O: The Intimate History of the Orgasm Hardcover - 2004

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The Sexiest Primate

‘Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself’
Kahlil Gibran, 1883–1931

The first act of sexual intercourse, the earliest example of two like creatures coming into intimate contact for the purpose of combining their DNA to create a new creature, probably took place about one and a half billion years BC, at a location deep in the primordial oceans. The lovers and parents to-be are thought to have been a type of single-celled blob called eukaryotes.

Sexual intercourse subsequently became the normal method of reproduction for practically all animals. Compared to asexual reproduction – or ‘cloning’, as practised by bacteria, shrimps and stick insects – sex between a male and a female is a far better way of improving the genetic stock of a species and ensuring the long-term benefits of natural selection.

However, the first sexual act by which two like creatures sought intimate contact expressly to give one another physical and emotional pleasure, in an explicit and mutually understood spirit of social, political, intellectual and economic equality and regardless of whether or not they succeeded in reproducing their DNA, may well not have taken place until some time in the twentieth century AD, most likely at a location in Western Europe or North America.

The paramours on this occasion, needless to say, were of the genus Homo, species sapiens, a distant and highly adapted descendant of eukaryotes. Many million examples of these Homo sapiens have since refined their sexual behaviour and begun to enjoy as a joint, democratic pleasure the powerful orgasmic spasm exclusive to their species, and differentiated again between males and females whose orgasms are so different, yet so similar.

So while sex is nothing new or particularly unique to humans, orgasm – in the sense of the pleasurable sensation enjoyed by the two sexes outside a reproductive context and sought in a pre-meditated, practised way – is both. On the evolutionary scale, Homo sapiens is a global newcomer and the orgasm is a complex, sophisticated phenomenon almost unique to these strange, new, bipedal creatures. Non-humans do not share our studied pleasure in orgasm to any significant extent. Even in the modern era, most Homo sapiens who have begun to appreciate this subtle, tricky, fickle but deeply moving neurological reward for the drudgery of reproduction have yet fully to exploit its delights. And by extrapolating Western surveys, which repeatedly report on the lack of sexual fulfilment suffered by a large proportion of sexually active people, we can reliably surmise that for the majority of humankind, satisfactory exploitation of the capacity for orgasm remains an unfulfilled ambition, a rigorously proscribed societal taboo – or a pleasure of which they are simply unaware.

The paradoxes and inconsistencies of orgasm make it a phenomenon to rival quantum mechanics in its fickleness. One indication of the orgasm’s immaturity in the scheme of things is that the anatomical machinery designed, or so it appears, for male/female pairings to enjoy the orgasmic spasm simultaneously and thereby promote the worthy cause of a couple’s mutual happiness and spiritual bonding, often works creakily, if at all.

Men are prone to have orgasms too easily, while women tend not to have them easily enough. The existence of prostitution by women for men in every society, but the reverse only in a tiny minority of Western cities, suggests additionally, and eloquently so, that men are also more physically dependent on frequent orgasm than women – dependent, that is, in the crude, urgent, mechanical ‘offloading’ sense that only they perhaps know. As a famous London madam, Cynthia Payne, once succinctly put it: ‘Men are all right as long as they’re de-spunked regularly. If not, they’re a bleeding nuisance.’ Masturbation too tends to be quicker and less of a production number for men than for women – although, so far as we can tell without the benefit of anyone who has masturbated as both a man and a women, it seems to be a rather less satisfying activity for males.

Rarer and the result of a more refined longing as they are, however, women’s orgasms, with their satisfying multiple muscular contractions, are an infinitely bigger and more expansive experience than the sensation men have when they ejaculate – a fleeting feeling not dissimilar, when the emotion is stripped out of it, to common-or-garden urination from an overfull bladder, a sneeze or an urgently needed bowel movement. The most prosaic analogy to be heard from a woman along such lines is that having one’s ears syringed is not unlike a very small orgasm.

There are more fundamental inconsistencies between the two genders’ orgasms, too. One such apparent mismatch in heterosexual intercourse is that men’s orgasms are practically essential for reproduction to take place, whereas women’s do not have any obvious function other than to be pleasurable. A woman is designed to conceive after intercourse regardless of her sexual response during it.

