Fight

Here sex is an arena for domination. The genitals are used to impress, control, and perform with a compulsive pride in the capacity to please the partner. Underneath are feelings of shyness, insecurity, and fear of being passive or dominated. The person tends to deny any need for pregenital pleasure for themselves although they may be keen on giving the partner such pleasure. Their own proof of potency is at the genital level. They "make the partner come," using their genital as an instrument. The use of the erect penis as an instrument of power is well known and part of phallic symbolism. But the vagina too can be used in this way. Where there is relatively little armor, this active satisfaction of genital needs is healthy. In chronic fight the person is heavily armored in the upper back, chest, and shoulders. The genital area is like a weapon wielded under orders from the rigid upper body. The person never loses control.

Movement is aggressive and vigorous, sometimes harsh. There is sometimes a degree of fright-rigidity in the chronic attack. Where this exists, movement is mechanical, efficient, compulsively impressive and controlling. The person would experience anxiety and fear loss of control if movements were to become more fluid and undulating.

If your sexual behavior is dominated by aggression and a fight ER, you may be getting away with it, and thus not feel any need to venture into your underlying anxiety. But you will know that the anxiety is there: remember how careful you have to be to make love right. As the partner of such a person you may find it hard to convince them that they need to let go of their dominant attitude. You may have to tell them you do not like it. At the same time, in spite of their apparent invulnerability, you will have to reassure them that it is safe to surrender control. It is in people with this ER that orgasm anxiety (see page 154) is most intense.

Once the control held in the muscles of the chest segment is let go, a strong flow of excitation is released downward into the pelvis. Sometimes there is a sudden contraction against the increased flow and a sudden loss of potency: the phallic performer unexpectedly fails to get an erection, or loses it; or the woman who can "always come" efficiently, finds herself lost and bewildered with little genital sensation. The fragility of the person in this situation must be respected by both partners. The feelings of powerlessness and fear of being overwhelmed by the partner are precisely what the whole potency performance has been hiding. Potency eventually returns quite rapidly once trust in the partner is established. Strong sexuality tends to reestablish itself even after setbacks.

Work on the mat is toward softer feelings. Chest rigidity covers heart feelings. These are the people who have not been able to give their heart, and they do not feel their heart melt when they make (emphasis on make) love. Unlike the flight oriented people, these people are well focused—in sex, well focused on the genitals. They have to be encouraged to back off a little, to take in more of what is happening emotionally, to make contact with the partner over a wider range, to let the other person in. Again a paradox: these very aggressive, competent, sometimes prickly people must be treated gently, as if fragile. Their ER of attack is provoked easily by the fear of attack from others.

This summary of how the various chronic Emergency Responses operate in sex may seem depressing. So much can go wrong! But remember your own experience: probably there have been at least a few times when everything has gone right. Don't forget how simple it is to make love when anxiety has been left behind. It may be worth discussing external changes that have occurred in your lives since things did go right; you may be more upset than you realize by current conditions in your life.

Understanding how anxiety can undermine sexual contact is a very big step in itself. You are in a love relationship, not just trying to achieve technical proficiency. Despite the nuts-and-bolts approach to genital contact here, these are not techniques for giving your partner an orgasm. Orgasms are not given, they happen. I have mentioned how, in the fight ER, the person tries to control the partner by requiring that they have an orgasm. It is easy to fall into this trap but it is counterproductive because it creates anxiety in the partner.

As a rule of thumb, you can assume that any measure you take to decrease your own awareness of anxiety in sex will add to your partner's: the only way out is to resolve anxiety together. Although I have emphasized understanding the partner, self-understanding is an important prerequisite. If you are happy in your sexual experience and orgasm, this is enough: your partner will love you all the more if you leave them free to follow their own feelings without your control, whether technically they have a full orgasm or not.

Pulsation

Modern clinical accounts of the sexual act usually ignore pulsation. This may be because natural sexuality is not easily observed in a laboratory, and because modern science restricts itself entirely to the mechanical. But pulsation is readily observable at various levels as follows:

The entire process of excitation rising in intensity and falling to relaxation.

The orgasm convulsions themselves, which are observably an alternating contraction and expansion of the body.

