away and wanting to just move forward, what would be the next step for us like taking that goal away? Is it more focusing on the female there and making sure that she’s enjoying? What would be your next piece of advice after taking the goal away?
Nicole: Well that’s a good question and interesting. So I got stuck somewhere so I’m going to come back and say I think that as guys you’re sex driven, but this would be my guess that my experience I do a lot of coaching, I’ve had like 4500 people go through this program. So my experience again and again and again is that often guys, especially younger guys interestingly, there’s this experience of chasing sex in a way that you never get fully satisfied. There is something about the experience of learning how to turn a woman on in a way that you can probably feel her desire for you that profoundly changes the experience itself. Where then it’s not just like you getting physical release, but you feeling another person’s desire for you. And I think that, I’ll just speak in certain like guy talk.
When you’re looking for the incentive or the payoff having a woman genuinely desire you rather than – I’m going to be kind of hardcore here – but have sex with you out a feeling of obligation, meaning that that would mean she was a good girlfriend or a good wife and she had sex, but she’s not really fully enjoying it those two different arena where she’s desiring you or doing it to be a good person are totally different worlds. The sex you have with a woman who generally desires the sex because it actually feels good in her body is totally different.
SPP: This is something that’s not foreign to me now that you bring it up where we chase that motivation of sex and then when we get to it it’s kind of like okay now what?
Nicole: Right.
SPP: And if it’s not that desire driven thing where we have that female sitting there desiring to be with us, then yeah it kind of leaves like that taste of boredom.
Nicole: Yeah exactly. And I think that if we gave you 10,000 women and you could just have sex and they were, whatever I don’t know what particular magazine you like, but they were that caliber of woman and you could have all of them I think that even if you went through all of them you wouldn’t necessarily gratify that feeling. The place where it’s gratifying is in something deeper and it has to do with her natural desire for you. So what taking on this kind of sex as a practice does it opens her general field of desire, and low and behold it’s almost, I don’t know if I should say this, but it’s like imprinting for a duck. You’re the face that she sees as her desires actually opening. And you can hit a whole new level of intimacy with a woman when you begin to relate with sexuality in this way.
SPP: I want to ask you real quick then about desire and your experience in coaching. Because it seems that guys on the whole are probably more apt to speak their desires. Do you find that women are starting to vocalize these desires or is that something that you teach to tell them to vocalize their desires? Because we’re kind of dumb and we don’t really pick up on a lot of things unless it’s told to us directly.
Nicole: Right. Well I just lovingly want to say I don’t think you’re dumb I just think you haven’t had women who knew how to give you smart instructions. It’s like oh my God the lengths that I have watched men go through in terms of trying to figure out this little, little, tiny, tiny, tiny spot on a woman’s body. It’s often heartbreaking to me. So it’s like oh my God than you for sticking in there.
SPP: That’s funny.
Nicole: I will see that that is the Number 1 piece that I start with women is, well first of all, it’s like women are just amazed. They’re like oh my God you mean he would actually want to put attention on me. I mean I think that’s the Number 1 thing that I get through with women. Like a man would actually desire to put his attention on here. And then I think Number 2 is beginning to speak that desire. As women so much of our worth comes from our ability to curve our appetite, to be chaste the good wife kind of quality, and to not eat too much so that we’re tiny physically, and to not need too much or be too emotional.
As women for the most part we just feel like we’re too much so when a woman actually gets to express her desire to a man – I mean it’s funny it’s like we have these guys come to the classes and they’re like I just want as much sex as I can get. Then you actually get them around these women who are genuinely turned on and basically like okay. And they’re like oh no, I don’t know what to do here. So then there’s this whole other element of training me what to do in the face of a woman who has genuine desire open.
SPP: Actually I think that’s probably true and I feel like I could see that happening in your classes. I wanted to ask you about, I know you kind of base your book around what you call “Orgasmic Meditation” and I was hoping you could explain that a little bit.
Nicole: So again this is with that idea that really the only gratifying type of sex is when there is this additional element. Like the element of concentration that you find in yoga or meditation, when it’s not solely physical like aerobics. So the practice itself is very, very simple. Do you want me to tell you?
SPP: Yeah please do.
Nicole: Okay. So the woman, and in this case I’ll just use a man and a woman and the description for purposes of simplicity. So she would lie down, he would sit next to her, he would put one leg under knees, one leg over her belly, and then he would take his thumb and he would put it at the base of her introitus. Now the introitus is if you were to have intercourse the point where you would enter. With me so far?
