Roe: Finish Yourself Off & Wrap Him Up

I like sex, but I feel under pressure to come when guys are fingering me or going down on me. I’m cool with speaking up and saying what I want them to do more or less of, but it doesn’t always get me where I need to be and a lot of the time it’s just easier to finish off myself. Do I need to get over this and work harder at coming with a partner, or is it “normal” for women to find it tricky?

You’ve got to hand it to porn: if nothing else, it’s encouraged men to do what women are discouraged from doing, and that’s quite literally taking matters into their own hands.

Because porn often a) shows men finishing themselves off after sex or a blow job (usually onto a woman, it’s all very predictable); and b) causes boys and men to spend so much time masturbating to porn that they eventually can’t achieve orgasm without their own signature death-grip and need to finish themselves off in real life.

Thanks to this addition to a culture that already normalises male masturbation while cloaking female masturbation in a shroud of shame and silence, men don’t approach sex in the same way that women are socialised to.

Men are going to achieve an orgasm, whether you get them there or they do. Women, however, have to pray the dude has some skills and leave it all up to him, because the God forbid we’d ever touch ourselves, right?

So let’s stop the madness here. My dear: “finishing yourself off” is a totally legitimate, perfectly normal way to achieve orgasm – and one that can absolutely be turned into a sensual aspect of sex with your partner. A woman, in the throes of some sexy activities, taking control and having an orgasm as he gets to watch? He should be so lucky!

Our culture is somewhat obsessed with keeping the female orgasm a mystery, constantly highlighting how difficult it is to achieve, how some types of orgasm aren’t “legitimate”, how some forms of female ejaculation are real or not real – it’s almost like we live in a patriarchy where our bodies are constantly policed and controlled . . . Ahem.

My dear, you’ve figured out the toughest part: you know what makes you come. What you’re doing now is not letting yourself do that. And for what? To save the male ego? Right, let’s stop that madness here too: LADS. WE CAN ACHIEVE ORGASMS WITHOUT YOU. THIS FACT DOES NOT RENDER YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS WORTHLESS.

The goal here is to not see every sexual activity as goal-oriented, but to enjoy yourself in the moment.

Putting pressure on yourself to achieve an orgasm during fingering or oral means you won’t be able to relax and enjoy yourself at all – and a partner who’s fingering you or going down on you just so you orgasm is also more likely to try rush things.

So both of you: back away from the clock and orgasm scoreboard. Instead, use activities you enjoy but don’t necessarily orgasm from as awesome foreplay. Move from some fingering to oral to having sex to giving your partner oral to having sex again – remix, rinse and repeat ad infinitum, until you’re ready to orgasm.

Then, we’re going to throw gender scripts out the window and we’re going to allow women the same sexual rights as we do men: the right to finish ourselves off if we want to. If he’s any kind of man worth having, he’ll feel honoured to have even been a small part of the process.

I’m a heterosexual woman, and I’ve been seeing my boyfriend for nearly three years. At the start of our relationship we used condoms, which my boyfriend hates, and he had been at me to go on the pill for ages.

Nearly two years ago now (after getting STD checks and doing all the responsible stuff) I took the plunge and tried the pill – and it’s been a disaster. I’ve tried several different versions and each one has had major side effects.

I’ve been depressed, my sex drive has plummeted, I’ve had crazily long periods and unpredictable spotting, and I’ve put on about a stone. My confidence has plummeted, which means I want to have sex even less, and I’m just sick and tired of having to constantly deal with doctors and trying the next version and dreading what side effects I’ll have to deal with.

I want to go back on condoms, but my boyfriend thinks I should keep trying to find a version of the pill that works for me. How do we compromise?

One of the basic canons of journalism is balance. It demands that if there are two or more sides to a story, then each side should be represented. However, there’s a caveat: balance does not necessarily mean all sides get equal weight. Attention is paid to whether an argument is valid, not merely whether it exists.

So for example, if you have a representative of the US Environmental Protection Agency on a news show saying that 20 years of scientific research shows that climate change is a real problem, you can of course also mention that Sarah Palin doesn’t believe this is true because the world is only 3,000 years old and Jesus happily rode around on dinosaurs for some of that or whatever that basket case is saying this week.

But you don’t give Palin the same amount of airtime as the EPA, and you really only let her on the show so you can explicitly explain why she and her fellow lunatics are wrong, and so we can all collectively laugh at her.

Balance is also a basic canon of compromise in relationships, and in decisions regarding birth control. And in your case, we have an example of equal weight being given to a your boyfriend’s Palinesque nonsense.

You have put in the effort. You’ve tried the pill and have suffered serious emotional and physical side effects, side effects that are affecting your health, confidence and libido – and therefore your relationship.

Take all the Girlfriend Brownie Points – and stop.

Some women’s bodies are incompatible with hormonal birth control, and you may well be one of them.

Hell, you might not be, there might be some combo of medications out there that would allow you to enjoy birth control with few side effects, but do you know what? Going on the pill is not medically necessary for your lifestyle, and you are not a guinea pig in a lab.

You’ve put your body through enough; it’s earned a rest.

Your boyfriend is going to put on his big-boy pants, suck it up, and go back to wearing condoms during sexual intercourse – and he’s not going to complain about it. Here’s why.

Your boyfriend’s argument is prefaced on the (bullshit) belief that his desire for a slightly elevated range of sensation during one sexual act is more important than how you feel in your body all day, every day.

He feels so entitled to the exact sensation he wants during penile-vaginal penetration that he thinks you feeling physically and emotionally crappy all the time is worth it.

Does that sound fair to you? Sound like a “compromise”? No.

And because you, darling girl, do not go out with entitled, self-centred idiots, he’s going to change his attitude. He’s going to realise that your relationship is based on both of your well-beings, and that wearing a condom during one type of sex is not detrimental to his.

He’s also going to notice that I keep emphasising that he only has to use condoms during one very specific sex act – because that’s all we’re talking about here. Taking you at your word that you’re both monogamous and STI-free, you both can enjoy oral sex, fingering, handjobs, anal sex, mutual masturbation (so underrated) and a myriad of other sexy activities without him having to use condoms.

So he’s going to realise that condoms are not the be-all and end-all of his sex life – whereas you feeling so crap and so taken-for-granted that you don’t want to have sex with him may well be the be-all and end-all of his sex life.

So he will use logic, reason, compassion and basic common sense and wrap it the hell up.

(I should probably mention that the Mirena Coil/IUD/Implant could all be options to explore down the line if and when you want a longer-lasting form of birth control: but don’t show your mini-Palin that part of the answer.)