Menthol Wetehee Ne 0

By Nicole Larson

| haven’t worn a bra for over
a year and the longer | go
without a bra the more real |
feel. | know that | am not the
only woman in the world to
walk around in public braless
on a daily basis, but | must
say | am in the minority. |
know this because | have
eyes and everyday | walk
around and see the breasts
of women being flattened,
pushed up, pushed apart,
pushed _ together, _lifted,
tucked, padded and pumped.

1 used to be one of those
women, and one day | just
gave up. | was tired of the
constant suppression of my
body and | could never find a
bra that fit. | had one bra that
was virtually useless, one of
my breast would fall out, yes
out, of the cup if | breathed
wrong. This is a rather
embarrassing problem to fix if
you are not alone. One of my
other bras had straps that fell
down if | was not in a semi-
shrug position, relax one little
bit and | was trying to sneaki-

I’m Free

ly pull them back up from my
elbows. My other bras did a
various assortment of push-
ing, lifting, shifting and flat-
tening. | had one that moved
the vast majority of my mam-
mary tissue to the area under
my armpits. Finally | could not
stand it any more, and took
the plunge. | went braless
one day and never looked
back.

As far as | can tell nobody
notices. | am the national
breast size average which
should mean that my free

wheeling breasts would
attract attention but no one
has mentioned anything, at
least not within my ear shot. |
don’t notice any extra atten-
tion and | don’t feel embar-
rassed, even while running or
going up stairs.

Lately | have tried to con-
vince other women to set
themselves free with varying
degrees of success. | con-
vinced one young woman to
try it, after she complained to
me about a bra that cut marks
into her rib cage. She

thought it was the best thing
since sliced bread. Other
women | know have a hard
time parting with their bras to
go to bed and | know they are
a lost cause on my braless
crusade. Not everyone wants
to experience this kind of
freedom, and why should |
force them? | didn’t want to
conform, but others may like
their forms.

Sex workshops help women gain confidence
and learn technique

By Rina Calabrese
MONTREAL (CUP) - We all
sat around in a circle, ner-
vous, tense, hesitantly wait-
ing for the Sex Toys 101
workshop to get underway.
Except for one woman, we
were all sex toy virgins. All
our eyes were transfixed on
Carlyle Jansen, our facilitator.
Jansen is the owner of Good
For Her, a sex shop based in
Toronto. A large plastic box
sat at her feet holding untold
apparatuses of pleasure.
After a quick introduction in
which Jansen explained that
one of the reasons she got
into this field was because
she was unable to orgasm
until age 26, she asked us
each to explain why we were
there. “Without getting too
deep, too quickly,” said one
woman with impressive can-
dor, “I’m 27, and | have never
experienced an orgasm.”

Another woman easily con-
fessed, “I love playing with
sex toys and | thought I'd
come see if you had anything
| haven’t seen before.”

|, of course, had the perfect
excuse; | was_ profiling
Jansen. Dipping into the large
plastic box, Jansen brought
out an assortment of vibra-
tors and dildos. Explaining
what each one does, she
then passed them around
and we each got to feel the
vibrations for ourselves.

The vibrators each had their
own special name: Blue
Gigolo, Red Dolphin, Blue
Mini Massager with Rabbit

Ears, Nexus and Clear Bump
and Grind. “This one is made
from a new material called
cyber skin,” said Jansen,
holding up an incredibly life-
like looking vibrator.

It felt creepily like real skin as
| squished it in the palm of my
hand.

The purpose of the work-
shop was to familiarize
women with sex toys so they
don’t feel so inhibited when
they go into sex shops. Most
women who've never tried a
vibrator don’t know what type
will work best for them and
they’re too embarrassed to
ask the salesperson any
questions, so they might end
up choosing the wrong one.
And for many women who are
non-orgasmic, a vibrator is
often the first (and perhaps
only) way for them to reach
orgasm. So choosing the
right one is incredibly impor-
tant. Rabbit Ears or no Rabbit
Ears could make all the differ-
ence.

Jansen herself got interest-
ed in sex toys because she
was non-orgasmic and it was
a vibrator that brought her to
orgasm for
the first time. “There’s a lot of
shame out there around
using sex toys,’ she says.
“There’s a lot .of shame
around non-orgasmic women
being able to orgasm from
vibrators alone. So what |
wanted to do
was help women feel that it’s
okay if they don’t orgasm,
that they can try a vibrator

and see if that gets them
there-and to

use the right kind of one, not
just a small teeny one that
doesn’t have power because
you're afraid to use some-
thing big and then all of sud-
den that’s not what's going to
work.”

So why does a vibrator often
work when all else fails?
Power, says Jansen. “There’s
some of us who are what |
call hardwired. We just need
a lot of stimulation and then
to boot those of us who didn’t
naturally discover orgasm at
age 12 or 15, the older we get
the more we're like ‘okay am |
getting there, am | doing it
right?’ We’re thinking about it
so much that even though it
might under normal circum-
stances be the right amount
of pressure we’re so caught
up in our heads and we can’t
relax so that there’s no way
we're going over the top.”

A vibrator has so much
power, she says, that you feel
that if it’s strong enough it just
forces you to have an
orgasm. “So the more you do
it the more it’s like ‘oh, okay”
she says. “But it’s a journey.
Sometimes it takes practice
and sometimes it’s just a mat-
ter of your body learning how
to do it. It’s like learning to
walk, after a while your body
knows how to go from one
step to the next and you don’t
have to think about it, it just
happens. It just takes some of
us a while to get there.”

Sometimes, reveals Jansen,

she is approached by the
non-orgasmic to personally
help them reach orgasm. “1
have some clients that | work
with who are non-orgasmic,”
she says. “They’ve tried
everything, they've seen sex
therapists, they’ve gone
through all the books.”

Jansen, who has been con-
ducting workshops for four
years now, says that the
major obstacles women face
are that they don’t know how
to have an orgasm; they don’t
know where their g-spot is;
they don’t know how to
orgasm from _ penetration;
they don’t know what ejacula-
tion is; and, they generally
don’t know their own bodies.
“A lot of it is about confi-
dence, a lot of it is about tech-
nique so that they know how
to do it properly so they can
feel more confident,” she
says.

Jansen admits she feels
much more confident as a
lover if she has some tech-
niques under her belt, so to
speak. Her biggest fear is that
she'll be trying to turn some-
one on and end up looking
stupid, so the knowledge of
technique gives her power
and confidence. Self-image
also plays a huge part, she
says. Our society is inundat-
ed with images of the perfect
body and women invest huge
amounts of energy .and
money into trying to conform
to that ideal.

There’s also a certain image
that's portrayed in a lot of

pornography videos, con-
tends Jansen, where women
are there for

men’s sexual satisfaction. “If
you compare how long the
men are performing oral sex
on the women versus how
long the women are perform-
ing oral sex on the men,
there’s a vast difference,” she
says. “The guys go down on
the women for 30 seconds
andthenthe |

women are on the guys for 10
minutes. | think that to a cer- |
tain extent men get a twisted
image as to what gives
women

pleasure through that and
through other very subtle
images that happen in adver-
tising and in the media.”

Women who walk into her
store are surrounded by
images of all types of women,
“not just skinny young white
ones who are generally those
who are portrayed as the only
ones who are sexy.”

This makes her customers
feel that they too can be sexy
and it makes a huge differ-
ence in increasing their confi-
dence in other areas of their
lives because their sexual
confidence affects their over-
all self-esteem. “It's not just
that sexuality is the key to
feeling confident in all areas
of our lives,” says Jansen,
“but it’s one of those keys that
can potentially affect other
aspects of how we feel about
ourselves.”