Karezza sounds like a combination of jazzercize, Italian food, and a club full of Latvians, but it's neither an exercise, a cuisine, or a place to forget your debit card before you throw up on a sidewalk very far from your apartment. No, it's something much more depressing: a sexual "trend" that implores couples to just give up on chasing the orgasm white whale. That's right: the hottest new jazz is flailing around in each others' Private Sectors for awhile, and then rolling over and turning on The Daily Show without climaxing.


Hot with couples who refer to sexual intercourse as "lovemaking," karezza is sweeping the nation faster than a case of drug resistant chlamydia during pledge week. Here's the gist: you have sex, just, the regular way. But instead of cumming at the end, you stop. And that's it.

Experts (ugh, fine. "sexperts") say that karezza — which is derived for the Italian word "carezza," which means "eternal, stabbing blue balls" — can be used therapeutically by couples looking to fix their unions, "get the spark back" by rubbing their genitals together until their pubes burst into flame, and treating relationship diseases like sex addiction and porn addiction, Dr. Deb Feintech told ABC. She explains that karezza teaches couples that the point of sex isn't to hump until there's a neural explosion, but rather to connect on an emotional level, tenderly undulating on pilled sheets while gazing deeply into each other's eyes.

I offer this to them as something to try for a month or so. They wake up every single morning and they are not even thinking about genital stimulation. They are snuggling, holding and breathing with eye contact and flow. It's very conscious — from the genitals to the heart.


From the genitals to the heart. I hope Dr. Feintech doesn't mind if I steal that for my wedding vows.

The practice of not deliberately orgasming is hardly new; the word was coined in an 1896 book by early feminist Dr. Alice Bunker Stockham. Stockham felt that couples had to push aside the horny teenager that takes over their brain while their pants are down (or petticoats are up) and and build valuable relationships with their spouses by focusing on each other rather than their reproductive drives. The theory is that having too many orgasms overstimulates the brain's pleasure centers, which just leads to people wanting more orgasms, which leads to all sorts of bad things like porn dependence and infidelity. Couples who talked to ABC for the trendpiece swear it helped them get closer, the never orgasming thing. They have sex every day! He's always putting his dick in me! It's awesome! Like playing pelvic thumb war!

But, you know, if it works for these people, more power to them. In a way, karezza sounds kind of zen. The way to have everything you want is to want nothing. The road to sexual satisfaction ends when you cease seeking it. What is the sound of one hand fapping?

[ABC]