if he is in trouble God will free him of it; if he is in a perplexity he will soon get out of it; and lastly if he is in poverty he will soon become wealthy.
It is considered more lucky to dream of the vulva as open. . . . If the vulva is open so that he can look well into it, or even if it is hidden but he is free to enter it, he will bring the most difficult tasks to a successful end after having first failed in them, and this after a short delay, by the help of a person whom he never thought of.
Generally speaking, to see the vulva in dreams is a good sign; so it is of good augury to dream of coition, and he who sees himself in the act, and finishing with the ejaculation, will meet success in all his affairs. . . .4
While not all of these terms are poetic or positive, this vista into a different cultural frame around the vagina shows a non-Western directing of elaborate levels of male cultural attention to the subtleties and aesthetics of different women’s vaginas, their moods, varying appetites, and their relationships to the life of the woman in question; and a very non-Western awareness that vaginas are pluralistic, individualistic, and have wills and intentions of their own.
Having seen how much sexual suffering Western women still experience, according to the data, even after the “sexual revolution,” and having learned from my research more about how Tantra and its related Taoist traditions regard the vagina so differently than does the West, I became convinced that Tantra had some answers to the question of how female sexuality was best understood, especially in terms of the brain-vagina connection. Increasingly, many signposts—both historical and now neurobiological—point to the centrality of the “G-spot”—or “sacred spot,” in Tantric terms—in mediating the relationship between a woman’s sexuality and her consciousness. In Tantra, understanding the “sacred spot” is fundamental to understanding the nature of “the Goddess,” which is seen as being an innate part of every woman.
So, looking for where a Tantric trove of wisdom might be found, I went to one of the best-known and most highly regarded regularly recurring Tantric workshops that centers specifically on “sacred spot massage.” The workshop, which takes places over two days, is taught by Charles Muir—whose booming recorded voice had swiveled the heads of all those undergraduates in the college library—along with his ex-wife, Caroline Muir (the couple is amicably divorced). The couple has been teaching “sacred spot massage” workshops for twenty-five years.
I confess that before I attended the Muirs’ workshop, I thought of Tantra primarily as intimidating; whatever treasures it might yield seemed, before I looked into it more deeply, to be obscured by esoteric mumbo jumbo, and people with startling amounts of facial hair. I didn’t doubt that there must be interesting or useful things to know, but Tantra just seemed to me—an overscheduled Western woman—like an alienating, labor-intensive hassle, involving not just my own mastery of a whole new set of approaches, but the roping in of my equally overscheduled mate. Could I glean the basics of what Tantra knew about female sexuality—and communicate them in an accessible way to women who did not want to take on a major new time-consuming life path?
On the weekend I attended, the workshop was being held at a big hotel in Midtown that, while still genteel, had seen better days. All weekend long, the forty male and female participants would learn Tantric skills centered on women’s well-being. On Saturday night, after a day of conversation and instruction, the women would walk among the gathered attendees and select a man (or men) who would give them “sacred spot massage” that night in a private hotel room. The massage would proceed according to careful earlier direction in an all-male seminar taught by Charles Muir. The theme of the seminar? Sacred spot massage is all about the woman.
It seemed clear from the discussion leading up to the deed itself that this model—of a male Tantrist completely focused on releasing female sexual and emotional energies, in all their variability and wildness, and the woman supported in simply receiving this care and not worrying about reciprocity—was what was so apparently transformative for all the participants involved. People who had gone through the training did indeed, in a noncultish way, describe this experience as changing their lives in ways far beyond the “merely” sexual. It seemed to confirm what I had learned about women’s neurophysiologic needs.
Early Saturday afternoon, I joined a group of workshop participants for lunch at a nearby vegetarian Indian restaurant. I saw a gathering of men and women, mostly in their late twenties to early fifties, speaking intently to one another, a sheen of eroticism lifting up over the table like the shimmer from a heat mirage. I took in the scene, with its highly excited atmosphere, and tried to figure out just what was so different about it. Then it hit me: all of the men were gazing deeply into the eyes of the women, and gave the impression, at least, of giving the women their undivided attention.
There was something else I noticed: while all of the women were quite conventionally attractive, many of the men were not at all conventionally attractive. But they were mesmerizing the women nonetheless. Did men who were at some kind of physical disadvantage in the mating game find themselves drawn to weekends and practices such as this, which would give them additional skills to bring to the table? The not-conventionally-attractive men, I could not help noticing, all appeared to approach the women, no matter how conventionally attractive they were in turn, with a rare kind of confidence—not arrogance, but a kind of certainty of their own value to women. Tall geeky men with pens clipped to their shirt pockets gazed confidently into the eyes of sleek sophisticates; grizzled older men gazed into the eyes of women of all ages; men of all shapes, sizes, and physical conditions were deeply attentive to women and quietly self-assured, and so, in spite of whatever they were or were not endowed with by nature, did come across as unusually charming. Amazing what an understanding of sacred spot massage must do for a guy’s confidence level, I thought.