SPP: Okay because I have no idea what that was.
Nicole: Yeah I know. I know. See there you go we have an important piece. That is called the Introitus. SPP: All right. I had a couple of other names for it, but hey.
Nicole: I bet you did. So then the next thing he would do would be to take his finger and put some lube on his finger and slide it up through the inner labia. Now the inner labia are the two small lips. And he would slide it up onto her clitoris and in the upper left hand quadrants her left upper left. So if her clitoris were a clock it would be the 1:00 position.
SPP: Right okay.
Nicole: Okay. And he strokes there. No more firmly than you would stroke a raspberry if you didn’t want juice to come out. So he would stroke there like a metronome up down, up down, up down. He would focus on his finger, she would focus on his finger, and that is the practice. And you do that for 15 minutes and you do it for 15 minutes a day. And if you do it for I don’t know 10 days, really I suggest if for 90, but if you do it for 10 days I can guarantee you my experience again and again and again and again is unbelievable opening in a woman’s body.
SPP: Why do you think that is?
Nicole: You know I kind of have this rule that I don’t talk about things I don’t know about. SPP: Okay.
Nicole: I don’t know sort of the miraculous way that it works. But I don’t know why it is that when you focus on your breath and breathing meditation that all of a sudden you have these really, really deep experiences of concentration right.
SPP: Yeah.
Nicole: The breath is just simple who would have thought of it. And I think the same thing is true with this tiny little stroke it just happens to be exactly what opens a woman’s body.
SPP: Well I guess we just won’t ask questions we’ll just oblige.
Nicole: Well and actually I like it that way. I’d prefer it in terms of like try it and see for yourself. It’s like I don’t want anyone to ever take my word for anything I’d much rather you try it and see. Because my experience is that time and again like this wonderful reporter from the New York Post Justin Rocket tried it and he came back and he was holding his finger up like it had been electrocuted. He was like what just happened? How could that little thing have such a profound affect? All of us were in the room like we don’t know we just know it works.
SPP: Yes don’t ask questions.
Nicole: Yeah. I mean you can ask questions and if I can answer them I will but if I can’t some things are outside of my very logical scientific knowing.
SPP: Right. So why is it do you think that some women can achieve orgasm easier than others. Do you think it’s a physical thing or a mental thing, or what do you think?
Nicole: Well here again I’m going to do some education. So I think every woman is orgasmic I don’t think every woman is climatic. So there’s a difference between climax and orgasm. Climax is that build, build, build, squeeze, explode, and orgasm is everything around it and sometimes including that. Does that make sense?
SPP: Kind of.
Nicole: Okay.
SPP: Chris is taking very detailed notes right now. SPP: Oh come on throw me under the bus.
Nicole: So what can happen for example, if a woman does this practice for a long enough period of time what you’ll begin to see in her genitals the minute a finger goes down, would be the exact contractions at her introitus. You would see the same flushing in her cheeks, the same ejaculate pouring from her. You would see all the same symptoms of climax but you wouldn’t have that major explosive experience. And I think it’s just some women’s bodies aren’t built for it. I think it works well in the male body I don’t know that it’s necessarily exactly what a woman’s body’s looking for. Our orgasm doesn’t tend to be as centralized, meaning a man’s orgasm tends to be very centralized in his penis right.
SPP: Right.
Nicole: For a woman it goes all the way to the very tips of her fingers all the way to the tips of her hair, like it’s just all the way out there. And so I think it’s much more spread out throughout her body.
SPP: I have another question too going back to the coaching. Everybody does kind of walking on pins and needles whenever they’re talking about sex. And it’s kind of been like that through our society for awhile where we’ve kind of been taught to be embarrassed or ashamed of sexuality.
Nicole: Yeah.
SPP: Where do you think we are as people now, especially in the United States with having that kind of being pushed away where we’re starting to not be as embarrassed or ashamed. But teenagers and their parents they’re still taught, I don’t want to say for the most part, but most people are still embarrassed to talk about it with their parents or embarrassed to talk about it with their peers.
