Author Archives: wise sloth

How To Go Down On A Girl

Photo of a beautiful woman's mouth with a cherry between her teeth

Note 1: All women are different. You need to communicate with yours to find out exactly what she wants, but if you don’t have a chance to ask, or she won’t tell you, then this guide is a good starting point.

Note 2: This guide is pretty long. So here’s a short summary if you don’t have time to read the whole thing: Get her in the mood. Turn her on and make her feel special and relaxed. Then lick, kiss, and caress around her vagina for a minute or two. Spend the rest of the time licking her clit rhythmically and rubbing the index finger in and out of her vagina while pressing against the roof. Start slow and gradually speed up, but don’t go too fast. When you find something that works, stick with it until she cums. After she’s done, cuddle with her.

Step 1: Get Her in the Mood

It doesn’t take much more than the sight of a woman to get a man in the mood, and men can have a powerful orgasm by having sex with a woman they’re not emotionally or physically attracted to. Women can too, but as a general rule, their bodies work a little different.

Women’s bodies are more tied to their minds. This means the better they feel emotionally, the better their orgasms will be. In fact, if a woman feels unsafe and insecure enough going into a sexual encounter, then her locked up mind will lock up her body as well, and she might not be able to have an orgasm at all. If you go down on her the right way she might still be able to have an orgasm despite her anxieties, but in order to give her the best orgasm possible you need to get her in the mood first.

If you’ve been with the same woman for a long time you’re obviously not going to spend hours setting the mood every time you’re intimate, but you can always do something, and every bit helps. If you have a one night stand or somehow suddenly find yourself in the position to go down on a girl and haven’t all day to woo her, you can still at least tell her the things that make her feel special and romanced. Here are a few techniques for getting a girl in the mood:

1: Be attractive and confident.

2: Compliment her. Tell her she’s beautiful and special. She put a lot of work into looking nice; compliment whatever she put the most effort into.

3: Talk to her in the morning and tell her you’re going to pamper and tease her all night and give her an epic orgasm. Tell her to think about that all day.

4: Sext her throughout the day and tell her erotic things.

5: Tell her you love her or at least that she’s important to you.

6: Touch her erotically and teasingly periodically throughout the day or over the course of a few hours before anyone gets naked.

7: Give her a gift. Anything is better than nothing. If the gift is delivered to her in front of her friends and/or frenemies then you win.

8: Take her out for a nice dinner at a classy place or cook her a classy meal. Or just give her one chocolate strawberry. Anything.

9: Create a romantic environment that engages as many of the senses as possible. Use candles, music, aromas, dim lights, soft fabric, and make sure the room is clean and classy.

10: Watch a sexy movie.

11: Get her to read some erotic fiction or you could read it to her yourself.

12: Give her a full body erotic massage.

The last item in this list is important enough to emphasize. Giving a girl a full body erotic massage is possibly the best thing you can do to prime her mind and body before going down on her. It gives her time to acclimate to being naked. It shows her that you care. It relaxes her body, which in turn eases any mental anxiety she may have, which in turn makes her body more willing and able to experience a full orgasm later. Plus, an erotic massage is obviously going to get anyone horny. The longer she’s horny the more the delayed gratification will build up inside of her.

Again, you don’t have to spend all day wooing and massaging a woman to give her a good orgasm, but the bigger the build-up, the better the orgasm. If you skip all of this and just go down on her right away there will be little to no build up and thus no pressure to release, and she might still be holding onto anxieties from a hard day’s work or insecurities about her body or her decision to share herself with you.

Step 2: The Approach

Once your girl’s clothes start coming off, you need to read her emotional needs to decide how she wants you to transition from kissing to performing cunnilingus. Sometimes it’s best to go down on her aggressively before she even has all of her clothes off. Sometimes it’s best to kiss every curve on her body first and tease her by grazing past her nether region teasingly over and over before settling down.

The important thing to remember here is that you don’t master sex by memorizing women’s pressure points and then striking them in the right sequence. Sex is less like Karate and more like Tango. Sex isn’t something you do to someone else. It’s something you do together; it’s a dance. Good tango dancing requires the dancing partners to read each other, communicate with each other and play off each other. In really good tango the dancers aren’t just performing synchronized calisthenics. They’re connected on an emotional level, and they express their shared emotional experience through the movements of their bodies. That’s how good sex happens. So if you want my advice on how to transition from kissing a girl’s lips to putting your head between her legs, I would say, “Listen to the music, and dance your way there.

Once you’re finally ready to go down on her, lay her on her back. There are lots of creative positions you can perform cunnilingus from, and they’re all worth exploring, but for a girl to have the best orgasm possible she needs to be able to relax and concentrate on nothing but you going down on her. She can’t be any more relaxed than when she’s laying flat on her back with a pillow behind her head and one under her butt. I don’t know why, but elevating women’s hips seems to help them achieve orgasm. So laying her flat on her back with her hips propped up is a reliable go-to position.

Step 3: Stimulate the Labia

When you finally get your head between her legs you have 1-2 minutes to be creative and do whatever you want. Don’t worry about technique right now. You can kiss, caress and lick anywhere in and around the pussy however you want. There’s no wrong way to do this. You just need to be sensual and physically express your passion. This is emotionally satisfying for her, and it stimulates blood flow to her sex organs, which will prime them to achieve orgasm. You only want to do this for a minute or two though, because random, chaotic movements, no matter how sensual they are, aren’t likely to give a girl an orgasm.

After you’ve given the groin area a sweet meet and greet you’re ready to get a little more scientific with your technique. Start from the outside of the vagina and work your way inward beginning with the labia majora. Lick your thumbs and her labia majora until it’s completely wet. Here’s why you’re worried about moistening both your thumbs and the labia majora. Next time you’re in the bathroom, rub your thumb on the mirror. Notice how rough that is? Now lick your thumb and rub it on the mirror. Notice how much smoother that is? Now lick your thumb and the mirror, and rub your thumb on the mirror where you licked it. Notice how that feels even smoother? That’s what the girl is feeling between her legs. Also, jam a cactus between your legs sometime. That’s what a girl feels when you go down on her with a five-o’clock shadow.

