Free Vagina by Naomi Wolf Page A

first met, we had never talked about the possible connection I had set before her, simply because it had never occurred to me. She looked at me, again, as other women had, with that abrupt expression of surprise and recognition.
    “Oh my God,” she said, and started laughing. “Ohhh . . . Naomi. Wow. Oh, definitely. I can have perfectly fine sex most of the time, fine orgasms, and what you are talking about does not happen. But then, once in a while, there are those amazing times just after sex like that, you feel—oh, things are electric! And you have insights about your work. It is like you get some kind of superpowers. And you just want to run a marathon, or write an opus. Climb the Alps!” She was laughing hard now. “But,” she cautioned, “it is not every time, by no means every time. I mean, I wouldn’t want it to happen every time, right? Because you would never want to do anything else if it did, or else you would be walking around in a creative mania all the time. If it happened every time, you would never get out of bed.”
    Does really special sex, sex that engages the vagina, emotions, and body in very specific ways—ways that involve very concrete kinds of activation of the parasympathetic nervous system—actually lead to female euphoria, creativity, and self-love?
    “Laura,” whom we met earlier, eloquently described this transformation of her whole self via sexual experience as “strange and unsettling” to go through. This sense of bafflement or mystification at our own reactions as women came up many times in the e-mail responses I received. If we don’t understand our own neurology and biochemistry in sex and love, our own female selves can be very “unsettling” to us.
    What had happened to us? What had happened to the actress who was transformed in an erotic ecstasy onstage? What had happened to the scientist who saw new connections in her lab, and to the entrepreneur who “wanted to write an opus”?

5
    What We “Know” About Female Sexuality Is Out of Date
They had laughed and made love and laughed again . . .
—Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love
    T his journey showed me, to my surprise, that even though we talk about sex all the time, the information we have about female sexuality is generally out of date. If women had easy—or at least easier—access to and could draw on the new scientific discoveries about female sexuality, which have not been widely reported, they would have a much deeper understanding of their own sexual and emotional responses—and could feel far more sexually alive and connected. Many of these new discoveries illuminate our conflicted feelings vis-à-vis our drive to be loved, and speak directly to the need for men and women to engage with what I will call “the Goddess Array,” the set of behaviors that activate the autonomic nervous system in women.
    Sex educator Liz Topp, author of Vaginas: An Owner’s Manual, in an eye-opening interview with me (in which she reported that senior girls in high school, even in our enlightened age, and even in excellent schools, have no idea where on the chart of the vulva the clitoris is—and neither do senior boys), referred to some of these behaviors, only half jokingly, as “the things that women need that men don’t need.” 1 The latest science confirms that these “little” gestures and flourishes, which are so often relegated to the category of “things that people do in courtship and stop doing in a long-term relationship”—those sexual or romantic “extras” that are sort of nice to dole out to women but are not deemed essential—are in fact physically and emotionally fundamental to women’s vibrancy. These practices radically boost a woman’s orgasmic potential. But at least as importantly, they help support her relationships, and are even essential to her mental health and peace of mind. They all add up to gestures and attentions that compose “the Goddess Array.”
    Why, one might ask,