Education - Foreplay

Foreplay

If intercourse is the entree, foreplay is the appetizer- which, as anybody knows, can be the tastiest part of the meal. On the other hand, sometimes it's also nice to have an entire banquet consisting of nothing but hors d'oeuvres, with no main course at all.

This, in fact, is the way some sex experts (including William Masters, M.D., and Virginia Johnson of the Masters and Johnson Institute in St. Louis) prefer to look at foreplay. To them, even the word foreplay is mildly objectionable, because it implies that all sexual touching is just a prelude to intercourse, which may or may not be the case. To them, non-coital sex Play is a better term, because it includes everything, takes the pressure off everybody and doesn't seem quite so desperately goal-oriented.

Well, whatever you call the delectable rites of arousal, and wherever they lead, they're still wonderful-and terribly important-especially to the woman.

The Light Bulb and the Iron

In one study, a group of 709 female nurses were asked to rank the importance of 15 different things (such as fatigue, stress and lack of tenderness) that interfered with their ability to reach orgasm. The women's most common complaint, outranking all the others by a good margin, was that their partners did not spend enough time in foreplay. Men, overly focused on the "goal" (intercourse), tend to hurry through it all. They tend not to slow down and take enough time to linger, to be playful, to explore - and to help their partners be satisfied.

How long is long enough? Well, only you and your partner can really tell for sure. But when these sexually experienced adult women were asked how long they'd prefer that their lovers indulge in foreplay, they replied (on average) about 17 minutes. That may seem like a long time, but the rewards of patience are rich. When Paul Gebhard, a collaborator of the late Dr. Alfred Kinsey, went back and reexamined the Kinsey group's data, he found that only 7.7 percent of the women whose lovers spent 21 minutes or longer on foreplay failed to reach orgasm.

"A man's sexual responses are like a light bulb: You turn it on, and it goes from cold to hot almost instantly. When you turn it off, it cools down right away. But a woman's responses are more like an iron: You turn it on, then wait and wait and wait until it heats up; and after you turn it off, you wait and wait and wait until it cools off," explains Jude Cotter, Ph.D., a psychologist and sex therapist in private practice in Farmington Hills, Michigan.

Foreplay is the way we smooth out the differences - slowing down the man a little, speeding up the woman a little, and meeting (let's hope) somewhere in the middle. Technically speaking, there's some interesting evidence that it's not so much that women's sexual responses are innately slower than men's but that they require more foreplay because it's harder for them to reach orgasm through intercourse. Dr. Kinsey felt that masturbation is a truer measure of women's actual sexual capacity than intercourse - and discovered that, even though many women are slow to respond during coitus, they could often masturbate to orgasm within a minute or two. To him, this showed that women's innate sexual capacities are really quite similar to men's.

All-Day Foreplay

The pleasure and utility of extended foreplay is not some great secret, and it's certainly not strange or unnatural - a huge variety of animals, including most mammals, will bite, scratch, nuzzle, smell, urinate upon, mount and otherwise make intimate contact with their partners for minutes, hours or even days before intercourse is attempted. "The student of mammalian mating behavior, iterated in observing coitus in his animal stocks, sometimes may have to wait through hours and days of sex play before he has an opportunity to observe actual coitus," Dr. Kinsey wrote, with his usual air of professorial dispassion.

We're not animals, of course, but we, too, do better when we work up to sex slowly. In fact, if you think of foreplay as anything that gets you aroused about your partner, the whole dance begins long before you take off your clothes.

"One of the things that men don't understand is that if a guy spends the afternoon with his partner, and they stop and get a sandwich, they joke and kid around, they laugh, they hug-to the woman, that's foreplay," says Dr. Cotter. Men want to know, What's the right technique for foreplay? Well, part of it to go for a walk with her, spend some time with her, do things that are sensitive and kind.

"If he stops and buys a single long - stemmed rose on Tuesday, for no particularr reason at all, he will probably have fantastic sex on Wednesday."

Sweet Sexual Signals

One way to make this sweet, lingering sort of foreplay a little bit more sexually explicit, he says, is to develop a sexual signal. Whenever she touches her ear in public, say, or yawns, or runs her finger along her throat, that means: "I can't wait to get you home in bed." Or, if you've got a slightly oddball sense of humor, you can give his penis a name. Call it "your friend," let's say. She calls him I work and says, "I sure will be glad to see you and your friend when you get home." Or, "Do you think your friend will still remember me when he sees me?" r, "Why don't you introduce me to your friend when you get home?"

Says Dr. Cotter: "Women are usually very sensitive to a man's sexual cycle; they usually know when he's going to want to make love that night. Using these little signals can help enhance this sense of sexual anticipation tremendously."

Mistakes We Make

When it comes to actually getting physical, men and women often make similar mistakes. From their own intimate observations, Masters and Johnson say that during foreplay both men and women tend to do things that they think would turn them on. For instance, many men stroke the shaft of the clitoris vigorously and rapidly, in imitation of the way men masturbate, or they plunge a finger deep into the vagina - even though many women find this un-arousing or even uncomfortable. By contrast, one of the men's most common complaints is that women don't grab the penis firmly enough; they treat the man's genitals as gingerly as they do their own.

(Interestingly enough, homosexual couples - who know from personal experience what a certain kind of erotic touch feels like - tend to be much more sensitive to their partner's needs, Masters and Johnson have found. Lesbians, for instance, know that the breasts are often tender just before a period and so treat them gently - something men often don't understand.)

The answer? Communication. It doesn't necessarily have to be verbal, but it's important to let your partner know, in one way or another, what feels good and what doesn't.

Aging Adds Awareness

As a man gets older, his sexual responses slow down a bit. The instant, unstoppable erections of his teenage years now rouse themselves more slowly, more reluctantly, and usually require more manual help in order to become fully rigid. In other words, the aging male begins to need more foreplay. In many ways, this is a blessing, because his sexual arousal cycle falls into closer sync with a woman's -the light bulb begins turning into an iron.

For the older male, foreplay doesn't only mean touching. It may also take the form of visual stimulation, like watching X-rated videos, because older men are more quickly aroused by the visual than they are even by manual stimulation of the genitals, Dr. Cotter has observed. Women, who may feel uncomfortable or even offended by steamy movies, should perhaps bear with their male partners on this, he says.

Enjoy the Afterglow

Even if intercourse is the entire of sex, there's no reason to skip dessert. Yet many people, men in particular, tend to fall asleep or jump up and go watch the late show shortly after intercourse.

"Very often, when the guy is finished, he's finished, and he wants his report card - he wants to know how it was," says Dr. Cotter. "But for many women, the wind - down part after intercourse, the hugging and kissing, the feeling of closeness -is the nicest part. Often there are times when she has intercourse just because of the aftermath."

Men need to be more sensitive to women's fondness for this sweet, intimate afterglow, Dr. Cotter says. But women also need to be more up-front about communicating their love of this special time to men.