I was wondering… why does it feel good when my bladder is full? Is it pressing on my g-spot? I’ll even start and stop my flow during urination because it feels so good, nearly orgasmic. Why does this feel good? My body is a mystery to me.

Thank you!
Curious Pee-er

Hmmm… it sounds to me like the Miracle of Nerves! There’s considerable variation in our neurology, as well as in the way we respond to sensation. Hence, what feels noticeable but neutral to one person might feel quite delightful to another; and someone might have much better-developed nerves serving a part of the body than someone else. As we use our bodies for various activities, nerves actually grow to support the use: that helps us get better at throwing a softball or knitting a sweater, and it helps us more easily reach orgasm once we’ve stumbled onto the stimulatory path that gets us off. So my guess is that your “sensorium” – your neurology and the way your brain interprets those neural signals – has always been tuned more toward appreciation of the pee sensation, and your start-stop play (and any extra stimulation you give your bladder during masturbation, like bearing down, pressing on it physically, etc.) would help reinforce this tendency to derive pleasure, plus it would also support further nerve growth. Pretty soon you have a full-blown erotic relationship to your full bladder… just as other people have an *anti*-erotic response because their nerves send a different message.
Your sense that this all has something to do with your G-spot might be right, but doesn’t tell the whole story, because not everyone has this degree of erotic response to a full bladder even if they have an active G-spot. I’d be curious about how long you’ve noticed this pleasure to be part of your experience and whether you felt special pleasure in a full bladder and peeing even before you began to think of it as erotic – and also how this interacts with more common kinds of erotic pleasure like clitoral or vaginal stimulation. These things might have some relationship to each other – or not. Bodies! So anomalous, so wonderful!
If there are any neurology buffs out there who want to weigh in, by all means feel free.

-CQ

Related at Good Vibrations:
The Good Vibrations Guide: The G-Spot
Multi-Orgasmic Woman * Paperback
Female Ejaculation And The G-Spot

“I am looking for the most reader-relatable woman – the neighbor next door. Our demographic is working moms, so if she has kids that is a plus. I am on a tight deadline so this is an ASAP.”

Call Hallie at (631) 486-5181, or email her at hpotocki@aol.com

Question: my wife takes paxil + is also survivor of sexual abuse as a teenager = she has like 0 drive or enjoyment, sex is a 1 a mo duty - what 2 do?

You’re right that your wife’s low libido/enjoyment could be due both to the meds she’s on and her history; let’s take these things one at a time (though they could well have some connection, and it’s valuable to acknowledge this, addressing them separately is also important).

First, the meds. Paxil (paroxetine), like many other common anti-depressants, is an SSRI: a specific seratonin reuptake inhibitor. Its side effects definitely include sexual problems, which in some people tend to manifest in the desire phase, and in others with an inability to get too aroused or to reach orgasm. Ironic, isn’t it, that so many people’s anti-depressant has a truly depressing side effect like this? But I digress. It’s possible that your partner will have better luck with a different SSRI — Welbutrin is one I’ve heard some people recommend — but this is, of course, a question for her to discuss with her doctor, as is the question of whether her dose could be lowered. About.com has a brief, good overview of ways to cope with SSRI-related sexual side effects at http://depression.about.com/od/sexualdysfunction/a/sexdysfunction.htm

Your wife should also take care not to become pregnant while using Paxil; it’s associated with a heightened chance of birth defects, and it carries a black box warning; if her prescribing physician has not carefully discussed this with her, she should make sure to get all relevant information. Whether or not she wants to remain on Paxil or switch to something else, she should definitely NOT just stop taking it; this drug is associated with a high incidence of withdrawal syndrome, which can have very unpleasant side effects. Even more depressing news: for some people, sexual dysfunction associated with SSRI use may continue past the time the drugs are being taken.

