O Read online

  International Praise for

  O: The Intimate History of the Orgasm

  “You might be forgiven for plunging straight into this hot pink tome with unbridled enthusiasm. After all, it promises nothing less than a ride through the development and quirks of that most sought after and occasionally elusive sensation. … Gratifyingly, it delivers. … The book will have you guffawing on the tube, but it’s a double-edged sword; a text which amuses but also illuminates.”

  —The Observer (London)

  “One of the best books on human sexuality that I’ve come across … an excellent and very down-to-earth history of human sexuality … It also takes a very critical but constructive look at sexuality in our western Christian society and the damage that has been done by religious guilt and repression. … If I had any control over the school syllabus, I would make this book required reading for sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds.”

  —Bishop Pat Buckley, News of the World (London)

  “[Margolis] knows more than you dreamt possible about climaxes. … [He] discusses bigger themes, such as how the power of the orgasm, the relentless human drive towards it, has led to a history of religious and political suppression.”

  —The Times (London)

  “What this rather amazing book is about [is] how our knowledge of, and attitudes to, sex change dramatically with every generation. … A serious piece of work. Everything ever written about sex, ever, seems to be referred to in Margolis’s 403 pages … [though] his style is fluent and light.”

  —The Daily News (New Zealand)

  O: THE INTIMATE HISTORY

  OF THE ORGASM

  Also by the same author

  The Hot House People

  Cleese Encounters

  The Big Yin

  Lenny Henry

  Bernard Manning

  Uri Geller: Magician or Mystic

  A Brief History of Tomorrow

  O:

  THE INTIMATE

  HISTORY OF

  THE ORGASM

  Jonathan Margolis

  Copyright © 2004 by Jonathan Margolis

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2004 by Century,

  The Random House Group Limited, London, England

  Printed in the United States of America

  All quotations are reproduced with the kind permission of the authors.

  All works are fully cited in the bibliography.

  Every effort has been made to trace all original copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make any necessary changes to future printings.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Margolis, Jonathan.

  O: the intimate history of the orgasm / Jonathan Margolis.

  p. cm.

  Originally published : London: Century, 2003.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9916-4

  Orgasm—History. 2. Sex—History. I. Title: Intimate history of the orgasm. II. Title.

  HQ12.M346 2004

  306.7—dc22

  2004052387

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Contents

  Preface

  1 The Sexiest Primate

  2 Coming, Coming, Gone

  3 Herstory

  4 Afterglow

  5 The Way We Were

  6 The Evolutionary Paradox

  7 Orgasm BC

  8 Sex and the City State

  9 Orgasm in the Orient

  10 Faith, Hope and Chastity: Orgasm in the Early Christian World

  11 Orgasm in the Middle Ages

  12 The Foundations of Victorian Prudery: The Orgasm from the Late Restoration to 1840

  13 A Tale of Two Sexes? The Orgasm from Victoria to Health & Efficiency

  14 The Orgasm from Freud to Lady Chatterley

  15 The Orgasm Comes of Age: From Kinsey to the Swinging Sixties

  16 A Little Coitus Never Hoitus: From Fear of Flying to Sex and the City

  17 Epilogue: How Was It for Us?

  Bibliography and Webography

  Preface

  My grandmother once told my mom that in sixty years of marriage, she and my grandfather never saw each other naked. I never saw my mother naked.

  My children, by contrast, are so accustomed to their parents walking around in the nude that they have been known to remind my wife and me to ‘put some clothes on’ when they have friends to stay.

  It goes without saying that the late twentieth century was a time of considerable sexual liberalism. I prefer not to imagine what kind of sex life my grandparents had. I suspect it would have been, like Thomas Hobbes’ description of primitive life, ‘… nasty, brutish and short.’

  Yet we fall into the trap of generational smugness if we imagine that our particular time or our culture invented sex.

  More than a hundred million acts of sexual intercourse take place every day, according to the World Health Organisation. Men and women have practiced procreative sexual intercourse for approximately a hundred thousand years. A back of the envelope calculation suggests, then, allowing for expanding world population since 98,000 BC, that human beings have had sex some 1,200 trillion times to date.

  It cannot, surely, have been bad every time.

  Sexual history, as a British psychotherapist, Brett Kahr, has put it, is ‘a minefield of progression and regression.’ Some of the greatest eras of sexual freedom are far in our distant past; some of the most repressed times are within living memory.

  What follows is a history not so much of sex, but of sexual pleasure, of sex as the culmination of a bonding process between two people or as a recreational activity that involves reproduction only as an optional by-product.

  The orgasm is the ultimate point of such sex. It is what we hope to attain. As any soccer fan will confirm, there is enjoyment to be had from a game that ends in a zero-zero score, but a great match requires goals. And many of the greatest matches, for real connoisseurs, have been high-scoring draws, with equal satisfaction for both sides.

  Yet orgasm has a highly paradoxical role within sex. My grandparents, I expect, will have been extremely vague about what an orgasm was. My grandfather was a corporal in the First World War trenches, so he will have had a rough idea that it had something to do with ‘coming off’ as ejaculation was then known.

  I am confident that my grandmother, however, will have died with only the fuzziest notion of what an orgasm was or where or how it was possible to acquire one.

