An Intimate Life

by Cheryl T. Cohen Greene

  “My neck still looks young. I wish it were a little longer. I have pretty arms and I like my skin tone over my chest.”

  At this point Mary Ann crossed her right arm over her chest and took her left breast in her hand.

  “My breasts are beautiful now that I’ve had implants. They used to be too small. When I was a kid I was worried that I would be flat-chested like my mother.”

  I wondered what Mary Ann’s original bosom looked like and how she determined it was too small. In my view, it was now too big and out of proportion with the rest of her beautiful body.

  “My stomach is nice and flat and I love my small waist.”

  Then she placed her right hand over her pubic mound and then the left on top of it.

  “From this angle, my vulva looks okay. I’m worried about looking at it more closely, though, because I can feel the difference in my lips and I worry that it is going to be too ugly to look at.”

  I suggested she take a deep breath and release it slowly. She closed her eyes. When she was finished, I asked if she was ready to continue and she opened her eyes and stared at herself in the mirror again.

  “My hips are in a good proportion to my waist because I exercise so much. I wish my butt was a little bigger. My husband once said he wished I had more to grab onto back there. I’ve thought about having surgery on it. When I was a kid my legs were long and skinny. They looked like stilts and I wished they were shorter. Now, I think they look like a dancer’s legs. I’ve toned them a lot and I love the way they look in tight pants. My ankles and feet are narrow and I like that.” She looked at me to indicate that she was finished. The look on her face was neutral, and I felt that she was honest in her appraisal of her body.

  “You did a great job, Mary Ann. I learned a lot about how you feel about your body. Was this helpful for you?”

  “Well, it made me realize how much of my body I actually like,” she said.

  We chatted a little more and then she put on her tights, skirt, and blouse and I got into my jeans and T-shirt.

  “Next time we’ll introduce our vulvas to each other,” I said, and then explained the Sexological to her. This exercise would be different for Mary Ann than it was with my male clients. I wouldn’t invite her to explore my genitals, for one, and instead of me touching her genitals, I would guide her in an exploration of her own vulva.

  When Mary Ann arrived for her second visit, she had her hair pulled back into a French twist and she wore a tight grey sweater. She looked as gorgeous as she had in our first session. I hoped that today, when she finally looked at her vulva closely for the first time, she would see that it was as beautiful as the rest of her.

  We talked for a while about how she had been since our first session and she said she had thought often about the images she had seen in Femalia. I asked her to share some of her thoughts and she said she was still shocked about how different each woman was and she wondered how it was that she had reached nearly forty without knowing this.

  “It’s not uncommon. The images we’re used to seeing are unrealistic ones. Most people, no matter their age, are stunned by those photos.”

  I asked Mary Ann if she was ready to do the Sexological. She stood up and I led the way down the hall to the bedroom.

  We ran through a series of relaxation exercises. We got undressed and I got the hand mirror and pillows from the closet. We crossed our legs over each other’s and I led Mary Ann on a tour of my vulva. I pulled back my clitoral hood and ran my finger around my clitoris. “This is where the smegma we discussed in our last session lives. You can clean it easily by gently retracting your clitoral hood when you’re in the shower and putting a little soap and water around it. But keep soap out of your vagina. It’s self-cleaning and you don’t want to throw off the acid and alkaline balance. It was really a big deal for me to learn about it, even though it seems so simple. It helped me to understand that my genitals weren’t inherently bad or disgusting. I could clean them like any other part of my body and remove the odor they gave off.”

  I invited Mary Ann to give me feedback. She said that she thought my genitals looked tiny compared to hers.

  “We have different shapes and they’re both perfectly natural. I would even call them beautiful,” I said.

  When it was her turn, we switched the position of our legs so that Mary Ann’s rested on mine. I held the mirror in front of her vulva so she could get a close look.

  “What do you think when you look at your genitals this closely?” I asked.