It’s worth knowing, finally, whether her libido and enjoyment of sex were always zero, or whether the Paxil has seemed to make these matters worse. But now let’s consider the other element of your wife’s known sexual issues: her abusive past. As you and she likely know, unpleasant or damaging sexual experiences can have a lifelong effect. One element of this is the way being used or exploited sexually can leave a person with no sense of her (or his) own sexual agency and pleasure potential, and also little or no connection to the notion that sex CAN be (and in fact I’d almost say is *supposed* to be) about pleasure and that engaging is sex without desire isn’t what most people want to do and isn’t want most partners want us to do either. Obvious in your letter is not just concern that the two of you have little sex, but also that it is duty-bound and not desired.

Last week, in a fairly different context, I mentioned Staci Haines’s important book The Survivor’s Guide to Sex (Healing Sex). I would strongly recommend that your partner check out this resource and see whether there’s something there for her — not just for her relationship with you, but for herself. It may be that even with her Paxil-influenced arousal issues, she can still achieve sexual pleasure through masturbation, and many sexologists have noticed that women who masturbate are often *more*, not less, interested in partner sex. If relatively mild stimulation isn’t rocking her boat, maybe a powerful vibrator like the Hitachi Magic Wand will — and if that proves to be true, welcome it into bed with the two of you, because the more she gets in touch with her own body and sexual feelings, the better it will be for both of you. YOU should also make sure you masturbate, not just as if it’s your only resort until that special night rolls around next month, but to truly explore pleasure. Do it lavishly. And make sure the two of you have as much opportunity to be loving and sensual and caring together as you can. Let her know you are her ally in healing — among other things, that means you can’t push her, only support her.

One last thing about the drug/sexual abuse connection. I cannot, of course, tell whether what I’m about to say is specifically relevant to your partner, but it’s worth considering this: If someone has not begun the healing journey from a difficult, painful, or abusive past, they may well have the sorts of issues that anti-depressants are typically prescribed to address. Put another way, if life has been depressing, a doc may well think an anti-depressant is called for. But SSRIs are powerful brain meds designed to correct a chemical imbalance, and it is my personal sentiment that many people are prescribed them who’d be better served by different healing modalities.

Best of luck to you both.
–CQ

The minute they closed the door to the bedroom, she set upon the fly of his jeans. His erection was already straining at the worn denim. She unzipped him and swooned over the gorgeous sight in front of her. So smooth and pink, it looked ready for a photo shoot for a glossy magazine.

Instead she went to work, swirling her tongue over his velvety head and spiraling her hands around his shaft. Even though he suggested at one point that she stop if she wanted him to fuck her, she wanted to finish him off with her mouth. She knew how much he liked it and she liked hearing the moans and exclamations he made then that he didn’t make when he came inside her. He didn’t object a second time.

Sure enough, he lost all coherence as she sucked on his hefty balls and ran her tongue up the seam between them. He even let the word “love” tumble out of his mouth at one point, though she wasn’t sure if he said he loved her or just loved what she was doing. She took it all with a grain of salt at this point. She finished him off with a concentrated assault on the head and some vigorous pumping on the shaft as he grabbed at her hair and groaned with abandon.

“What about you?” he asked afterward. “What would you like me to do for you?”

“How about you just lie back and I’ll show you what I like?” she suggested.

They’d had sex several times, and he had been eager to please her each time. But there were always tricks that only a woman knew about herself and what brought her pleasure. And she’d had so little good sex for so many years, she had caught on early that the only way she’d be satisfied is if she took matters into her own hands. Those hands had gotten pretty skilled over the years.

“God, I love seeing you touch yourself,” he said. This seemed to be a new thing for him. Maybe most women didn’t have to do this if they had a guy around. Lucky them. Maybe they just felt self-conscious. Well, she’d gotten past that, hadn’t she?

He was already grinning as she lay back on the pillows, unbuttoned her blouse and revealed a lacy demi-bra, black with pink rosebuds. She ran her fingers over the scalloped edge of one cup, down the gentle slope into her cleavage, already dewy, and up the other side.

She skimmed her hands down over her breasts, leaving on the bra to get her money’s worth out of it. She moved lightly down over her stomach, past her belly button to the edge of her jeans. She scooted the waistband down to show the matching string bikini. She toyed with the lace there and lifted her eyes to him in a tease. He was already hard again and his eyes were dancing.

“I can’t believe you,” she laughed.