Nicole: Yeah well I think in my experience is just, we’ve had the center for seven years, and just in the past seven years I mean the change is like exponential. How quickly the changes are occurring in this arena. I mean I have this story of we have opened the center and my business partner has this journal entry that said “Two people contacted the business today. One was the postman and the other was a wrong number.” And that was like what happened and all of a sudden now we’re on CNN, New York Times. It’s like whoa it’s exploding. And I think it’s because our culture is ready to hear it.
You know Thomas L. Friedman has this great article called The Great Disruption about basically the fact that our culture is I’d say going into climax, everything is kind of falling apart. All of the rules that we’ve known sort of like if you stay a job your whole life then you’ll get your IRA and it’ll be safe and good. And we’re discovering that those things aren’t working. In discovering those things aren’t working I think we’re coming back to basics. I think we’ve been taught a life of deferred pleasure and then all of a sudden it’s like wait a minute I deferred it and I’m not getting the rewards for deferring it. I’m actually going to have it now. So I think you’re beginning to see that in terms of food, in terms of actually taking care of our bodies in terms of our sexuality. And I think it’s just beginning to open up as an easeful thing to talk about. Now the challenge that we face is we don’t know how to talk about it.
SPP: That makes absolute sense not knowing how.
Nicole: Yeah. But I think once you get people started my experience is – I just went to a dinner party and I usually take the emotional collateral and I put my foot out, but now it’s like I started but it just caught on with great ease. So I don’t know I’m just noticing in my life it’s much easier, and definitely in the media.
SPP: No I can agree because even going in the interview you’re a little nervous how do we talk about it blah, blah, blah, but then once you get on the subject it’s just like anything else just a little more interesting.
Nicole: Exactly yeah.
SPP: I was just going to say I wanted to ask you, I know we’re approaching the end of the time, but two questions that are kind of similar might be a little different. What do you think all women wish men knew about sex? And then what do you think or what do you wish everyone knew about sex that you have learned from your research?
Nicole: I think my experience is that I think every woman would want men to know what a hurdle it is for her to admit her desire, and for her to actually begin to admit how deeply she desires sex. And I think the other piece every woman would want a man to know is that we desire sex as much if not more than you; it’s just that the cost of admitting that is great.
SPP: Now I’m a little confused because what is the cost? Because to me I mean if a woman were to admit that it’ll be like awesome. All right.
Nicole: I mean let’s be honest, you guys are smart guys right, so it’s going to be a little bit different, but I’ll tell you like you know what you guys I was called a slut. You get it?
SPP: I get it.
Nicole: And all of a sudden like I’m out there in the world as a woman who’s willing to talk about sex. I cannot tell you the things that people assume about me just because I’m willing to talk about this subject. So a woman actually admitting it is putting herself in a very dangerous position. She doesn’t know if it’s actually going to have the guy be like oh thank God I really wanted to connect with you, or if it’s going to have him say like well she’s not quite marriage material.
SPP: Right. Okay. What about further down the line? Once you are in a committed relationship and everything like that getting them to open up at that point.
Nicole: Right. Well I think if you think about it like imagine that you’ve been squeezing your hands a really long time, really tight, and then all of a sudden you say you want to open it. You know how you would have to open it more slowly, because it would kind of be cramped and your fingers would be creaky. That’s how a woman’s sexuality is. We keep it tapped down very, very tightly. So the opening has to be slow and warm with a tremendous amount of attention. And really with you as a guy saying like “I love seeing you like this.”
SPP: I really appreciate you spending this time with us. This has been one of the most fun and enjoyable, laid back interviews that we’ve done too. It was on a subject that Chris and I was kind of, not really worried about but just didn’t know how we were going to approach it, and how it was going to go. So I really appreciate you coming on here and sharing with our listeners. And I wanted to give you the opportunity to throw out any plugs that you might have for your coaching classes and your book, or anywhere else you want to point them to, your personal Web site, wherever it may be.
Nicole: Oh great. Well I have a book coming out on May 25th. Woo-ho. So everything is kind of building toward that slow sex, the art and craft of the female orgasm. And then sure we have coaching and courses, we have a whole wide online education if you feel uncomfortable about doing something in person or if you’re not in San Francisco or New York. And you can find out anything you’re interested in that domain on www.onetaste.us.
SPP: Awesome. Thank you very much.
Nicole: Yeah thank you. You guys are great to talk to and thank you for having this subject addressed on your show. I really appreciate it.
SPP: Absolutely. I’m sure our listeners will appreciate it too. It’s one that everybody has an interest in I can assure you.