Jackalope: The Truth about the Big O

Going for the full magilla: Carolina Poe now has a Facebook account

Friend 'em if you got 'em.

Here's the outline

I laughed my ass off writing it.

Introduction (My experiences/Why I wanted to write this book)
·         Faking it: I wasted my 20s. (No, not with you.)
·         Shame over taking longer to come than my male partners
·         Guilt: “Normal” women are able to do this, aren’t they?
·         Buying into Movie Sex bullshit: No, in fact, this is pretty rare
·         Not talking about it, or why it’s important to get real with our friends
 
Physical
·         Common wisdom, or what you’ve heard all your life (and why it’s not true)
·         What doctors say
·         What sex writers say
·         The Orgasm Loop (give credit)
·         Other considerations
o   Be happy with your body, no matter what size
o   Practice makes perfect: let me introduce you to the shower massager (AKA Running the tap suddenly becomes arousing)
o   Maybe it is a jackalope: why you should feel free to ignore everything in this book
o   Maybe men ought to have to work at it: why the very question of clitoral vs. vaginal orgasms is bullshit
 
Spiritual
·         Tantra: hello, big O
·         Meditation: Out of the blue
·         Zen: Not attaching to outcomes
·         Animal: Remember that first you are an animal; proceed accordingly.
·         Sacred Feminine: When all else fails, remember that women have been objects of beauty and lust for eons, and you, my beFallopianed friend, are no different. Seeing sex as worship.
 
Sisterhood:
·         Stories from very honest women
·         Stories from not-so-honest women
·         Stories from righteous bitches who want you to suffer (i.e., the ultra-conservative point of view)
·         Stories from men, who may or may not have been deceived
·         The original story: Eve’s point of view
o   World religions and sex – stories and attitudes

Jackalope: Now on Twitter!

I figured, what the hell. Apparently my twitter address is http:twitter.com/carolinapoe -- I suppose that makes me @carolinapoe? I don't know. I do know that I will do my best not to Twitter needlessly. 

BTW: Hello Stop, Eli and Jude! mwah! mwah! mwah!

I'm writing about about your vagina.

OK, not your vagina specifically, although maybe someday. Do you have a particularly glittery vagina? Because that could be interesting. 

 

I should just turn off the comments right now.

 

Here's the deal: I'm writing a book about sex, specifically women's sexual health, even more specifically whether or not the vaginal orgasm exists, and if it does, should we be falling all over ourselves to figure out how to do it, or should we write it off as this year's pet rock?

 

Arguments for: Those who've had it say the vaginal O is way better than the clitoral kind: deeper, stronger, longer. Like, you see the face of God longer. And hey! Who am I to turn that shit down? Also, wouldn't that make quickies, like, totally irresistable? Let me tell you, if I could turn 5 minutes in a stairwell into 5 minutes in heaven, I'd do it. All the time.

 

Arguments agin: This is where my feminista friends get riled. Part of the reason I am writing this book is because I believe there are women out there who think that just because they don't operate the way men do--that being, men can come if they rub up against a table leg for 30 seconds--that it's too much trouble, or they're too ashamed to ask, or they feel guilty that they can't come on command, not having been marinated in testosterone their entire lives.

 

In short, they feel like a failure for not being able to achieve Movie Sex (or Romance Novel Sex), where, with apparently no clitoral stimulation whatsoever, a woman comes her brains out. In about 20 seconds.

 

Obviously Movie Sex is total horseshit, and yes, women operate differently than men do Down There. So the argument goes, why shouldn't men have to work to give us an orgasm? What's so special about this mythical vaginal O, and why should we promote that backward, chauvinist line of thought: Why can't they be more like us? 

 

I have to tell you, I am deeply swayed by this. Men should commit to their women reaching climax just like women commit to their men reaching climax. And if it takes a little longer, so be it. That's the way we're made. Who can argue with that?

 

It should be said that the ones making this argument are the ones who can whip one out in two minutes flat. Two minutes flat! Isn't that some kind of land speed record? I am sorry to say that I myself am not so blessed, although if that's what doing your Kegels'll do for you, I'm all in. In fact I just did 20. Whoop! Another 10! Get down.

 

But I digress.

 

Here's the other thing: When you tell people you're writing a book about sex, you get three things: you get people who stare at you, politely appalled and wondering how quickly they can get away. You get people with opinions. And you get people with stories.

 

Lord, do you ever. People--and OK, it's mostly people of the be-wanged persuasion--cannot shut their traps about the girl I knew from college who wanted to write a photography book about strippers, and her photography wasn't very good but the manager at the Lusty Lady said if she wanted to take the photos in the first place, she would have to work there as a stripper herself... I wonder if I still have her number.

