Whole Living Guide > by Sharon Nichols
The Art of Sexploration:
Sheri Winston Probes Holistic Sexuality
Photos by Dion Ogust

Random porno. Bad jazz hangs in the air like the stank of old, cooked collards. CandySlice stands at her sink wearing some nasty red thing. Where’s the beef? He’s there in the doorway, clutching his toolbox.
Beef: You lookin’ for a plumber?

Candy: Oh, yes!

Beef rips off Candy’s nightie.

She falls to the floor, legs open.

Beef jumps on board and gets after it.

Candy yelps straight away.

Candy: Yeah, baby! Here I come!

Okay, so it’s cheesy and stupid. But here’s a fright-ening news flash: sexpert Sheri Winston says many guys learn their moves from porno. Ponder that for two seconds. They watch it, pair up with a real woman, do what Beef did, and she’s not having a screaming mimi. In fact, she might fake it just so he’ll get off her and go fix a sandwich.

Guess what? Porno is fiction. Candy’s faking it too.

“I don’t criticize pornography,” Winston explains, “but it’s not a great place to learn sexual technique. You can’t blame the guys. They’re doing the best they can. And women don’t necessarily know either, so how should the guys know? Pornography is where we get to see other people have sex, so that’s where technique is learned. But it’s not real for a woman’s experience of arousal.” Simply, Winston proclaims that women need to teach men how to be their lovers, and men must accept the need to learn.

All hail the Goddess of Groin. Winston’s got 20 years of professional experience under her belt as a midwife, gynecologist, counselor, massage therapist, nurse, and educator, and she’s got as many initials trailing her name as she has workshops. Trust her. She’s attended over 500 births and has had her fingers inside a lot of vaginas, so she knows what’s going on in there. Her latest call is teaching a new paradigm of holistic sexuality: We’re whole, sexual beings with inseparable bodies, minds, and spirits, who are also connected to our partners, families, communities, culture, and planet. Winston is empowering pelvises throughout the Northeast with maps of the clitoris, revelations about vaginal ecology, the mysterious female body, and what’s wrong with American sex.

“Our models of sexuality and anatomy are inaccurate,” she says. “When our experience doesn’t fit that model, we think something’s wrong.” Winston reports that 60 percent of women aren’t orgasmic from intercourse—10 percent never have them—yet our cultural model says sex is about penetration; everything else is frills (e.g. Clinton didn’t really have sex with Monica). The orgasm problem stems from ignorance of female anatomy. “About 70 percent of structures responsible for female arousal aren’t in most textbooks, books on biology, medicine, or midwifery. Women have a whole network with as much erectile tissue as men and can have an orgasm with just part of it aroused.” So, girls, can you locate your vestibular bulbs, clitoral legs, or anterior sponge? Winston can, and she’ll also explain how they’re sacred, magical parts that cause both partners to burst with fruit flavor. “There’s a variety of orgasm; it’s nice to know these structures. Like music. You can play guitar, or have keyboard, drums, and guitar. Most women are just playing with one instrument.”

It’s not just the books. Winston says our entire cultural model and sexual paradigm is screwy. “We still have negative ideas that sex is shameful, yet in our culture sexuality is absolutely pervasive. We get this media message that it’s everywhere, everybody’s doing it, and there’s an ambiguity creating a tremendous conflict for people.”
One problem with the model is its focus on masculine energy and arousal. There’s yin/female receptive energy, and yang/male giving energy; men’s arousal is quick, like fire in dry tinder, while women’s arousal is slower, like bringing a pot of water to boil. “A woman needs to be coaxed open,” explains Winston. “Her crotch isn’t this open hole! Diagrams of female anatomy show the vagina as a tunnel waiting for a penis to fill it. Vaginas aren’t like that! They’re collapsed; the walls are touching each other. It’s more like a potential space, a magic door. Men need to learn how to tantalize and tease. A woman’s arousal doesn’t start in her genitals, but on the edges working in. Male arousal starts there and can stay there.”

True, a guy could be reading the Wall Street Journal, a woman could simply grab his manhood, and he’d dance a jig. But we know that’ll never jive with the missus. Winston spells it out. “Women need to feel connected before having sex; men get connected through sex. Men are constantly confounded that women don’t respond like they do. Of course they are! Every image of sexuality they see says women and men have the same arousal. And they don’t. Women need to be approached indirectly. Many women have intercourse before arousal, then blame themselves for not having an orgasm.”

To be holistic sexual beings, Winston suggests examining the cultural models of more enlightened, sex-positive cultures—the Taoists, Native Americans, and other tantric traditions that embrace sacred sex. Expounding further on the water/fire, yin/yang principle, she addresses that all-engulfing woman’s issue: How can a man just do me, then not give a crap?

