“11 minutes” & masturbation

by Rain

After reading “11 minutes” by Paulo Coelho, and the impact that book had on me, I felt the need to share what I learned with you.

The book deals with sexuality, the importance of passion, and the conception of sex.

introduction

Maria, from the interior of Brazil, goes to seek her fortune in Switzerland, only to find that reality is harder than she expected and she ends up working in a brothel on Rue de Berne, the heart of Geneva’s red-light district. The book deals with issues surrounding sex and sexuality, such as prostitution, and sacred sex in the context of love. Because of its graphic descriptions, the novel has been described as “erotic”.

Maria is on journey to find what true love is but ends up letting her own life guide her. She enters a life that leads her down the path of sexual awakenings and almost leads to her self-destruction when she is introduced to all sides of sexual experience. When she has given up hope to find true love she meets a painter with whom she falls in love. And she must now choose where she is to take her life. Either to let it lead her or finally take control of her life and end this subtle self-destructive life she is leading. Just like many of Coelho’s books, this book is also about a journey of self-discovery that leads the reader into understanding the issues of sex (in prostitution), sacred sex, and sex in the context of love.

The book started by this beautiful poem:

“For I am the first and the last
I am the venerated and the despised
I am the prostitute and the saint
I am the wife and the virgin
I am the mother and the daughter
I am the arms of my mother
I am the barren and my children are many
I am the married woman and the spinster
I am the woman who gives birth and she who never procreated
I am the consolation for the pain of birth
I am the wife and the husband
And it was my man who created me
I am the mother of my father
I am the sister of my husband
And he is my rejected son
Always respect me
For I am the shameful and the magnificent one.”

And I will share some more quotes from the book before I talk more about my topic:
At every moment of our lives we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss.
Eleven Minutes

After a while she began to enter a kind of paradise, the feelings grew in intensity, until she noticed that she could no longer see or hear clearly, everything appeared to be tinged with yellow, and then she moaned with pleasure and had her first orgasm. Orgasm! It was like floating up to heaven and then parachuting slowly down to earth again.
Eleven Minutes
Maria discovers masturbation.

If I must be faithful to someone or something, then I have, first of all, to be faithful to myself.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s diary

Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally come to realize that nothing really belongs to them.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s diary

. It is not time that changes man, nor knowledge; the only thing that can change someone’s mind is love.
Eleven Minutes

I’m not a body with a soul, I’m a soul that has a visible part called body.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s diary.

In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each of us responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s diary.

No one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s diary.

There is always a right moment to stop something.
Eleven Minutes

Passion: it can be used to describe the beauty of an earth-shaking meeting between two people… It’s there in the excitement of the unexpected, in the desire to do something with real fervor, in the certainty that one is going to realize a dream. Passion sends us signal that guide us through our lives, and it’s up to me to interpret those signs.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s Diary.

Considering the way the world is, one happy day is almost a miracle.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s Diary.

The great aim of every human being is to understand the meaning of total love. Love is not to be found in someone else, but in ourselves; we simply awaken it. But in order to do that, we need the other person. The universe only makes sense when we have someone to share our feelings with.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s Diary.

Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s Diary.

Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it – which of these two attitudes is the least destructive? I don’t know.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s Diary.

Profound desire, true desire is the desire to be close to someone.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s Diary.

What is real always finds a way of revealing itself.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s Diary.

Really important meetings are planned by the souls long before the bodies see each other.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s Diary.

Anyone who is in love is making love the whole time, even when they’re not. When two bodies meet, it is just the cup overflowing. They can stay together for hours, even days. They begin the dance one day and finish it the next, or – such is the pleasure they experience – they may never finish it. No eleven minutes for them.
Eleven Minutes
Ralf to Maria.

Sex has come to be used as some kind of a drug: in order to escape reality, to forget about problems, to relax. And like all drugs, this is a harmful and destructive practice.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s Diary.

We all have a clock inside us, and in order to make love, the hands on both clocks have to be pointing to the same time… If you love another person, you don’t depend on sex act to feel good. Two people who live together and love each other need to adjust the hands of their clocks, with patience and perseverance, until they realize that making love is more than just an encounter, it is genital ’embrace’.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s Diary.

If you live your life intensely, you experience pleasure all the time and don’t feel the need for sex.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s diary.

When a teacher helps someone to discover something, the teacher always learns something new too.
Eleven Minutes
Terence to Maria.

The world enjoys suffering and pain. There’s sadism in the way we look at these things, and masochism in our conclusion that we don’t need to know all this in order to be happy, and yet we watch other people’s tragedies and sometimes suffer along with them.
As I say, it’s the human condition. Ever since we were expelled from paradise, we have either been suffering, making other people suffer or watching the suffering of others. It’s beyond our control.
Eleven Minutes
Terence to Maria.

The art of sex is the art of controlled abandon.
Eleven Minutes
From Maria’s diary.

We are human beings, we are born full of guilt; we feel terrified when happiness becomes real possibility; and we die wanting to punish everyone else because we feel impotent, ill-used and unhappy.
Eleven Minutes
Ralf to Maria.

Why was it that in God’s holy world men were only interested in showing her pain. Sacred pain, pain with pleasure, pain with explanations or without, but always pain, pain, pain…
Eleven Minutes
Maria.

“I felt that pain is a woman’s friend.”
“That is the danger.”
“I also felt that pain has its limits.”
Eleven Minutes
Maria and Ralf.

