Yoni mapping: the map of your sensations

You probably know the way from home to work by heart, every bend, every traffic light. You know exactly where your neck tightens after a long day, and which spot on your back calls for a hand. But the map of your own sex — what is sensitive there, what lies dormant, what responds — who ever showed you that?

For most women, no one. We learn to protect it, to look after it, sometimes to offer it. Rarely to explore it for ourselves, slowly, with no other aim than knowing. That is what yoni mapping is about.

An idea from Joseph Kramer

Yoni mapping — genital mapping in Kramer’s own words — was developed by Joseph Kramer, founder of the Body Electric School in California, the same man who created modern yoni massage with Annie Sprinkle. He teaches it within the Sexological Bodywork programme, an educational approach to touch born in California.

His definition fits in a single sentence: with the tip of one finger, the mapper touches points on the vulva or the vaginal wall, and the receiver decides where the mapper touches, how long a point is held and with how much pressure.

Everything lies in that last part. Mapping is not something done to you. It is something you direct.

The face of a clock

To find our bearings, we borrow a simple image: the face of a clock. Twelve o’clock lies towards the clitoris, six o’clock towards the anus, three and nine on either side. This geography is no esoteric invention: it is exactly what pelvic floor physiotherapists use to note, during an examination, that an area is tight “two centimetres in, at four o’clock”.

The difference lies in the intention. The physiotherapist looks for painful points in order to treat them. Mapping looks for nothing in particular: it takes stock. It asks a question, point by point, and it listens to the answer.

You can map only the outside — the lips, the hood of the clitoris, the entrance to the vagina, the perineum. You can also, if you have asked for it, map the inside, wall by wall, at different depths.

You decide everything

In practice, this is how it goes.

The finger rests on a point, and stays there. Still at first, or with very gentle pressure. Then I ask you what you feel. You can answer in your own words, or with a very simple scale:

• Nothing — neither pleasant nor unpleasant, a neutral or sleeping area;
• Discomfort — tension, tenderness, sometimes a slight pain;
• Warmth — something awakening, not yet pleasure;
• Pleasure — gentle or intense;
• An emotion — rising without warning, sometimes with no apparent link to the touch.

You can ask for more pressure, for the finger to stay longer, to move to the next point, to go back. You can also say stop, and everything stops. There is no right answer, no “normal” map to reach, and no sensation is a disappointment.

For the inside, the rules of internal yoni massage apply exactly: an agreement given before the session, a yes spoken aloud again in the moment, a lubricant suited to mucous membranes. Everything is explained in Consent and yoni massage: a yes, before and during.

What you discover

Every map is unique, but some discoveries come up often.

Sleeping areas. Places that do not respond, or barely. This is not a flaw: tissue that has never been touched for its own sake may simply never have learnt to speak.

Silent scars. An episiotomy, a tear during childbirth, an old operation. Joseph Kramer’s programme points out that loss of sensation in a genital scar is often “accepted as normal”. Many women feel it during mapping as if for the first time.

Surprisingly lively areas. A point on one side, an area of the front wall, a precise spot at the entrance: sometimes where you least expected it. Research confirms this, incidentally: intimate sensitivity varies enormously from one woman to another. It is one of the reasons why the debate about the G-spot has never been settled.

Emotions. This is perhaps the most unsettling discovery. A precise point, touched slowly, can bring up tears, a memory, an old anger, relief. The body keeps a trace of what it has lived through. These emotions are welcomed as they are, without being interpreted.

In the end, many women leave with a knowledge of themselves that no book could give them. A map of their own, which they can explore alone, or share, if they wish.

What mapping is not

Let us be clear, because some practitioners are less so: yoni mapping is not a treatment.

It does not treat vaginismus, pain during sex, vulval pain or the after-effects of childbirth. If you are living with any of these, the right person to see is a doctor, a midwife or a physiotherapist specialising in pelvic floor rehabilitation. They have the training, the examinations and the treatments that I do not have, and do not claim to have.

Nor is mapping a therapy. If you carry a history of sexual violence, you are welcome, at your own pace, with all the pauses you need. But supporting someone through trauma is a professional’s work: a doctor, a psychologist or a specialist organisation is there for that.

What mapping can offer, on the other hand, is a rare kind of time: time in which your sex is listened to, point by point, with nothing expected of it.

In practice, at Escale de Soie

Yoni mapping can take place within a session, after a long full-body massage has brought relaxation and trust. We discuss it during the conversation that opens the session: the outside only, or the inside too, and how much time you would like to give it.

Because it calls for slowness, I recommend experiencing it within an Immersion: two and a quarter hours of massage leave time for everything, without ever hurrying. Mapping can then flow, if you wish, into a more fluid yoni massage. Or end there.

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A map that belongs to you alone

Yoni mapping has nothing spectacular about it. It is slow, attentive, almost silent. And that is perhaps why it leaves such a mark: it gives you back authority over a territory you have often been taught to keep at a distance.

To discover yoni massage as a whole — external, internal, origins, frame, prices — you can read the complete guide to yoni massage. And for any question, I am available on +33 7 43 54 47 87, with no commitment, in English if you prefer.

Your body is not unknown territory. It is a country whose map no one ever gave you.