An Orgasm in Exam Room #2: Her Post-Divorce Awakening

a Girl Boner podcast transcript

Karen: So I learned about the clitoris, I learned about all of that. And then they asked me if I’d ever used a vibrator.

I kind of had heard of vibrators, but there was no way in hell my ex-husband was gonna like introduce a vibrator. And I was like nervous to have ever done anything like that. So I said like, no. And they literally pulled out a little one of those little blue bullet vibrators and said, why don’t you go try this in the other room?

August/narration:

Karen Bigman is a midlife sex and relationship expert, certified sex educator, and menopause coach. An orgasm in an exam room played a big role how she ended up doing that work. It was part of a major sexual awakening that started around the time she got divorced. We’ll get to all of that.

But first, let’s go back.

Karen said she learned “not much” about sex early on.

Karen: That was the truth of the matter. As in an elementary school child I remember the movie that showed a cat giving birth. [cat meows]

I actually remember two classes that we had that had anything to do with sex. One was the later one in the teen years, which was the biology class where the poor teacher or tried to teach a bunch of teenagers about periods.

As I got older, and I had a high school sweetheart, my mom left a little book by my bedside about venereal disease, which is what STIs were called back in the day. And she was a psychologist, and that is how she taught me about sex.

August: Oh my gosh. What did you think when you saw that book?

Karen: I laughed of course. Like by that point, I probably was well cooked, you know?

August/narration:

In other words, she already knew about sex.

Karen: And my dad would just always say like, “Don’t get pregnant. Don’t get pregnant. Don’t get pregnant.” That would’ve been his greatest disappointment in life is if I got pregnant.

August/narration:

There was no internet back then, no smart phones or computers to seek out sex info. So Karen just had to figure things out.

Karen: I honestly, I think I learned by doing with my high school boyfriend. I remember there was a lot of chatter. One or two serious couples and it’d be like, oh, are they doing it? Are they doing it? We didn’t know really what it was.

August/narration:

She remembers when she learned firsthand what a French kiss really was.

Karen: It was in fifth grade.

August/narration:

She went to a party at a classmate’s house. The parents were away.

Karen: We all agreed that we were gonna all try French kissing that night, all the couples. And the guy that I was, dating, or whatever you call it at that age, he goes, “You know, let’s just kiss and I’ll tap you on the back if I want you to stick tongue again.”

August: You have like your own little almost like leveled safe words. It’s like ‘tap means keep going.’

Karen: I guess so, right? We were ahead of our time. Who knew?

August: Was it a pleasurable experience?

Karen: I guess so. I mean, I’ve always loved kissing. To me that’s the most central part of any intimate experience.

August/narration:

After high school she started college, where she had one partner.

Karen: It was my high school boyfriend. We used condoms.

by then. And I, I grew up, in Montreal, Canada, and we finished high school in the English system at literally 16. So when I went to college, I was just turned 17. And I’d never been to a gynecologist. So I learned about birth control in college at the clinic by getting a diaphragm.

I’ve always been somebody that’s not one to hook up. It was just never something I was comfortable doing. So I, even if there were shorter term relationships, I’d always only had sex as we knew it then, intercourse, with somebody I was in some sort of relationship with.

I was kind of a serial monogamist. Other than my high school boyfriend, I had my heart broken quite a bit. It was kind of figuring myself out and learning to value myself was a really hard thing until I met my ex-husband.

August/narration:

We’ll call him Dylan. They met during a holiday weekend.

Karen: It was actually quite a romantic story.

My ex-husband and I both grew up in Montreal, went to college in Boston, went to graduate school. He went, to Harvard. I went to Columbia. ended up in, in New York City. So at that point we were both living in New York City and it was, uh, July 4th or July 1st in Canada.

It was a holiday weekend. We were flying back to Montreal and sat next to each other on a plane. We were 10 months apart. He was 10 months older than me. Had grown up in a different community than mine, but we sort of knew mutual people. It was not common for my peers to leave Montreal and go to college in the States.

