Gina Ogden
A Conversation at the Heart and Soul of Sex
By Joy Davidson, Ph.D.
When strangers ask me what I do for a living, if I’m in a particularly mischievous mood I sometimes tell them that I’m a sex worker. I admit to a naughty little thrill watching eyebrows raise and jaws drop, but I never leave anyone twisting in discomfort for long. I quickly explain that I’m actually a psychologist who specializes in sex therapy. The truth, however, is that just like a “real” sex worker – maybe even more than most sex workers – sex is my life. I talk about it, write about it, teach it, study it, and on a good day I even get to do it. Off duty, of course.
Sex being my life and all, it’s rare that I uncover something completely fresh or surprising about the emotional aspect of my pet topic. The medical stuff, sure, new research is always forthcoming. But when it comes down to what we do and how we feel about sex, it’s unusual for my own eyebrows to arch a notch higher. But last month, thanks to the work of my colleague Dr. Gina Ogden, I discovered a new and fascinating wrinkle in the fabric of women’s sexual experience.
You might recognize Dr. Ogden as the author of the 1994 bestseller Women Who Love Sex (Womanspirit Press, 1999) based on her dissertation study of 50 easily orgasmic women. Her research made headlines then, and she’s about to make waves again with another survey featuring women, sex, and spirituality. Notice I didn’t say “sex and religion” because we’re not talking about dogma or religious tradition here – far from it – even if her new book, based on a survey of nearly 4,000 people, is titled, The Heart and Soul of Sex: Making the ISIS Connection. In it she invites readers to experience the convergence of body, mind, heart, and spirit in the “uncharted territory of ecstasy and mystical revelation.”
If you’re thinking, “puhleeeze – not another finish line that ranks up there with multiple-orgasms, G-spot shockwaves, and waterfall ejaculations,” you can relax. Ogden doesn’t prescribe fancy sex tricks or cosmic rituals. Instead, she lets us in on the secrets that ordinary women reveal in order to demonstrate that nothing more is required for ecstatic connections than keen awareness and full engagement during our sexual experiences, no matter what form they take.
When I sat down with Gina for lunch at a West Side restaurant, the vibrant Bostonian had just returned from a two-month-long stint in California, playing Granny Mame to her 4-year-old granddaughter. Sexy and energetic still, Ogden tackled my questions with a depth and humor that have become trademarks of this ageless icon:
JOY DAVIDSON: What prompted you to launch a study about women, sex, and spirit?
GINA OGDEN: I wanted to address concerns raised by my sex-therapy clients: Isn’t there something more to sex than intercourse? Is there something special I’m supposed to be feeling? I created my survey – “Integrating Sexuality and Spirituality (ISIS)” – to investigate those and other questions that traditional sex researchers don’t cover. For instance: How does sexual relationship feel to you? What do you experience? What does it mean in your life? In a moment of sexual ecstasy have you ever experienced God?
“God” covers a lot of territory. What did you mean by God? A Judeo-Christian God? A new age God? A pagan or nature-based God?
All of that, and more. Forty-seven percent of the women who responded to my survey answered Yes to that question. They described a personal sense of relationship with a power greater than themselves. Some women call this God. Others refer to Goddess, Great Spirit, Higher Power, or Nature. There are names to fit every belief system, including agnostic. Some women spoke of seeing the face of God in their lovers’ faces, feeling cradled in the loving power of the universe during orgasm, merging with the world of nature as they were making love, experiencing prior lifetimes with their lovers. What is important about these relationships (other than so many being reported) is that they are invariably transformational. When sex becomes a path to the spirit or soul, life takes on new meaning, broader vision, increased power, and understanding.
How do the women who responded to your survey distinguish between spirituality and organized religion?
Women talked about spirituality as a personal and direct connection with higher power, and religion as a more culturally based set of traditions or rituals.
In our culture, we equate sex with intercourse to a degree that diminishes pure, multi-dimensional pleasure for women and men alike. Not to say that intercourse can’t be great, but it’s only one facet of sexual experience. When the emphasis of sex is on intercourse alone, erotic experience can be terribly limited. I know you’ve made similar observations, and I’m curious to know what your survey revealed.
The majority of the 3,810 ISIS respondents were clear on that point: Sexual experience is more than intercourse, more than genital stimulation, even more than orgasm. It’s more than the performance aspects we can count and measure. How we respond sexually has to do with our minds, hearts, and spirits – as well as our bodies.
The subtitle of your book is “Making the ISIS Connection.” I get that ISIS is an acronym for the title of your questionnaire, but it sounds like it’s meant to encompass far more than that. Can you describe what the ISIS connection actually means?
