Reviews for Optimal control

The average rating for Optimal control based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-07-25 00:00:00 Marvin Tahmahkera Rejecting the very idea of penetration as the sole definition of “real sex,” Shere Hite’s The Hite Report on Female Sexuality (1976) sought to understand how individuals regard sexual experience and the meaning it holds for them, using the clitoris as her critical lens. “Its not specifically just orgasms we are talking about here,” she wrote, “we are talking about a complete redefinition, or un-definition, of what sex is.” What I love most about Hite's work: she uses the personal accounts of women themselves, collected from long essay-style questionnaires, as the main text. Its very success lies in the glut of personal accounts. To know that women are sexually frustrated is one thing, but to read page after page of “Long foreplay makes me uncomfortable because I worry that I’m putting my man through too much work, when I know that he could come so much sooner if he let himself" is quite another. In response to the question, How have most men had sex with you?: “Most of them start kissing, petting, really getting off on the breasts—then the fingers in the vagina a bit, love talk, when we’re ready, cunnilingus and fellatio simultaneously, then I get on top, then he does. This is fairly standard with a lot of guys.” “I hate the usual pattern—kiss—feel—eat—fuck, simply because it’s usual. I like people to talk to me and moan a lot. I like when people are expressive and creative with me.” “Foreplay with constant pressure to have intercourse.” All but 5% of heterosexual couples, Hite discovered, followed the “reproductive” model: foreplay (touching, kissing, oral), followed by penetration, and intercourse (thrusting) followed by orgasm (especially male orgasm), usually defined as the “end” of sex. “This is a sexist definition of sex, oriented around male orgasm, and the needs of reproduction,” Hite wrote. “This definition is cultural, not biological.” Hite also found that 70% of women did not orgasm from intercourse alone. Although she stressed that orgasm was not the sole, or even necessarily, the main pleasure of sex, she asked her readers “Why do women so habitually satisfy men’s needs during sex and ignore their own?” For the majority of women clitoral stimulation is used for arousal purposes but not orgasm. A point Hite returns to again and again: through the reproductive model of sex, male orgasm is given a standardized time and place that is prearranged and preagreed during which both people know what to expect and how to make it possible. This places women in the position of having to ask for “extra” stimulation, something “special,” causing many women to feel guilty: “What I believe contributes to my not having an orgasm sometimes with my partner is my unwillingness to risk letting my partner know he/she is stimulating me in the wrong area or not going fast enough or hard enough or not taking long enough. When I realize I’m not going to climax right away and I think my partner is getting bored, I frustrate myself and stop.” “When I ask, and receive, I feel inordinately grateful. Yet I did what he needed to come to climax, and I didn’t feel he owed me anything.” “Out of all the information popularized about female sexuality since the ‘sexual revolution,’ the idea of clitoral stimulation has really made the heaviest impact. But I still feel my partner is doing something that for him is a mere technical obstacle to deal with before going on to the ‘real thing,’ and I resent feeling uptight about having him do that to me.” While the 1960’s may well have been, as Masters quipped, “the decade of orgasmic preoccupation,” Hite showed that this did not, and still does not, necessarily carry over into women’s actual sexual experiences. That is—an awareness of the mechanics, ease, and potency of female orgasm did not appear to have much effect on the way 70% of women fucked. “If women couldn’t ask for clitoral stimulation to orgasm, or do it themselves, they were unlikely to get it from the man they were with," wrote Hite. “Is the answer to the oppression and neglect of female sexuality and especially orgasm that men should lean to give (better) clitoral stimulation? Yes and no. Of course men should learn these things, but even more important, we [women] should find the freedom to take control over whether or not we get this stimulation.”

Review # 2 was written on 2014-08-26 00:00:00 Shane Manka This one was added to my collection while I was majoring in psychology at the University of Washington, and on the recommendation of my only girlfriend ever, Patty. Read the first time in 1976, while I was making a last gasp effort to convince myself that I was straight, the overall impression I got then from this book was that sex with women might be very complicated. Reading it now, after nearly 30 years of water under the bridge, the main message of the book seems to center around the individuality of sexuality, and how a mechanistic approach tends to diminish the pleasure for most. During this reading I thought often of the young women I've met in recent years, and wondered how things are different for them, compared to how it was for the young women of my generation… or my mother's.