Once you’ve got the labia majora wet, massage it and the surrounding area lightly with your thumbs. Do small, fluid circles or slide your thumbs up and down the length of the lips for 10-30 seconds eventually working your way to rubbing the inner lips (the labia minora) without penetrating the vagina. Slower movements are usually better than faster movements.

There are two reasons why you’re massaging on and around the labia. First of all, the girl probably isn’t wet enough inside for you to stick your finger in her vagina, and you’re going to need to stick a finger or two inside her eventually. Even if your fingers are covered in enough lube to make up for her being dry, you should still let her get wet on her own, because getting wet is her body’s way of saying she’s ready for penetration. Massaging the labia will help her vagina moisten and relax.

The other reason it’s important to massage her labia is because when her vagina gets attention inside and out she’ll have a stronger orgasm. Think of a blowjob. Just having your dick sucked is great by itself, but if the girl massages you’re balls in the process, then so much the better. Massaging her labia is sort of equivalent to massaging your balls. You don’t want to focus all your attention there, but she’s missing out if it’s ignored completely.

Step 4: Stimulate the Clitoris

After spending 1-3 minutes doing your meet and greet and massaging the labia majora and minora you’re ready to proceed to Step 4. At the beginning of this step, you’re actually going to be licking the clit at the same time as you’re massaging the labia.

If you don’t know where the clit is, stick one finger inside the girl’s vagina. Now trace that finger straight up pulling your finger out of the vagina. Keep moving your finger straight upwards along her skin in the direction of the belly button. About a quarter of an inch above the opening of the vagina your finger should snag on a little hood-shaped piece of skin. When that happens the tip of your finger should be pointing directly at the clit under the hood. The clit should feel like a small bump. If you can’t find it on your own it’s better to ask for directions than to never get there, because if you can’t get there then she won’t get to cum. I can’t stress this enough, the clit is the whole point of going down on a girl, and until you get there you’re missing the point.

When you get there, don’t try to be creative. I’ve read in several men’s magazines that a great way to make a girl cum is to spell out the alphabet with your tongue on the clit. I’m convinced they tell you this to make sure you remain sexually inept so you have to keep buying men’s magazines for advice. The alphabet thing doesn’t work because it’s not rhythmic.

Women need constant rhythm to orgasm just like men. When you get a blowjob or a hand job, you don’t want the girl to be stroking you chaotically and licking you all over the place randomly the whole time. You want her to give you rhythmic strokes that get progressively faster without ever getting too fast, and once she gets to a good pace you don’t want her to change anything, because when you’re right on the verge of cumming and all of a sudden the girl starts doing something different you’ll be laying there screaming in your head, “Damn, you were almost there! I was obviously enjoying that. So why did you stop doing that?!” The same thing happens to girls.

You don’t have to worry about her getting bored with what you’re doing. She won’t. Pretty much all she needs you to do is go up and down with your tongue like the Karate Kid painting a fence or like turning a light switch on and off with your tongue. If you cut the tendon on the bottom of your tongue on your bottom row of teeth then you’re going way too crazy with your tongue.

Licking side to side with your tongue may feel good to her, but your tongue will get tired faster than licking up and down. So that technique is better suited for the meet and greet phase than getting down to business.

The only other technique that most girls like is having you suck their clit sort of like you’re giving a blowjob to a tiny penis. You can suck it up and down or suck it between your lips and then, while you have it trapped there, lick it with your tongue like a tiny lollipop. You can really get a good grip on a clit that way, especially if/when they harden, which happens to some girls the closer they are to cumming.

Whatever you do, start off lightly and slowly. The clit tends to be sensitive at first. Plus, women need to settle into the experience of being gone down on and get their thoughts straight. Think about this: If a girl grabbed your flaccid penis and started stroking it as hard and as fast as she could you would not be happy about that (most of the time). But if a girl did a strip tease for you, then kissed your body up and down before giving you a slow, sensual blowjob that gradually sped up to fucking-speed….then you would have a memorable orgasm. Girls’ minds and bodies work the same way.

Step 5: Fingering

So you’ve been licking the clit and massaging the labia for a minute or two. In this time you’ve increased the speed of your licking a little. If you’re lucky, the girl will give you a sign that it’s time to step it up a notch: moaning, heaving, wetness, hardened nipples or the clit hardening and growing minutely taller. You won’t always get a clear sign though. A day will come when you’ll just have to guess.

You could always ask, but it might kill the mood. Then again, if you’re completely lost, you’re already killing the mood. If you do have to ask, don’t ask apologetically and insecurely. Ask confidently or playfully. You can ask her forcefully if that’s the tune you’ve been dancing to. Just find a way to work it into your dance.

After massaging the labia and licking the clit for a minute or two, stop massaging the labia. Then take the hand that you write with and lick the fingers you’re going to stick into the vagina. You want to use the hand you write with, because you have more control of that hand, and it’ll take longer to get tired. Don’t lube your fingers up with lube, because that would keep you away from the clit too long, and that will give the girl time to cool down, which neither of you want. Get your fingers as wet as possible as quickly as possible, and then insert one or two fingers into the vagina with your palm facing up.

You want this to be comfortable for the girl. So don’t try to cram as many fingers in as possible. You might even want to start with one and work your way up to two or three after her vagina loosens up, but only use three fingers if they fit easily. If you’re unsure how many fingers you should use, then only use one. You might think one finger is too little because it doesn’t fill her up, but you don’t need to fill her up. You need to rub the roof of the vagina without hurting her.

Once you start fingering the vagina with your writing-hand, then your non-writing-hand is just going to get in your way if you try to keep stimulating the labia with it. You can use that hand to lift the girl’s ass to help you reach her clit or play with her breasts or caress her wherever. Do whatever you want. Just know that if you do too much with that hand you run the risk of distracting her from what your tongue is doing.

