IO: Ritual.

Seek

GO: Yes.

The Holiness of Feeling Good:

Gina Ogden on
Women Who Love Sex

GO: When I am defining and describing my notion of women who

love sex because they want connections and relationship I believe it
is different than women who settle for just snuggling. Im not talking about just snuggling, although theres nothing wrong with just
snuggling. Ive had many, many people come up to me and say I am
a woman who loves sex including a man once at a reading. Its all
over the map. [They may say], Im a woman who loves sex because I
have a heart-to-heart connection with my partner. [Or,] Im a woman
who loves sex because Ill screw anybody who is wearing pants or a
skirt.

BY BETHANY SALTMAN

r. Gina Ogden family therapist, sex therapist,

teacher, speaker, researcher is a pioneer in the
field of womens sexuality, looking into things like the
number of women who can have spontaneous orgasms
climax with no physical contact whatsoever (of her
admittedly small sample size of highly sexual women: 64
percent!). But whats even more impressive is the way she
dismisses numbers, knowing that the subtle continuum of
womens experience is much more important.
Dr. Ogdens books include The Heart and Soul of Sex
and Women Who Love Sex, both re-released by Shambhala in 2007. Her new book, The Return of Desire, is
due out this year. She is a busy woman, and we were lucky
to catch her.
InsideOut: One of the women in Women Who Love Sex says that
as women we need to cop to what she calls the holiness of feeling
good. I found that very interesting. Reiterate to me and to our readers, if you would, why women need to cop to that. What would be in
our way of admitting it?
Gina Ogden: Women in this culture have been programmed that
its not OK to feel good, by which I mean powerful, pleasure-loving,
able to express our pleasure with our bodies, with our minds. We
have been programmed instead to look good, obey the rules, never
be shrill in terms of our sexuality, to be very good partners whether
its to men or other women. We dont want to get out of line.
Sexuality, sexual response is one of the ways we can break
through the constraints of culture into something that is vast and
boundary-less, which is what is called the universe the universal
mind, god, holiness, love, and whatever you name all of that vastness
that is out there. In terms of our sexuality, when we can say Yes,
that is the connection then we have broken through from this
mentality of being the good partner, a good wife, a perfectly responsive sexual being. We are then responding to something much
larger than our partners, our earthly partners. We are responding in
a very total way.
22 | www.insideouthv.com | JAN/FEB 2008

IO: In your book you write, Lust for sex is longing to bond with a partner and at the same time yearning to belong to ones own self body,
mind, heart and soul. How is this so different from what we are used
to hearing, that women long for relationship, which sometimes means
they like to snuggle, or whatever, whereas men are just after sex?

IO: What about women who dont love sex? Do they exist? Are they
women who just havent gotten there yet?

IO: So spirituality is, in fact, very grounded.

GO: Yes. One of my teachers, Emily Conrad, talks about the resonance
of the fluids in our bodies that are resonant with the fluids in the
planet. Carl Jung talked about the irrational fact of experience, and
this is one of them. This is an irrational fact of sexual experience.
For years I went around doing the womens groups, saying women
dont have a language to describe all this, and I realized when I was
writing Women Who Love Sex that they do, and the language is the
language of religion: holy, vast, endless, worship. Clearly sex has been
purged from the language of religion, God forbid. Way back, we all
knew that sex and religion were hand in hand. Sex and spirit were
part of each other. There was no separation.
IO: Some religious traditions still maintain that more than others.
GO: I write about this in The Heart and Soul of Sex. Religion and
sexual romance have a lot of traditions and rituals still in common,
but in the terms of religion, they are never called sexy; and in the
terms of sex, they are never called religious. Think about the laying
on of hands, making a joyful noise, music, dance, flowers, special
foods, and so on.

GO: I actually do write about them, not in a book thats in print yet,
but in a book I just finished called The Return of Desire. What I am
getting at in that book is how some [of womens] ideas and experiences [are being] translated into this national epidemic framed by the
pharmaceutical companies, mainly about all the women in the world
who dont like sex, who do not have a sexual desire.
The first question I ask is: What is sex? [In this context], sex is only
framed as intercourse, or as how many times you have genital stimulation to the goal of orgasm. That is different than broadening the
definition of sexual response to include emotions and how you think,
as well as how you feel, and the meanings that are contained in all of
that. It also includes other parts of your body. This is what women are
talking about. Theyre talking about more than the big I more
than intercourse. For women who dont love sex in their own terms, I
would ask what is it they dont love.
What I find is [that] what they dont love is impersonal, demanding,
coercing basically intercourse or being felt up, but not noticed as
human beings. When you get into the whole problem of this elusive
thing called sex drive, I opt out of that. I am not a scientist and I dont
get into the testosterone argument, other than to understand a lot of
the stuff that is being framed as the hormonal coordinates of sexual
response that you can get from pharmaceutical interventions.
There are studies coming out that begin to show that your hormonal makeup can be changed by things like falling in love, by excitement, by attention, by waking up in a spiritual sense so that the
whole idea of sex as only physical, is, I believe, extremely limiting. If