For me to meet somebody who had had that similar path and left home very young was kind of nice. And we, we had a lot in common. I was 25 when we met. We got engaged in six months, got married the following end of October. So pretty quick.

August/narration:

She liked him right away, although not in an OMG, he’s so hot type way.

Karen: He’s very witty. Funny.  I was not immediately attracted to him. We had a lot to talk about ’cause we had so much in common. interestingly, my parents were Holocaust survivors. They got to Canada and They were never religious before the war. And so we never went to synagogue. They never cared if my friends were Jewish or not Jewish. We didn’t celebrate holidays and it was almost something missing, but it was something I just didn’t really pay much attention to.

As soon as I met this guy who was also Jewish, my mother lit up. “Oh! You’re 25, he’s Jewish.” And I’m like, Why does that matter? When it never mattered before. So I do think I felt a little pressure, ’cause he was probably the first Jewish guy I dated since high school. well, we must be really compatible because we’re also of the same religion.

August/narration:

Early on, her marriage with Dylan was good.

Karen: It was interesting. Both of us were living in New York and quite lonely. I was working in corporate America. He was also in investment banking and working incredible hours a lot. And so we didn’t have great social lives outside. And so when we met, we had each other, which was really nice.

August/narration:

They had their share of romance together. But the marriage proposal was not part of that.

Karen: To this day, I say one day someone’s gonna ask me to marry them in a much more romantic way.

August/narration:

One night they were watching TV together.

Karen: I said to him that, “You know, this is insane that we’re both paying rent in New York City. Like we should be living together.” And he said, “Well, I’m not, living with you until we’re engaged.” I said, “okay, well ask me to marry you,” and he goes, “okay.”

August: So did you have that bliss feeling of being engaged or did it feel a little bit more everyday?

Karen: I guess it was blissy ’cause that’s what I knew. It was like the dreamy, you know, we went back to Montreal and, and my mom a, had had a diamond for us and we had it set.

August/narration:

And she could tell that Dylan really wanted the wedding.

Karen: It’s not that I didn’t want it, I just it wasn’t like one of these girls…

August/narration:

Girls who grew up dreaming about a wedding.

Karen: To me it was just something I was supposed to do.

August/narration:

Sex was sorta like that, too.

Karen: I didn’t realize that I was a sexual person. I knew I liked sex, and our sex life was fine. But of course I didn’t have that much experience by that point, but good enough that I, thought it was okay.

August/narration:

Very early in the marriage, Karen had doubts about it.

Karen: It almost gets me emotional ’cause I think this was the point where I really realized I didn’t know if this was gonna be the person for me was on our honeymoon. We went to Australia. We flew to Cairn, which is on the coast to go out to the Great Barrier Reef, and we spent a night at the beach .

And we were walking along the beach and the stars were up and it was just the most romantic setting. And I kind of pulled him over and I said like, ” Let’s have sex.” And he would not. It was like he could not let go enough on his honeymoon with his wife to have sex on the beach.

August/narration:

It’s not that everyone needs to want to have sex in nature or in public — she knows they don’t. But Karen realized there was something deeper at play, a way in which she and Dylan were very different.

Karen: He was just a very emotionally shut down person. And who knows, when you’re 25? You don’t really think about how you wanna get deep with somebody.

August/narration:

There wasn’t a single moment when it hit Karen that she wanted a divorce, she said. It was more like figuring it out over time.

Karen: He was a workaholic and I chose to stay home with my kids when I had them. So we were married for three years when I left the workforce. and I never really thought that I would be a stay-at-home mom, but the way the job was working out, I couldn’t stay on part-time.

There was no internet back then, so it wasn’t like I could do a job from home so easily. And because he was working so hard, I said, okay, like, I’m gonna stay home and take care of the kids, which was an extremely lonely experience for me.

