I wrote this yesterday and haven't edited it or anything. Minutes after putting down the concluding lines, I went to the Berkeley Poetry Slam and performed it. At some point really soon, I?m sure I'll actually revise it. But in the interim, I thought I'd put it here. It's not a poem, really. It's just a piece. As I introduced it at the Berkeley slam last night, I will introduce it here:

I'm about to get very very graphic. So if you're squeamish around the notion of women's genitalia and/or women's pleasure, you just might want to sit your ass down and listen.

Yesterday a friend of mine told me that she had never had an orgasm while sleeping with someone else. I was horrified. I mean I understand that she has only been sleeping with men, and I could count on one hand the number of times I have had an orgasm while having intercourse with a man. And you can ride a long way on pride--the female pride at birthing the male orgasm can cover for pleasure in a pinch. And regularly does. So I understand that you can have a perfectly lovely sexual experience without ever coming close to coming. Nevertheless, to have never had an orgasm during any kind of engagement with a man. I mean, my god. What about oral sex, even? I wanted to lay her down right there and give her a fucking the likes of which her body wouldn't believe.

Why is it okay? Why is it okay for women to have sex with men for years of their lives and never, ever have an orgasm? This seems like a big problem to me. Not between my friend and her sexual partners but universally everywhere between men and women in heterosexual couplings. If a man doesn't come, the act is incomplete. If a woman doesn't come it's okay, no big deal. I mean, women are so difficult that way after all and don't seem to mind so much. Don't seem to mind as much as a man might. And I mean it' not like you have as obvious a physical manifestation of the female desire for sexual satiation as you have a physical manifestation of male desire. I mean, you could never gore somebody with the physical manifestation of female desire. You couldn't even threaten somebody with it. Therefore, it must not be a important--or even significant. Oh, your clit's a little swollen with excitement? Poor baby! Does he even notice? Does he even know where your clit is? Whether it's cream colored or brown or pink or lavender? What it looks like when it's relaxed? What it looks like when it's anxious about the very important matter of your pleasure? You certainly know the nuances of his physical manifestation of desire--with your eyes closed, with you hands tied behind your back, with your lips with your breasts with the back of your neck.

Maybe he should step back. Study a little. Lie at the crossroads of your thighs with a ready tongue and a sketch pad. Test him on the various shapes and colors. Make him identify them with his eyes closed, with his nose. Make him tell you what pink tastes like. Make him demonstrate every nuance. Make him turn your brown pink and your pink purple. Without using any extraneous limbs. He doesn't pass until you come and come and come and come and then some.

Lesson 2 will involve rhythm. Lesson 3 will involve pressure. Lesson 4 will involve duration. And Lesson 5 will involve terminology.

And if he says he doesn't like the taste, make him swallow a mouthful of his own semen every time he comes. Teach him about squeamish. If you go down on him, spit the semen right back into his mouth and hold his nose until he swallows. Tell him you don't like the taste of him, either, but that his pleasure is important to you, important enough for you to move past your own distaste. And if your pleasure isn't equally important to him, maybe you'll have to reevaluate the nature of your relationship.

And having tasted of women and tasted of men, I can tell you, nine times out of ten, you taste better than he does. And though he doesn't know it yet, he'd prefer the taste of you to the taste of himself .

Do not go down on him unless he will go down on you. Period. If he will not go down on you and you're having something of an oral sex standoff, give him no more than five chances to make you come by any other supposedly mutually beneficial mechanism. Then refuse. You've got better things to do with your time.

And having undertaken to pleasure men and to pleasure women, I will readily agree to the protestation that men are easier to please. But in a world where women are twice as likely to get infected by HIV than their male partners are, and one hundred percent more likely to get pregnant, a woman risks her their life and future every time she open her legs. So for any gentlemen in the room who might be upset at the prospect of embarking on the search for the ever-elusive under-available female orgasm--you wanna have sex, then you better believe you are embarking on that quest. Every time.

And for the women who are loathe to put them through it--

Remember what semen tastes like.

Then lie back and remind yourself that you deserve nothing less than ecstasy every time.