Come Early, Come Often

by Gwen Cooper — August 29, 2007

There's a book proposal that's been getting a lot of buzz lately--a memoir written by a woman in her mid-30s who's never had an orgasm. Not one. Not during sex, not while fooling around, not even by herself in the privacy of her own home. The author reminisces about the various sexual encounters and adventures she's had over the years, in far-flung places all across the globe, none of which have ever culminated in a single moment of climax. And while I suppose no situation can be entirely tragic if it leads to an insightful and readable piece of writing, the premise of this book-to-be strikes me as profoundly sad.

Perhaps it seems more so to me than it would to another woman because I find myself at the other end of the spectrum--much like Chicago voters, I come early and I come often. This isn't always an unmixed blessing; when you can have orgasms fairly easily, you tend to want them fairly frequently, which (something I'm sure our male brethren can relate to) doesn't always lead to the smartest decision-making. I'll freely admit that I've selected sexual partners over the years who any sane person would have seen were bad news, simply because I was...well...horny. On the flip side, I've found that it's far easier for me to separate sex from emotional attachment and put it in it's proper place--something that frequently enhances and deepens a relationship, but that just as frequently is no more than what it is. Some of the guys I've slept with over the years might not have been the greatest guys in the world, but at least I didn't try to convince myself I was falling for them, simply because I'd ended up getting naked with them.

I've only read excerpts from this author's book (the book itself won't be published for another year or so), so I'm not sure if it will turn out she has some sort of physical problem--but I can't help hoping that such ends up being the case. I mean, it's hard to imagine a guy who hadn't discovered masturbation by his high school years, much less one who'd settle for having numerous sexual partners, but no orgasm, without pulling in a team of medical experts to figure out what the heck was wrong. It may be harder for women to have orgasms than men, but "harder" ain't "impossible." Assuming there's nothing physically wrong with this woman, I can't help feeling that she becomes emblematic of our collective failure in certain areas. No matter how much things have changed over the past few decades, society still tends to encourage men to be sexual conquistadors and women to be pillars of emotional support. And, in doing so, we end up depriving one group of full emotional maturity, and the other of significant levels of physical pleasure.

This, of course, represents my thoughts a day or so after reading the proposal. Because I'll admit that my first thought was: Oh, honey, just buy a vibrator and be done with it! There are better ways of getting a book deal...

Gwen Cooper is the author of Diary of a South Beach Party Girl, recently published by Simon & Schuster. To read all of Gwen Cooper's posts in "The Dating Life," click here.