Sex Is Natural. So Why Are So Many People So Bad at It?

Leave it to me to bogart the pussy.

The pussy isn't mine, it isn't real and it isn't the only one I'll be seeing in the next few days. It is a luxuriant, anatomically correct pillow about the size of a large cat (no kidding).

It belongs to Sheri Winston, sex educator, counselor, former nurse practitioner/midwife and founder of the Center for the Intimate Arts, who is here in Orlando, Fla., to teach classes on Wholistic Sexuality. It's an approach that feels intuitive, taking broad scope of influences into account -- culture, history, biology and mostly our relationship with oursevles -- in helping us develop our sexual potential. Winston's pillow has a velvety vestibule, silky lips and a pearly little clitoris that winks out from the upper center, all to better illustrate points in some of the 52 classes she feels a passionate calling to teach.

The class we're in now, Maps of the Clitoris: Unlocking the Keys to Female Pleasure, (also the name of Winston's book, due out in October) is, in part, a detailed lesson in anatomy, and the pillow is being passed around so we can get a 3-D appreciation for what she's describing.

I admire and hector it just a little longer than I should, when Winston asks for it back to stress a point: women have just as much erectile tissue as men -- you just can't see it as well. By the time full arousal occurs in us, she says, holding the pillow, "You should have a handful of pussy at that point."

The more highly aroused we are, the better sex should feel: "You should not have anything in your vagina unless it feels fabulous." She advises us to check ourselves out with a mirror at various stages of fullness to see what she means.

Thankfully, this is homework.

Most of us have either a comic or uncomfortable image of adult sex-ed class, from Kathy Bates' queasiness at the thought of squatting over a hand mirror in "Fried Green Tomatoes" to more explicit goings-on on late-night cable.

Winston's class thankfully requires minimum nerve. Although I've written quite a lot about sex in the past few years, and have been having it even longer, this is my first sex-ed class as an adult, and Winston's warm enthusiasm and humor is a relaxing intro. For most of the people in my first class with her -- including a mom, grandma and daughter -- this is a first.

"We still have ... a sort of 1950s mentality -- a strong religious and moral code -- which says that below-the-waist and above-the-knees is something that should be disavowed," says Dawn Jensen of Orlando, a team leader and independent consultant for Passion Parties, and founder of an interactive adult sex-ed service, the Sensual Coach.

To the cognoscenti in more sophisticated cities, adults taking classes to have better sex might be commonplace, but Winston's visit to the Florida School of Holistic Living in Orlando presents a somewhat unique opportunity for those of us who don't encounter this sort of thing every day to learn about sex in a nonsexual environment.

She likens great sex to a great spot for swimming out in the woods, to which you've either been given no map or a shitty map. When you get lost, you don't think, "What's wrong with this map?" you think, "What's wrong with me?"

"I thought there was something wrong with me," one of the women in class said of a very early experience she had with female ejaculation. She was 18 when her equally young partner freaked about it, thinking it was incontinence. That freaked her out.

From then on she held back, afraid it would happen again. She didn't realize it was not only perfectly fine, but it was desirable enough that people would come to classes like these to learn how to do it.

Several of Winston's classes this week center around variations on the orgasm -- multiple, extended, ejaculatory or orgasms -- things many people think are rare: only "special" people get these heightened sensations. Not true, Winston says.