Tumescence (swelling) and detumescence (return to normal) of the genitals in both sexes.

The movements of intercourse: undulation of the body back and forth between expansion (extension of the trunk) and contraction (flexion).

A constant expansion/contraction of the genitals throughout intercourse.

Expansion and contraction of the genitals at orgasm.

Many people move too fast in intercourse because of anxiety or a habit and it indicates predominance of voluntary pushing and pumping. Involuntary movement, on the other hand, is seldom faster than the breathing which is usually about fifteen breaths per minute. In the excitement of making love the breathing may increase to a rate approximately equal to the normal heartbeat-but by this time the heart also will have speeded up. About one full breath per second is all that is humanly possible, even at the height of excitement, except in very shallow panting which involves only the upper chest. The latter carries some danger of hyperventilation and a flight away and up from the abdominal sensations of sexual excitement.

The explorations will probably have shown the correspondence between full breathing and movement, and pulsation. Full breathing out naturally goes with a reaching forward of the pelvis and genitals. Not that this synchronization is unchangeable: sometimes response to sensations or to movements from the partner will vary the rhythm. The process is not a mechanical pumping. To move slowly at times may prolong the pleasure. It is natural, even, to resist being entirely swept away in the early stages of intercourse, and some degree of resistance can intensify sensation. The movement and breath both vary considerably but are not unrelated. It might be most accurate to say that breathing and movement in sex, while not exactly synchronized, are coupled.

Just as breathing is observably a pulsation, so the undulating movements of intercourse form a part of this pulsation in an intensified form.

Given a level of sexual excitation, an unarmored person will usually experience spontaneous contraction of the muscles of the pelvic floor and genitals toward the end of the out-breath. This pulls the penis forward and up, as if to intensify the movement into the vagina by reaching still further in, and the sensations match this. The contraction of the vagina at about the same time acts to grip the penis and pull it further in. Thus the contractions of the genitals are coupled to the movements of the pelvis and the moment of maximum penetration along with intensified sensation. The man's and the woman's genitals pulsate rhythmically together in this shared expansion and contraction; individual sensations are intensified simultaneously, leading to an increasing sense of fusion.

This genital pulsation, beginning as sporadic contractions during the first phase of coitus and becoming established as a constant, rhythmic process during the involuntary phase, is not mentioned in the mechanistic literature on sex. It is well known that women can increase vaginal sensation through deliberate squeezing movements (as in Kegel exercises for promoting tonicity of the genital area), and some do this also to please the man by squeezing the penis. It is less well known that in potent women such a conscious effort will begin to trigger involuntary and regular pulsations in the vagina.

Pulsation in the female genitals involves both the vagina and the clitoral area and unifies genital sensations. The old controversy about clitoral vs. vaginal orgasms is thus resolved. As Masters and Johnson point out, the connections between clitoral and vaginal sensations are so close as to render them almost inseparable. The clitoris, having the denser concentration of nerve endings, is generally conceded to yield more immediate sensation. Once pulsation is identified as the major source and sign of genital excitation, the vagina can be recognized as the main focal point of female sexuality with the clitoris playing an essential role in the build-up of the excitation.

Similarly, in the man the pulsation of the genitals involves the whole area of the pelvic floor, including scrotum and testicles and probably the prostate internally, though concentrated in the penis. The densest site of nerve endings is at the tip of the penis, but sensation centers in the penis as a whole, and is apt to spread over the much wider area involved in the pulsation.

In fact, the whole concept of nerve endings as the main source of sensual pleasure becomes dubious in the face of reports of melting waves radiating through the whole body from the genitals; of absorption in a softly exploding bubble of sensation; or of momentary transformation into a ball of light.

A further pulsation which can be identified in orgasm, although it is not externally observable, is the reported sensation of becoming, at the moment of orgasm, a melting mass which suddenly expands beyond the confines of the body then contracts back within its boundaries again.

The normal rate of genital contractions at climax, according to Masters and Johnson, is one spasm every four-fifths of a second. This comes near to the normal heart rate of sixty-eight to seventy-two beats per second and is actually a sudden acceleration of the preceding pulsatory rhythm of genital penetration.