In 1966, when I was eight years old, my mother gave me a little pink book, A Baby is Born. In great detail, and with lots of close-ups and diagrams, it described exactly what a sperm and egg looked like and how they joined together, with subsequent portraits of the developing fetus.
How did the sperm meet the egg to begin with?
The book said simply, "Mommy and Daddy love each other very much. They lie close together and, after performing intercourse, the sperm is on its way to fertilize the egg."
There was no accompanying diagram, so I made what was probably my first earnest attempt to read between the lines of any piece of literature. I gleaned nothing.
Egg Sex © Susie Bright, from Susie Bright’s Sexual Reality: A Virtual Sex World Reader
Twenty-five years later, I was pregnant, and this time I went out and bought my own collection of pink and blue books bulging with instruction for prospective parents. Of course, there was a great deal to learn about fetal development and breast-feeding techniques, but I couldn't help but check each index under "Sexuality— during and after pregnancy."
All the manuals, from Dr. Spock to the latest yuppie know-it-all, followed an almost identical script: "Mommy and Daddy love each other very much..." Following this vein, the paragraphs on sexuality gave advice that was unexplicit, vague, and almost threatening in their avoidance of the nitty-gritty.
Steeped in a romance-novel notion of marriage, sexual advice to pregnant moms— whether revealed in print or in the strange silences at the doctor's office— gives short shrift to the dramatic changes in women's sexual physiology and desires. Great emphasis is placed on how to cope with the ambivalent husband's feelings towards his wife's body and the burden pregnancy puts on their normal sexual routine.
None of these books was written in the sixties. All of them glow with feminist and holistic approaches to mothering, supporting working moms, refuting the sexist prejudices against breast-feeding, and offering all manner of enlightened positive self-esteem for the mother-to-be.
I began to wonder if anyone knew what went on in women's sexual lives during pregnancy. The most definitive statement the books managed was: Sometimes she's hot, sometimes she's not. This wouldn't be the first time that conventional medicine had nothing to contribute to an understanding of female sexuality.
Meanwhile, my clit started to grow.
Everyone knows that a pregnant woman's breasts swell in accompaniment to her belly, but why had no one told me that my genitals would also grow? My vulva engorged with blood; my labia grew fatter; my clit pushed slightly out of its hood. I was reading absolutely everything on the subject of pregnant sex by this point and, by picking out the fragments of pertinent information, I learned I was not peculiar in this regard.
It's a little embarrassing to be thirty-one years old and finally get the message that my primary and secondary sexual characteristics are not simply for display and petting. I was being physically and psychologically dominated by the life growing inside me, and I wanted both to escape and to submit. I was unusually sensual and amorous, and yet, twenty weeks into pregnancy, I found I could not successfully masturbate the way I had been doing since I was a kid. I was stunned and a little panicky. My engorged clitoris was different under my fingers; too sensitive to touch my usual way. What other way was there?
That's when it hit me. The experts all say that it is a mystery why some women get more horny when they're pregnant while others lose interest.
I'll tell you something— no one loses interest. What happens is that your normal sexual patterns don't work the same way anymore. Unless you and your lover make the transition to new ways of getting excited and reaching orgasm, you are going to be very depressed about sex and start avoiding it all together.
It's not just a technique change, either. Feeling both desirable and protected are essential to a pregnant woman, and if protection is not forthcoming from the outside, she will build a fortress that cannot be penetrated.
I no longer believe that some women don't feel sexual during those long nine months. Some are frightened by the sexual changes their growing bodies demand. But so many others confided to me, "I was so hot, and I couldn't explain it to just anyone."
It's an awesome feat of American puritanism to convince us that sex and pregnancy do not mix. It's the ultimate virgin/whore distinction. For those nine months, please don't mention how we got this way— we're "Mary" now.
Your average Mary's physical transformation is quite different from an immaculate conception. A woman's vagina changes when she is pregnant, much like her vulva and clit. The lubrication increases; its smell and texture are different. Often exhibiting a pregnancy-type yeast infection, her genitals smell like a big cookie.
When I fucked during my pregnancy, I felt like I was participating in a slow elastic taffy pull. I was more passive sexually than ever before, with no ambition to strap one on, or get on top, or do much of anything besides take it all in and float. I was one gigantic egg cozy.
Truthfully, you don't get gigantic for at least five or six months. The advice books make much controversy over positions for intercourse, but I didn't find positioning to be that big a deal. It's typical of mainstream sex books to focus on "positions" in the masculine way one might prepare a sports manual. You can fuck on your back for a long time if you like, as long as your partner doesn't insist on collapsing upon you. Flat on one's belly is impossible after six months, but slightly turned to the side works just fine. It is often recommended that the woman get on top— but as I mentionned, I couldn't be bothered.
Sex is also a crucial way to prepare for childbirth. Start with the premise that birth is the biggest sex act you will ever take part in, and everything will flow from that. If you are smart and take childbirth preparation classes, you may even get a teacher who knows something about the sexual side of birth.
