Let’s go back to elementary school, where we all learned about the five senses. You know the ones: Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch. Most of us use all five senses every day without even thinking about it. I can honestly say that much of the stimuli I receive through the five senses is second nature, often barely even noticed by me.
Do you take any of your senses for granted? For the purposes of this post I am talking about the senses as they relate to sex. After spending some time thinking about the subject, Jill and I discovered that we have been doing exactly that. This is a situation we hope to remedy, especially in the bedroom. Or the living room. Or the bathroom, the garage, the car, the backyard, or anywhere else we might be going at it.
As part of our discussion on the subject, Jill and I separately ranked the importance of each sense, and then we shared our rankings with each other. We were not surprised to learn that our rankings were exactly the same, listed here in order from most important to least: Touch, sight, hearing, taste, and finally smell. (Jill notes that she originally ranked taste and hearing in the opposite order, but changed her mind.)
Sex feels great. There is no doubt that the sense of touch is, for most people, the most important one. Without the ability to feel physical stimulation, sex as we know it would be nothing like it currently is. It’s very unlikely that, without tactile sensation, Jill and I would enjoy sex as much as we do, or even be able to get off at all. In college, I had a classmate who was disabled, incapable of feeling anything from the waist down. He said that he could get an erection and actually have sex, though he felt nothing apart from the emotional connection to his wife.
Jill and I touch frequently, whether we’re holding hands in a public place, cuddling close together on the sofa, or sleeping beside each other at night. These situations aren’t overtly sexual, but when we touch it is frequently a reminder of more intimate contact.
Since it seems like such a no-brainer that the sense of touch plays the biggest role in sexual arousal, we felt no real urgency to test the hypothesis. However, in the interest of science we blindfolded each other and experimented with a few different items, including a silk handkerchief, a cotton wash towel, a smooth rolling back massager made of wood, a feather, and our hands. I don’t know the scientific term for it, but they all felt pretty good.
Keeping in mind the starring role that touch plays in sex, there are four other senses that are actively involved when we are intimate. Each one is important in enhancing the overall experience.
Although we both ranked sight as the second most important sense, in my opinion it’s only slightly less important than touch. Whether we are seeing each other masturbate, watching an adult movie, or observing our reflection in a mirror as we have sex, visual stimulation is a huge part of what turns us on. One recurring theme in our fantasies is voyeurism, often in the form of watching another couple have sex. The fact that Jill and I are both turned on by the thought of visual stimulation, and not necessarily the visual stimulation itself, speaks volumes about the importance of sight.
Hearing’s important too. However, until recently we mainly thought of hearing in relation to sight. Watching a porn film is hot, but listening to the sounds that accompany the visuals amps up the heat tenfold. However, Jill and I found that listening to the same porn film while not looking at the television led to much greater arousal than watching the television with the sound turned off. In fact, sometimes we’ll put a porn film on in the guest room, and have sex in our bedroom. The sounds of the couple in the movie excite us greatly, and while we have sex we fantasize that they’re actually in the next room. Clearly this is an instance wherein hearing is more important than sight.
After some reflection, we realized that we have placed a high value on our sense of hearing for at least as long as we’ve known each other. The first time we had sex, I was surprised by Jill’s enthusiasm. She was not shy, never hesitating to tell me what she liked, and what she wanted me to do. It went beyond dirty talk (something else she excelled at); the simple fact that she was vocal meant that she was involved and not passive, and I found this tremendously exciting.
Before we got married, Jill and I sometimes went days without seeing each other, and we would have phone sex quite often. Though a poor substitute for the physical intimacy we desired, phone sex was always satisfying. Listening to the person you love tell you the things she would like to do the next time you’re alone together, hearing the sounds she makes as she comes, and hearing her say that she’s turned on listening to you doing the same, each of these things involve two of our most unappreciated sexual organs, the ears.
We found the last two senses – taste and smell – subordinate to the first three with regard to sexual arousal, but they are still involved. Taste is probably the bigger of the two for both of us. We both love to kiss, and while much of this is due to touch – the way Jill’s tongue feels as it zips in and out of my mouth, for example – taste is a factor as well.
Jill finds the act of giving oral sex extremely arousing, to the point that she can sometimes come close to orgasm simply by doing it, with little if any stimulation of herself. She believes that this is due to the way I taste, though she admits that she’s also greatly excited by the knowledge that I enjoy it so much.
It’s widely understood that the sense of smell is most inextricably linked to our memories. What that means is that the smell of a certain type of car upholstery may subconsciously trigger memories of the fifth grade, when your dad might have driven a car with the same upholstery. I was reminded of this recently, when Jill and I went out to dinner. She wore a certain perfume that I haven’t smelled since one of our early dates, which happened to culminate in sex. Cut to last month. While sitting in the car on the way to the restaurant, I began to think about sex without knowing exactly why (other than the fact that I frequently think about sex). We were already planning to come home after dinner and have sex, but as I continued to drive I was surprised at the severity of my sudden arousal. As we arrived, I asked Jill if she’d ever worn that perfume before, and she told me not since we first started dating. I made the connection.
Unlike the experiments we did for our sense of touch, we didn’t really do anything to test our remaining senses. But in the future both Jill and I hope not to take these senses for granted, or at the very least be aware of them. To make better use of our sense of smell, we might try using scented candles or oils to set a sexy mood. Jill is a fan of sandalwood, a scent she finds particularly exciting. Additionally, we’ve got some scented massage oil we’d like to try out.
Regarding our sense of taste, we always hear or read that you should try incorporating food into your sex life. And sure, licking whipped cream off of Jill’s body is hot, but it’s not the taste of whipped cream that I’m interested in at that moment, it’s the taste of my wife. Because of this, and because we’re both actively trying to lose a few pounds, we don’t mix food and sex too often. Granted, our sense of taste isn’t one that we take too much for granted anyway.
We don’t really take our sense of hearing for granted, though in the interest of enhancing the experience from an aural perspective, I am trying to compile a playlist of songs that turn us on, so that we can have some music playing during sex. But not too loud; I would hate to miss any of our own sounds.
Like touch, we appreciate our sense of sight and I don’t think we take it for granted. We probably don’t spend enough time actually looking at each other prior to having sex, mainly because we’re both so excited that once the clothes come off we can’t wait. But that’s something I’d like to do more of. But we’ve never been the kind of couple to have sex with the lights out; we both love the visual, and typically spend as much time looking at our reflection in the mirror as we do looking into each other’s eyes.
So maybe we don’t take all of our senses for granted. We hope you don’t either.
-Jack
