She Comes First

She Comes First — Ian Kerner

The Question That Started It All

When Lorena Bobbitt was asked why she had taken a knife to her sleeping husband, her answer had nothing to do with the headlines. "He always has an orgasm," she said, "and doesn't wait for me. It's unfair." Ian Kerner opens his book with that line because, stripped of its violence, it names a grievance that millions of women carry quietly. He is not defending what she did. He is pointing at the resentment underneath it, the slow accumulation of nights that ended the moment her partner was satisfied.

The numbers behind that grievance are blunt. Kinsey found that roughly three out of four men finish within two minutes of penetration. The 1994 Sex in America survey out of the University of Chicago found that three-fourths of men reliably reach orgasm during intercourse, while fewer than a third of women do. Read those two facts together and a pattern appears: more than two out of three women, on average, are consistently denied their climax during the very act that is supposed to be the main event.

Kerner's response to this is not more effort, more thrusting, or a better technique in bed as it is usually imagined. It is a complete reordering of priorities, summed up in the title. She comes first. Not as chivalry, not as a favor a generous man does, but as a strategy that, once you understand female anatomy, turns out to be the most reliable route to satisfaction for both people. The book is his argument for why, and his manual for how.

Confessions of a Premature Ejaculator

Kerner earns the right to make that argument by starting with his own failure. For years he suffered from premature ejaculation. He describes himself, with the self-deprecation that runs through the whole book, as having "all the self-control of a tube of toothpaste being run over by a Mack truck." This was not a minor inconvenience. It shaped every encounter and filled him with the kind of dread that makes the problem worse.