The Big O: Orgasm

For thousands of years, the orgasm has been the elusive Holy Grail of the bedroom, yet we could never quite put our finger on it. Not satisfied with past investigations, Jonathan Margolis embarked on a two-year quest to get the low-down on sexual climax. His findings make for stimulating reading : There can be few subjects surrounded by as many myths as the human orgasm. It was my own belief in a few of them that set me off on a two-year quest to discover the truth about this most sought after, yet elusive, of bodily pleasures. The specific spur was an article by a celebrated and outspoken female journalist mocking the male obsession with Viagra. What is it with you blokes, she was asking, and your belief that we girls actually want you to be able to hump away for half an hour like a pneumatic broomstick? When are you going to get it, she went on? Don`t you understand that it`s quite boring watching you attempt athletic records - especially when we know you`re only doing it by reciting football results in your head? And don`t you realise we get quite sore down below decks while you think you`re impressing us? I didn`t regard myself as sexually naive at the time - you wouldn`t after being married 27 years - but this was news to me. My own performances, I would rate as neither Celtic nor East Stirling, but mid to upper Division One. Please excuse me for imposing my private life on you on a Sunday morning, but for me, I would feel I was giving poor value if I lost the plot within a minute, but was doing quite well at five minutes or so. As for the Holy Grail of simultaneous, mutual orgasm through straight, penetrative sex with a woman, I had long suspected that this was strictly for the Champions League. With a variety of foreplay, during-play and after-play methods, I`d always muddled through somehow, and received remarkably few complaints, but you couldn`t help wondering what it would be like to experience what the media, the movies and popular mythology strongly suggest is `the real thing`. It was only after burrowing deep into centuries of sexological literature and research, plus initiating my own discreet inquiries with friends and acquaintances (I don`t know if people confide in me because I`m seen as harmless or because as a former investigative reporter I`m good at winkling information out of them) that I discovered that `the real thing` is 99% the creation of soft pornography and male self-delusion. Ancient cultures more sexually literate than ours recognised that real, loving sex was far more than a mechanical docking manoeuvre. Even the Bible recognised the importance of foreplay. To the later embarrassment of both Christian and Jewish religious fundamentalists, the erotic Song Of Solomon contains a clear request from a woman to be stimulated manually: `Let his left hand be under my head and his right hand embrace me.` In real life, the full-house sex we dream of - a mutually perfect period of lithe thrusting followed by orgasm à deux - barely exists. Typically, my female friends will have experienced it once or twice, in a variety of propitious circumstances, while my male friends will suspect it happened once or twice, but can`t be sure because they have wondered for years if the woman in question was faking it. Even Sting, who made every man in the world feel inadequate (and every woman, I suspect, a bit queasy) with his suggestion that using `Tantric` methods he could keep sex going for eight hours, later confessed that he`d forgotten to mention this included dinner, a movie and four hours of pleading. `But don`t you long for a guy who can keep it up for hours?` I would ask women friends. `Sometimes,` they`d reply, `but if that happens, you suspect he`s either incredibly vain, didn`t fancy you - or was gay.` There`s a serious point here, too. It has long been known that the best way to avoid premature ejaculation (whatever your definition of that) is to have sex with a woman you don`t find attractive - or at least to pretend you don`t find attractive. Su-nii-ching Fang Nei Chi, author of a seventh-century sex manual, Secrets Of The Bedchamber, wrote: `Every man who has obtained a beautiful crucible will naturally love her with all his heart. But every time he copulates with her he should force himself to think of her as ugly and hateful.` In many ways, the liberated 20th century, when we threw off the terrible hypocrisy and misogyny that had afflicted sex in the Western world since Christianity took hold, was as beset by sexual myth as earlier times. One of my other spurs for writing a history of the orgasm was a 1920s sex manual I found in a second-hand shop in North Berwick. It cost 50p, was called Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology And Technique and was written by a retired Dutch gynaecologist called Theodor Hendrik van de Velde. It is very probable that readers` parents will have a copy hidden away at home even today, as it remained the most explicit textbook on sex until well into the 1960s. Van de Velde`s was an incredibly brave and outspoken book, as well as being far too explicit for any modern tabloid. But incredibly, its basic premise - that the only `valid` sex was penetrative intercourse resulting in mutual simultaneous climax - was the most corrosive form of delusional moonshine.