 

Yes, thank you, mister man. This ain't that kind of party.

 

In fact, with any luck, this book will have none of the following things on the cover:

• Naked people, doing anything: gardening, vacuuming, showing off a Technique. No.
• A woman shown from the torso down, wearing boy shorts and pressing her knees together as if she were 6 instead of 26. No.
• The words ORGASM, SEX, or VAGINA. No.

I want this book to be a book you could read on the bus, a book you could lend to a girlfriend without blushing. A book whose cover you would not be ashamed to show the guy behind you in line at the post office.

This is why I want the title of my book to be Jackalope: The Truth about the Big O.

I'm in this nonfiction proposal class, and for the last two weeks, when it's my turn to introduce my book and do whatever little riff we're doing that day, I have gotten no laughs, not one, when I popped out my title. Not one!

Until Jackalope + Big O, that is. Once I hit that, people laughed, which is important. If I do it right, this book will be The Girlfriend's Guide to Pregnancy, only about the vag--yes, all right, yours--instead of the uterus.

I mean, there was a reason nobody laughed. The titles, up to now, have been terrible. Well, you be the judge: here's the complete list, in chronological order, with thanks to Jen for laughing her ass off when I came up with the first one.

1. Zen and the Art of the Vaginal Orgasm
2. Dirty Lies: Why You Can't Come
3. Jackalope: Does the Vaginal Orgasm Exist?

It's true that the term "vaginal orgasm" does not exactly roll off the tongue. It's not one of those inherently funny words, like poontang. Never underestimate the power of a well-placed poontang.

But back to my comfort zone, which we are out of.

My comfort zone around sex is courtesy of my mother the home health nurse, in that while we do not use cutesy-poo phrases to describe sex or anything that goes along with it, we also talk as little about sex as possible, except to our doctors, our husbands (but only if necessary), and of course, ON THE INTERNET.

Oh: There are so many, many problems with writing this book--the first of which is that I have to write it without smelling phantom poontang. (See?)

It is an unfortunate side effect of writing a book about the vagina that in talking about the vagina, certain sensory details come to mind.

This has eased off somewhat, but the first time I had to look a bunch of strangers in the eye and tell them that I was writing a book about the vag--and mind you, in person, I look like a kindergarten teacher; no one would ever sell me dope in high school--well, let's just say that the women in the class looked politely appalled, and the men in the class looked like they were listening to one of those oily porn soundtracks. 

I decided to lighten things up.

"The audience for my book is, obviously, sexually active women from 30-60 and, of course, the all-important 12-year-old boy demographic."

No joy.

So I changed tack, hitting the feminism angle hard, busting out all the 10-dollar words I know: polemic, psychographic, more with the little accent over the E. I thought that by getting all smartypants about it, people would at least start nodding their heads, like, Yeah, I know a womens-studies course where they talked about that.

This did not happen. In fact, people stopped making eye contact with me.

It was like I'd thrown a rotting 50-pound chinook onto the table and then invited them all to take a big whiff. Even the men were starting to look embarrassed, although they were still making eye contact. With my nipples.

That squicked me out, so I gave it one last shot and appealed to the ladies. "I'm an ex-crime reporter, so I'm the ideal person to write the book--having covered men's crimes for years."

Har! Har! Yeah. Nothing.

So I smiled prettily and took a deep breath, as if I hadn't just outed myself as a) a woman who wanted really ripping orgasms, b) a woman who doesn't know how to have them vaginally, and c) a woman who will sacrifice her dignity to find out.

After all, when in doubt, just breathe. Try not to think about vaginas. Remember your mother was in the Junior League. Sort of.

There was a brief silence. The instructor, a fine woman whose classes I will be taking more of, smiled kindly at me, said something nice, and we moved on: to the second travelogue, the third book for foodies, and a book about how to invest in a down economy. By the time we got to the woman who is writing a book about kittens, I was busily fanning the flames of my shame, too busy to hear who her demographic was. Probably women aged 30-60 who are sealed at the Fallopian tubes.

Now, obviously, even if this goes south on me--particularly if this goes south on me--this could all be comic gold. And so I am going to ride this thing like SeaBiscuit, which is why I've created this blog.

So if you're not into reading about one near-40s girl's struggle to maintain her dignity while writing on the topic known as the vajayjay, kindly move on, and leave the giggling to me and my friends.

Oh, and if you decide to stick with me, get used to the word vag. It's strangely addictive. Thank you, Diablo Cody.