At a dinner party in Paris, a man with a beautiful scarf made an announcement. Orgasm without touch was a myth.
He said it pleasantly, between bites of duck. He had the voice of a man of wide reading. “It is an old wives’ tale,” he said.
“The body is a machine. No input, no output.”
A woman across the table put down her fork. She was a retired schoolteacher with cropped white hair and enormous patience. “May I tell you about a Tuesday?” she said.
“It was in 1987. I was sitting on a bus, in the rain, with a basket of tomatoes on my lap.”
The table went quiet. She said nothing more about it. She picked up her fork, took a bite of duck, and looked at the man with a gentle, level, devastating smile.
He changed the subject to wine.
I have thought about that dinner often. It taught me something. This subject has two kinds of people in it.
The skeptics say it cannot happen. Then there are the women who know it can. They have waited decades for someone to say so out loud. The truth, as usual, lives in the interesting space between them.
The upper floors of this house, the Terrace and the Sky Room, are about touch-free pleasure. They rest on a foundation of research, some of it solid, some of it thin, and some of it still being written. This section lays that foundation out in plain view. You can decide for yourself what to believe.
An Honest Word About Numbers
Here is a part to say with great care.
Nobody knows how many women can have a touch-free orgasm. The research is limited, the surveys are small, and the definitions vary from study to study. The group is probably small. For many women, it may be a rare event or a one-time surprise, and for a few it may be a regular joy.
Many abilities once thought rare turn out to be trainable. The upper rooms aim to make this ability easier and more accessible. They give every reader a sincere chance to explore it. No promise is attached, and none is needed.
The reward is the exploring. Along the way, women report calmer minds, richer sensation, deeper breath, and a closer friendship with their own bodies. A touch-free peak may arrive, and it is a delightful bonus.
It may not arrive. You still come home with a great deal.
And success, here as everywhere in this book, is optional.
The Fading Ladder
Here is a way to think about the path from touch to touch-free, and it is a simple one. Touch can teach the body a response. That response can move, step by step, to something lighter. Bodies are good at learning associations.
Pair a feeling with a cue again and again. Over time, the cue can bring up the feeling. Less and less of the original touch is needed.
Step one, what works now. Begin with the touch you already enjoy, in any comfortable form.
Step two, light touch over clothing. Soften it, and slow it. Add a layer of fabric as a bonus.
Step three, pressure and movement. Replace the touch with a pillow, a rolled towel, a rocking of the hips, or the weight of your own thighs.
Step four, little or no touch. Let breath, imagination, sound, and the pelvic floor carry more of the work. Notice the result.
Move down the ladder at your own speed, for weeks or months. Climb back a rung at any time. The same ladder applies to devices, with a planned taper.
An honest note. This is a proposed method. It builds on our knowledge of the learning and conditioning of sexual response.
It is a reasonable suggestion, and it awaits testing. Treat it as an experiment. Let your own experience be the judge.
The Six Channels
The upper rooms are organized around six channels. Think of them as six radio stations. Each has its own flavor. Each can carry pleasure alone or in combination.
Movement. The body in motion, with the core, the floor, and the whole pelvis at work.
Breath and energy. The rhythm and depth of your breath, and the practice of moving attention through the body.
Sound. Sighs, hums, and voice. You make the vibrations, and you hear them.
Mind and imagery. Thought, memory, imagination, and your mind’s favorite pictures.
Erotic media. Reading, listening, or watching. Use it at a low volume and with a plan, as one of many channels.
Fantasy and cues. The signature scents, textures, and settings. Your body links them with pleasure.
One channel may be your favorite, and two or three may work well together. That combination is called stacking, and it is a major theme of the upper rooms. Learn to use several channels at once, and the whole becomes a good deal more than the sum.
THE MYTH: A real ability would show up in every body, and anything rare must be fake.
THE TRUTH: Plenty of real human abilities are uncommon and also trainable, from perfect pitch to a fast mile. Rarity says little about reality. The evidence points to three things.
Touch-free pleasure is real for some women. More women may be able to reach it than anyone realizes. Nobody can say how many.
The honest answer has two parts. The experiences are real. Women across many studies and many centuries have described them, and the laboratory has recorded the body’s responses.
The question of their frequency is open, and the explanations are still being worked out.
A good skeptic and a good dreamer can share a table here. Take the practices as experiments, keep notes, and trust your findings.
This piece of seduction craft is yours alone.