He would come home late or he would call and say he was coming home and then get caught on a call and not come home until much later, and I would just get more and more upset.

Of course, he couldn’t text me and say, “I’m not coming home.” It was a very different time. And it was just feeling more and more lonely and I couldn’t understand what it meant. I’m like, I’m married, how can I be lonely?

August/narration:

Karen was about 40, married for 13 years, when she reached an emotional low.

Karen: I sunk into a terrible depression. I get emotional even talking about it. Finally, finding therapy. I learned the expression alone in a marriage. course raising children presents a whole, different, paradigm for how you show up for each other. I had insisted that we have dates every Saturday night. We had a babysitter that we loved.

August/narration:

But the intimacy just wasn’t there.

Karen: He was exhausted. No wonder, working as he did. And so I felt rejected and I couldn’t wait for the adult conversation. I couldn’t wait to go out and see the world when he came home. And we wanted different things. He was happy to just sit and veg.

Socially, he was my only kind of contact with the outside world because where I was, the stay-at-home moms were stay-at-home moms in name, but the nannies were raising the kids. It was a very isolating experience and wasn’t like, he got it when he got home and said like, “Let me help balance that for you.”

So when I started going to this depression, which brought up all sorts of stuff from childhood, it was like, oh wow. Is this all there is?

*****

August (ad):

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*****

August/narration:

Karen’s marriage came to a slow end.

Karen: It was a long period because I think I always knew that I would end up divorced. I didn’t know necessarily that that’s what it would be, but I just didn’t think that he was gonna be the last person in my life.

So it took about 10 or 12 years of sticking it out, figuring myself out, going back to work, navigating other things, and then finally just saying like, this is just not gonna work.

I also wanted to make sure I’d be okay financially ’cause I had not worked most of the marriage and so I wanted to make sure we were at a good place. And he was very decent. We had a very amicable divorce.

August/narration:

And it couldn’t happen soon enough.

Karen: I can still remember lying in bed watching TV by myself. I just would like lie there and binge watch ER and Grey’s Anatomy and all these shows and thinking to myself, God, I just can’t wait till I’m on my own. I just can’t wait till I’m on my own.

August/narration:

I asked Karen if she divorce brought a a sense of freedom or celebration. She said she yes,, especially on the day she moved out of the family home.

Karen: My daughter was in her last semester of high school and he didn’t wanna move. And I think I needed to get out because I’d been home for so many years and I didn’t mind moving. I figured to New York City. It’s across the, park my daughter will come visit.

I moved out and that very first night, I can see it on the upper West side. I had like a lazy boy chair, and I was facing the window and the sun was setting on the, Hudson River .

August/narration:

And she started crying.

Karen: It was like tears of relief. had been fighting for so long. I had been so sad and unhappy and feeling like I couldn’t do and be myself for so many years, and this probably preceded him that I finally thought like, now I can, finally live.

August/narration:

A big part of that “finally living” involved spicy exploration and her full on sexual awakening.

Karen: When I first separated from my husband, I had connected, very cliche, on Facebook with an old… he wasn’t actually my boyfriend in business school, but he always pined after me and I was never really that interested. But we reconnected , after, I guess it was 26 years and we started talking and then we started dating. He was also separating from his wife of 20 something years, same age kids.

August/narration:

Reconnecting with him was hot.

Karen: It was like all of a sudden we couldn’t keep our hands off each other ’cause neither of us had had a lot of sex towards the end of our marriages.

I mean, his situation was even worse. I don’t say mine was terrible, but his was really bad. So we were very excited to constantly be having sex with each other whenever we could.

August/narration:

Even if it meant getting busy in a car. Like this one time.

Karen: He was gonna drop me off at my apartment My daughter was still around. We had nowhere to go. So we pulled over on, East 63rd Street in Manhattan next to a Duane Reed with a fluorescent light.

And we hopped in the back seat and we had sex in the back seat. I had never done that, even in high school.