Van de Velde wrote in all seriousness that it was only possible for a women to orgasm when a man ejaculated inside her. Such piffle probably did as much damage in the 20th century as Sigmund Freud`s bizarre 1905 idea that the clitoral orgasm in women is `infantile` and there was something wrong with any woman who didn`t have the `mature` vaginal orgasm in regular penetrative sex. Today we know that all orgasms are clitoral, even if there are some rather fine ones to be had by stimulating specific points in the vagina such as the G-spot. We also know from countless academic sex surveys that it is extremely rare for women to orgasm by intercourse alone, and that the vast majority never will without a bit of help. Yet Freud`s nonsense remained the gold standard of thinking on sex well into the 1970s - and millions of educated people still believe in it. Even the sex gurus of the modern era got it wrong. The celebrated Masters and Johnson said that a man who couldn`t keep thrusting away in sex for more than 15 minutes was suffering from premature ejaculation. A lot of men, me included, would regard such a feat as Olympian. Masters and Johnson also said that no woman could or should be satisfied with less than three to five orgasms per sexual encounter. I think it would be fair to say most women in the real world would regard such a marathon as remarkable to say the least. These influential Americans were, at least, more on the money than a British book of 1953, Sex In History by Gordon Rattray Taylor, which does not contain the word orgasm. Even its polite alternative, climax, only appears twice. But have we, by contrast, become too orgasm-fixated in today`s world, when every women`s magazine contains its mandatory monthly article on orgasm ? Religions, of course, and clergy in particular, have been unhealthily obsessed with sex for 2000 years - in their case, obsessed with stopping anyone from enjoying it. They prefer not to explain how this fails to be a grievous insult to the God who gave us, uniquely among all creatures, organs and mechanisms designed purely for pleasure. But the modern, democratic cult of orgasmic satisfaction for all has made the orgasm become something akin to a human right, for the first time since the ancient Hebrews (and the early Muslims a couple of thousand years later) wisely made it a religious necessity for a husband to satisfy his wife in bed. On the whole, I think, this has to be a good thing. One of the downsides of the more equal distribution of sexual pleasure, however, is that we are inclined to over-emphasise the importance of orgasm as a life objective, at the expense of the wonderfully pleasurable stuff that could, and should, precede and follow it. Good sex - and, again, the ancient Indians, Chinese, Greeks, Jews, Arabs and others (Sting included) knew this - begins hours, or even days, before the much-vaunted act itself. The soundbite age compulsion to get to the end of the story quickly is like watching goals without the football in between - unsatisfying and ultimately a little bit boring. This, in turn, leads to sex being slightly disappointing . The culprit, of course, which didn`t exist for the lucky ancients, is time pressure. We are too busy and stressed for good sex. At the kind of yuppie dinner parties where people used to discuss the G-spot, I have found that in recent years, couples have started talking almost competitively about how much they don`t have sex any more. One friend three years ago coined the expression dins - double income, no sex - and within a few months, it had spread virally all over the internet. Dins struck a chord with people all over the world who thought they were alone in finding they were `doing it` once a month if they were lucky. Don`t fear for the future of good sex though. The growth area these days is among the over-50s. Men were always up for it past 50 if they were lucky enough to be unaffected by illness or impotence. But today up to 70% of post-menopausal women - women who were young and sexually assertive in the 1960s and 1970s - are reporting that their sexual feelings are returning with a vengeance . Free of the fear of conception, the interruptions of small children and the stresses of worrying about career and finances, they are discovering that sex - when, crucially, they can find a like-minded partner - is at last delivering the orgasmic delights they strove for in their youth. The golden age of the orgasm may yet arrive, but in a way nobody quite foresaw.