I started chatting with a modest, dark-haired entrepreneur from Australia, who was married to a Belgian woman. He had flown halfway around the world to be at this event: he explained that his wife, after twenty-four years of marriage, had confessed that she no longer felt desire for him; she was belatedly getting in touch with her own sexuality and had awakened to this catastrophe for them both—she was parched in some way. I was amazed at the man’s forthrightness in facing the couple’s problem.
“Because I love my partner,” he said, “I lived in hope of things improving. It was very painful. This journey has taken many steps.” Not wishing to lose the marriage, the man was here at the sacred spot massage weekend to see what he could learn about stoking the fire between them.
Tantra, he said, was already helping the couple. “We started with healing touch—nonsexual massage,” he confided, surprisingly ready to share his insights and not flinching as I took out my yellow legal pad and a pen. “It’s a way to connect without the expectations and demands of having to perform, of sex. The giving and receiving of nonsexual touch is so powerful,” he explained. The Tantric approach of nonsexual massage had helped him “become better friends with his wife.” Their marriage, he said, had, over time, become “an illusion—not real on the intimate love part. We were so busy with a family, raising children—living the expectations of the world around us. I was always the warm, giving one; she was colder. It’s great that [Tantric practice] is finally allowing her to receive; sexually and in general.
“I’m here,” he continued, “because I want to know more about the art of loving: I want to learn this skill. As boys, as men, we are actually taught a lot more about having the ejaculation than about enjoying the moment. We are taught that frequency is everything. The idea of wanting to create intimate moments becomes the last priority, when it is the very thing to which we should look forward.”
Another man I interviewed echoed this desire for nonsexual intimacy, a desire that formed the basis of his Tantric approach. We started talking after I noticed him smiling mischievously at me—he was completely bald and rather stocky,
and altogether charmingly inoffensive in his approach. I folded my arms, identified myself as a journalist—that universal antiaphrodisiac—and asked him what had drawn him to the weekend.
He smiled even more broadly.
He had taken the workshop four times already, and he was back, he declared, because, “My lovers tell me I’m getting better and better.”
“What’s the secret?” I asked him. I couldn’t help smiling, too, at his boyish bravado.
“I transmit energy, love, and affection in my touch without doing something necessarily sexual,” he said. “It’s about the art of enjoying the moment rather than wanting to just ‘get it.’ To hold and experience a connection, not to go in a programmed way to please this one or that one, or to please yourself. Every man should learn a Tantric approach at twenty.”
Why had he begun to investigate these skills in the first place, I asked him?
“I found that sexual intimacy without love makes me feel empty. I don’t want to go back into situations like that. I found that it’s not about ejaculating [primarily].”
With a Tantric approach to a woman’s desire, he said, “You’re paying attention. . . . You’re not in your own world. How can you not be more successful?” He said that men often complain about women being emotionally volatile. But sacred spot massage, he said, helps to ground women emotionally: “If you [as a man] are present and can hold space for their emotions, how can you not be successful in relationships with women? Women [who receive sacred spot massage from men] are better able to ground themselves sooner, not hold on to their stuff, not create new stories, like: ‘You never pay attention to me.’
“You’re paying attention, asking permission to enter. Tantric teachers talk about how many nerve endings there are in the vaginal lips—most nerve endings are in the first inch. You’re paying more attention. It’s a whole different experience. You’re appreciating that area, not just trying to just get in as fast as you can, as deep as you can. . . . What is porn? Deep; fast; ejaculate. In contrast, Tantra is: slow; connect; explore every inch of what you’re doing.”
“Do you think most men in our culture understand the vagina?” I asked.
“Men in our culture don’t understand the penis or the vagina,” he said. “Because how often have men in our culture explored either? Get in, release, get out. Most of our sensitivity, too, is that first inch—the crown. Charles Muir talks about seven sections to the penis—each one relates to a chakra. But men don’t learn control in our culture in relation to their own pleasure either. Orgasm can be longer—for some men it stays for days. Do you think most men in our culture learn that the female sacred spot can be reached in different ways—you may have to curl around, or come from a different angle? Why would you learn that?” He laughed. “Angle, depth, rhythm: each creates a different response. Even when [one’s penis] is soft you can part her lips with it. Even if you don’t have a hard-on at that moment, you are exploring; it’s a game; that can be one of the most intense parts of an evening.
“These days especially,” he said, “young men learn from porn. You’re watching people put themselves in rather weird positions. Being subjected to all these images, you compare the person you’re with to a pair of breasts, or legs; you get into this whole comparison thing; and you also compare yourself to the hundred guys in the world with ten- or twelve-inch penises.
“Men don’t talk that much about sex—that is, about technique, detail, or emotions. You might say, ‘Hey, we were on the rooftop, it got crazy,’ but you don’t communicate much that is that useful about women. Most men don’t know about this stuff. It’s nowhere in the culture.”