Before your finger penetrates the vagina, you should tease her opening. Stick the tip in and out playfully. Then stick your finger in up to your knuckle a few times. Then slide your finger all the way in. Feel free to do this for a whole minute. Teasing the vagina by penetrating it in stages helps the girl’s mind and body acclimate to being penetrated. So instead of being shocked by having a foreign object unceremoniously crammed inside her, she’ll yearn for your finger to go deeper and deeper into her personal space. The emotional comfort and delayed gratification will give her a better orgasm. If you do this too long, it will dry out her vagina and start to chafe.

Once you get your finger/s all the way in you can give her vagina an internal meet and greet by caressing her tunnel however you think will convey your passion for her… for a minute at most. After the initial internal meet and greet, don’t bother rubbing the bottom or the sides of the vagina. Don’t bother making circles to touch all 360 degrees of the tunnel unless the girl is really tight and you need to loosen the vagina up for sex afterward. Don’t worry about reaching the very back of the vagina. There’s not a pot of gold back there. The trick isn’t to go deep. The trick is to be sensual and to cover the length of the G-spot.

Don’t get stressed out about finding its exact location; it’s not a point like the clit. It should really be called “the G area,” and that area is the roof of the vagina just past the opening. If your fingertips feel ridges on the roof of the vagina then you’re probably there, but every girl feels different. The G-spot is unlikely to be deeper than one inch past the opening. Sometimes it can be immediately past the opening on the inner lip of the pubic bone.

Here’s a reliable way to hit the G-spot. Insert your finger all the way in her vagina with your palm facing up. Then slide your finger all the way out while pressing your finger against the roof. When you do that it will be impossible to miss the G-spot.

Another way to find the G-spot is to stick your index finger just inside the vagina and press upwards, then hold your finger there while you lick her clit. She may rock her hips until your finger hits the right spot. Even if she couldn’t tell you where her G-spot is, she’ll know when you hit the spot that feels good. Then you’ll know exactly where her pleasure spot is. If she doesn’t wiggle into position, then you won’t learn anything or accomplish anything by motionlessly holding your finger against the roof of her vagina. So you may want to try this technique for a few seconds and abandon it if it doesn’t yield any results.

Don’t finger-bang the vagina unless you know she likes it rough or she keeps gyrating her hips to simulate being finger banged. If she does, then oblige her, but beware that finger banging too soon can wear our your arm muscles very quickly. You don’t want to get her worked up and then have to stop using your hands altogether. That will be disappointing to her and set back her progress towards orgasm.

Here’s another reason you should be wary of finger-banging. Think about getting a hand job. There’s a point where the girl can stroke you so fast that you don’t feel anything and/or the friction numbs your cock. The same thing can happen to a girl.

When in doubt, don’t finger bang. Just keep sticking your finger all the way in and pulling it all the way out (while pressing against the roof of the vagina) or give the roof a rhythmic, sensual massage like you’re massaging a flower. You can change things up a little by sliding your fingers to the left and right like a snake slithering. You can also just massage the roof in circles like massaging your temples when you have a headache. The wildest you should possibly get is twisting your wrist back and forth so that your fingers make a corkscrew motion.

You can do combinations of these techniques, but don’t keep switching it up. If you do one method, do it for a while. If you change, stick with that for a while. Give her time to get into what you’re doing. And make sure that whatever you’re doing you do it fluidly. Herky-jerky motions won’t get you anywhere. If she’s responding well to what you’re doing then don’t change.

Once you’ve got all this going on just keep doing it. You’ll want to slowly increase the speed of your licking. You’ll also want to increase the speed of your fingers… but not by much.

At the beginning of this step it was okay to give the clit long, full strokes with your tongue, but as you get closer to orgasm you need to speed up your licks and press against the clit harder with your tongue. Licking the clit too fast is like getting a hand job that’s too fast. It may be too fast for her to really feel. Pressing harder is almost always better than licking faster. Whatever speed you choose, keep your licks rhythmic. It helps to keep your breathing rhythmic.

Step 6: The Orgasm

There are several ways you can tell a girl is about to orgasm. Her clit may become very hard. The inside of her vagina might expand noticeably. She might grab your head and start screaming, or her body might tense up and spasm violently.

There are a few different ways you can finish a girl off that produce different kinds of orgasms. Use the one that seems most appropriate for the mood.

The first method is the easiest and is a good choice for beginners. As soon as your girl experiences the first shaking blast of her orgasm, keep licking her clit, but do it a little slower and lighter. The reason for doing that is because when a girl orgasms, her clit becomes too sensitive to touch. If you keep mashing on it with your tongue, it will feel painful. However, if you lighten up your touch, you can keep stimulating it a little longer, which will give the girl a longer (and possibly multiple) orgasms.

The second method gives a girl a short and powerful orgasm, but it’s risky. As soon as she experiences the first shaking blast of her orgasm, start licking her clit at full speed using the tip of your tongue. With the fingers you have inside her, press a little harder against the roof, and speed up a little, but keep all of your motions rhythmic.

When she finally orgasms, keep licking at full speed, and finger bang her. Keep doing this until she pushes your head away from her. This is tricky, because of how sensitive the clit becomes after an orgasm, just like how the head of the penis becomes very sensitive after a man orgasms. So if you stay on the clit too long and hard you can hurt a woman, but if you let off too early you ruin the best part of the orgasm.

Regardless of which method you use, the clit will eventually become too sensitive to stimulate. However, you may still be able to apply static pressure on her clit pressing the back of your tongue or the palm of your hand on it and holding it there with firm pressure. If she moves her hips then let her, but don’t do anything yourself. After 5-30 seconds she’ll have gotten all she can out of her orgasm and will relax. Then you can move away.

Also be aware that during moments when her clit is too sensitive to touch, the inside of her vagina won’t be, and being penetrated during/after an orgasm can be extremely pleasurable for most women. So after she cums and you stop licking, consider leaving your finger/s inside her and give her heaving, sweeping motions against her walls with your fingers for a few more seconds. Sometimes she may want to be finger banged after her orgasm.

