The Joys that Vibrators Can Bring to Your Sex Life

Is there such a thing as having too much fun?
Would looking for ways to have better sex after years of good sex with your partner be sinfully greedy? From the averted gazes, blushes, and giggles that so many people produce when sex toys are mentioned, you would think increasing sexual joy past some legal limit truly breaks a law. Not so. By nature, human beings are game players and tool users. We enjoy inventing recreational activities that enhance our abilities to do required tasks: accurate javelin throwing and bringing down dinner-on-the-hoof have something important in common. So, too, game-like sexual fantasies, whether all in the mind or role-played with costumes and props, "tools" if you will, are natural extensions of a healthy desire to heighten pleasure and enrich sexual relationships.
Vibrators have a place among the tools that people use to improve their sexual skills, increase their own and their partners' pleasure, and add joy to their sex lives.
Near the end of the 1960's, vibrators came to market as a way to provide women, especially non-orgasmic women, a new kind of intense sexual stimulation whether or not they had a sex partner. Whether hand-held or designed to fasten over the hand, a vibrator is simply an appliance that produces a steady, rapid rhythm - at about 2,000 vibes or oscillations a minute, far steadier and faster than the human hand. Most female orgasms depend on clitoral stimulation, and vibrators provide the most intense clitoral stimulation possible. Sex therapists continue to recommend them for the not-yet-orgasmic.
In lovemaking with a partner or as an aid to masturbation, vibrators work best as a complement to other sexual stimuli. Using a vibrator doesn't reduce the sensual pleasure of direct body contact, of skin on skin, of mouths and tongues, of hands or genitals.
However, repeating the same sexual behavior can put you and your partner in a rut. If you rely for a long time on a vibrator to reach orgasm, you can become fixated on the vibrator's predictable stimulation, making it difficult - if not impossible - to find satisfaction any other way. Even worse, should your pattern of vibrator use cease to work for you, you could face a difficult process or relearning how to be orgasmic.
The best advice: vary your sexual routine, for variety is the spice of satisfaction. Couples often integrate vibrators into their lovemaking to enhance sex play, with the emphasis on play. "The point is not to have a relationship with the vibrator but to use the vibrator to help create a sexual experience," notes Julia Heiman, PhD, co-author of Becoming Orgasmic, in the March 1996 issue of Sex Over Forty.
Experience It For Yourself
So what's it really like? Imagine yourself in the following erotic situations, and if that deep-down flutter response is triggered, give yourself permission to pick up a vibrator and go for more joy. Bob and Laurie like to set a sensual mood every night at bedtime with scented candles, massage oil, soft jazz, perhaps showering or bathing together. They don't expect to have intercourse every night, but they do count on their private time to give them a chance to feel physically close and sexually intimate. One of their favorite sex toys is The Deluxe Foreplay to Love System, a vibrator with various attachments, some of them textured for all-over body massage, some of them for stroking her labia and clitoris or for stimulating his penis.
Just knowing their evening ritual might include a muscle-relaxing massage, along with intercourse or a vibrator-induced orgasm for one or both of them, keeps the aggravations of the day in perspective and reinforces the emotional closeness of their marriage.
"Vibrators are so perfect for orgasms that it's easy to forget how wonderful they are for massage," writes Betty Dodson, PhD in Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving . "Whenever you vibrate, you are stimulating the flow of blood to that area, a marvelous health and beauty treatment for the entire body."
"Many of the products sold as toys are actually therapeutic for many men suffering from decreased penile sensation and/or erection difficulties," said Barbara Keesling, PhD, sex therapist and author of Sexual Healing. For this reason, Margie and Sid ordered their first "plain vanilla" bullet-shaped vibrator from a catalog. Sid had found himself distracted by how much longer it was taking him to become aroused. Worry that he had lost the seemingly automatic hard-ons of his youth was making him avoid sex - a sure way to make it even more difficult to get an erection.
It only took Margie a few tries to discover what Sid finds most arousing. In between stroking, kissing, and gently sucking his genitals, she eases the vibrator up and down the underside and around the coronal ridge (the ridge below the tip) of his hardening penis. Margie always combines the vibrator's rapid stimulation with caresses from her mouth and hands, and sometimes when she and Sid proceed to intercourse she presses the vibrator against the exquisitely sensitive spot between Sid's scrotum and anus (the perineum). Other times, when Margie sits on top of Sid with his penis inside her, he brings her to orgasm by stimulating her clitoris with the vibrator. After she comes, she boosts his orgasm by touching his penis with the vibrator as she moves over him. Even more surprising to them both, the vibrator sometimes helps Sid enjoy a second orgasm with a soft-on!
Aiming For The G-Spot
One of the many specialty G-spot vibrators now available is designed to stimulate what has been described as the G-spot located on the upper wall of many women's vaginas - a controversial subject. (See the June 1998 issue of Sex Over Forty.) The surface of the G-spot tends to feel rough to the touch and, like erectile tissue in the penis, it may become firm and swell when stimulated. Until Daron introduced a G-Spot vibrator into their lovemaking, Sheila didn't know exactly where her G-Spot was or if she even had one. The discovery brought her to a new level of sexual excitement and to entirely different-feeling orgasmic experiences than she was used to from clitoral stimulation. With the help of the vibrator, Daron learned how to find Sheila's G-Spot on his own, and now he takes great pleasure in sharing this new erotic joy with his lover. These days, if Sheila feels more like having sex than he does, Daron doesn't worry about performing. Cradling, nuzzling, kissing, and caressing Sheila as she relaxes back into his arms, Daron watches as she uses first her fingers and then the vibrator to arouse herself. As her vagina moistens, Sheila spreads her labia and slowly inserts the vibrator inside until she finds her G-Spot. Once in a while, the explosive orgasm that Sheila experiences in this position, with Daron's loving hands on her breasts, is just stimulus enough to arouse Daron, and he then masturbates to climax or they go on to enjoy unexpected intercourse.
Try It For Yourself
The ways that vibrators can raise the joy factor in your lovemaking are limited only by your imagination. You can play the watching game and, like Sheila and Daron, find erotic pleasure in seeing your partner climax; you can play fantasy games, with the vibrator a "stand-in" for an imaginary extra player; you can experiment with perineal or anal stimulation. For virtually any sort of stimulation you can imagine, there is a vibrator on the market. If you and your partner explore the possibilities in a loving, trusting, mutually understanding way, there's no downside - just more joy in your sex play.
Marty Klein, PhD, a psychotherapist, Certified Sex Educator, and author of Ask Me Anything: A Sex Therapist Answers the Most Important Questions for the Nineties, urges us not to distrust sex toys just because they are designed exclusively for pleasure. Klein reminds committed couples seeking increased joy and intimacy in their sex lives that "it's good to consider being creative. . . . Relax," he said, "keep your sense of humor, use your experience, and enjoy the results. . . . Don't try to do it perfectly, just do it!"