of time. It has nothing to do with sexual orientation and everything to do with nerve endings in the region which make it a particularly delightfully erotic experience (done properly, of course). Also, because of the taboos around the anus, for some people it’s an adrenalin high simply to traverse that forbidden territory.
After individual sessions with them both, my assessment was that someone with a robust interest in experiencing anal penetration was married to someone who thought the adult anus was the puckered passageway to Hell. We could fix that through education and information and reach a comfortable compromise because that is just the technical side of sex. The larger problem in this marriage was that they were incredibly angry people who couldn’t communicate without fighting. It was the reason their sex life was in a mess in the first place. They’d both behaved badly, and each made the other feel unloved and unvalued. The fact that each of them could talk more freely with me about sex than they could talk to one another was the first problem I addressed – it told me that they were afraid to be naked with each other. If you can’t be emotionally naked, if you can’t tell your sex partner your secrets, if you’re too angry to tolerate each other, the chances of a fulfilling sex life are virtually nil.
In Dr. Brame’s world, sex is a beautiful and bonding thing. It holds the potential for people to find relaxation, intimacy, and connection, thanks to the phenomena of sexual brain chemistry. In a happy, loving couple, sex reaffirms the romantic bond and provides you with the best free private entertainment known to humanity. It’s a privilege and a thrill to be so naked with someone – not, as some couples treat it, an invitation to rejection and criticism. Rather than a dangerous evil, sex is a natural resource adults can exploit for the good. We can tap its potential to build deeper and more lasting commitments. We can learn to communicate, negotiate, and become team-players in ways that enrich permanent relationships.
The emotional and psychological importance of sex to human health is consistently devalued by our culture. I am continually interviewed by popular magazines on “creative quickies” or “adventurous positions for orgasm” or one I did last week for Glamour on “10 places to touch him.” I do my best to be anatomically accurate but honestly, telling people to have sex in a certain way when you don’t know the people involved could be a recipe for disaster. What if one or both are too tall, too short, too fat or too skinny for a particular position? What if one of them is disabled and is numb in the place you recommend licking? It’s like when food sites promise you the recipe for a “perfect” meal and you find out it’s filled with things that give you hives.
Nothing in sex is ever gospel, neither on a broad-scale nor on a one-to-one basis. No matter how comprehensive one may try to be, sexual emotions and responses are too varied and complex to be authoritatively catalogued. There is much more to sex than techniques and anatomy. Sex is both private and social. It is intensely private in that most people don’t talk about what they do in the bedroom. But it is also very social, in that most people abide by, or at least are aware of, “rules” set by society.
What most people don’t realize is that those rules are in constant flux and, like all social customs, change, evolve, revert, and are subverted by historical, political and religious forces. In the 21st century, I must also add “technological” forces since the advent of a generation raised after the Internet was invented, and in possession of gadgets to hook up and “sext” with from puberty on, has altered the course of human sexual history.
When we look at the emerging data on sexual relationships, it’s still a chaos of unanswerables. For example, a 2012 study reported that more women are breaking their vows of monogamy than before, and that their number may soon rival or even outpace the number of male cheaters. The way it was reported and blogged about, one might think the news that wives are now fooling around almost as much as husbands is proof that Western Civilization is collapsing. The notion of women doing something men have traditionally done is terrifying. Prepare for Armageddon! At least, that’s how the story sounded, filtered through the minds of sex hysterics always on the look-out for proof that the Rapture will be triggered by a lubricated vagina.
As a sexologist, I take all such data to mean exactly what they mean: we are looking at a snapshot of human sexual behavior at a moment in time and at a particular place. Even if I trusted that this one study was definitive, it still said very little to me about overall human behavior. It is interesting only in that it suggests we live in a culture where American women feel freer than they did 20 to 30 years ago to break their marriage vows.
The key difference between now and past times is not that we are necessarily more permissive as a society: it’s that we keep more records now. But we’ve only been gathering data on sex since the Victorian era and, needless to say, have gathered it from a Victorian point of view, operating from some of their assumptions, possibly asking the wrong questions, and then acting alarmed by data that shows society is not living up to the idealized model.
To my knowledge, no such survey existed at the time but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that female adulterers were numerous during the WWII era. The draft and the War’s effect on ordinary civilians was what you’d expect: an awful lot of lonely military wives left behind in the prime of youth, surrounded by men yet to be drafted or soldiers passing through, at a time when happiness was about what you could have now because tomorrow might never come. If the statistics didn’t show massive amounts of fooling around during the war years, I’d be surprised.
What we don’t know about the history of mating and sex will always be greater than what we do know. We may know a period or place’s public face of sex, according to the dictates and precepts of the dominating religion or political system. The only assumption we can make with any certainty about the past however is that despite different customs and belief systems, humans have always been sexually creative, sexually diverse, and very horny.
Even when religious fervor was at a pitch in Medieval Europe, and a celibate monk named Albertus Magnus was describing the only correct position (missionary) for married couples – a theory which later became religious doctrine – there is abundant documentation that people carried on then just as they do now. Unmarried sex, extra-marital affairs, threeways, gay and lesbian sex and everything else many people still call abnormal have always been pretty normal for humans. As someone who has looked at tens of thousands of vintage porn photos, I’m absolutely certain that if there were webcams in the Middle Ages, we’d have footage of debauched serf orgies. Instead, we have to rely on Flemish paintings depicting them.
I find it grim how many adults are inexperienced or clumsy with sex and how many limit themselves to a tiny, sometimes monotonous repertoire of sex acts. Whether it’s the traditional couple who only have intercourse in one position their whole lives, or the kinky person who obsesses so much over toys, he or she never learns the basics of orgasmic sex, acquiring basic techniques for giving and getting sexual pleasure is a litmus test of your own ability to function as a satisfying, adult sexual partner.
If we really cared about supporting committed relationships and marriage, we would encourage grown-ups to mature sexually. Like the rest of your life, if your sex life doesn’t grow it will stagnate. In my perfect world, adults would experiment with all the different ways they can climax – oral, anal, manual, penetrative, non-penetrative – so they can have enough variety in their sex lives to sustain them and keep them interested into old age. The longer you are with someone, the more ways you should know how to turn them on and get them off. That would be a more successful model for permanent sexual partnership than telling people they can only have sex in one or two positions for the rest of their lives.
I’m more flexible when it comes to frequency. Some experts claim there is a fixed number of times it is normal to have sex. I disagree. I encourage people to orgasm regularly but I’m content with whatever is regular for them, without pressuring them to meet an artificial standard. The desire for orgasms is one