I asked my new Tantra friend: What comes to mind when he thinks about the vagina? Like many people to whom I had put this question, he laughed. Then he said: “It’s great. It’s wonderful fun—a mystery to explore. A place of fun, enjoyment, magic—confusion at times: if they [women] are not quite reaching an orgasm—us guys are very process oriented, and it can be like: ‘This worked last time!’ It’s a wonderful space; on the other hand, at the same time, it’s bedeviling.”
He mused, “If more women knew themselves better, the more they could explain what is going on: communicate to themselves, or to a partner, how to connect more. It would feel really good if more women communicated what they wanted—offer, invite positive reinforcement.”
On Saturday night, I entered the hotel ballroom where the sacred spot massage selection was to take place, my curiosity intensely piqued by that afternoon’s conversations.
A tangka, a sacred fabric tapestry, hung on the wall by the stage. The tangka featured the goddess Shakti standing in an inverted triangle, the universal feminine symbol. The Shakti had long black wavy hair; she held open pink lotuses in each of her four hands; and a corona of light surrounded her. She looked like the darker, earthier sister of the radiant Mary of New College.
The expansive, shabby ballroom in the hotel’s basement had been set up with a podium ranged with banks of yellow roses, and comfortable cushions were scattered over the floor. Women and men of all ages lounged on them or sat up attentively throughout the proceedings. Charles Muir stood at the podium, delivering a lecture—in a dry, Borscht Belt accent, ready with a grin for every punch line—about how men should approach “the yoni.” He made the same general points that Mike Lousada had made in our conversations and that I had heard in Muir’s own audiotapes: cherishing, patience, respect, care, attention.
“There is a point called the yoni-nadi,” he said, “in the woman, which is found inside of her: behind her pubic hair is the pubic bone. On the backside of the pubic bone—if you go inside her vagina, curl your finger back against her pubic bone—there is erectile tissue there that swells up. About two square inches of it. When the area is activated, the point comes to the surface and manifests in vaginal orgasms. It is the point that connects ‘down there’ to your brain—so many neural circuits are there. This is the South Pole of the clitoris, which in turn is the north side of her sexual energy.” (I would note that this phrasing confirms the latest Western anatomical discoveries about the actual relationship of the clitoris to the G-spot—they are North and South Poles of the same anatomical structure.) “We stop at the clitoris because there is so much pleasure there. But on the other side of the clitoris is the G-spot.”
Throughout the workshop, I noticed that whenever sacred spot massage was discussed, it was presented as a practice more about releasing emotion than primarily about accessing pleasure. Caroline Muir explained that Charles would teach the men “how to be present for a woman as she releases whatever she needs to release—to stand in his love even if she is raging at him. . . . The men will be trained in this art of sexual healing. . . . The encouragement, permission, and invitation from a man to express authentically whatever she’s feeling is a step to amazing foreplay, because she can actually trust you. If some damage happened to us at the hands of a man, as it has for almost every woman, we need to trust that a man can be with our bodies and our yonis without having to fuck us. It’s your hands, heart, lips, spirit that bring healing.”
Charles Muir added, speaking to the men: “Your message is: ‘Tonight I will serve you. No matter what you look like or how big your breasts are, I will serve the Goddess in you. And the women will be asking: ‘Does Goddess move me to choose one of these men to have sacred spot massage from?’ ” The men perked up.
“Science says it takes fourteen days to experience new neural pathways. I say bullshit. This spot is a fulcrum with so many nerve endings to the brain. Will this develop into something serious? It is a healer, not a beloved. This is a one-night hand.” Laughter.
Charles Muir led the men out—they were all going to room 1750. “When they come back they will know things,” he smiled to the remaining women. “You can look at them with new respect.”
The men trooped off behind Muir. As I watched them pass—a group of men about to gather together to watch a sexually explicit video featuring a woman
’s body—they struck me as different from any other group of men, off to a night out at, say, Hooters. They seemed—I don’t know how to say this any other way—as if they were heading off to approach the female body in a way that was, yes, sexual, but also respectful.
After the men exited, Caroline Muir took the stage. She is a surreally juicy-looking, witty blond woman who appears to be about forty-three, but who is, in fact, in her early sixties—a fact that when revealed, elicited gasps from the now woman-only crowd. That night her hair was curled in wild tendrils, and she wore a loose salmon-pink top, slim white jeans, and delicate sandals; her toes were painted shell pink.
“Yes, we pamper the Goddess,” Caroline Muir began, and she then segued into a discussion of “female ejaculate,” that awful phrase for the liquid that emerges during orgasm in jets from the urethras of many women, which is called amrita in Sanskrit. “Amrita comes through heavenly realms,” she explained, according to Tantric tradition, and “comes through us into the vagina. Energy comes down and down. You can let go—if there are towels with you. You want to put it on your own face. He can drink it and become very awake—oral sex is not the best thing for him to do late at night—he’ll be walking the halls while you are sleeping like a baby.”