…it’s (pain) a very powerful drug. It’s in our daily lives, in our hidden suffering, in the sacrifices we make, blaming love for the destruction of our dreams. Pain is frightening when it shows its real face, but it’s seductive when it comes disguised as sacrifice or self denial. Or cowardice. However much we may reject it, we human beings always find a way of being with pain, or flirting with it and making it a part of our lives.
Eleven Minutes
Ralf to Maria.

Pain and suffering are used to justify the one thing that brings only joy: love.
Eleven Minutes
Ralf to Maria.

They all believe that man feels desire for only eleven minutes a day, and that they’ll pay a fortune for it. That’s not true; a man is also a woman; he wants to find someone, to give meaning to his life.
Eleven Minutes
Maria thinking about the other prostitutes, her mother and her friends. Bodies always understand each other, even when the souls do not.
Eleven Minutes

Maria asks Ralf to touch her and feel her with his hands. In all languages in the world, there’s the same proverb: “What the eyes don’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over”. Well, I say there isn’t an ounce of truth in it. The further off they are, the closer to the heart are all those feelings we try to repress and forget. If we are in exile, we want to store away every tiny memory of our roots. If we’re far from the person we love, everyone we pass in the street reminds us of them.
Eleven Minutes
Maria, in her diary, quoting a priest.

Love was necessary if one was to experience pleasure in bed.
Eleven Minutes
Maria thinking.

After reading those quotes you already awaked yourself on some points…

We all know it is quite harder for women to reach orgasm during intercourse so they turn to masturbation, though it is not the only reason why women as well masturbate.

Only about a third of women experience orgasm regularly during intercourse. A third can reach orgasm with intercourse but need extra stimulation. A third never achieve orgasm during intercourse but can by manual and oral stimulation. Having orgasms by means other than intercourse is a normal variation of female sexuality. In the past, people thought that “mature” women had their orgasms with intercourse; you will sometimes run across an older book that has this view. However, laboratory studies in the 1960’s showed that an orgasm is an orgasm no matter which way you obtain it. How a woman reaches an orgasm has nothing to do with her mental health or emotional maturity.

While there are many ways a loving partner can help a woman reach orgasm, in the end, a woman is responsible for her own sexual pleasure. That does not mean her partner should not be involved. Communication between partners is very important. It is up to the woman to inform her partner her likes and dislikes in their love making.

And here is the important point that the book did talk about… communication

It is never about reaching an orgasm or not or the way to reach one, but the communication between the couple, they should click together literally

“Many women enjoy the closeness and physical intimacy of sex and are satisfied even if they do not, or do not always, have an orgasm.”

I found a good simple article about masturbation:

Written by Christine Webber, psychotherapist and lifecoach

What is masturbation?

To masturbate means to stimulate yourself in a sexual way. This can be done by hand, or with sex aids – some highly-sexed women can even do it by rubbing their thighs together. And a tiny minority of women can do it with no genital contact at all, but simply through caressing their breasts.

Such stimulation often leads to orgasm, but not invariably, as many women enjoy stroking themselves and experiencing pleasure that does not necessarily culminate in a climax.

Most men have masturbated, often beginning at a fairly young age.

Women tend to start masturbation later however, and it does not tend to be such an automatic activity as it is for most men and boys.

Furthermore, even once a woman has learned to masturbate, she will probably do it less than the average man – and it seems that far fewer women than men do it regularly.

Various people have speculated on why this is the case. But most agree that it is to do with basic sex drive.

It does appear that if you compare the sex drive of an average young woman and an average young man, then the man is likely to be the more highly sexed of the two. This is partly because a woman’s fluctuating hormones tend to mean that her desire for sex is not as constant as a man’s is.

Another reason for masturbation being less important to women than men is that a man’s sexual apparatus is all outside his body and he is focused on the pleasure his penis provides him from a very young age.

Women’s sex organs are less obvious. For example, the clitoris – which is the main organ of pleasure in most women – is hidden away under the labia. Also, though this is less the case now than it used to be, girls have traditionally been brought up to be more modest and secretive about their bodies.

Even so, many young women nowadays will enjoy masturbation prior to experiencing love play or intercourse with a partner. But vast numbers of females do not discover masturbation till their late teens – and some never do it at all.

Is masturbation a good thing?

Years ago, girls were told that masturbation was an ‘immature’ activity and that it was important not to get too fixated on it and that if you did, then you might be unable to progress to ‘proper’ lovemaking with a man.

Most experts now regard this sort of advice as nonsense.

Indeed, most clinicians and counsellors working in the world of sex and/or relationship therapy believe that a woman can learn a great deal about her own sexual response through masturbation, and that she can then pass on what she knows to any partner – male or female – she may have.

So, masturbation should not be regarded as immature or shameful. It is something that most normally-sexed women do. They may reserve it for when they feel in need of a treat, or they may do it very regularly – even when they are in a relationship.

Some women choose to masturbate in order to ease abdominal cramps during their periods. Others only ever do it if they feel seriously frustrated. And yet others do it both privately and also as part of the loveplay they share with their partners. All this is normal.

For some people the very idea of stimulating themselves can seem worrying, or unappealing, or something to be ashamed of. It’s a good idea if women can rid themselves of these feelings.

Masturbation is a great way to lessen tension in your body. It’s a very safe way to have an orgasm. And it’s probably the best way to learn about how your body likes to be loved. . But masturbation, like most things, takes practice. And the only way to learn about your own sexual response is to try it.

Finally … I heard about lots of source of pleasure, like passion which is the biggest mostly.

I as well heard about women who reach orgasm without even touching their genitals, some just by thinking or watching their lover…

I as well came across something important in the book, sadism and they way pain can give pleasure to some, and how dangerous it can be as well.