The Naked Reader Book Club: Spontaneous Sexual Combustion

A Florida gentlemen who asks to be referred to only as “Joe Francis” (no he’s not that Joe Francis) says that while he usually likes planning sex out one of his best surprises happened when he me an “incredibly hot” traveler at a local gay resort.

“We had great conversation, danced, made out, and he even persuaded me to strip down to my boxer briefs for the evening—as he had already dropped trou to his tighty whiteys,” Joe Francis recalls.

“I ended up coaxing him behind a rather large oak tree where we proceeded to make out with more, I felt him up, and eventually blew him. It didn’t take long before he gave up the spunk... and we ended up spending a few nights together while he was here, all filled with that same gotta-have-it passion.”

A few years later the scene of this liaison suffered a series of hurricanes (the spirit of blowjobs past?), one of which tumbled the massive tree. Joe says he felt wistful seeing the site. “It was like seeing where a childhood home once stood and then finding it had burned down...” The instant blaze between them lasted, however. They still keep in touch, even after over a decade.

Certainly we’ve all been knocked over by waves of lust and managed to hold our impulses back until we were able to get our target to a private space. So what happens on those occasions when our chemicals commandeer the vehicle, in this case, our bodies?

“The short answer is that sex makes you stupid,” laughs Sheri Winston, sex therapist, educator, former midwife and author of Women’s Anatomy of Arousal: Secret Maps to Buried Pleasure, (Mango Garden Press, 2010) which won the Book of the Year award from AASECT (American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists).

“It turns off the thinking part of our brain. It has to. If you’re thinking about what’s going on you’re not having great sex. The brain is very complex, so it isn’t just this one part but the neo cortex, ‘the executive office’ part of our brain which does “the judging, planning, evaluating, discussing negotiating part”—that’s “offline when the arousal circuit takes over,” Winston says.

The arousal process is the same physiologically, whether it happens slowly or quickly, Winston says, but what’s going to bring that urgency on is a combination of different loops we get into when we’re in those juicy new relationships. “The novelty/newness loop, the attraction/desire loop, the falling in love loop—when all those things happen, it’s pretty overwhelming, and when you get all those things happen simultaneously then you get knocked on your butt.”

“Have you every seen a cat in heat?” she asks. “It’s hysterical. They’re like a caricature of a horny woman. “Fuck me, fuck me now!” And the male cats are coming around doing anything they can to get to the females. When we think about that animal urgency, that’s what’s happening with us.”

Women are actually more susceptible when they’re ovulating, Winston points out, despite the fact that, as humans, we can be in heat any time—not just when we’re fertile. “We think ovulation is hidden,” she explains,” but there are signals, the smells, the pheromones are still happening (i.e. this New York Times story reporting that strippers who are ovulating get better tips.), and people pick up on that.”

There is one drawback to sudden sex, of course. Sometimes, you have to pay the piper. We’ve all had those mornings after when we wake up thinking, I can’t believe I did that!

“Arousal overriding common sense may good for ‘good sex,’” Winston warns, “but it’s not so good for negotiating boundaries and safer sex, and some of the things that are more challenging for some people.

“ ‘Oh, I couldn’t help it. I was swept away,’ is the usual excuse for bad behavior, behavior outside of integrity, or not using condoms” says Winston, “and I understand that because it is so powerful because it’s designed to be powerful—otherwise we wouldn’t reproduce.”

The arousal and gratification feel so fabulous … Who wouldn’t want to just let go? “You’re getting all these feel-good chemicals,” Winston explains. “The endorphins are a natural opiate. You’re getting oxytocin, the love hormone and also the orgasm hormone and the falling in love hormone, PEA (phenylethylalanine). So [there’s] this whole love/lust soup going on, and we can have that happening even if we’re past our fertile years,” or when we’re not ovulating, though that urgency will likely decline as a longer-term relationship.

“So you when you have those moments when you simply can’t make it from the car into the house without tearing each other’s clothes off (and hopefully not hitting the horn and waking the dog and the neighbors) you have your chemistry and primal, biological imperatives to thank for it—and they should get some high praise, maybe even a nice gift basket. After all, one good, ‘Wham bam, thank you, Ma’am, deserves another.’”


To purchase the Naked Reader Book Club selections, visit the Naked Reader Book Club Store.

The Naked Reader Book Club	Selections for July 2010
Frenzy. 60 Stories of Sudden Sex, edited by Alison Tyler	Can't Help The Way That I Feel, edited by Lori Bryant-Woolridge
Making The Hook-Up Edited by Cole Riley