She returned to business, slipping her fingers under the panties and up and over her mound, light with hair. She was already aroused from her oral exploration of his cock, so the second she got to her clit, the electricity was on. She knew she had a head start on things and it wouldn’t take long to complete this little lesson for him.

That first delicious sensation was enough to elicit a sigh, and that was all it took for him to spring over to her and start kissing her on her stomach. He kissed around the sides of her breast and pulled down the lace to suck at a nipple.

“You drive me crazy,” he told her.

“Thanks. But just watch for now,” she said.

He leaned back again, and she removed her panties so he could see her hand in motion. She first put two fingers on either side of her clit and rubbed up and down. As the feeling spread, she began making circles around a larger area. In their previous times together, he had always paid attention there, but often he would poke at the thing like it was the on/off button on the TV. It wasn’t quite the action she needed, but she decided to show him a more effective alternative rather than say anything.

As she got more aroused she let her head tip back. In between the circles, she ran a finger down to the entrance of her vagina, circled it, then returned again to her clit, pushing down harder and moving her hand faster. Her hand swept over the whole area now, pushing into the bone that sheltered that exquisite font of pleasure.

She opened her eyes to look at him and saw him stroking his hard cock, murmuring encouragement to her. She closed her eyes for the final stretch, picturing him with his cock in hand and thinking of his excitement growing along with hers. If she were alone, she could conjure up scenes from their previous lovemaking. As she got close, she would often think of him and the things he said right before he came, always full of more passion than sense. That surrender was usually enough to push her over the edge.

But today she just had to think of him there next to her, so excited by watching her, and she felt the warmth start to spread in that wonderful moment when the mind can let go and let the body take over. Her orgasm washed over her and she gave herself up to it, arching her back and pushing into her hand. As it subsided, she removed her hand, wet and slick now, leaving behind even more wetness that – judging from the leer in his eyes – would not go to waste for long.

Gallery: Pink Pleasure Party at Valencia Good Vibrations:

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From Misty, Senior Buyer:

After spending a few hours taking in the sights at the hot-in-the-shade Dolores Park I headed over to our Valencia store to get ready for the Dyke March. It was amazing – Dykes on Bikes, bicycles, and scooters rolled past revving their engines, cheering and waving to us as we cheered back waiting to hand out discount cards to the marchers! As usual the march was a blur as person after person came through – in all states of dress, undress, costumed and more!

Our Pink Pleasure Party was a flurry of activity with people coming in off the streets to enjoy our Lusty Lady Go-Go dancers, take a spin on our Wheel-of-Pleasure, nibble the treats (including a rainbow & unicorn themed cake), buy raffle tickets benefiting the Center for Sex & Culture and taking in loop-preview of Reel Queer Productions first release – Roulette. Both director and a few of the stars were on hand for signings and chatting people up!

Sunday was incredible – our shimmer-and-shine float was packed with queens including THE Dr. Carol Queen and an amazing country band who twanged along the entire route! We were all decked out in our country-western best and handing out coupon cards and give-aways from our some of our vendors! There were marchers from our three Bay Area stores as well as folks Vibratex and LELO! We had country dancers, representatives from Olivia Cruises and more… it was a blast and amazing to hear the crowds cheer for us when we walked by! It was a long hot route but I was thrilled to be a part of it!

From D in Merchandising:

Good Vibrations turned up the heat in the city on one HOT pride day! The crowds and participants were all enthusiastic and amazing!

From Managing Director Jonathan Plotzker:

Floating down Market St to the cheers of adoring fans (customers) was exhilarating!

From Steve Duncan, Creative Director:

SF Pride is such an amazing celebration of diversity and self expression It was an honor to be able to celebrate it this year with all of the fans of Good Vibrations and with our wonderful vendors, Olivia Cruises, Dr. Carol Queen, our LGBTQ community partners, the Foggy City Square Dancers and the Western Star Square Dancers and “the all-gal, honky-tonk” band, the Dosie Dildos, who rocked our float all the way down Market Street”.