My teacher was subtle. She gave us an almost unreadable handout in the fourth month, an instruction sheet for an exercise called "perineal massage." I thought of my perineum, the little inch of skin running between my vagina and my anus. How could rubbing something the size of a birthday candle help me in labor?
The flyer (which opened, of course, with the obligatory spiel: "Mommy and Daddy love each other very much...") said that Daddy should massage and finger the vaginal opening until he could put more and more of his fingers inside, relaxing the vaginal muscles through such caresses until he might be able to press a small orange or even his whole hand into Mommy's opening.
His whole hand! I called up one of my friends who has the breadth of experience as both a mother of two and a retired porn star. "Is 'perineal massage' really fist fucking?" I asked her.
"Of course," she said, laughing, "and it really helps."
I could see why. A hand going inside my pussy is a little like a baby's head trying to move outside into the world. How exciting! For the first time I felt a surge of confidence about my chances for a successful labor. Since I had practiced fisting, clearly I was in great shape for the real thing.
Perineal massage is not discussed in every hospital or prenatal setting. Most couples and their care providers are steeped in the dominance of penis-vagina intercourse. It requires a different sort of orientation to devote attention to the possibilities of fingers and hands. But with a little encouragement and a flyer with pictures and plain English, I think more parents would enjoy the intense relaxation and vulnerability that comes with fisting, or "oranging," if you prefer.
I pestered my teacher for three weeks about whether she thought using a vibrator during labor would be helpful for pain relief. She said each time that we would discuss it next week. She recommended all sorts of other distractions and exercises: going to the bathroom frequently, changing positions, getting in the bathtub, focusing on a special object, etc. Well, I decided on my own that my Hitachi magic wand was going to be my focus object. I believed that stimulating my clit would be a nice counterpoint to the contractions going on inside my belly.
I have a great photograph of me in the delivery room, dilated to six centimeters, with a blissful look on my face and my vibrator nestled against my pubic bone. I had no thought of climaxing, but the pleasure of the rhythm on my clit was like sweet icing on top of the deep, thick contractions in my womb.
I would have been too tired and distracted to touch myself with my fingers at that point, and the power cord was just one of about ten that the doctors had coming from my bed. Due to my baby's unusual breech position, I had a complicated birth that finally ended in an emergency Cesarean. But I had a great labor.
My friend Barbara confessed to me after her first child that she had never been so turned on in her life. When the baby's head was crowning, she called out to her husband over and over, "I want to come, touch me, please touch me!"— and he thought she was hysterical.
We are utterly unaccustomed to seeing birthing as a sexual experience. A lot of us think of childbirth as something close to death; at least, that's what I was afraid of. I heard women screaming in the rooms next to me at the hospital and I knew those screams weren't exclusively from physical pain, but from wild, wild fear. It's terribly frightening when you don't know what your body is doing and when your sexuality is divorced from this incredible process. Being afraid makes the pain much worse and makes your stamina unknowable.
There was a traffic jam of births at the city hospitals the week I had my daughter. It was about nine months after the big earthquake hit San Francisco, and apparently staying home had been a fertile pastime during that otherwise sobering period.
The other women who had children the day and night I was in the hospital did not appear to have husbands at their sides. It was easy for me to imagine their stories: they were single; they were lesbian; they had husbands who didn't want to see them that way; they had husbands who had left them earlier in their pregnancies; they had husbands in the service and far away.
I didn't read a single parenting book that reflected any of these lives, although they are as commonplace as conception itself. The fractured fairy tale ("Mommy and Daddy love each other very much") is only resonant in the sense that parents need to be loved and nurtured, because they are about to give of themselves in a way that they never dreamed possible before.
If the mother doesn't receive tenderness and passion during her nine months, the bitterness she develops lasts well beyond childbirth— her kids will knew all about it. Perhaps I could encourage childbirth professionals to advocate good sex during pregnancy as a key to psychologically healthy children.
After the birth, you will get doctor's instructions to abstain from sex for the next six weeks. We've all heard the woman who says, "I don't care if I don't have sex for the next six years." But if her pussy is so sore, why can't she enjoy oral sex? Her breasts are leaking colostrum, ready to start expressing milk, and they need to be sucked by someone who knows about sucking breasts— babies don't always get the hang of it instantly, or at mom's command.
The truth is, this six weeks rule is arbitrary, and it's based on the fear of an infection resulting from a man ejaculating inside the vagina. There is a lot more to "sex" than this. Nothing magic happens at the end of six weeks. Not everyone's os and vaginal passageway are in the same condition after birth. Having had a Cesarean, mine had not been through a full-blown vaginal birth. Without knowing exactly what risk I was taking, but knowing that the doctor didn't know what he was talking about either, I came home from the hospital and made love on the sixth day after my daughter was born.
I've spoken with many women who admitted the same. "My husband and I had waited so long for this child," said my nurse practitioner/midwife, who had a child after she was forty, "that we had to be intimate right away."
I appreciated her using the word "intimate," because I don't think it's the case that you just have this wild hair to get it on once the baby is born. You might want a closeness, a release, and a celebration that you haven't necessarily experienced during labor.