you opened up the definitions of sex beyond performance, you would

find a lot more woman who really did like sex, but they wouldnt define
it the way it is being defined.
IO: Is it any different for heterosexual women, bisexual women, lesbian
women? Are there any real patterns there?
GO: One of the things that I also tried to do in this book, and have
tried to do in other books as well and I say this right out in Women Who Love Sex is not to try to define the lesbian experience, the
bisexual experience, the heterosexual experience, because so much of
the sexuality literature is written in divisive language, as heterosexuals vs. lesbians vs. bisexuals vs. trannies vs. queers vs. whatever. What I
see as my contribution or vision is to see if we can erase some of those
distinctions and get back to basics. What do you feel? What does it
mean in your life?
That said, I think that in terms of the lesbian experience and my
partner of 27 years is a woman, so I speak from experience theres
stuff you learn in this world by breaking out of the conventional mode
of whatever you are supposed to be, whether its heterosexual, white,
young, middle class, you name it and that when women are with
other women, you learn something.
The way I make love with my partner is different from the way I
made love with men. The initiation is different. How we respond to
each other is different. Is that because we are different people? Is that
because we are two women? I cannot tell you.
IO: Different in terms of what you feel with your female partner?
GO: In terms of what you feel, and in terms of what the experience
means.
IO: Where does love fall here?
GO: Love is all of the above: emotional, physical, spiritual, mental. It
is different for everybody. On one level, its an energy universal. Its
expressed physically. Helen Fisher and her cohorts and colleagues at
Rutgers have done some very interesting studies the love studies.
Theyve done brain research on women and men, college students
actually, to determine what happens when you fall in love, and the
great dopamine rushes and other kinds of hormonal changes [that
accompany love]; and what happens when you fall out of love, and you
feel rejected and want to murder somebody.
There is definitely a physical and physiological component to
love. Clearly there is an emotional component to love. Go back to the
poetry of the last 10,000 years. Clearly there is a mental component
to love, whether its expressed in a Woody Allen-type anxiety, or in
a feeling of being able to float in the mainstream because were all
supposed to walk around in couples holding hands. Clearly there is
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a spiritual component to love because you are reaching out beyond

yourself, heart to heart and energetically, in this way that is uncanny.
That is the indescribable that enables you to leap tall buildings in a
single bound, and that nobody has ever been fully able to describe
because its both an extremely personal experience and a universal
experience.
IO: You state that 64 percent of the women you are talking to, the
women who love sex, experience spontaneous orgasms in other
words, thinking off. Can you explain this a little bit?
GO: This was of 50 women that I interviewed for my dissertation. I
dont know how many women or men there are in the world who can
think off. But whenever I bring it up in a lecture, there are always a lot
of appreciative nods. I think its important to write a whole chapter
about it, because its basically a way to broaden the definition of sexual
response beyond physical touching, especially genital touching.
By the way, I have known a variety of paraplegics and quadriplegics
who can use this technique. They just think good thoughts or bad
thoughts. They think off, because they are sexual people even though
they have no feeling from the chest down. Our sexual energy is not
[channeled] only through physical sensation. That is really the point I
am trying to make in that chapter.
IO: I couldnt believe how you described it in the book: We got into
the lab, they lay down, they reached down and got themselves off, and
I measured it. Do these women ever get shy?
GO: Well, it isnt what you know, its who you know. There are some
people who get off on stuff like that. Those are the people who get
studied in laboratories. This is why laboratory research is basically
meaningless. However, with that said, it creates numbers for people
and the power language is numbers. You see what I am saying? So
thats why I engaged in that.
IO: Do these kinds of statistics or studies ever give women a complex
and a feeling like, Oh my God, I cant do that. I must be repressed.

Whats Love Got

To Do With It?
Everything ...
and we have everything for the
(wine) lover in your life.

GO: I think theres some women who say, Oh, I can do that too; or
Oh, if other woman can do that, maybe I should try it; or maybe, Ive
already done that, but I didnt recognize it. Let me try that again. Its
in the eye of the beholder. v
Bethany Saltman is the managing editor of InsideOut. She
has published essays and interviews in magazines such as
The Sun, Buddhadharma, Killingthebuddha, and Geez. She
is a Zen practitioner who has studied with John Daido Loori,
Roshi for more than 10 years. She lives in Phoenicia with her
husband and baby girl.

1173 Rt 9 Wappingers Falls, NY 12590

845-298-0555 www.viscountwines.com
Peter Landolt, Wine Director

JAN/FEB 2008 | www.insideouthv.com | 77