It is an honor to start Good Vibrations’ Pride Celebration curating Joey Plaster and Gabriela Hasbun’s multimedia presentation “Polk Street Stories Project; Lives in Transition” at our Polk Street Store. It is a moving and honest testament to the many people who pioneered San Francisco’s first gay neighborhood and the transitions, over the last three decades, that neighborhood has undergone. The exhibition runs through August 25 in Good Vibrations Polk Street Store’s Gallery Space.

Good Vibrations’ Post Dyke-March Pink Pleasure Party at our Valencia Street Store is always one of my favorite SF Pride Events. This year we celebrated with over 1,100 fans of G.V., partying with a live DJ, Olivia Cruises (whom we’re partnering with on their Halloween Cruise), LELO and queer artist and NoFauxxx.com film director Courtney Trouble. This was the third year that I’ve been involved with the party and each year it gets better and better.

Marching with Good Vibrations in this year’s Pride Parade has a very special meaning to me. My family was with me marching in the contingent, including my gay partner and our 19 year-old gay son. What a way to spend Pride Sunday than to march with Good Vibrations promoting sex positivity and true family values!

Gallery: Marching on Sunday

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From Camilla Lombard, Events Coordinator:

I cannot imagine a bigger thrill than performing and participating in the best parade in the world! There was so much love and creativity expressed, it’s a memory I will always cherish. The Dosey-Dildos were thrilled to be a part of the Good Vibes float. That’s one for the grand-kids!

From Nyx in Marketing:

It was so inspirational to watch the Dykes on Bikes roar down Valencia Street outside of Good Vibrations’ Mission store. As one woman rode by and flashed her post-mastectomy breasts, she shouted “5 year survivor!” I thought about how all of these women were survivors in their own way. I felt proud to support them as they celebrated themselves and their community.

While waiting to march with the Good Vibrations contingent, I considered the place this Pride Parade held in the current political climate. I thought about how much this community had struggled in the past, just to get where they were today, facing more struggles in the future. I felt like I was a part of something important, the fight to recognize rights, and the truth that everyone deserves equality.

From the Internets

Our award winning float! (Earphone warning: the crowd is cheering very loudly!)

Camilla is interviewed!

Related Links:

Violet Blue’s Miss California’s Pride Guide * SF Pride’s Website * NowPublic Pride Parade

Related Products at Good Vibrations:

Shopping Guide for FtM and Transmen * Gay DVDs * LGBT / Queer Erotica

I get the appeal, I really do. Not only is the idea of you or your loved one bound and restrained very sexy but it comes with the extra naughty notion that police officers use handcuffs on bad people. Haven’t we been playing cops and robbers since we were little kids? Who hasn’t tied up their best friend in a chair and interrogated them for an hour? That isn’t just me right?

Okay, so here is where fantasy can mix with reality. We have super sexy restraints made of leather, sometimes fuzzy on the inside and always a backup accessory to go dancing at bondage a-go-go. Don’t like leather? Are you vegan or just plain prefer man-made materials? We also have restraints made of felt or neoprene (a spongy, machine washable material). Maybe this is just a gag gift that may actually be used later on. The felt Cuff Loves are pretty cheap at 12 bucks a pair. Come on, give it a try. You just might like it…

The Cuff Love

Leopard Restraints

A lot of different things come up for me around this. First, I’ll admit to having a judgment- I get squicked by his actions and it’s not easy to figure out where my squick affects what I think about it. That’s one of the challenges with dealing with sexuality- we often enact laws around sexual behaviors that have more to do with our (or our lawmakers’) sense of disgust than any real or potential harm that has been caused. For a really dense, but interesting read on that, check out the book Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law.

At the same time, I have to ask who he has actually harmed. I’m sure that there will be plenty of people who will argue that if this guy is using these photoshopped images for masturbation, it’s a short distance to acting those fantasies out with a real child. This is the slippery slope model of sexuality and while it can sometimes be a reasonably accurate way to describe some situations, it gets applied with a broad brush. Once we accept that the slippery slope is inevitable, it’s easy to conclude that we need inflexible boundaries around what we do since that’s the only way to keep from sliding into the pit. But the slippery slope is often about a story that we make up in our heads about what we believe will happen, rather than an accurate reflection of the situation.

