Free Vagina by Naomi Wolf

self-love; if a sexual experience had ever led them to see better the connections between things; and if, on the other hand, periods of sexual loneliness, depression, or frustration had negatively affected their confidence, creativity, and energy. Their answers confirmed that the young scientists, the actress, and I were not so aberrant in our gender.
    A typical question-and-answer e-mail went as follows:
NW: Has a really profound sexual experience ever affected your confidence levels?
RESPONDENT: Yes.
NW: Given you more energy?
RESPONDENT: Yes.
NW: Made you like yourself more?
RESPONDENT: Yes.
NW: Boosted your creativity? If so, please specify how.
RESPONDENT: I am a painter, and did an artist’s residency in Vermont for a month about a year ago. I was away from my husband at the time. Because of the private space that I was provided, I ended up delving into [sexual] memories dealing specifically with past relationships. Having a good relationship—both sexually and otherwise—does boost my self-confidence, and my motivation to pursue my artwork . . . after visiting my husband mid-residency, I returned [to work] feeling more confident, and had more self-love. Someone at the residency commented, “You look really nice today,” and I’m sure it was because seeing my husband had boosted my confidence.
    Women from many different backgrounds e-mailed me in droves. Many women spoke of unusually profound orgasms—not the everyday kind—as experiences that were followed with a sense of unusual power, energy, and confidence; of self-love; and of the world sparkling.
    “Laura,” a British thirty-four-year-old administrative assistant, wrote to me. “I met someone at work,” she confided, “and we developed a fast attraction. It was very quick for me and I suspect he was interested in me for a while. Anyway, we had a go, and a really good sexual experience that changed me deeply. My confidence level shift was immediate; I stood taller and walked stronger. More energy? Every day for two months I woke up and exercised, joyfully. I loved my self more too; started getting pedicures to express it. Creativity? I played guitar every night, and learned four new songs. Connections between things? This relationship restored a dormant psychic ability that has enhanced all of my thinking since. Conversely: that relationship has not continued. Lately I have begun to grieve and miss it; mostly I miss all of the above.” She went on, “I am sad and feel the return of my old stories of negative self-image, of rejection. I find this to be strange, and unsettling to experience.” She concluded poignantly, “I have also tried sleeping with other men and have not felt anywhere near this influx [of feelings].”
    Laura wrote that she was orgasmic with the other men; indeed, even more so than with the one with whom intimacy caused such an awakening. Many other women echoed this idea, that what was transformative to them in those profound sexual experiences was not a simple matter of the quantity of orgasmic “fireworks.” What was transformative for them was something subjective about the quality of the orgasm that merged the physical realm with the realm of emotions or perception: the intensity that it created, and in turn the confidence and creativity it unleashed.
    I asked this same set of questions of an old friend “Patrice,” a woman my own age who was now an accomplished businesswoman. We were sitting out in her back garden in a pretty suburb of what I will say, to conceal identities, was Ann Arbor, Michigan. She had a postage-stamp garden; her laundry was drying in the sun on a line just beyond us; and her six-year-old boy was playing with a friend in the glass conservatory that we could see from where we were sitting at an outdoor table by a plot of herbs. She looked like a perfectly “ordinary” wife and mother in her forties. Oddly enough, though we had talked frankly about our sex lives for twenty-three years, since we