There are important grey areas here that need to be clarified early on in an account such as this. One is the question of whether male orgasm is a straight synonym for ejaculation. Ejaculation in men is the physiological expulsion of seminal fluid, whereas orgasm is the ‘climax’, the peak of sexual pleasure. Orgasm and ejaculation generally coincide, but they have been acknowledged for many thousands of years to be distinct processes that can occur independently. Some semen may be emitted before the male has even become very sexually aroused. And most men are familiar with the ‘dry’ orgasm that can result from a number of sexual dysfunctions, as well as be consciously cultivated, most famously by ‘Tantric sex’ practitioners, in an attempt to preserve sexual stamina and erection. The muscular pulse of orgasm proper, however, serves to aid conception a little by pushing sperm on its way along the eight to thirteencentimetre- long vaginal passage.

The female orgasm is not completely divorced from conception, either. In fact, women may, according to one veteran British sex resercher, Dr. Robin Baker, retain slightly more sperm after orgasm than in climax-less sex, and while orgasm is occurring may even draw the sperm up through the cervix and into the uterus. This is a marginal effect, however. Orgasm is functionally unnecessary for successful conception.

Yet for billions of women, neither Baker’s contention that orgasm aids conception, nor the model of female orgasm as a pure pleasure finer than anything males will ever know, means a great deal. This is for the very good reason that orgasmic pleasure remains elusive for much or all of their life. Female orgasm even in today’s supposedly more knowing world is an all-too-rare thing, and there is little reason to suppose the situation has ever been any better. Lionel Tiger, Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, states a truth for all times when he declares in his 1992 book The Pursuit of Pleasure that, ‘The gross national pleasure is far lower than it need be.’ It is ironic that, mechanically speaking, in terms of reliability of orgasm, male homosexual intercourse and its female parallel ‘work’ rather better than the reproductive (or pseudo-reproductive) heterosexual variety.

If it is not all, then, an agglomeration of curious design flaws, the best that can be said of the human orgasm is that it is a work in progress. But ‘progress’ implies a history, and how can we know anything of the human orgasm’s history? Does it even have a history?

To answer the second question first, we can be reasonably confident from the study of surviving isolated primitive societies, many of which have language and customs relating to both male and female orgasm, that it has existed for the 100,000 years or so that humans have been ‘civilized’. And if we take an overview spanning from those days to now, we can tell that, far from being some fleeting neurological phenomenon like blinking, orgasm has consistently been of disproportionate importance to the way people have evolved both as organisms and in societies.

But has the orgasm changed; has it improved or deteriorated, in any progressive or regressive way, down the millennia? History is nothing if it is not a narrative and without evidence of a traceable journey what follows might as well be an account of constipation through the ages – even though this might, on reflection, not be such a fatuous idea; many great people, from Martin Luther to Mao Ze Dong, suffered from the affliction and may well have owed their temperament and actions in part to its miseries.

But the human sexual climax is rather more of an issue than constipation. The orgasm’s has been a long intellectual journey, during which whole civilisations for long periods in their history have advanced, then backtracked, then advanced again. If orgasm were merely humankind’s profoundest pleasure, it would be a matter of some importance – especially given the tortured relationship various cultures at different times have had with the curiously controversial idea of enjoyment.

But the orgasm’s existence, as we shall see in this and subsequent chapters, has been influential in more than just the history of human physical gratification. Orgasm has been central, principally, in defining how both men and women and same-sex partners form and maintain couples. This in turn has been crucial to directing the way the human family has developed, to determining important facets of how we live together in broader communities under religious and legal constraints, and even to shaping, via the institutions of marriage and subsequent property inheritance by children of a sexual union, how we distribute land and material goods.

The pursuit of orgasm has, indeed, been one of the most powerful impulses we have. Its iconic importance has been manifest in every culture and country in the world – never more so than today. And a large proportion of the world’s literature and art has been preoccupied with the endless, appetitive, unquenchable craving for orgasm; the sexual compulsion, of which orgasm is the goal, has routinely made and destroyed marriages, and occasionally dynasties.

There is a good argument that testosterone, the chemical catalyst for desire in both sexes, has been the most influential compound in human history. Bill Clinton’s predilection for oral sex in the Oval Office was only the latest chapter in a long dirty book. Today, additionally, in an era when it is no longer widely taboo, the quest for orgasm has become even more of a business proposition than it was when the oldest profession was the only profession. Orgasm has become the universal yearning underpinning the sex industry. Britney Spears even released a song in 2003, Touch of my Hand, expressly about masturbating. It is not merely for sensationalist impact that the zoologist Desmond Morris called Homo sapiens ‘the sexiest primate alive’ – and he did so thirty years before that key date in the history of orgasm, March 1998, when the US Food and Drug Administration approved sildenafil citrate (marketed as Viagra), the first oral pill to treat male impotence.

