From the South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Masters of the universe

Is a guy really a he-man if he doesn't make a she "rah"?

by Courtney Hambright

January 25 2006

My friend Velma and I were cooling our innards with some icy beverages in front of Tarpon Bend in Fort Lauderdale recently, when we spied a lone gentleman standing at the inside bar. The man waved to Velma, interrupting my lecture about the essential role of clitoral stimulation in a female orgasm. As she waved back to the bloke and distractedly said that even good handwork during sex doesn't induce the ultimate pleasure for her, I considered being annoyed.

In light of what she'd just said, I really couldn't imagine what her motivation for pursuing another romantic connection might be. She still loves sex, she said. The dude at the bar was cute in a gangly, Noah Wiley way. So I figured, what's to lose? I could get this guy's take on the basics of intercourse while she flirted her ass off.

I was confused about something and his perspective might prove useful. Here, Velma and I had been having a delicate conversation about achieving female orgasms, which for some women is akin to courting a ghost. Yet almost every time I hear men talk about sex, they say, "I fucked her" or "I screwed her" with the deep, cavernous groan of a bodybuilder huffing out the last rep of a twitch-inducing bench press set. Men make their sex sound like the most powerful, atomic-thrusting action that has ever occurred. Deep-sea oil drills and cannon blasts have nothing on what's in their pants. It is the center of the universe.

But the weird thing is, I don't see many women walking around with holes blasted through their backs from the sheer force of what so many men are packing. Stranger yet, most women's primary erogenous zone is not even located in their vaginas.

With this in mind, we approached poor 36-year-old Ian Brown, who was just minding his own business at Tarpon Bend. I broke the ice with, "Do you think your penis is the center of the universe?"

"Yes, of course," he answered. "I'm a guy."

Fact: No man's penis is the center of the universe.

How do I know this? Well, before I became a big person who is allowed to drink alcohol and have sex when I want to, I was a little person who had to go to school to learn things. One thing my teachers taught me was that people in the past were wrong about everything. People just keep getting smarter, it seems.

For example, those stupid people in the past used to think the Earth was the center of the universe. That's wrong. Because some idiot astronomer named Ptolemy had said so, like, a thousand years earlier, everyone believed it.

Many years later, Copernicus set him straight, saying something like, "No, dumb ass -- it's the sun." But nobody wanted to hear that, because if the Earth was the center of the universe, then they could feel cool and important. It's the same way with men and their penises.

Yet recent research contradicts this thinking. Last year, Newscientist.com reported that a survey of 4,037 women conducted by St. Thomas' Hospital in London found that, though 14 percent said they always have an orgasm during vaginal intercourse, 32 percent are unable to orgasm more than a quarter of the time and 16 percent never come through sex at all. It's shocking.

I decided to conduct a little research of my own recently at Automatic Slim's in Fort Lauderdale. I talked to four women, and only one of them, a 23-year-old named Anna, had ever reached orgasm from vaginal intercourse without clitoral stimulation. "It was only one time," she said, "a year and a half ago."

Two of the four said men typically understand how their bodies work and sex them up appropriately. The other two said men generally tend to be clueless.

"My husband understands this, but other people didn't," 24-year-old Elizabeth said. "Only three or four out of the 13 men I've been with actually did."

Statuesque, 25-year-old Lauren educates as she fornicates: "By the time I'm done sleeping with a guy, he's well-versed in what I need."

Lauren is a straight-up chick. And she has a point. Men can learn.

Even Ian changed his mind: "As a guy, the center of the universe is the female body. That's what you're constantly looking at. They say that every guy thinks about sex every 10 seconds. But sometimes, when you're having sex for a long time and you get to a point where you're tired, you say, 'I've got to get my rocks off. We'll try again tomorrow.' "

If sexual pleasure is a biological incentive to people the Earth, why does the friction of the old reliable heave-ho leave the pathway to a woman's uterus so cold? In physical distance, it's nary a fingertip's length between the functional vagina and its daffy but petite upstairs neighbor, the clitoris. But when distance is measured in physical pleasure for a woman, we're getting bicoastal. The Grand Canyon is nowhere near, say, some small peak on the Appalachian Trail.

And the Great Plains between them are where the buffalo roam, huffing with great fury. Don't get me wrong: A wild male animal is a fabulous thing. It's like Ian said, "It all comes back to mental stimulus, putting the other person in a situation that will turn them on."

Agreed. But when a man's trampling you in the path of his blind passion, you get to wondering if he couldn't just reach around and hit the pleasure point. Every post-adolescent male knows this is crucial to a female's sexual experience. It's elementary. But when it comes to applying sexual knowledge in everyday life, men who are boasting about their prowess should save some of that air for practicing their ABCs.

"A woman can do that to herself," Ian pointed out.

"That's true," I said, "but it's not the same when it's your own hand."

"Oh, that's like the old high-school trick, ghost hand," Ian observed. "You sit on your hand at the wrist for five minutes until it falls asleep, and then, you jerk off with it."

The man was a guru, but I needed more opinions. So I hit up a pack of 21-year-olds at E-Bar.

A cute, fast-talking blond named Curtis had the geography of the female body all figured out. "You start off with a little bit of kissing on the back of the neck," he said, "you go right down to the nipples, then down south a little bit." Smooth player, no?

I asked him about manual stimulation during sex.

"It's very important. If you can't stimulate a girl from her clitoris, you have to work the nipples. When I'm with a girl," he bragged, "her legs are shaking like this." He lifts one of his legs to show me. "She'll be like this for an hour."

"Interesting," I said, doubting him.

"I'm not getting laid unless I go down there and experiment with my hands," he added. "I'm not going to take my pants off and say, 'Let's go.' For the most part, my dick finishes the job."

Quick kid. But I still had to ask, "Is that to say your dick is not the center of the universe?"

"I guess that's safe to say," he concluded.

See, people do keep getting smarter.

Courtney Hambright's column appears every other week.