After you pull your face away from her vagina, pull your body up next to her and embrace her in your arms. This post-orgasmic afterglow heightens the experience for most women. It lets her know this wasn’t a purely physical experience for you, and therefore it allows the orgasm to be physical and emotional.

This is no small matter. If a girl had to choose between a night of a guy making her glow emotionally and a guy making her glow physically, she’d probably choose the emotionally satisfying evening. To girls, the emotional connection made during sex or foreplay is often the main reason to have sex or engage in foreplay. So I reiterate, if you’re going to go through all this trouble to please her physically, then go to the same lengths to make the experience as emotionally pleasing.

While you’re laying next to her you can stick one of your legs in between hers so that your thigh presses up against her clit. Don’t rub your thigh up and down her clit, because her clit will still be sensitive. Don’t worry about how strategically your thigh is placed in her crotch. Just press it up there. By applying pressure with your thigh you’ll continue to keep her sexual excitement from fading away the same way you did with your tongue. She’ll love the fact that you’re helping her hold onto her orgasm. Plus, it’ll show her that you really do know what you’re doing.

Instead of pressing your thigh against her clit you could also mount her in a missionary position and press the base of your cock against her clit, but don’t penetrate the vagina. Just press and hold it against the clit. If she gyrates her hips to rub her clit against the base of your cock then let her, but be hesitant to rub back unless she’s rubbing you so hard it’s obvious that her clit is no longer too sensitive for friction.

A note to men who don’t want to go down on girls:

What I’m about to say is just my opinion. You don’t have to agree with me, but it’s worth contemplating.

It’s perfectly understandable how a guy could be a little grossed out by a woman’s vagina and hesitant to put their mouth on it. There are a lot of different kinds of secretions down there. However, they’re really no worse than what a woman is going to have in her mouth when she gives a blowjob. And really, when you have sex you’re both wallowing in bodily fluids and gasses. Being bashful about bodily fluids is just kidding yourself and holding both of you back from enjoying the fullness of sexual intimacy. None of those juices are going to hurt you. After having sex enough times you’re going to realize that and throw your inhibitions out the window eventually. So you may as well go ahead and take the plunge.

Going down on a girl is about more than just swapping bodily fluids and eliciting a chemical reaction in each other’s pleasure organs. Look at it from the girl’s point of view. Her vagina is her most private, most sacred part of her body. Very few people in all of eternity will ever get to see or touch it. So getting to go down on her is a privilege that you should be honored to experience. So don’t view going down on a girl as an icky challenge. View the opportunity as a sincere and flattering compliment.

That’s reason enough to be willing to go down on a girl, but you should be eager to go down on a girl because it’s one of the most intimate ways you can show her how much you care about her. If your girl is important to you, then her pleasure and her emotions should be important to you. Going down on her is a chance for you to express your passion for her in a way that she’ll feel all the way down to the center of her core. Frankly, if she’s not important enough to you for you to get over your oral sex anxiety, then she deserves better than you.

A note to women who don’t want men to go down on them:

Ladies, I’m not trying to lecture you on how you should view or share your body. I just want to share some thoughts with you from the male perspective. I know a lot of you feel bashful about letting men see or touch your naked body let alone allowing them to put their mouth on your vagina.

It’s natural to have insecurities, and you know better than men what goes on between your legs. You might be ashamed of your own vagina, and you might not believe that a man would actually want to put their tongue on or in it. As I mentioned before, yes, there are some men who feel that way, but they’re mostly sexually inexperienced men who will grow out of it or they’ve been brainwashed by religion to fear and loathe sexuality. In that case, the problem isn’t you. The problem is that they’ve been duped into believing in mythology that reflects the values of primitive tribesmen and not reality.

In reality, your body is a treasure. Your vagina is a treasure, and any man who gets to go down on you is the luckiest man in the world. Mature men recognize that, and mature lovers truly, truly want to show you how much joy you bring into their life by channeling that joy through your clitoris until it fills up your pleasure core to the point of exploding and shaking all of your limbs with a full body orgasm. There are very few joys in this world equal to the satisfaction it brings a man when he gives the woman he cares about an orgasm. So on behalf of every mature lover out there, I beg you. Don’t let your insecurities come between us. Let us return the joy you give us. Let us connect with you on that most intimate of levels. Let us go down on you.

Other technical pointers:

1: Always wash your hands before fingering a girl, especially if you give her a massage and have lotion all over your hands. Dirty hands can be painful and cause infections.

2: Trying to fit both your hands and your face between a girl’s legs comfortably can be difficult. If you just absolutely don’t have enough room to maneuver and are so uncomfortable that you’re getting frustrated, you can have her rest her ass on a pillow, which will give you more room. You can also move your head a little closer to her belly button. You might be surprised how far up her abdomen you can put your head and still be able to lick her clit.

3: If a girl ever stops you while you’re going down on her and says something like, “You got me so hot. I can’t wait any longer. Put it in me now!” Sometimes she means exactly what she says, but sometimes that’s just a nice way of saying, “You’re not going down on me correctly, and I’m not going to cum. So let’s go ahead and skip to the sex.” This could lead you to believe that what you’re doing is working great, when it’s really not, which is why it’s so important to communicate outside of the bedroom.

4: If your tongue or jaw hurts when you’re done it just means you’re not going down on her enough. The way you build up your muscle strength is by performing more cunnilingus.

5: If you’re going down on a chubby girl, your nose may press against her stomach and make it difficult to breathe. In that case, tilt your head to the side so that one of your ears is resting on her flesh. You’ll be licking her clit from a sort of sideways angle. You won’t have as much control over the clit as you would facing it directly, but at least you’ll have at least one nostril open to breathe with. You could breathe through your mouth, but that will dry out your tongue.

6: If a girl likes having her nipples played with outside of cunnilingus, she’ll probably like having they played with during cunnilingus. For other girls, playing with her nipples distracts from what’s going on between her legs. Think about when you’re getting a blowjob. Sure, it’s nice if the girl shows you she’s getting into it by grabbing your ass and caressing your stomach a little, but those hands could be better used by fondling your balls or stroking the shaft of your cock. So if you’re going to caress her or grab her body away from her sexual organs, you may want to do it just long enough to get the point across that you’re excited by what you’re doing and then get back to stimulating her where it counts most.