  “The left is a little longer, but it’s not as uneven as the one picture we saw.”

  “Can I guide you in some exploration of your vulva?”

  “Okay,” Mary Ann said shyly.

  I asked her to hold back her outer labia with one hand so that the other hand was free.

  “With your index finger, circle lightly around your vulva,” I said. “Does one side feel more sensitive than the other?” I asked.

  “The left.”

  “Interesting. It’s not at all uncommon for women—or men—to feel more reactive on one side of their genitals than the other. It’s very natural. Maybe there is a connection with the left side being longer, and maybe not.

  “You know, I would guess that other women in your family have similar-shaped labia,” I added.

  “So, you think it’s a family thing?”

  “It could be.”

  Slowly, Mary Ann seemed to be normalizing her labia, getting more comfortable with the idea that an uneven length didn’t mean that there was anything wrong.

  I asked her to insert her index finger up to her first knuckle into her vagina and explore her G-spot.

  “I worry that I might not have one,” Mary Ann said.

  “Not every woman is extremely sensitive in that area. It’s talked about so much that it easy to believe that all women are, but if you’re not that’s perfectly natural. It doesn’t mean that anything is broken or wrong. Just as genitals can look different, they can respond differently as well, despite what you’re led to believe.”

  Mary Anne inserted her finger into her vagina.

  “Okay, now hook your finger up toward your pubic bone. Gently feel around and see if there’s any spot that feels more pleasurable than another. If there isn’t, don’t worry. There’s nothing wrong. Again, not all women have G-spot sensitivity.”

  Mary Ann explored and then said, “I guess I’m one of the women who isn’t sensitive here.”

  “And that’s alright.”

  As we untangled our legs Mary Anne said, “I wonder if my husband ever noticed that my lips are slightly uneven.”

  “Is this something you feel you can talk about with him?” I asked.

  “I think so now. Before, I just assumed that he noticed and didn’t want to hurt my feelings.”

  Mary Ann’s perspective had shifted a little. I believed that the two exercises I had done with her were likely to be effective.

  As we parted that day, I told Mary Anne that if she felt she ever wanted to see me again or if she had more questions that she should call me. I called Jodie that night to update her on our last session.

  Several months later, Jodie called about another client. She let me know that she was still seeing Mary Ann and that it would take some time to fully address her body image issues, but she no longer believed that her vulva was the problem.

  10.

  becoming a surrogate

  Michael and I hadn’t had sex for almost a week. For some couples this would be unremarkable; for us it was a red flag. We had been in California for about a year and suddenly our sex life had dropped off a cliff. When I tried to kiss or cuddle up with him in bed he told me he was sleepy and rolled over onto his side with his back facing me. Michael being too tired for sex was like a fish being too tired to swim. I remembered when he would work a ten-hour shift at his hospital job and then come home and spend hours making love with me. The first couple of nights I tried to convince myself that maybe he was tired.
Maybe he just needed some downtime. But when I was rebuffed for the fifth night in a row, I knew something other than fatigue was at play.

  On the evening of my sixth day of involuntary abstinence I went to a yoga class; at the end, as I lay in corpse pose with my feet flopped out, palms turned up, and my back pressed against a rubber mat, I started to cry. Anxiety ran through me like a current that couldn’t be shut off. Six days without sex was surely a sign of trouble. Was it the first stage of total disengagement? Was this Michael’s way of easing out of the relationship?

  “Deep breaths. Don’t forget to breathe,” the willowy yoga teacher said as she walked between the rows of prone students.

  I couldn’t breathe because my nose was too stuffed up from crying. I sat up, walked over to the doorway of the room where our shoes were lined up against the wall, slipped my feet into mine, and left the class. As I drove home, I decided to talk with Michael. I needed to know what was going on. Even if my worst fear was true, at least I would know what I was dealing with and I could put an end to the speculation that was making me too anxious to relax even in corpse pose.