But we hopped in the backseat and, we did it right there and I was like, wow, okay, I’ve been there, done that.

August: Did it measure up to what you thought it might be?

Karen: No, but I could talk about it and like, it just sounds like it was such a great experience. [laughs]

August: Sometime they don’t have to be the most pleasurable experiences in the world, but you just did something so different, so new, so invigorating in different ways. that can be exciting, like that can be its own kind of cool fantasy experience that you lived.

Karen: Yeah, I mean, we’d, go into bathrooms and bars and restaurants, like things that I would’ve done or might have done in my twenties, but never did.

August/narration:

Some of that fun and adventure, though, was tempered by something else.

Karen: The sad-ish turn of events was that, that was also around the time that I was in perimenopause. Didn’t know the words, but I was on hormone therapy. My doctor had put me on it, when I started to have hot flashes.

August/narration:

She’d also started struggling to experience orgasms. Including during the car quickie.

Karen: It wasn’t just that we were in the backseat of the car and I didn’t have an orgasm. It was that I was also having issues having orgasms when we were having sex in bed.

And I was like, okay. Now the universe is really punishing me because I’m like, I can have sex…

August/narration:

As much sex as she wanted to, basically. She had a willing partner and freedom. She’d been dreaming of those things for 20 years.

Karen: At this point, I moved out, like we could do it anywhere we wanted to, and I wasn’t able to have an orgasm. So that was, almost like the beginning of the journey that I’ve been on .

August/narration:

Since then, so much of her life has changed. One of her first steps was going to her gynecologist to talk about her orgasm challenges. She was 52 at the time.

Karen: Even telling my gynecologist who had known me for 20 something years that I couldn’t have an orgasm was embarrassing.

August/narration:

But she gathered her courage and did it.

Karen: The first reaction was, well, you’re going through a divorce. There’s a lot of emotion. So kind of like, it’s in your head. And I’m like, this is not in my head.

Finally, she referred me to a sexual medicine practice. At the first appointment you meet with a nurse practitioner who deals with the medical side or the clinical side and a sex therapist. And the sex therapist, Bat Sheva Marcus, she’s almost like a Dr. Ruth. she’s actually an Orthodox Jew.

August/narration:

Side note, I interviewed Bat Sheva Marcus for my Girl Boner book, for one of my favorite chapters. She really is amazing.

Karen: The first appointment, they ask all these like very personal questions, of course. Have you ever been able to have an orgasm?

How do you have an orgasm? Do you need clitoral stimulation? Which of course we never think about because who knew that? And and I’m like, well, yeah, maybe, I don’t know. I think so. Could be. So I learned about the clitoris, I learned about all of that. And then they asked me if I’d ever used a vibrator.

I kind of had heard of vibrators, but there was no way in hell my ex-husband was gonna like introduce a vibrator. And I was like nervous to have ever done anything like that. So I said like, no. And they literally pulled out a little one of those little blue bullet vibrators and said, why don’t you go try this in the other room?

So I took the doctor’s orders, went into exam room number two, and I kid you not less than five minutes. I came out and I said, this has just changed my life. Like, oh my God, everyone, I need to tell everyone about these things because they’re really amazing.

They also taught me that my testosterone level was very low too, so that was a contributing factor as well. So I, they put me on testosterone. it was a sexual medicine practice, so they also did fertility there. So I guess I wasn’t the only person to orgasm in exam room number two, but maybe one of the few women.

August: Okay, so I’ve heard a lot of vibrator stories and when a doctor even just recommends pleasure, it’s such a big deal. I’ve never heard of it happening right there. That is amazing, and I’m so glad you had that experience after being diminished and your desires kind of being pushed aside. So how did that impact you then moving forward, besides getting very into your vibrators?

Karen: I of course brought this to my new partner and I’m like, look at this, like, we’re gonna have some real fun now. So that was the beginning of really learning about them. And then I’d go back and they’d tell me different ones and like, I learned about different vibrators. So that was such a great experience.