7: If your girl is sexually liberated enough you can substitute a vibrator for putting your fingers inside her. If you do that, make sure you get a small vibrator, because a big one will get in the way of your chin. Also, work it inside her as gently and as rhythmically as you would with your fingers. Making it vibrate too hard or thrusting it inside her too fast or forcefully will draw her attention away from what you’re doing to her clit, and that’s bad.

8: If you’ve watched a lot of porn you’ve probably seen what I call, “the porn pat.” That’s when you slap the clit. Don’t do that. That’s bad. And don’t be like Jay from “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” and rub the bridge of your nose on the clit. That doesn’t do anything.

9: You can stick your tongue inside the vagina and move it in and out like you’re fucking it with your tongue, but you’re not going to bring a woman to orgasm like that. This technique is okay to do during the meet and greet stage for a few seconds to a minute. The longer your tongue is inside her, the longer your tongue isn’t on her clit.

10: Most women won’t want you to go down on them after they’ve been running around all day and sweating because their vagina will smell and taste sharp. Even if you’re really into that, she’ll likely be self-conscious about it, and that anxiety will lock up her body and prevent her from having as good of an orgasm as possible, if at all. Don’t tell her that her vagina isn’t fresh. Instead, passionately suggest taking a shower together before going down on her.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Sex positions and techniques
General Sex Advice
Dating Advice
Relationship Advice
Philosophy of Sexuality
Friendship
My Tweets About Romance

No Action Is An Island

 

Have you ever known anyone who dated an asshole and was miserable because of it? Did it ever annoy you how they’d constantly make excuses for why their significant other was an asshole and why they were going to put up with it? The whole time they were making excuses you were probably thinking, “That person was an asshole yesterday. That person is an asshole today. That person is going to be an asshole tomorrow. Why don’t you understand that?” Well, your friend was oblivious yesterday. They’re oblivious today, and they’re going to be oblivious tomorrow. Why don’t you understand that?

How you act in a given situation is how you can be expected to act in any other similar situation. Everything you do or think is a piece of a pattern of thoughts and behavior that has existed in your past and will exist in your future.

No action is an isolated incident. Everything is part of a pattern. This is why psychologists and fake psychics understand you so well even if they only know a little bit about you. They understand that every little detail they know about you is indicative of a larger whole.

This is why bad drivers and people who stand in the middle of the aisle at the grocery store blocking 15 shoppers while they stare mindlessly at a jar of pickles should piss you off. If they’re dumb enough to do that one seemingly idiotic thing, then how far does that pattern stretch throughout the rest of their lives?

So you have to ask yourself, what are your tendencies? Are there any tendencies you have that you try to minimalize or make excuses for? The next time you do some small irrational thing, stop and try to find how that irrational action fits into a pattern in your life because I guarantee it does.

Next time someone is mean to you and comes up with a seemingly valid excuse for why their meanness was an accident, don’t believe them. The only accident was that they let you see the real pattern beneath the mask they’re wearing.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

Piancavollos’ Traveling Snail

Sign of the "Piancovollo" city limit sign in the Dolomite mountains of North East Italy.

From 2000-2001, I was stationed at Aviano Air Base in North-Eastern Italy, at the base of the Dolomite Mountains. One day I hiked to the top of a nearby mountain named Piancavollo. From the top, you can see miles and miles of farmland, small towns, and the long runway of Aviano Air Base. They say on a good day you can see Venice, an hour’s drive away. From Piancavollo all of civilization is spread out before you in a panorama. It makes you wonder how many people are milling around down there going on about their lives? How many dramas, how many love affairs, how many tragedies, how many criminals? But then again, you know all about what’s going on down there. You live there, somewhere, and you’ll be back before you know it. But from up here it seems so far away as to be surreal, just like how the top of the mountain does from down there.

Arial photo of the city of Piancavollo, looking down from the mountain of the same name

When I first arrived in Italy and saw that mountaintop commanding the horizon I told myself that I had to climb it to be able to say I did it and chalk up one more experience in the story of my life. When I finally got to the top and started looking down at so many places that I hadn’t been yet I started thinking about all the other places around the world that was craving to visit before I die. I didn’t want to look back on my life and say that I didn’t live a vibrant life because I never went to Hawaii, or Moscow, or London, or Key West, or Alaska.

I’m terrified of living a mundane life. Never mind the fact that in the short 22 years of my life I’ve been to Athens, Jerusalem, Cairo, Paris, Rome, Florence, Pisa, Vienna, New York, LA, and Cancun to name a few. But that’s not good enough. I’ve gotta keep moving,

Anyway. So I was standing on this mountain, eye level with the clouds, adding up all the places I needed to visit when my concentration was broken by the thought that I really had to pee. So I scurried over behind some tall rocks and whip it out to do my business when I realized that there was a large snail lying right where I was aiming. So I took a step to the side, and while I was standing there waiting to finish relieving myself occupied my attention by staring at that black and yellow snail.

Look at this little snail. Its life was a total contradiction to my quest for variety. In its entire life, it would never travel more than 20 feet (or something like that). It may never even see another human. It might not even see me right now. It certainly will never notice the vast panorama that’s embracing a hundred miles of varied landscape behind it or understand what’s going on in any of those towns. But do I have the right to say the snail’s life is a tragedy because it won’t see the Eiffel Tower or touch the Wailing Wall?

I won’t ever get to see what a blade of grass four times my height looks like. Surely that snail is getting to see some pretty amazing things down there. But there’s something more important implied by this snail than appreciating the view from a quarter inch above the ground. How many amazing places do you have to go and how many amazing situations do you have to get yourself into before you can say that you lived an amazing life. What if there were more than 7 wonders of the ancient world ever built? What if there was a structure built in every single city on Earth that was worthy of being called a “wonder of the world”? You couldn’t see all of them in one lifetime. So how many do you have to see before you officially lived a vibrant life? How few can you get away with seeing and still say you didn’t live a mundane life?