These days, too many women – and men – are diagnosed with sexual dysfunction and low sexual desire because they don’t live up to the performance standards of intercourse with a goal of physical orgasm. Yet they are capable of pleasure on many levels that traditional research seems not to count. So I offer a model for broadening our ideas about sexual experience, organized around a circle I call the “ISIS Wheel.” This wheel functions as a container or metaphor for how we think and feel about sex, in addition to how we perceive the physical sensations. As you open yourself up to the profound wisdom of your own body, mind, heart, and soul, you are making the ISIS Connection, which enables sexual experience to enter the uncharted territory of ecstasy and mystical revelation. Also the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis was known as the initiator of sexual mysteries, so we have her good model to follow as well as respondents from all over America.
Were any of the results from your study specific to women over 50?
What was so interesting, and indeed one of the major ISIS findings, was that the women said sex got more satisfying with every decade. In other words, the 50-and 60-year-olds were having more meaningful sexual experiences than the 20- and 30-year-olds. They reported richer relationships, possibly as a result of having matured beyond old “good girls don’t” constraints and cultural ideas about how women are supposed to look, act, smell, and groom themselves. This flies in the face of current medical thinking, which assumes that sex goes down hill at midlife and beyond, and also that we need medical help to keep our desire alive and our vaginas lubricated.
Was there any difference between women who were sexually involved with men, and those who were involved with other women?
I haven’t computed the statistical differences. What’s remarkable about the data, however, is how similar the narrative responses of heterosexual, bisexual, and lesbian women are. Their backgrounds differ somewhat and their life challenges differ, but they all report multidimensional sexual experiences involving body, mind, heart, and spirit.
I speak to a lot of young people about sexuality, as well as to their parents and grandparents. Everybody is very concerned about when, if, and how young adults become sexually active. As you know, every bit of scientific data shows that the Bush administration’s “abstinence-until-marriage” curriculums don’t work, and seriously endanger the health and emotional well-being of young people. Do your results further challenge this “abstinence” paradigm?
Not in so many words, but those results do underscore that sexual experience includes how we think and feel and what sex means in our lives, as well as our physical sensations. So in broadening the definitions of sexual experience beyond a definable set of activities, the ISIS results make “abstinence-only” a reduction-ad-absurdum. It’s like saying, “Don’t think about a white rabbit.” You can’t ask young people not to think about or have feelings about something that is a wellspring of life and creativity. The ISIS results suggest that we need to teach young people how to say Yes to pleasure and/or sexual pleasure in a way that’s appropriate to their age and situation. That is the best preparation for marriage or any other kind of earthly or sacred union they want to enter into as they mature.
Are there emotional and spiritual markers that indicate when a young adult is “ready “ to become sexually active – that is, signs to look for within themselves that indicate readiness, beyond chronological age or commitment level within a relationship?
These are totally great questions that I think are beyond the scope of this study. Though you might infer from the findings that the usual benchmarks of age, commitment level, etc., are not always the most effective criteria for meaningful sex, there is great individual variation. Some women find ISIS experience with themselves, and some not until their third marriage at age 50, or their seventeenth relationship at whatever age, or when they discover an affair, or suddenly with a woman partner. Yet it feels important to say that about 90 percent of the respondents were heterosexual, and from their letters appear to have led pretty traditional lives. Which is all the more interesting to me because we find Southern Baptists, Ohio school teachers, rock-ribbed Vermonters, and Bible-thumping Mormons all describing these ecstatic sexual experiences where touch is seen as holy and God is in their orgasms. Okay, so there are a fair share of California coastal types, too.
In the final analysis, what do you hope your readers will learn from The Heart and Soul of Sex?
Well, each reader is going to bring her or his own experiences into the book, so the first thing I wish for readers is that they become exquisitely aware of their own approach to sexuality – what they want, what they don’t want, and what sex means in their lives. Beyond that, there are many tried-and-true exercises from my years as a sex therapist and workshop leader. These range from meditations and affirmations to how to practice safety as erotic foreplay, open yourself to heart-to-heart connection, and even write a compelling ad for a spiritual lover.
Dr. Ogden will be conducting “Heart and Soul of Sex” workshops for women at Kripalu Center in Lenox, Massachusetts, August 25 – 27 (for info: 866-200-5203 or www.kripalu.org) and at the Rowe Conference Center in Rowe Massachusetts., December 1 - 3 (for info: 413-339-4954, www.rowecenter.org)