Give yourself a free afternoon and let the senses lead. Put on music for chills. Wear your favorite fabric. Sit by a window with a warm drink, and let your mind wander.
Notice what stirs. A warmth, a shiver, a flush, a drift of memory, a quickening of the breath. You are collecting data, and you are also simply a woman receptive to her own world.
Receptivity is quietly irresistible. Be open to being moved, and you tend to move others.
Rina read the research on a Sunday afternoon, with her feet up. Her face grew slowly warm.
She was fifty-one, a nurse’s aide, and a person of very practical habits. She had never told anyone about the bus. Twenty years earlier, on a long, rainy trip home from her mother’s house, she had felt a slow, rolling warmth. It came from nowhere.
The engine hummed beneath her, and the windows steamed over. She took it for the start of an illness.
“A fever, I thought,” she told me. “I sat there so quiet, so confused, and a little bit thrilled. And then I put it away in a drawer for twenty years.”
She took it out again that Sunday. “It was real,” she said. “It was not a fever. It was me.”
Do you have a drawer like that? You are in very large company. Open it, and write down the contents.
A Story: The Concert Hall
The hall was golden and enormous, and the cello was playing a single, low, sustained note.
Hana sat in the fourth row of the balcony in a dark green velvet dress. Her hands were folded in her lap, and her coat lay on the seat beside her. She had come alone, on a whim, for a piece from her girlhood.
Now the cellist, a slender woman with a long braid, drew her bow across the strings. The note began to swell.
It filled the hall. It filled her chest. The sound seemed to travel through the wooden seat, up her spine, and into the base of her skull.
It rang there like a bell. She felt the vibration in her ribs and the soles of her feet.
She breathed in, and the note rose. She breathed out, and it fell. Her shoulders loosened, and a warm tingle spread from the back of her neck down her arms and across her belly.
The music climbed, a slow, aching ascent. Her thighs pressed lightly together on the velvet seat, and her eyes slid half closed.
The note held. The note held longer. Somewhere in the audience, a person coughed. The sound seemed to come from another century.
Hana did not move at all. She felt the music in every part of her at once, a long, slow, golden wave. It rolled up from the floor and broke somewhere behind her heart.
A single tear slid down her cheek. She was smiling.
The last note faded into silence. For a moment nobody breathed, and then the hall erupted into applause.
Hana clapped slowly, with a flushed face and trembling hands. The woman beside her leaned over and whispered, “Wasn’t that something?”
“It was everything,” said Hana. She meant it more than the woman could possibly know.
This takes about twenty minutes, and you will need a pen.
Sit somewhere comfortable, and think back across your life. Have you ever felt arousal, warmth, or release unexpectedly, with no touch at all? During a workout, a long bus ride, a favorite song, a dream, a swim, a thunderstorm, a book?
Write down each moment. Add a few words on where you were, what you were doing, and how it felt.
Do not analyze. Just collect. A single line for each memory is plenty.
Then read your list through, and notice any patterns. A kind of setting, a kind of movement, a kind of music. These are your own personal clues, and you will meet them again in the rooms upstairs.
You may notice: a surge of recognition, a small laugh, a flush of surprise, a feeling of being less alone, or a long quiet. All of those are right answers.
SKIP IF: The exercise brings up painful memories or feels like pressure. Close the book, and do something kind. The list will keep.
Log: the number of moments.
Garment: a sheer silk robe left open and a pair of ivory panties. Position: on your back, one knee dropped open in a butterfly, the other foot flat.
This one lets your hand do very little, and your mind do a great deal. Let one knee fall wide, indecent in the best sense. Rest one hand, flat and still, on your belly. Breathe in for four, out for six.
Breathe out, and imagine warmth pouring from your palm down into your pelvis. It moves like honey, slow and heavy.
Picture a hand, not yours, an inch above your skin. Both of you pretend it is not there. Feel the ache gather beneath it. Let your hips lift a little toward it.
Slide your hand down and rest it over your button. Keep it light, more thought than touch. A tiny pulse of your fingers. A tiny pulse of your floor.
Let the fantasy lead and the hand follow. Stay at the edge to your limit.
At your limit, press, circle, and let the wave carry you. Do less and you feel more.
Out and about: sit with your palm resting on your thigh. Imagine it belongs to someone else.
The Private Wing has a printable history worksheet, a reading list of the studies in this section, and a gallery of women’s own stories of the unexpected. They are told in the women’s own words.