Taking this idea one step further let’s ask if you really need to see any of these “wonders” at all. Maybe I’m wasting my time and money traveling, and all these adventures that I’m so proud of having have really been distracting me from focusing on something more important. Maybe visiting amazing places is less important than having an amazing personality. Maybe the quality of your environment is determined by the extent that you appreciate it regardless of what or where it is. Maybe it doesn’t matter how many mountains, rivers, or antique buildings you get to see, especially when there’s an entire universe of complex uniqueness in the mind of everyone you pass on your way to see these inanimate buildings and rocks.

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Whatever the answers I at least figured I could lighten up a little about not getting to visit more famous places. By the time I finished thinking about all this, I had been done peeing for about a minute now and had just been standing there on that mountain exposing myself to a snail and staring into oblivion. So I collected myself mentally (and physically) and started off down the mountain back to my busy, little town where I had plans to do nothing for the rest of the day.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

My Goals
My Life Stories (in chronological order)
My Art

An American Beauty-esque Rant About Life In America

You ever feel like Kevin Spacey’s character in “American Beauty?”

 

 

You have an indoor job that doesn’t require a lot hard physical labor. So theoretically you have an easy job, but you come home from work every day tired. You’d think you would have lots of energy because there’s so little sensory stimulation in suburbia, but your job is stressful and pointless. You have no job satisfaction. The only places you ever go are to work, a gas station, home, a grocery store, and occasionally a restaurant or mall. Wash, rinse, repeat over and over again. Your life is a skipping CD. It has become so routine that you can do it without thinking, and sometimes you do. Months fly by and you don’t even realize it because you’ve been asleep at the wheel the whole time.

Then one day you take a vacation to someplace you’ve always dreamed of, and your vacation probably goes something like this: You spend the whole vacation running from attraction to attraction in a wild frenzy trying to fit everything into your short trip, which makes you more exhausted than when your vacation started so that you’re relieved when you get home. When you get home you realize you spent way more money than you budgeted, because you got overcharged for everything, and now you’re going to stress out over making your money back. Despite all the problems with your vacation it still got you thinking about how jealous you are of the people who live in the picturesque place you visited, and now you’re depressed because you had a taste of a better life (that you know someone else is living), and now you have a frame of reference with which to measure how dismal your bland, stressful, circular life is.

So you get back to your bland, stressful, circular routine and the memory of your vacation quickly rides the conveyor belt of time to the back of your mind. You don’t realize it, but if you had have enough money or vacation time left you’d take another vacation as a roundabout way to buy happiness, but since you can’t do that you’re forced to endure the unfulfilling lifestyle you’re trapped in. So you try to find little ways to bring some happiness in your life (or at least ways to feel alive): buying a new hat, masturbating, watching a movie, going bowling, getting drunk, eating at a new restaurant, etc.

So basically you have a tiny life, and it starts to feel claustrophobic. That compounded with your stress and lack of respite you start feeling depressed and develop panic attacks. You start to suspect that there’s something wrong with you, and all the self-help books you read agree you’re an ungrateful emotional cripple for not being maniacally happy every moment of every day. Since the self-help books didn’t solve your problems (and actually made you feel more guilty) you suspect there is something wrong with you biologically. So you go to see a therapist who puts you on antidepressants, which make your stifling lifestyle more bearable by forcing you to be happy chemically.

The problem isn’t that you don’t understand the self-help secret of life, and the problem isn’t biological for most people. The problem is that our economy is designed to force you into a repetitive, stressful, lackluster lifestyle that is too expensive for most people to escape. Nobody intentionally designed it like that. It’s just the way it happened. If beer or antidepressants help you get through it then you may as well try them, because you’re probably going to be stuck in the cycle for a long time. Here are some other helpful hints for coping with modern life: Go insane. Get a hobby. Convince your boss to let you wear pajamas to work. Exercise. Work in the porn industry. Quit your job and move to a third world country.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty
Socialism and Communism
The Life of the Rich
The Life of the Poor
Oppression in the Workplace
Success and Retirement
The Housing Market
Healthcare in America
The Stock Market
Banks
Taxes
Cryptocurrency
Fixing the Economy
My Tweets About Economics

 


The Rising Tide of Vagrant Intellectuals

Photo of Charles Bukowski sitting at a desk covered in papers, speaking into a microphone, holding a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of alcohol in the other.

 

Throughout most of human history, the only people who could read were the upper class. Until the invention of the printing press, the upper class was also the only people who could afford books, which all had to be hand-written. Even if a peasant could read, lived in a city with a library, and were allowed in the library he still wouldn’t be able to learn enough to be considered educated, because he wouldn’t have time to learn, because he would have had to work the fields or the factories from morning to night.

The printing press helped make education more affordable and accessible to the poor. Unions gave us the weekend and the 40 hour work week, which gave the poor time to learn. The invention of free public education allowed the poor to learn to read and get a taste for intelligence. Very recently children of blue collar workers have been able to access higher education through grants, scholarships, and loans. Now that the internet exists anyone can research any topic they want through free websites. Anyone can purchase almost any book that exists on Amazon.com, even upper-level college textbooks that used to be only sold at university bookstores.

Towards the beginning of human history, the only people who could ever hope to be intelligent were the wealthiest people on the earth. As a result of social progress and technological advancements access to knowledge has slowly trickled down to the middle class, and now the lower class finally has the same privilege (at least in first world countries).

With the lowest class of society finally having practically unrestricted access to knowledge I see a new class of philosophers and thinkers forming. I call them the vagrant intellectuals, and I have high hopes for them.

Think about this. What is an upper-class socialite going to be inspired to write? A pampered socialite from old money doesn’t have to face the harsh realities of life and isn’t going to be able to relate to the real human condition, and that’s going to be reflected in what they publish: over-worded pseudo-intellectual crap.

