Slow Sex Part 1: On the Merits of Slow

Read time: 5 - 7 minutes

Discover Intimacy is a content series designed to share intimacy-related stories/topics you don’t often encounter. We cover intimacy through the lens of history, art, culture and science.

This week, we’re kicking off a mini-series on Slow Sex, based on the work of Nicole Daedone in her book, Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm.

Today, we’ll cover the basis for Slow Sex – what it is, why it’s necessary and how we practice it.

To fully understand what Daedone is offering in Slow Sex, we must first understand her approach.

“What I discovered… was that sexuality is not just a fringe activity, an exceptionally fun hobby. Instead I saw it for what it really is: a source of power, a well from which I could draw the energy I needed to discover who I was and how I wanted to live my life.”

Identifying sex as a source of power from which one can draw energy represents a paradigm shift in the way in which we often encounter sex and power – especially in the recent and heightened awareness of #MeToo – where power is wielded over an un-desiring, unwilling partner to obtain sex.

Daedone goes to great lengths in early chapters to address the criticality of spoken consent, mutual understanding and a deep desire from both partners to not only be physically, but mentally, emotionally and spiritually present.

What is Slow Sex?

“Slow Sex is a way to approach sex that emphasizes sustainability, connection, and nourishment. It deepens your relationship to your partner and your own body, so you can experience orgasm from the inside out.”

Daedone contends that many of the challenges people experience during intimacy – inability to connect; inability to feel pleasure deeply; inability to fully experience pleasure outside of a predicted, climatic event – are a function of the expectations we place on sex. “Put your leg here. No, put your hand there. Touch here. No, don’t touch there. Harder. Faster.” These expectations can interrupt our ability to fully immerse ourselves in the pleasure event and prevent us from feeling the sensations around us.

“In Orgasmic Meditation we learn to shift our focus from thinking to feeling, from a goal orientation to an experience orientation. This shift turns all our expectations about sex on their head.”

What is Orgasmic Meditation?

Orgasmic Meditation, or OM-ing for short, is a meditation-based practice where the male partner (in heterosexual couples) strokes his female partner’s genitals with one finger of one hand for 15 minutes. 

Daedone is quite prescriptive in where and how OM-ing should be done. Next week, we’ll explore exactly how to OM.

If you’re wondering about same-gender or other-identified couples, Daedone states that they can take turns in the OM-ing experience, but in heterosexual couples, she focuses specifically on women being the recipients of stroking by their male partners because women are often carrying significant mental and emotional baggage about sex and their sexual experiences. She attributes much of this baggage to societal forces – standards of purity and appropriateness, body image, sexual trauma, etc.

About women, Daedone says…

“We put ourselves into the shape of the sex we think we’re supposed to be having, which is modeled on the example of a man’s experience. We spend a lot of time in our heads, wondering if we’re doing it right, concentrating very hard on 'getting somewhere' – 'somewhere' being synonymous with climax.”

The OM-ing practice, deceptively simplistic in nature, is designed to help both partners get back to the sensation of simply feeling our bodies and not thinking. Not occupying our thoughts with mental baggage, entrenched expectations and other ideas that rob us of pleasure.

In an OM practice, we begin to look at orgasm not as the “main event” to which we race with fervor and great expectation, but rather a collection of all pleasure events within our intimacy.

If we expand our definition of orgasm, we give ourselves space to experience intense pleasure at every step of the journey.

It’s possible that what we've outlined here sounds less than exciting – where you’re unsure how a practice so basic will bring the sexual pleasure Daedone promises.

Oftentimes, when we want to improve an experience – sexual or otherwise, we have a tendency to add more to it. That’s based on our mental training – add more salt, add more sugar, add more features, add more hours, add more jewels, add more, add more, add more. 

And so, in an effort to enrich our sex lives, we proceed down a potentially never-ending rabbit hole of sexual one-upsmanship. Vibrators. Toys. Dolls. More positions. More partners. More partners, in more positions. And this is certainly not an indictment of those experiences – the exploration of sex and the wide array of activities within it can be fulfilling. But if our ability to achieve pleasure is predicated on having the extra bells and whistles, we will miss out on the authentic pleasure our bodies can offer without those things.

Next week, we’ll continue our mini-series on Slow Sex and dive into OM-ing – how it works, what you do, what your partner does, etc.