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From: cohill@vtserf.cc.vt.edu (Andrew M. Cohill)
Newsgroups: alt.sex,alt.support,sci.bio
Subject: Re: Help--having problem with missing orgasm
Keywords: orgasm, help
Message-ID: <1791@vtserf.cc.vt.edu>
Date: 29 May 91 12:51:13 GMT
References: <1991May28.214636.2338@athena.mit.edu> <1991May29.013629.21224@eng.umd.edu>
Followup-To: alt.sex
Organization: Fire in the Mountain
Lines: 59

In article <1991May29.013629.21224@eng.umd.edu> scottk@eng.umd.edu (Scott K. Walker) writes:
>In article <1991May28.214636.2338@athena.mit.edu> cemunoz@bard (Carlos E. Munoz) writes:
>>
>>A good friend of mine approached me meekly yesterday, asking me if I could give
>>him some advise or a few words of encouragement.  It seems that his girlfriend
>>"cannot have an orgasm."  I thought that it was rather strange and unusual, so
>
>It is not the norm, but it does happen.  I beleive that the best advice is
>not to worry about it.  If they BOTH enjoy what they are doing, then go 
>with it.  It may happen, or it may not.  The worst thing that your friend
>can do is to make her feel bad about it.  If you keep trying and failing,
>then she will feel like there is something wrong...
>

Hmmmm...having been through this exact situation myself, I have to
disagree.  I would say that there is something wrong, and that ignoring
is probably not a good idea.  

Item 1:  If he is bothered by it, then it is a problem, whether or not
she is.  They both need to talk about it. Take it to it's logical
conclusion:  does this guy want to spend the rest of his life with her
like this?

Item 2:  The fact that she says it is not a problem does not mean that
it is not a problem.  My first wife had exactly this opinion;  while I
have never received the whole story from her, from what I gleaned from
observation and joint counseling, the inability to have an orgasm was
a symptom of a *lot* of repressed family stuff.  She eventually left me;
in part, I think it was because I was concerned about the sex stuff, and
that made her think about her family stuff, and so she left the person
that was making her do that:  me.


One final note:  one might be inclined to seek help from a therapist who
specializes in sexual problems. Be very careful;  the one we went to
viewed it strictly as a mechanical problem without addressing the
underlying issues.  The results (see above) were disastrous.  As I found
out later from reading and other therapists, this was pretty stupid, but
not entirely surprising.  Problems that couples have with sex are almost
*always* rooted in something else entirely (money, power, family, etc).
Reading "The Joy of Sex" ain't gonna fix much.

What did I do wrong?  I convinced myself that it was alright to ignore
her sexual problems--that we were on such good terms in other areas that
it would not matter.  In retrospect, I had lots of little warning signs
that things were not quite right, but I chose to ignore them all because
I was focused more on the notion of being married than I was on the
notion of having a healthy relationship.  I paid the price;  we lasted
exactly six months after the wedding.

Best regards,
Andy


-- 
|          ...we have to look for routes of power our teachers never       
|              imagined, or were encouraged to avoid.   T. Pynchon          
|                    
|Andy Cohill        cohill@vtserf.cc.vt.edu            VPI&SU