But the poor, the dejected, the abused, the chemically dependent dregs of the earth have been bitch slapped by reality, and now they have the educational resources to understand and articulate that experience. Plus they have the technical resources to disseminate their hard-earned knowledge upwards to the rest of society. Plus, they can help the rest of the dregs make sense of their lot in life and articulate their experiences.

The rich are losing their monopoly on literature and intellectual culture. More and more you can expect the poor to shape national dialogue. The more the poor air their experiences and grievances the more well-rounded our understanding of our society will become and the more the world will be forced to acknowledge and rectify the unfair conditions the poor live in.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

The Importance of Public Education
Flaws in the Public Education System
Improving Public Education

 


Don’t Argue With People Who Point Out Your Flaws

What would you do if one of your friends had a big piece of broccoli in their teeth that they were oblivious about, and the two of you were about to go out in public? If they’re your friend, you’d say, “Hey, you’ve got some broccoli in your teeth. You should pick it out so you don’t embarrass yourself, friend.”

Broccoli in your teeth is a metaphor for everything you do wrong. For example, growing up I went through a series of bad haircuts. In fact, it was pretty late in life before I ever had a good haircut. I had a lot of friends through the course of those haircuts who should have told me I looked like a waterlogged circus clown. My friends would have told me if I broccoli in my teeth. So why didn’t they tell me my haircut sucked?

We all know acquaintances, family, and friends who are doing something wrong in life, but we don’t say anything because it would be rude. In 2004, I worked with a guy who acted ridiculous, and everyone complained about him behind his back. I always felt guilty every time he made a fool out of himself because he didn’t realize it. Everybody else did though, and they were just going to let him keep on being a moron and keep ruining his life. Well, I couldn’t live with that on my conscience. So one day I had a long conversation with him about how he was making his life harder, and he needed to put more thought into the decisions he made.

He lashed back, demanding me to explain what made me think I was so great. From then on he was quick to criticize me. I’d made an enemy by trying to help him. And all the people he thought were his friends just kept laughing at him behind his back and letting him be an idiot. But I didn’t give up. There were a few times after that when he did something stupid again, and I said, “This is what we talked about. That was a bad idea, and you’re going to regret it, and when that happens, you need to analyze the situation and learn a lesson from it.” His stupidity always came back to haunt him, and he never learned a lesson…but he did resent me more.

It was ironic that he thought I was a prick, because I was the most honest, concerned, and helpful friend he had in that circle. It absolutely blows my mind the unwavering resolve people have when it comes to not listening to (or more precisely, thinking about) advice and staying stupid. I’ve seen this time and time again, even when people ask you for advice. You give it to them, they argue with you, do the opposite, regret it, and then do the same thing over again and wonder why their life sucks.

So do you think I was being a prick by calling out my friend’s mistakes? Don’t answer. It’s a trick question. It doesn’t matter if I was. He needed someone to point of the proverbial broccoli in his teeth by any means necessary for his own good.

Do your self and the world a favor. Embrace criticism. It’s better to lose face and look dumb for a minute than to be dumb for the rest of your life.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

What is sin?

When I was a Christian, I was confused by the subject of sin. I couldn’t figure out what exactly constituted sin. I reasoned that if civil laws have themes running through them, then Biblical rules must have an even more profound common denominator than The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

So I took a year-long course on The Old Testament and read the Bible from cover to cover. To my astonishment, the only common denominator I found that tied all the commandments of the Bible together logically and coherently is this: Everything the Bible says is a sin was a cultural taboo in ancient Middle Eastern Jewish culture. You only have to scratch the surface of The Torah to find this, and the deeper you dig, the more you’ll find.

Consider some of the sins listed in the Old Testament and try to find the common denominator they all share:

  • You can’t cut your sideburns.
  • You have to be circumcised.
  • You can’t work on Sunday
  • You can’t eat animals with cloven hoofs.
  • You can beat your slaves, kill your children and sell your daughters.
  • If you have a wet dream you have to leave the camp for several days until you’re spiritually clean again.

"If two men are fighting, and the wife of one man tries to rescue her husband by grabbing the other man's private parts, you must cut off her hand. Don't have mercy." Deuteronomy 25: 11-12

"The children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall you buy. And they shall be your possession. And you shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession. they shall be your bondmen forever." Leviticus 25:45-46

Finding any other pattern between the sins listed in the Bible becomes harder when you include The New Testament. Try to find a common theme in these New Testament rules:

  • Homosexuality is still a sin.
  • Adultery is still a sin, but you should no longer stone adulterers as God commanded.
  • Slavery is still approved of, and slaves are told to obey they masters at least 4 times.
  • Working on Sunday is now okay.
  • Not believing the story of Jesus is a now a worse sin than murder.
  • Divorce isn’t a sin if the wife fornicates.
  • Stealing is still bad.
  • Women shouldn’t wear pearls or gold, and they should either cover their heads during prayer or shave their heads.
  • Jesus turns water into wine for people to drink, but Paul says drinking is a sin.

"Slave, obey your earthly masters with deep respect and fear. Serve them sincerely as you would serve Christ." Ephesians 6:5

Put the rest of the Bible to the test if you don’t believe me. Read the whole thing, and every time there is a commandment stated or implied, write it down. Make a list, and then try to find some form of logical, purpose-driven standard that ties them altogether. I guarantee there is only one common denominator that elegantly and without exception ties all of the rules in the Bible together: Jewish values projected into their cultural manifesto.

If you liked this post, you may like these:

 


My Philosophy On Being Calm

As a child, my favorite characters on television were the old guys (usually Asian karate masters) who were always perfectly calm and had everything figured out. They’d sit there and smirk as the young fledgling hero fumbled through their quests like a clueless 11-year-old lost in a big city.

 

Black and white photo of Mr. Miyagi (from the movie, "The Karate Kid) holding chopsticks and looking calm and wise.