  Even growing up in the 1960s, I was fantastically innocent by today’s standards. It was the custom then in wholesome boys’ books like The Hardy Boys series for characters to do almost anything rather than ‘say’ their dialogue. Frank and Joe and friends like Chet and Biff, would asseverate, smile, chuckle, declare, expostulate, muse, mutter and grin their lines, but most commonly, they would ‘ejaculate’ them. (As in: ‘What!’ ejaculated Mr. Hardy. ‘That’s ridiculous! Why would you steal his cane?’)

  I was vaguely aware that this was a somewhat awkward usage, but I could never understand, until I was long beyond The Hardy Boys, why my parents sniggered at it.

  And I wasn’t alone in such innocence. Sex in Hi
story, a notably progressive 1953 book by a renowned author of the day, Gordon Rattray Taylor, does not contain the word orgasm. Even its polite alternative, climax, only appears twice.

  Yet aside from the need to breathe and eat, the pursuit of orgasm has been one of the strongest single determinants of human behaviour throughout history.

  Every bit as profoundly as the craving for love (more so for much of humanity) the unquenchable desire for orgasm has made and destroyed marriages and dynasties, inspired poetry, drama and novels, destroyed people’s health through sexual diseases and fired up a world-wide, cross-cultural sex industry. Sex, rather than money, is the most happiness-inducing factor in modern Americans’ lives, according to economics professor David G. Blanchflower of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, co-author of Money, Sex and Happiness: An Empirical Study, a 2004 survey of 16,000 people for the National Bureau of Economic Research. Blanchflower’s study quoted previous work in which 1,000 employed people had been asked to rate nineteen activities for happiness; sex came top, commuting, bottom.

  In objective terms, however big and overpowering and breathtaking they seem at the time, however exciting and passionate the build up, however warm and satisfying the prized ‘afterglow’, both the male and the female orgasm are actually relatively minor events.

  Even when sexual partners are skilled, compatible and having sex on a frequent, regular basis, a combination that all research suggests is a rare thing, the capacity for orgasm as a life-sustaining mechanism, hardly rates with digestion or vision.

  Readers will need to be aware throughout what follows that ‘sexology’ is an inexact science, in which researchers notoriously are at odds with one another, relying as they do on a somewhat rickety mixture of laboratory work, questionnaires, and, not infrequently, mere hunches. But even if some of the research I present in the pages that follow seems to be contradictory, there is a near consensus that, physically, an orgasm for either sex is barely more than a flash in the pants.

  Averaging out for both men and women, they last just around ten seconds apiece. With the mean frequency of intercourse standing at once to twice a week, most individuals will experience a mere twenty seconds of orgasm a week, a minute or so a month, or a total of twelve ecstatic minutes a year.

  Over a typical, verging on the optimistic, sexually active lifetime of fifty years, then, we can expect to enjoy some ten hours of orgasm, twenty or thirty for the most avid of masturbators.

  Given the time we spend thinking about, worrying over, preparing for and analysing sex and our performances of it, ten or even thirty hours of ‘product’ in a lifetime seems a very low return for all the effort.

  But whether through sex or masturbation, orgasm’s serotonin rush and momentary muscular relaxation comprise the most potent and popular drug we have.

  And even if we lack the addiction, we are assaulted daily by a barrage of social, cultural and media pressure to acquire it. An English religious commentator, Malcolm Muggeridge, observed in the 1960s that ‘the orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfilment’.

  That was a decade before almost every women’s (and, latterly, men’s) magazine in the world made it mandatory to include a sensational, monthly feature on orgasm.

  Despite its iconic importance in virtually every culture and country in the world, however, no definitive account has ever been written of the orgasm – of its little-known, largely secret history, its biology, anthropology, psychology, technology, and sociology, its cultural role and its literature.

  That, aside from the fact that I really rather like orgasms, but could never quite work out why, is the reason I have written this.

  The Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University, the Magnus Hirschfeld Archive for Sexology at the Humboldt University of Berlin and the libraries of RELATE’s Herbert Gray College in Rugby, England, the Women’s Sexual Health Clinic at the University of Boston Medical School, the Department of Medical Sexology at the University of Utrecht, the Henry Koch Institute in Berlin, the Kinsey Institute in Indiana, the Institute of Psychology and Sexology in St. Petersburg and the Center for Sexual Health in North Carolina, have all been of great assistance in the research for this book.

  My thanks additionally for all their help and wisdom to: Gabrielle Johnson, the late Professor Marcello Truzzi, Dr. Marc Demarest, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Mike Robotham, Mike McCarthy, Clare Kidd, Wahida Ashiq, Tracey Cox, Matthew Norman, Bryony Coleman, Jemima Harrison, Jon Laine, Owen Scurfield, Ruth Margolis, Claire Ockwell, Lucy McDowell, Jason Williams, Lisa da Souza, Dr. Marvin Krims, Fiona Wentworth-Shields, Hannah Shepherd, Jon Gower, Julia Cole, Dr. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Professor Chiara Simonelli and not forgetting, for obvious reasons, Sue Margolis.

  Jonathan Margolis, 2004

  1

  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 unique to these strange, new, bipedal creatures. A few isolated species and sub-species aside, non-humans do not share our studied pleasure in orgasm. 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 thirteen-centimetre-long vaginal passage.