Review of Jenny Block’s “O Wow – Discovering Your Ultimate Orgasm”
Table of Contents
If you’ve read any of Ms. Block’s work on the Huffington Post, Playboy, AskMen and more, then you know her empowered female voice.
This “O Wow: Discovering Your Ultimate Orgasm” by Cleis Press, covers the ‘bread and butter’ clitoral orgasm, but also the A, U & G spots, anal orgasms and multiple orgasms. There’s also a chapter called ‘Mysterious Orgasms’ – you’re going to have to discover that one for yourself.
What is an ultimate orgasm according to Jenny Block?
“An ultimate orgasm is your personal best orgasm. It doesn’t leave anything at the table. It doesn’t want anything more. It lasts as long as it lasts. It takes as long as it takes. It’s as messy and loud or quiet and tidy as you like. It has no room for shame or apology. An ultimate orgasm comes from questioning, exploring, experimenting, with no concern for how society or religion or anything else defines sex or female orgasm. The ultimate orgasm belongs to you and only you and it is your responsibility to find it, to have it, and to keep it for as long as you want to live a fully sexually satisfying life.
Want to know the secret to having the ultimate orgasm? Knowing your body and being in the zone. That’s it. Lots of tips and tricks and ideas follow later in the book. But first and foremost, we have to empower ourselves to pleasure. No matter how much your partner is committed to your orgasm, you are the only one who can and should be responsible for your orgasm.
There’s no judgment. No right or wrong way. No bad orgasms.”–From the “About the Book”.
- Publisher: Cleis Press (August 11, 2015)
- Length: 216 pages
Book Excerpt from “O Wow” by Jenny Block
Chapter One – Decoding Female orgasm
It’s time for a revolution of the orgasmic kind. It’s time for every woman to embark on a search for her ultimate orgasm. It’s going to be the most pleasurable and the most powerful revolution yet. Women who regularly experience ultimate orgasms have the power to change, well, everything. It’s the easiest, most delicious proposition ever. All we have to do is come.
The idea for this revolution came from a painful and entirely unscien-tific experiment: I came and then I didn’t. That is, I had sex and enjoyed orgasms—with a partner and without. And I refrained from having sex and denied myself orgasms—with a partner and with myself. Sounds simple, I know. But it’s bigger than it sounds, because it’s about coming, and yet it isn’t. It’s about denial and satisfaction, and it’s about what happens to our bodies, minds, and spirits when we withhold versus when we give in to release.
Without orgasm, I am tired and in pain. I am lethargic and unmoti-vated. My creativity is as a dried well. I am closed, quick to lose hope and even quicker to temper. With orgasm, well, it’s the opposite all around.
Women are overburdened, overstressed, overworked, and underpaid.
I wish we could turn all of that around in one day. Equal pay. Equal protection. Equal everything all around.
But I’m a realist, and I know that isn’t going to happen overnight. Gloria Steinem, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Camille Paglia, and so many others have been fighting the good fight and writing the right words for generations, and although we have come miraculously far, we are still woefully behind.
I have discovered a crack in the wall, though. I have uncovered one space where our inequality is evident and from which we can derive great power—female orgasm. It is both concrete and metaphorical. If we owned it and harnessed it and made it our own, we could almost certainly turn things around overnight.
Orgasm is the base of all female power. Detach from it and we literally repress ourselves, our power, and our ability to rise. Connect to it and we are a force to be reckoned with, the likes of which no one has ever seen.
To do that, we first must ask: Why has female orgasm been relegated to the shadows for so long?
1. It empowers women.
It’s a sad fact of life: Things that empower women often get quashed and squashed and stamped on and out. Voting. Revealing bathing suits. Abortion. Birth control. Need I go on? If women are in control of their orgasms, they don’t need men. They can still want them. But they don’t need them to “make” them come. Being in control of your own orgasm is liberation to the nth degree.
2. It involves admitting that the female body is equal to—or better than—a man’s.
If female orgasm is as important as male orgasm, then the female body is as good as the male body, which means—gasp—women themselves are just as important. Because women don’t generally orgasm from the act that causes procreation, women’s pleasure has taken a backseat to men’s and women, all too often, have taken a backseat to men. It’s time for us to be in the driver’s seat.
3. Men don’t understand it.
No matter how much you study or read or experiment in the field, if you can’t have a female orgasm, you can never truly understand female orgasm. You can learn the mechanics. You can hear the explanations. But only a woman can tell you how female orgasm feels—and even then, she can only tell you how it feels for her.
4. It’s not easy or instant or simple.
Female orgasm is not quick, and male orgasm often is. Female orgasm is not simple, and male orgasm often is. We live in a male-centric world. Ground zero is always the male experience. That is the problem when it comes to female orgasm: It’s judged against male orgasm, and that simply doesn’t make any sense. When it comes to female orgasm, the only ground zero is the woman having that orgasm.
5. It seems selfish to worry about it.
Women have been made to believe that female orgasm is superfluous. That it’s extra. That it’s a #firstworldproblem. Male orgasm is coddled and revered and covered by health insurance. Female orgasm is ridiculed and pooh-poohed. Women who care about it are selfish whores. Good girls lie back and say, “Thank you. That felt very nice.” And don’t tell their partners what it is that they actually desire.
6. It’s sexual and women aren’t supposed to be sexual—or, if they are, it has to be for men.
Women are sexual. Men are sexual and women are sexual. Women’s sexuality is not founded in or based on male sexuality. It does not exist for men. It exists very happily without men. Women can choose to share their sexuality with men, but they get to choose and define what that means and how that looks. Otherwise, what on earth is the point? If you’re not trying to make a baby, why have intercourse with a man who doesn’t make you come? If you want closeness, cuddle. If you want romance, have a candlelit dinner. If you want intimacy, take a long, hot bubble bath together. But why have intercourse so that he can come and you can lie in bed awake with blue box? That simply makes no sense, and it’s time for this nonsense to stop.
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