 

One day it dawned on me that I’d been fumbling through life crippled by my own ignorance just like the fledgling heroes on my favorite Saturday morning cartoons, and just like the young heroes on television, I was the only obstacle keeping me from becoming a calm, centered Zen master too. All I had to do was figure out the supreme truth they understood. Unfortunately, I couldn’t ask my parents or any other old people in my real life to teach that secret to me, because they didn’t know it either.

If nobody would tell me the secret to supreme calmness then I’d just have to figure it out for myself, and I reasoned I could do it without having to go through a lifetime of meditation and martial arts training if I just worked backward and reverse engineered the process from the conclusion.

The conclusion was that all life’s problems aren’t worth stressing over. I just needed to know why.

The difference between the old, wise, tranquil guy and the man who jumps out of a skyscraper when the stock market dips, is perception of priorities. When you know what’s important then you don’t worry about the unimportant things. When you have a skewed perception of what’s important, then you overreact to unimportant events. So you have to ask yourself, what’s important and why?

Imagine all the worst possible things happening to you at once. Your loved ones die. You go bankrupt. You go to prison. You lose your legs. You lose your rank in your high school’s social hierarchy. Once you’ve lost in every way that you can possibly lose in life, what have you really lost? All you’ve lost is external luxury. But you still have your self, the only thing you ever truly owned. Nobody can take that away from you, and as long as you have yourself then you can still till a life for yourself.

The only time you’re taken from you is when you die. Even then, it’s not logical to fear the inevitable. And the big kicker about death is that when you die you lose everything in life anyway. So when you lose anything in life before death…shit…you were going to lose it anyway. So you can’t ever lose anything that you weren’t going to lose anyway.

This makes a lot of suicides ironic. The point of suicide is to escape your intolerable life. If people could choose between suicide and a better life they’d just choose the better life. So if you’re at the point that you’re willing to kill yourself then you’re free to do anything. If you’re willing to let go of all the ties that bind you to the earth then you’re free to fly to the ends of the earth.

Look, shit happens. So don’t be surprised when it does, and don’t freak out because you think it’s the end. It’s never the end until you’re dead, and in the meantime, shit happening doesn’t change the fact that you’re still you and you can still experience life.

So the old, wise guy realizes that nothing really matters. but the reason the young hero can’t achieve the same Fight Club-esque sense of freedom from worry is because he’s trying too hard. Don’t try to hold the philosophy that loss is unimportant tightly in your mind. Just let go. Say, “Fuck it.” All you have to lose is your anxiety.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

Professionalism Is A Straitjacket

Goofy photoshopped image of Donald Trump wearing a straight jacket in a padded room.

 

Think about any behavior that constitutes professionalism: wearing business suits, ties, leather shoes, addressing people with formal speech, prostrating yourself before abusive customers, sitting upright in your chair, etc. None of these behaviors are necessarily things you’d choose to do on your free time. In your free time, you wear comfortable clothing, speak naturally and honestly, stand up for yourself, lounge around comfortably, etc.

Professionalism is an unnatural set of behaviors forced upon you by someone else to improve their company’s image at the expense of your freedom and comfort. Professionalism ties your hands behind your back and prevents you from living how you want to…just like a straitjacket. This is inhumane and defeats the purpose of working in the first place.

Why does your job exist? What does your business provide society and why? Why does our economy exist in the first place? We work to survive and find happiness. The whole point of working or even having this gigantic, intricate, thriving economy, is to streamline the hunting/gathering/tool making process so that we don’t have to waste our lives fighting for survival.

In other words, our economy has grown out of the desire to be happier, but professionalism stifles us all day every day. So if your company enforces strict standards of professionalism and makes a lot of money, and even if it makes its customers happy, it defeats the purpose of its existence by making its workers less happy than they could be if they were allowed their basic human rights.

If you ever see a company that has very strict standards of professionalism you automatically know that that company’s C.E.Os don’t care about their workers’ rights, dignity or comfort. For a dollar, they’d gladly put their workers in a straitjacket and tell them to like it.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty
Socialism and Communism
The Life of the Rich
The Life of the Poor
Oppression in the Workplace
Success and Retirement
The Housing Market
Healthcare in America
The Stock Market
Banks
Taxes
Cryptocurrency
Fixing the Economy
My Tweets About Economics

My Theory On Aggregate Happiness and Immediate Karma

Aggregate Happiness

There are millions of moments throughout your life where you’re faced with a decision that can cause you a tiny bit of happiness or a tiny bit of distress. The amount of happiness and stress is so small that it basically doesn’t matter: like waiting to use the restroom until later, satisfying a slight hunger, resting for five minutes, rubbing one out before work, etc. These choices might seem inconsequential, but when you think of the millions upon millions of these tiny choices we make in our lifetimes, if we always choose to take that extra piss, snack, nap, or whatever then those millions of choices will add up to a huge chunk of happiness, but if we always choose to tough it out we will have amassed a huge pile of misery over the course of our lives.

Text: "It all adds up."

Immediate Karma

We only have so much time in this life. Therefore we only have so much time to be happy. Whenever you’re angry, confrontational, jealous, convincing, condescending, etc. you feel angry, confrontational, jealous, etc. If you’re always acting that way then you’re always feeling that way. So at the end of your life all you’ll have to look back on, all you’ll have experienced will have been negativity.

The second you’re mean to someone, you’ve already created an experience for yourself that is not worth remembering and is wasted time that could have been spent experiencing happiness. So when someone is being a dick to you, understand they may or may not ruin your day, but they sure as hell are ruining their own. Even if they look like they’re enjoying harassing you, they’re not experiencing pure, honest joy, and they’ll never be able to get that moment back. It will have been wasted on sub-par joy for the rest of eternity.

On the other hand, no selfless act is ever unrewarded. Anytime you do something virtuous you get the reward of feeling happy. Even if you don’t get a tangible reward, ask yourself why you would have wanted a tangible reward anyway. You would have wanted a tangible reward because it would have made you happy. Well, if you take joy in doing good without getting a tangible reward then you just skip straight to the end goal: immediate happiness.

Example of cause and effect: A man jumps on a see-saw with a boulder on the other end, causing the boulder to fly in the air and crush him.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help