  When I got home, Michael had just put the kids to bed and he stood at the kitchen sink washing dishes. I walked up behind him and put my arms around his waist. He turned on the water to rinse the suds off his hands and then twisted his body around, loosening my embrace. He took a few steps away from the sink with his hands up and grabbed a dishtowel.

  “Michael, we need to talk,” I said.

  “Okay,” he answered, and sat down at the kitchen table.

  I sat down across from him.

  “What’s going on? Why aren’t we having sex?”

  Michael explained that he was feeling performance pressure because I regularly initiated sex.

  “When I want sex I’ll initiate it,” he said.

  This rocked me. First, I was humiliated. Was he saying that he didn’t want to have sex with me? Was this Michael’s way of accusing me of being a sex maniac, à la John, my teenage boyfriend? Also, I thought we were casting off tradition here. Was it suddenly wrong for me to want and initiate sex? I tried hard to maintain my composure, but soon I was crying again.

  “Remember back in Boston when I told you that I had never been monogamous?”

  I sure did. Michael told me this the first time we slept together. I wanted to think the sheer force of my love would turn him into a one-woman man.

  “Well, I don’t want to be monogamous now. I need more stimulation,” he said.

  More stimulation? I felt like the wind had just been knocked out of me. Then he pointed to an issue of the Berkeley Barb that lay on top of a pile of papers on our table. “Have you seen the ads for swingers parties in here?”

  It took me no time at all to realize that Michael was asking for an open marriage. My feelings were not just mixed, but at odds. In 1970, traditional marriage was one of the many institutions up for popular review. In truth, I was curious about exploring with other men. I was only twenty-five. I had finally shaken off my religious guilt and shame and I was living in the heart of the sexual revolution, the San Francisco Bay Area. Part of me was happy to dispense with the confines of marriage, but another part of me was terrified of losing Michael. But then if I refused, would I push him out of my life completely? I did a quick, barely perceptible calculation and realized that opening the marriage would probably offer me the best chance at keeping it.

  That night as I lay beside Michael, watching his chest rise and fall to the rhythm of his even breathing, I thought about our life together, about what I wanted it to be, and about what it was in reality. I remembered one evening back in Boston when Michael, his friend Ron, and I spent most of the night talking in my apartment. Somehow we got on the subject of cheating. Michael asserted that if he was attracted to a friend’s girlfriend, he saw nothing wrong with sleeping with her behind his friend’s back. Ron fired back that that was a betrayal of the friendship, but Michael held his ground. If both people were interested, why should they deny themselves? There was plenty of reason to know that no matter how much I loved him or how special I imagined our relationship to be, Michael would never limit himself to me.

  On a brisk Saturday night a couple of weeks later, we left the kids with some friends and headed to Concord, a bedroom community about fifteen miles east of Berkeley, for our first swingers party. Michael, who rarely wore anything other than jeans and a T-shirt, donned a pair of dress pants and a button-down twill shirt. He even had combed back his hair. I remember thinking that my husband looked like he was going on a first date with a woman he wanted to impress.

  It was easy to recognize the house where the party was being held because the driveway and the street in front of it were clogged with sedans. Michael maneuvered the yellow submarine behind a mammoth Lincoln and a red Chevy Impala. I wanted to grab his arm as we walked up to the front door, but instead I kept both my hands wedged into the pockets of my skirt.

  Michael smoothed out his shirt before he rang the doorbell. Through the frosted glass of the door window the group of people standing in the foyer looked ghostly. I was trying to make out the ratio of men to women when our host opened the door. Her hair was styled in a beehive and lacquered into place. She wore a blue polyester jumper over a white blouse that tied into a huge bow at her neck. I could detect a change in her skin tone along her jaw where her heavy pancake makeup ended. She took our coats and my purse and led us into the sunken living room. I quickly scanned the crowd, which I judged almost immediately as decidedly unhip. If Michael expected a grotto of lolling bohemian beauties he had wildly miscalculated and I was tickled because of it.