But we have been sexy in different ways at different times. Evidence that human sexuality is a completely different thing when you compare, say, Ancient Rome, Renaissance Florence and 1980s San Francisco, implies that the orgasm is effectively a cultural artefact, and that the sexual urge is shaped as much by society as by hormones. As the scientist and philosopher Jacob Bronowski wrote in 1969, in his book The Ascent of Man: ‘Sex was invented as a biological instrument by (say) the green algae. But as an instrument in the ascent of man which is basic to his cultural evolution, it was invented by man himself.’

Unlike when palaeontologists find a bone or archaeologists an arrowhead, anthropologists and historians have no access to the cultural artefact of orgasm, to people’s actual experience of it. We have contact only with the edifice of text and artwork surrounding the artefact, which is not quite the same thing; a Princeton University scholar, Professor Lawrence Stone, has explained that even when data does survive on historical lovemaking, it is highly selective. Few historical letters or diaries allude directly to sex, and those that do – like some of the earthy British seventeenth- and eighteenth-century diaries of men like Pepys and Boswell – give an entirely male perspective. Assessing women’s experience of sex in these circumstances is extremely difficult. We, the modern and post-modern Western cultures, have accordingly ‘created’ the orgasm in the same very real sense that we have ‘created’ radio from naturally existing but disorganised electromagnetic waves.

But the orgasm is, additionally, the principal example of the extraordinary human genius for intellectualising and making a pleasure for its own sake of natural phenomena that happen to be necessities of life. From the need to eat and the resultant discovery of cooking food, we developed gastronomy. From the need to communicate and the resultant evolution of language, we developed poetry. From the requirement to keep warm and the resultant clothing, we developed fashion. From the need to keep fit for hunting and fighting, we developed sport. And from the need to reproduce, we have honed the byproduct of our reproductive act, the phenomenon of orgasm, into a leisure pursuit which we follow for the sheer enjoyment of it. Even medical science, with fatal diseases still unconquered, has found time to concern itself with differentiating between pleasure and reproduction.

Not all the evidence for orgasm being a cultural construct is to be found in literature or art, however, nor even in the peculiar moral blanket with which myriad cultures and religions have attempted down the years to smother orgasm and try to suppress or kill it off altogether. The most telling way in which we have built a cultural superstructure on the foundations nature gave our species is to be seen in the manner in which we have succeeded, through contraception, in separating the natural coincidence between sexual climax and babies.

It is remarkable that today we barely think about squalling, puking, doubly incontinent infants when we have sex. Sex is primarily seen as being about romance, glamour, pleasure, good living, happiness – almost anything other than nappies, sleepless nights and teething rings. To the couple having wild sex in the dunes or simpering at one another in an expensive restaurant, it might even seem ‘unnatural’ and strange that what they are doing has the slightest connection with baby production. This interest in pure eroticism, in sex as a leisure pursuit, is fundamentally human – a primary symptom of civilisation in the way it presupposes that basic survival needs have been taken care of, and that there is now time and energy to spare for fun for fun’s sake.

Professor Richard Dawkins of Oxford University, one of the world’s leading thinkers and writers on evolutionary biology, points out that contraception appears to overturn the most fundamental Darwinian dictates by offering the pleasure of sex without the reproduction. He suggests that the explanation for this is that the human brain has evolved its own, advanced, ameliorated spin on survival; in sex-for-pleasure, the brain is seeking and experiencing pleasure as another method of aiding survival. The civilised activity of sex for fun may well go back further than we imagine, too. According to a book by Jeannette Parisot, Johnny Come Lately: A Short History of the Condom, a fresco in the Dordogne, France, dating from 10–15,000 BC, provides the (literally) sketchy first record of a sheath being used for sex.

Human culture meanwhile, rather than evolution, dictates even the times when we indulge in the pleasure of sex. Oestrogen and testosterone levels are at their highest at dawn, yet the most common time for lovemaking in modern Western civilisations is 11 p.m., between the smoochy dinner date and the need to get to sleep so as to be up for work in the morning.

So what about the more difficult question of the physical feeling of orgasm, and how we might assess whether that too has a history? This is bound to be a tricky question, given that even sexually aware men and women have never quite managed to impart to the opposite sex what their version of orgasm feels like. Greek myth, informed as it was by the experience of Greek mortals, had it that a man called Tiresius was privileged to spend seven years as a woman, and then invited to Mount Olympus to be debriefed by Zeus on his experiences. Tiresius’s principal conclusion was remarkable; after taking seven years to ponder on the huge number of differences between the sexes, he summed up his observations in one line. Women, he informed Zeus, enjoy sex more than men. For being the bearer of this unwelcome message for men, Tiresius was blinded.

