Life-Changing Sex

If you’re anything like us – busy, hard-working “fortysomethings” with far too many children – sex may have fallen way down your list of priorities. Even if you’re not anything like us, when you’ve been together a while, sex can get dull. There are loads of how-to-make-love-to-the-same-man-for-ever type books around, recommending thousands of life-changing sexual techniques. So my man and I jumped straight in at the deep end and scoured the bookshelves for the latest and greatest. If we’re going to do it all, we might as well be adventurous about it, we decided. And here, for your delight and delectation (and deridation quite possibly!) is what we discovered…

Tantric sex

What is it? Tantra (a word derived from the Sanskrit tanoti (to expand) is a spiritual method of yoga, developed in northern India and Tibet centuries ago. Used in sex, it aims to unite the individual with cosmic consciousness. How is it supposed to work? Using lots of special Tantric exercises – many of them breathing exercises – subtle energies are released and circulated in a certain way. Other exercises strengthen the body for better love-making. The exercises have great names: Riding The Tiger is my personal favourite! Intercourse is slow with limited thrusting. Orgasm isn’t the be all and end all of the experience – pleasurable feelings of other kinds are what you should be after. Tantric sex is supposed to heighten your state of sexual awareness and guide you towards “oneness” with your lover.

What’s supposed to happen? Sexual bliss, by all accounts.

What did happen? Doing the exercises proved so complicated and time-consuming that as soon as we got into bed we fell asleep. I’m sure, with practice though, it’d benefit anyone’s sex life. But you need to have lots of time to spare and be really dedicated to achieve good results.

Repeat performance rating: 5/10, although I feel it’s unfair to judge Tantric sex after having just one “go” of it. People who practice it have reported amazing improvements to their sex lives.

Cat (coital alignment technique)

What is it? Discovered by Edward W. Eichel and written about in a book called The Perfect Fit, the Coital Alignment Technique incorporates a sexual position which is said to be the ultimate for feminine pleasure. Apparently, according to sceptics, CAT is nothing new: it appeared in sex manuals which date back to the “50s. In those days, it was called “riding high’!