August/narration:

As it turned out, so was opening up about sex.

Karen: Bat Cheva made it so easy to talk about sex. I must have been one of their few single patients, so they loved all my stories of the different guys I was dating and my love stories and my heartbreaks. It was something I really wanted to talk about. More importantly, I wanted to teach all my girlfriends ’cause there are a bunch of them that were married and had painful sex or were having issues or stopped having sex.

So I invited her to come to my house. I had a group of girlfriends I would make dinner for. she came and spoke to the whole group. that was like, okay, Karen’s the person we’re gonna talk to. Like, I’m the one that’s gonna talk about sex.

August/narration:

She became that person. The sex person of the group.

Karen: It was just, something that I, was very comfortable talking about.

August/narration:

Talking to partners about her affection for sex toys was a little harder.

Karen: I was nervous to mention it when I dated new partners, but it was just like, we’re gonna have a vibrator in the bedroom. It’s just, this is part of my toolkit.

August/narration:

When it comes to wisdom she wants you to go away with, Karen wanted you to hear this:

Karen: The thing that pains me the most is when women particularly give up on sex and just decide like, I don’t need it anymore. It’s just not that important to me. Just because I want it doesn’t mean everybody wants it. And I fully understand that.

August/narration:

But for many folks, especially women and people reared as girls:

Karen: It’s something that we feel like we don’t deserve. We’re supposed to suffer. We’re supposed to not have orgasms and be okay with it. We’re supposed to have, as my old girlfriend said, “husband sex.” We’re supposed to do all these things, but nobody’s ever supposed to do anything for us.

And so part of this is like, I want my orgasm in the bedroom. I’m gonna have one whether you’re gonna give it to me or not. that is part of my right and my enjoyment in this experience. That’s something that I feel like we have such a hard time doing.

The other thing is just shame around talking about it and admitting that we’re having challenges or admitting that we’re having fun and that we like sex cause you’re not supposed to, if you’re a woman, you’re just not supposed to like sex.

Everybody’s thinking it and nobody’s saying it. And that’s the part that’s so frustrating because as soon as I meet a stranger, man, woman, wherever, if I’m sitting at a bar or somewhere or sitting next to somebody on a plane, as soon as I say what I do, people wanna talk about it.

‘Cause they’re all experiencing it and they’re all embarrassed and afraid. And if we just open our mouths and talk about it, you can be respectful and still talk about it. Like that would just make this whole world a better place.

August/narration:

Karen started her podcast, Taboo to Truth: Life and Sex After 50, after moving to a conservative area.

Karen: Believe it or not, California does have some conservative neighborhoods. With my pink hair, and my big mouth. I moved into one of them.

August/narration:

She realized how common sexual shame was there during a book club meeting.

Karen: The book had a racy sex scene. The husband was giving the wife a blow job, and [a bookclub member] was mortified. And I was rolling my eyes saying, seriously, folks, we can’t even talk about it in the context of a book. And I said, look, I’m able to talk about it. And I just picked up my phone and decided, I’m gonna start a podcast — which started with my story and then became bigger and bigger.

August/narration:

She said the podcast has been the most interesting and fun part of her journey.

Karen: All those years of being told, just go find your passion. Sixty years later, I found my passion. It’s not just about sex. It’s about human behavior. It’s about how we show up in the world.

The stories I hear from people about how they’ve dealt with, what they feel, their inner passions, learning about different ways of being in the world, whether it’s your, gender fluidity or sexual fluidity or relationship fluidity, learning about all this stuff. I just feel like I’m the person who can bridge that gap between getting older and being sexual and still being able to have sex and talk about sex. ’cause it’s easy for me to do.

August/narration:

Find Taboo to Truth, Life and Sex after 50, wherever you listen to podcasts. On Karen’s website (linked in the show notes), you can find courses and freebies she’s created to help you along your own path.

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