Tainted love

Sometimes you just need to get away from it all. To get away from the fast-paced big-city hype and get into your girlfriend, emotionally speaking of course. And what better way than with a workshop designed to improve your sex life?

After careful consideration my girlfriend and I selected “Diving Into Ecstasy,” a tantric sex workshop offered through the sex store Good For Her. Believing the store caters mainly to dykes, I was only mildly apprehensive. True, my sexual prowess might weaken slightly if displayed for all to see, but at least it would be an accepting environment. Or so I thought.

My fears melted away with a mental image of my partner and I, resplendent with dewy afterglow, twisted in our damp-with-sweat white sheets, rendered completely speechless after the mind-shattering orgasms. Yes, I’m talking multiple.

Cut to me, dragging my partner through a bitter winter night in search of that deeper sexual connection, and let’s face it, bigger, better and longer-lasting orgasms.

Housed in a small white clapboard building, Good For Her has an unassuming appearance. You wouldn’t expect that just beyond the front door a colourful range of dildos, harnesses and women’s porn await discovery.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t all we discovered as we climbed the narrow staircase to the second floor. Emerging into a tiny room full of empty chairs, we were greeted by a middle-aged man and woman.

We then lapsed into an uncomfortable silence in which my girlfriend and I realized three things. One, we were the first couple to arrive and these were our instructors. Two, judging by their discomfort they were clearly not expecting a dyke couple and lastly, we had just gotten ourselves into a truly sticky situation. Clearing our throats, we excused ourselves to go downstairs and sign in.

“Um… there are more gay couples signed up, right?” my partner asked hopefully of the young woman sitting behind the desk.

From the sympathetic look in her eyes, we already knew the answer. “You’re the only ones,” she replied uneasily. “We’ve had a gay couple for this class before, though. You’ll just have to plug your ears during the ejaculation part,” she added weakly.

Already soaked for $30 apiece, we rejoined the group with a growing sense of foreboding. We had arrived with some fears: getting naked, telling strangers our sex secrets. But all that faded to a new fear: being the token dykes of the hetero tantric sex party.

After a short intro about their lives and respect for tantra, the husband and

wife duo asked everyone to introduce themselves and share why they had come. Filled with thirty-something couples, the overwhelmingly popular response was to enhance their already vibrant, thoroughly exhilarating and in-no-way-lacking sex life that never fails to please them both even on a slow day. All the women grabbed tight to their man’s arm, most likely to keep their egos from falling and shattering on the floor.

As our turn approached, all I could focus on was how to say it. Every dyke understands that ongoing process of coming out. It doesn’t just happen once in your twenties after an experimental year in college when everyone shrugs it off, calling it a phase. No, it’s an ever-humbling process whereby you inform people on an almost daily basis that, yes, you do indeed like -and lick – pussy.

With that thought lingering, I took the lead and announced our desire to raise hell in the bedroom and watched as they all registered what that really meant. Their features all held the typical expressions: surprise, sympathy, boredom and that shiny-eyed hint of intrigue. Splendid.

The first bit of class actually got me going. We learned how to ground ourselves through meditation in order to calmly store sexual energy inside us instead of racing off to the finish. The idea is to let the sexual energy build and build and build until your mutual desire crackles between you like super-charged static cling. It’s the kind of excitement that lives in the loins unprovoked for days until it brims so full that your lover’s softest touch can send you into a rocking, wild sea of orgasmic ecstasy.

Our mutual fantasies were ripped from us with one sentence, jolting us back into the room.

“And now we’ll focus on mastering the ejaculation.” The husband leader grinned with his boyishly cocky assurance.

You could almost hear the screeching of brakes as our imaginations ground to a halt.

For the next hour, the husband ran the show. He explained the finer intricacies of separating ejaculation from orgasm to extend the penis’ staying power, complete with orgasmic sound effects, while we squirmed directly in his line of vision.

Early in his monologue, I noticed my girlfriend and he were deep in a staring contest – her face stony and closed off, his triumphantly defiant as if to say that we dykes could not rob him of his ejaculatory mastery. And we couldn’t. We couldn’t even leave the room without tripping over our classmates, making a huge scene and forever hating ourselves for our weakness. So we sat and forced our minds to wander.

Three hours later, we stumbled out into the night, images of our instructors’ bodies woven in various sexual positions burned into our retinas and the sounds of their dramatized orgasms ringing in our ears.

We had become unwilling voyeurs of a world best left in our pasts. There’d been no need to fear that our own sexual inadequacies and secrets would be revealed that night. The deepest, darkest and sexiest secrets of our instructors and classmates were scary enough.

Trying to shake off that sullied feeling, I resolved that my guard had been let down for the last time. It’s a daily struggle to surround ourselves with people and places that accept us, not just tolerate us, and it’s easy to forget just how much of straight life we block out in order to achieve that goal.

But we learned something positive from the experience, too. Our sex life is a sacred thing that generates its own fire. It doesn’t take $30 and a humiliating experience to reconnect sexually and spiritually. All it takes is some attention and love for each other’s bodies and souls to reach sexual heights previously unimagined.

As for those unwanted images, well, we’re careful to let thoughts of that terrible night lie dormant in a murky pool of memories we rarely wade into, never to touch our sex lives again.