My midwife also told me that she started asking her patients how soon after childbirth they had resumed intercourse. Lots of people break the rules, as you can imagine, and she found that women who had intercourse earlier on also resumed periods much sooner than those who waited. This little discovery— from a professional who wouldn't ordinarily tell me such things— reminded me again how little we know because no one shares taboo information.
Nursing is another source of mixed feelings, erotic and otherwise. One women winces in pain from chapped and bleeding nipples, while another has orgasms from her baby's suckling. Again, if these things were brought out in the open, a lot of nipple soreness would disappear. Breast-feeding does not come instinctively, and it helps to have someone show you as well as tell you how to nurse comfortably.
I was satisfied just to nurse my baby competently. My erotic feelings came not so much from my baby's sucking as from feeling my breasts express themselves at other times. Sexual arousal will make your breasts leak when you're lactating, another important fact missing in most parent handbooks. As much as I have lectured on G-spot orgasms, I had never had anything come out of me when I was making love before, and this made my head swim with embarrassment at first, and then arousal.
I've always been one of those women who could be secretive about her climax. I could come without crying out. I could be very sneaky. Having my nipples not just stiffen, but release milk like a faucet every time I was turned on took me for a very un-private loop. But I loved rubbing it on my lover's chest, or my own. I felt some feminine equivalent of virility, making the biggest wet spot of them all. This was the very opposite of being hooked up to the electric breast pump, which made me feel like a working cow. Handy, but totally un-erotic.
It would be unfair to conclude the erotic disposition of pregnancy without talking about changes in sexual fantasies. Our fantasies often seem to be written in stone at an early age and are not too easily transformed in our adult years. But having a baby is the next big hormone explosion a woman can have after puberty, and she may surprise herself with what comes to mind at the moment of orgasm. I did.
In retrospect I see that my fantasy life during my pregnancy was cathartic. One of my biggest and most irrational reservations about having a child (besides fearing that I would die in childbirth) was that if I had a boy, I wouldn't know how to raise him. I would be a disaster, whether teaching him how to use the toilet or to fly a kite. Petty sexual stereotypes aside, I didn't know what little boys were like. I have no brothers, was raised by my mom, and always preferred dresses.
Some folks were concerned that concerned that I was planning a politically correct dress code for my offspring. "If it's a girl, I suppose you'll always make her wear pants," one fellow pouted.
"Oh no," I said. "If I have a little girl, I'm going to make sure she has the frilliest, laciest, puffiest dresses you ever saw—" remembering the kind of dresses I always wanted.
"And if it's a little boy?" he started.
"Of course," I interrupted, "He'll have the frilliest, laciest, puffiest..."
My teasing was just a cover. I really didn't know what little boys were supposed to wear.
One night, I was making love with my boyfriend, and I spontaneously imagined that he was my son. I came like a rocket, and I didn't have the nerve to tell him about it for weeks.
I was so puzzled and embarrassed. In the meantime, I could not get this image off my mind. I recalled a really tacky porn movie I had seen years ago, Taboo, where beautiful mom Kay Parker has a son (in real life, a grown-up actor named Mike Ranger) who only has eyes for her. I wasn't aroused by the movie the first time I saw it, but now this scene could turn me on instantly. I couldn't masturbate or make love to anyone, man or woman, without conjuring up this incestuous exchange.
At the same time, while making my plans for the baby and talking to friends and family, I was noticeably more at ease about having a boy child. I didn't knew what sex my baby was, and unlike so many other moms, I didn't want to know.
I started noticing mothers with their sons on the street, and I didn't panic; I smiled at them. Somebody gave me a book on how to be a "dad," with all sorts of fabulous hints on butch activities from skipping stones to throwing a ball. I read the whole thing and thought it was a blast. I asked all my friends how many of them had fathers who did any of these things, and our answers shed quite a bit of light.
When my team of doctors finally pulled my daughter from my womb, they were exuberant. "It's a girl!" somebody said. I was shaking very badly from the anesthesia, but this warm little yolk of feeling spilled in my head, and tears of relief came to my eyes. I was so pleased to have a daughter.
When I came home and had my first chance to fantasize (something sleep deprivation cut into quite a bit), I could not for the life of me conjure up my "imaginary son"! He had split. My odd incest fantasy had expressed my fear of having a boy, and when that possibility disappeared, the fantasy lost its magic. I don't know what would have happened to my fantasy if I had indeed come home with a son. I think I would have moved on, just as I did after Aretha's birth, to new sets of anxieties which became fresh erotic fodder.
In the early years of motherhood, I fantasized about being pregnant again— talk about kinky. In reality I had no desire to be eating soda crackers for a month and going to the bathroom every ten minutes. But I do have glowing memories of the sexual discoveries I made during pregnancy, and I'm grateful I had a sexually loving and inquisitive support system around me. If the whole process could be like that.... Well, maybe I'll have another one, I told myself, when my daughter is old enough to change the diapers.
I wrote this story... 16 years ago this month. Gulp. Yes, it's my daughter's birthday this week, and my little egg is all grown-up! Happy Birthday, little one, and sweet birthday wishes to all the other moonchildren out there!
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