As for gauging what were the sexual feelings experienced by prehistoric men and women, let alone their simian grandparents, we are obviously confined to informed guesswork. It is perfectly plausible that the greatest sexual difference between prehistoric men and women was the same as, according to Irma Kurtz, it is today: when it comes to sex, Kurtz wrote in a 1995 book, Irma Kurtz’s Ultimate Problem Solver, the male’s greatest fear is of failure, while the female’s is of not being loved.

But we are not completely without biological evidence on which to base our conjecture about what sex was like thousands of generations ago. Desmond Morris contends that man’s basic sexual qualities come from his ‘fruit-picking, forest ape ancestors’, and according to the American anthropologist Helen Fisher, too, the physical facility for orgasm had already evolved before our ancestors came down from the trees.

Of course, we have no preserved soft tissue from prehistoric times to prove conclusively that pleasure has always been sought through sexual intercourse. But it is highly unlikely that the clitoris, the only organ in the human being that exists purely for pleasure, with no known anatomical role, has suddenly developed in the brief five million years of human evolution as a response to our growing social and intellectual sophistication.

An outstanding piece of biological evidence for prehistoric man and woman having been rather erotic beasts is measurable with a ruler. It is the simple fact that the human penis is enormous in proportion to the rest of a man’s body, dwarfing by far even that of the gorilla, whose organ is a puny two inches erect. Only the barnacle, improbably, has a larger penis in relation to its body size. (Owing to the barnacle’s somewhat sedentary lifestyle, its penis has to be capable of searching the area around it to find a receptive female. It also throws its penis away once a year and grows a new one.)

Not only do human males have gigantic sexual organs, but they flaunt them, too. Gorillas might argue that they do not need such a huge penis because they show off by means of their body size. But human men demonstrably announce their sexual power by displaying their penis – or, in modern life, a symbol thereof, such as a gun or a car with an extravagantly long hood and a name such as Testarossa – a real name, chosen without apparent irony by Ferrari. Additionally, any man who has felt under his fig leaf can attest to feeling as if he has as many highly tuned nerve endings down there as lucky women with their clitorises, even though anatomists claim these have 8,000 nerves – twice as many as the penis. This is not to forget the labia, which for 10 percent of women have even more nerve endings than the clitoris. The clitoris is also understood today to be bigger than was once thought; it seems to have two previously undetected ‘arms’ extending some nine centimetres back into the body and up into the groin.

Another key exhibit in the case of whether prehistoric humans had the ability and desire to enjoy sex for its own sake is to be found in the existence of a substance called oxytocin, or ‘hormone of love’ as it has been called. Oxytocin is a neurotransmitter synthesised by the hypothalamus or ‘master gland’ at the base of the brain and stored in the posterior pituitary, from which it pulses out when required, which is during sexual activity and later in childbirth. At the end of a pregnancy, oxytocin stimulates uterine contractions and milk production. Immediately after a woman has given birth, it also prompts the desire to nuzzle and protect infants. This effect of the hormone, its tendency to prompt sensuality, helps us understand its role in promoting the pleasurable feelings of sex.

Oxytocin, which we have no reason to assume is anything new in the body’s inventory of catalytic chemicals, induces feelings of love and altruism, warmth, calm, bonding, tenderness and togetherness, of satisfaction during bodily contact, sexual arousal and sexual fulfilment. And it is during orgasm in both men and women that oxytocin floods through our bloodstream more notably than at any other time besides the peak of childbirth.

As with most other bodily substances, oxytocin has more than one job. It makes us feel warm, content and at one with our partner. It also coordinates the sperm ejection reflex with the male orgasm, and, it is believed, the corresponding sperm reception reflex that operates in the female orgasm. As part and parcel of inducing an altered state of consciousness, oxytocin released by female orgasm helps women lie still for a while after orgasm. This crucially increases the likelihood of conception – as well as making it probable that women will seek further coitus because they enjoyed it so much the last time.

Oxytocin is, then, far more than a side effect of orgasm, or a necessary component in the formula that produces successful reproduction. It is what makes orgasm nature’s sugar coating to disguise the bitter pill of reproduction, the chemical basis for our capacity and longing for romantic attachment. It is the molecule that for 100,000 years or more has made us want to have sex face-to-face, adoring one another, and to live in permanent, monogamous couples – the latter otherwise done only by one species of ape, the bonobo, an endangered chimpanzee existing in small numbers in the Congo and believed by some naturalists to be the closest primate to humankind. Albatrosses, swans, a handful of crustaceans and a rare New Zealand songbird called the hihi also ‘mate for life’ – but not for remotely ‘romantic’ reasons.


From the Trade Paperback edition.