When I was growing up there was never any embar­rass­ment over nudity at home. As divor­cees, my parents natur­ally enjoyed sexual rela­tion­ships with various part­ners from time to time.

So I have never seen any reason why I should not enjoy the same easy sexual arousal and orgasm appar­ently prom­ised by erotic fiction. Espe­cially since I have been lucky enough to have:

• enthu­siasm for erotic liter­ature, sexual fantasy and masturbation;
• a sexu­ally attractive body (pretty with a good figure);
• a close rela­tion­ship with my partner and an adven­turous sex life.

I was natur­ally curious about erot­i­cism because I recog­nised that sex was a natural part of adult rela­tion­ships. I saw sex as an adven­ture to some extent and read avidly about the exploits of pros­ti­tutes and call-girls in an attempt to under­stand how to be a ‘good lover’.

Being a ‘good lover’ appeared to involve being relaxed about nudity, phys­ical sex play and sexu­ally explicit activ­ities. I under­stood that an ‘unin­hib­ited’ woman would natur­ally be able to respond to being pleas­ured in a similar way by a man.

Even though from the very first time, I real­ised that sex was for the enjoy­ment of the men in my life, I have been willing to invest in pleas­uring them because I cared about them. Their obvious sexual frus­tra­tion meant that unless I had a good reason, I accepted going along with their desire for sex.

I came to realise that the erot­i­cism and sex play that many men hope for is often based on situ­ations where women are being paid for offering sex. The fact is that pros­ti­tutes are, after all, not enga­ging in sex for their own sexual pleasure. In other words, it’s all an act.

Never­the­less, I have always been determ­ined to make the most of my sexual exper­i­ences with a partner. I find it too humi­li­ating (and insulting to my partner) to ‘put up with’ sex, ‘lie back and think of England’ or fake orgasm.

Over time this enthu­siasm inev­it­ably has had its ups and downs but even so I have been willing to invest effort over decades in exploring ways in which my partner might be able to return the favour.

Sex for love or for money?

No one likes to admit it but men often pay for sex (whether by supporting family or paying for dates). Never­the­less, we can differ­en­tiate between: (1) sex for pleasure where men pay directly for sex and (2) sex within a loving relationship.

The proposal of the sexual revolu­tion was that the line between these two would become blurred. The sugges­tion was that in a more liber­ated world, men and women could hope to share sexual pleasure when they enter into intimate sexual rela­tion­ships.

“Certain it is that many males reach orgasm before their wives do in their marital coitus, and many females exper­i­ence orgasm in only a portion of their coitus. … Masturb­a­tion thus appears to be a better test than coitus of the female’s actual capa­cities; and there seems to be some­thing in the coital tech­nique which is respons­ible for her slower response there. … The record indic­ates that the average (median) female ordin­arily takes a bit less than four minutes to reach orgasm in masturb­a­tion, although she may need ten to twenty minutes or more to reach that point in coitus.” (p626 Sexual beha­vior in the human female 1953)

No one explains how women can hope to orgasm during sex when they need 20 minutes or more stim­u­la­tion yet younger men orgasm within a few minutes. Are there really so many generous male lovers out there?

Some­times a woman knows that some­thing is missing from sex. Other times the man suspects that his partner is faking or hopes that she would be more enthu­si­astic about sex if she could enjoy orgasm during sex as he does. In some cases, the man is much more driven by sex than the woman. In other cases the couple is keen to find new ways of making sex even better over the longer-term.

We would like to share some of these ideas with other couples, who have explored a variety of sex play together in a spirit of explor­a­tion and adven­ture and who are open to new ideas.