Sex (clitoral sucker use): Does Satisfyer affect my clitoris?
Although it seems like it has been with us a lifetime, the Satisfyer is barely five years old. It became the star gift of Christmas 2019 and has revolutionized the sexual enjoyment of thousands of women. Then came a bunch more clit suckers. But as happens with everything, over time the ‘seams’ begin to show. Or at least, that’s what some people believe.
Elia, real name, is worried. It is becoming increasingly difficult for her to reach orgasm with these devices. “I need to crank it up.” And neither does she find sufficient stimulus in other practices to achieve it. Such is her concern that she has asked in her friends’ WhatsApp group if anyone else feels the same way. “She worries me.”
We do not know the response of the rest of the members, but it is true that experts in this field answer questions like Elia’s. One of them is the psychologist and sexologist Almudena Naharro. “Of course I receive questions about whether it is good to use it a lot or if it creates dependency,” confirms the expert.
The Satisfyer, or any other sex toy, is a tool to achieve pleasure. «On a social level it has been a revolution. Female self-stimulation is a topic that has not historically been talked about, unlike male self-stimulation: they have social permission to do it since adolescence or even before,” explains Naharro. So criticizing a device that has managed to remove the veil of invisibility from female masturbation seems to have more edges than the medical one.
The numbers
65
%
of Spanish women have used a sex toy while in the case of men it is 50%, according to the German portal Statista.
2
out of 10
people do not masturbate, according to a study by the Womanizer brand.
70
times a year on average
is the number of masturbations of a woman according to that same survey. In the case of men it rises to 166.
«There is nothing good or bad. It all depends on the context and use. We should not pathologize things without studying what surrounds them,” supports gynecologist and popularizer Miriam Al Adib.
– Can the sucker cause this inability to enjoy sex in any other way?
– When this disability occurs, it does not have to do with a mechanical problem, but with another type.
That is to say, suckers do not ‘desensitize’ the clitoris, as Elia has come to think. Or at least, there are no studies that demonstrate that physical effect. This ‘desensitization’ has another origin, almost certainly mental. “Any practice can generate this type of effect: for example, if you watch porn movies and you only find pleasure through this practice,” continues the doctor, who serves at her centers in Madrid, Marbella and Almendralejo.
Both experts warn that a healthy sexuality is a rich sexuality and that means crossing certain limits or barriers that we all put in our way. To begin with, “women are not just a clitoris,” Al Adib reminds us. And therefore, we cannot base everything on stimulating it with more and more power.
Naharro, who has his own psychology center in Badajoz and works mainly online, specifies even more: “We want everything immediately, we live outward, in the era of overstimulation and productivity above all and that also affects the sex”.
– Come on, we turn to the suction cup as a quick solution…
– Which is not bad if it is what we want at a given moment, the problem comes when what we want is to expand options and sensations. It’s a matter of habits. We have lost the ability to connect with ourselves.
Habits
“We want everything immediately, we live outward, in the era of overstimulation and productivity above all and that also affects sex”
Almudena Naharro
Psychologist and sexologist
The pace of life we lead encourages receiving a quick reward. And in our daily lives we often act like this: we want solutions now, results now and gratifications now. “You rush and stress all week and then you ask your brain to stop, change the chip and focus on the sensations… But it no longer knows how!” explains the sexologist. You have to train him again. And it’s not about doing meditation, you have to work on sex or what the expert calls resuming the “work of erotic self-knowledge.”
– It’s complicated?
– It’s about dedicating time to ourselves, investigating our fantasies and preferences, seeing what we enjoy the most, what music stimulates us…
Sometimes he even recommends that his patients keep a notebook and write down all those sensations.
The sex of ‘jack, knight and king’ should be overcome: it is an area in which we have to explore. And that takes time, but there are times when the era of immediacy boycotts us. “Sometimes we believe that only the genitals exist, but the brain is the most important sexual organ and the skin is the largest,” concludes Naharro.
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Misunderstood
Recently, a summer course at the University of Cantabria that did not recommend clitoral suckers made headlines in many media outlets. There was a lot of controversy with him. Are they really bad? “If I only manage to reach orgasm through penetration or oral sex, no one protests, but when it goes beyond the norm, that’s when they start attacking,” reproaches sexologist Almudena Naharro. In the case of the Cantabria course, you had to read the fine print. The physiotherapist who taught it referred to it as a tool to treat and rehabilitate certain disorders that affect the pelvic floor. In that case, “it makes us reach orgasm very quickly and in a short period of time, but what we are looking for is the opposite.”