Even when the slippery slope model is an accurate description of the behavior of large groups of people, it’s often not accurate when describing an individual. The fact is, we don’t know what he might have done in the future. There are those who would argue that we can’t take a chance on his hurting a child. Yet, that flies in the face of our legal system’s presumption of innocence, as well as the fact that if we could get prosecuted for thinking of committing a crime, we’d all be in jail for something.

There’s also a way that we use cases like these to pretend that we don’t (as a culture) sexualize youth in general and girls in particular. There’s a part of me that wonders what the real difference is between what he did and the way that photoshop is used in every single image that we see in advertising and other media. For example, here’s a before-and-after series of celebrity photos (click on the porfolio link at the top of that page and roll the mouse over the photo to see the unaltered version) in which people are made skinnier, skin tones are lightened & evened out, hair is lightened, and eyes are made bigger, all of which are markers of youth (lighter hair as a marker of youth is specific to white people, of course).

Most people look at sexualized images of women that have been modified to look younger or even child-like, and see them as nothing more than everyday images. But what if the man in Tennessee had had the photoshop skills to make the faces of the women in the nude photos look like girls without having to do a cut and paste from photos of actual girls? Is there a difference? At what point does that cross a line? When does making someone look young turn into child porn?

Ultimately, the ostensible reason for laws against child porn is that it harms children. But they also get used by many people to convince themselves that they’re not like those evil people “over there”. And when we do that, we lose sight of the fact that, on some level, we’re surrounded messages that equate youth and sexiness. If we were to actually take a serious look at that, folks like this guy might not seem like they’re as different from everyone else as we like to think.

Cases like this make me wonder what it would be like to live in a world where wisdom and experience were seen as sexy. I doubt that we’ll ever have a world in which youth and inexperience, especially female sexual inexperience, isn’t prized. But what if we also honored the gifts that come with age? But that’s a topic for another day.

The most obvious issue for me is that despite all of the social changes that have taken place over the last century, for the most part, we generally still see pregnancy as something that women do (or as something that happens to women). Of course, it is something that takes place within women’s bodies. But even the increasing number of people who say things like “we’re pregnant” doesn’t change the fact that for most people,  it’s “she’s pregnant.” And that’s reflected in the way that men talk about hormonal birth control.

There’s a lot of resistance from guys around taking a birth control pill that has unwanted effects, even though women have been doing that for decades and that the male versions seem to have fewer unwanted effects. And a lot of men are caught up in the idea that fertility = masculinity, even though women have been able to overcome their version of that. I think that part of the issue is that there’s nobody championing male birth control and modeling that taking a birth control pill doesn’t make you less of a man.

Of course, a male pill wouldn’t protect you against STI. And there’s always the question of how you’d know for sure that your partner was using it. But if you have the sorts of sex that make birth contol relevant, what would keep you (or your partner) from using it? What would make it more likely?

Seeking Volunteers for a Study Addressing Menopause and Sexuality

What are some of the issues that affect sexuality during menopause? African American and Caucasian women are needed for a study addressing questions about menopause. Participants must be women between the ages of 40 and 60, experiencing menopause, English speaking, currently not taking hormone replacement therapy (HRT) or on hormonal birth control, in a relationship with a sexual partner, and without major medical or mental health problems. Participation requires completing an online or paper survey. Some volunteers who live in the Washington, DC metropolitan area may also be eligible to participate in a substudy that involves a small blood draw. Participants in the blood draw substudy may be compensated. For more information, please contact Robert Clark, MS, at 301-295-9666 or at menopausestudy1@gmail.com. This research study is sponsored by the Uniformed Services University,
Department of Medical and Clinical Psychology, in Bethesda, Maryland. You can access the on-line survey here:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=VcP8PJrCyVoqmjAp9o3BJw_3d_3d

This study was endorsed as a meritorious research project on January 30, 2009 by the CARAS Research Advisory Committee, a community advisory board hosted by the Community-Academic Consortium for Research on Alternative Sexualities (CARAS).

For more information on CARAS, please visit the CARAS website at https://www.caras.ws . Download the current CARAS Calendar at https://www.caras.ws/downloads/CARAS_Calendar.pdf