  I turned to say something to Michael and discovered he was already mingling. As I made my way through the crowd, several men, none of whom I found attractive, ogled me. I felt like I was being looked at like a new piece of meat. We were supposed to be scaling the heights of sexual adventurism and all I could think was, Is this how a new prison inmate feels?

  I poured a glass of wine and pretended to examine our hosts’ record collection. As I flipped through the rows of LPs in the cabinet next to the stereo, a few intrepid men approached me, but I was about as welcoming as a dentist’s drill.

  Many of the guests had paired off and were having sex on the shag-carpeted living room floor. As I pretended to read the back cover of a Neil Diamond record, I noticed Michael out of the corner of my eye chatting with the one woman in the crowd who was his type. She was tall and slender and her dark hair hung down just below her chin. She had a pointy nose and chiseled cheekbones.

  “Having fun?”

  I looked away from Michael and found our host standing next to me.

  “Oh yes. It’s great. Thanks for having us.”

  “Looks like your husband’s met Nina. Did you know she just made her debut at the San Francisco Opera?”

  “No, I didn’t. Isn’t that wonderful.”

  “Yup, she’s got a gorgeous voice—a soprano.”

  “Fantastic.”

  I drained my glass.

  “Time for a refill,” I said and walked across the room to the bar.

  So, Michael was chatting up a diva. At that point I had some very particular ideas about how to raise his voice a few octaves.

  I sat down on the couch and nursed my wine. I watched as the conversation between Michael and Nina heated up. He touched her arm. She smiled and ruffled his hair. They kissed. Before long they were one of the writhing couples on the floor. I told myself to stop watching, but I could barely blink. What really upset me was that Michael was doing stuff with her that he did with me. He was going down on her and she was wriggling with delight. I wanted to believe this was reserved for me, his wife, the one who was special enough to marry. Neither one noticed me staring at them. About four other couples were splayed out on the spacious floor, and at least two of them were having intercourse. People buzzed around as if it were normal to have to step over copulating couples to get to the other side of the living room. It wa
s all so tawdry.

  Finally, I pulled myself off the couch and went out onto the deck. I leaned against the redwood railing, the cool night air pressed against my burning face. I looked up at the moon and out over the hills. It was a big world filled with lots of people. Seeing Michael with someone else hurt, but I reminded myself that I, too, now had the freedom to wander.

  I left the party without even speaking to another man, and I was pretty quiet on the drive back home. I knew the boundaries and rules I had been raised with would have never worked for me. They would have led to a life of misery. But should there be no boundaries? Was Michael’s contrarianism really just a guise for his hedonism, a convenient vehicle for selfish behavior? Once again I felt myself pulled in opposite directions. I was hurt. I didn’t want to share Michael, but at the same time I was curious. I wanted to redraw the boundaries. At this point, I just had no idea where.

  I had always wanted four children, but with our tenuous financial circumstances Michael and I decided to stop at two. For now, we would concentrate on raising our two wonderful children with as much love and attention as we could possibly give them. Also, an open marriage was complicated enough. The last thing I wanted was to get pregnant by another man.

  I tried taking the Pill, but it caused my mood to do gymnastics. One minute I was cheerful and content, the next I was crying and battling despair. So I opted instead for an IUD, called a Lippes Loop. It was painless and I didn’t have to remember to take a pill every day or endure mood swings the size of the Grand Canyon.

  One day, about three months after the Lippes Loop had been implanted, I was in the shower and I noticed that the strings attached to it pushed out farther than normal. I pushed my finger up and felt something protruding out from my cervix. It was blunt at the end and about as wide as a toothpick. My IUD had come loose. I tugged on the strings and eased the Lippes Loop out of my cervix. As it exited, it sprung back into a double-S shape. I stepped out of the tub, toweled off, and called my doctor.