“Yang energy starts from below and rises up, like fire. Hence, male sexual energy starts in their genitals—the root—and they can have completely genital sex, not having it touch their hearts or minds. That tendency for men to separate sex and love is because their energy can stay in their crotch. Female/yin energy starts from above and trickles down like water. It must go through our hearts before it reaches our genitals. Heart energy must be engaged before we open our legs. The more advanced, enlightened man recognizes that by moving that energy through his whole system, he’ll have a more complete, wonderful experience. Ask men the best sex they ever had and they’ll usually say it was with a woman they truly loved.”

Another difference between the sexes is in communication styles—women negotiate, men want to know who’s in charge. Winston explains: “If I say ‘let’s go shopping’ to a guy, he hears me ordering him. As women, we don’t get that. We’re just suggesting. If we make a suggestion in sex, he resents it, feeling disempowered. Women must learn gender communication, to say ‘I love it when you...’ whatever, instead of ‘please do this.’”

How about the classic “she wants to talk, he wants to sleep?” Winston has a solution. “Guys, women want to feel connected beyond the sex, so here’s a hot tip. To make her happy, just hold and touch her for two minutes, say three nice things that are true, then you’re off the hook and can go to sleep. ‘I care about you so much, this was wonderful, I feel so connected,’ whatever..., and she’ll be happy. Women also need to understand that after men ejaculate, they’ve just thrown off this huge burst of energy, and zoning out isn’t a personal thing.”

In Winston’s holistic paradigm, sexuality begins with a relationship with our self. Not just self-pleasure, but a healthy view of our bodies, genitals, childhood beliefs, spiritual traditions, parental teachings, and first sexual experience. Once this view is in order, we can better connect with someone else and join that holistic web where our sexuality is always with us. “It’s not a separate, compartmentalized piece of us that stays in the bedroom. It’s the most primal force in the universe! That’s the problem with abstinence and ‘just say no.’ That’s like standing on the beach, holding up your hand, and saying no to the tide! There wouldn’t be six billion of us if our sexual drive wasn’t so strong. Constraining it is another example of what doesn’t work. People with healthy sex lives are healthy in every way.”

Winston strongly endorses education—not merely technique, but communication and relationship skills, and how to work with sexual energy. “We have the most twisted culture around sexuality and the highest teenage pregnancy rate for any industrialized country, twice that of the next highest country. It’s not because our youth are having more sex; the rate of sexual activity doesn’t change much from culture to culture. It’s that our sexuality is supposed to be secret. Kids are taught to say no instead of learning skills or experiencing their bodies. We just throw them out there.” A gynecologist at Planned Parenthood, Winston sees the diseases and confusion of youth starving for info and guidance; they’re floundering and they know it. In a rigid, sex-negative culture that still enforces laws against sodomy, homosexuality, and even the purchase of vibrators in some states, it’s clear that our lingering puritan ethic simply isn’t working and must be tossed off like Candy’s nightie.

Winston’s currently hosting a few sliding scale fee workshops. On February 16 she’s teaching “Vaginal Ecology” at Toys in Babeland, a women-run sex store in New York City. It’s Girl Gonads 101—hygiene, maintenance, etc. On Thursday, March 20, she’ll host her short evening program “Introduction to Wholistic Sexuality” in New Paltz, a sampler for those who want to consider attending her full-day classes, “Wholistic Sexuality for Women,” on March 22, and “Exploring the Mystery of Female Sexuality For Men” on March 23.

“That last class is so fun!” Winston exclaims. “Women take the Saturday class, then their men come on Sunday grinning, saying, ‘I had such great sex last night, I wanna learn more!’ Learning from me is less threatening than from their partners. Men get comfortable because I make jokes and use all kinds of language. To me, they’re all just words. I like the word ‘pussy’ because of this analogy: say you meet a kitty and want to make friends with it. Are you going to pick it up, flip it on its back, and start rubbing its belly? I don’t think so! First you approach it, talk to it, start petting it. As the cat relaxes, it begins opening up to you. If you move too quickly and the cat isn’t relaxed enough, it gets tense and closes up. But once the cat trusts you, it’ll be a purring puddle of fur and you can touch the more sensitive areas, rub its belly, do anything to it. Women are just like that.”

Ultimately, Winston’s message is that all anyone wants is to love and be loved. “We want to connect. Sex is the most basic way of connecting we have, and it works. The trick is to find those who are interested in moving and exploring that sexual energy, who are open to that enlightenment.”

And sorry, y’all. Winston doesn’t run a dating service.

To read more on Winston or pre-register for her workshops, call (518) 537-3170, visit WholisticWomanCare.com, or e-mail sheri@wholisticwomancare.com.