CheekyChicago

There’s a reason that The Pointers Sisters struck a chord in the 80s with their song about wanting a man with a “slow hand” and a “lover with an easy touch.” Because as fun as vigorous, energetic, all-out-thrusting can be, fast sex is not necessarily all that orgasmic for many women.

Quite a few women prefer or even need slow to moderate paced sex in order to orgasm. Not all women orgasm from slow hand sex and, even those that do sometimes prefer fast-paced hard core sex. But there’s something about slow, rhythmic, interactive sex that helps many women to orgasm.

Unfortunately, many men have been raised on porn that stresses fast, vigorous, all-out, make her sore sex as the only model of how couples have sex. This is a shame because men, like women, want so hard to please their partners when they actually get a chance to move past porn and into a bed with a real, live partner. And yet when they get that chance, they may fumble around, do the 1-2-thrust-kapow and then wonder what went wrong.

Going slow during sex can help women to explore what does and doesn’t feel good about sex. Going slow can also help many men to pay attention to their own sensations so that they can back off if things get too intense and they want to last longer before ejaculating. And going slow doesn’t mean that you can’t ever move fast.

In the movie The Reader, there is a scene where the couple is first beginning their sexual relationship and Kate Winslet’s character (she plays a 30-ish woman having sex with a teenaged boy) specifically teaches the teenager to go slow. In effect, she teaches him to make love and not just “do it.”

If you typically have more energetic, vigorous sex and yet you’re yearning for more pleasure or an easier orgasm, try to slow it down if you can – even if it’s just parts of the sex act that you scale down and see how they feel. Set the pace with slower, more seductive kisses. Say “go slow” or “more gentle” if you need to. Or move your hips in a slower way to indicate the pace you’d like to try. Grabbing your partner’s thrust-crazy hips and slowing things down manually is an option, too.

A cool thing about sex is that it’s dynamic. You can go slow for several seconds or minutes and then revert to a faster pace and return again to something else. You can shake things up, keep each other guessing, or try one pace that works for your orgasm and another pace that works for your partner’s pleasure and/or orgasm. If you’d like to have an easier time with orgasm, try the slow hand approach a few times and see how it works for you. It may be something to add to your bag of tricks.

Debby Herbenick, PhD, MPH is a sex researcher and educator at Indiana University, and the sex columnist at Time Out Chicago. Her new, fun sex book is Because It Feels Good: A Woman’s Guide to Sexual Pleasure and Satisfaction.