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In a very different age, the 1980s, the libertarian Professor of Psychiatry Thomas Szasz wrote in a book,
Sex: Facts, Frauds and Follies
, that women have learned that being sexually self-affirmative is ‘unfeminine', and hence, are unable to discharge their sexual tension through coital orgasm. This socialisation argument, that women simply
learn
to be less orgasmic than men, has wide currency today. ‘Such women are now called
anorgasmic,' contended Szasz, ‘but men who cannot weep are not called alachrymal. The former condition is thought to be a sexual dysfunction, but the latter is not considered to be a lachrymal dysfunction.'

A number of interesting explanations for the mystery – and frustration – of female anorgasmia have been garnered from experts by
QueenDom.com
. Peg Burr, a Californian sex therapist avers there: ‘My guess is that anorgasmia relates to a lack of efficacy and control in one's life. Orgasm requires becoming vulnerable and open. This openness is based on an intact sense of self which does not feel threatened (engulfed, or overpowered) by sexual union. Persons who are rigid and/or controlling have great difficulty allowing themselves to be vulnerable and completely orgasmically responsive with another person … Women have less personal power in (and over) their own lives, due to social roles which teach them to be passive and non-assertive. They therefore may (unconsciously) exert control where they can, over their own bodies, and unfortunately, limit their own sexual pleasure.'

A practical and pragmatic analysis of anorgasmia – and a possible solution to it – comes from Dr Judith Schwambach, the Indiana-based syndicated sex advice columnist. ‘By far the most common culprit I have observed in my practice is a weakened female PC [pubococcygeal or pubic] muscle. Without a strong PC, most women require direct clitoral stimulation to experience orgasm. A very weak PC may be unable to provide sufficient vaginal tightness for the man to easily achieve orgasm.' The advice, says Dr Judith, is ‘Kegel exercises', available from a variety of medical sources, to tone up your PC.

Bryan M. Knight, meanwhile, a Canadian hypnotherapist and proprietor of the Web domain
http://hypnosis.org
puts his explanations for anorgasmia more crisply still, in four bullet points: If there is no biological cause, then possible reasons are, ‘The woman was sexually abused as a child. She has a need to feel in control. She's having sex with an inconsiderate or unknowledgeable person. She'd be responsive to a woman.'

Other suggestions from QueenDom experts to combat the problem include self-hypnosis, making sure you are not already having orgasms but simply not recognising them as such, managing stress, avoiding alcohol and drugs before sex, not worrying about losing composure or dignity, never faking orgasm – and ‘being a little greedy: when you know what you like, ask for it. Your pleasure is your partner's delight.'

But is it still possible that the human female, ultimately, is just less well designed for sexual and orgasmic pleasure? Is it something in the plumbing? Or is the most important thing we have to understand about sexual delight that men and women desire it equally, are equally capable of it – but are designed to approach it via separate routes?

The sociobiological case for the latter is put eloquently by an Illinois clinical psychologist, John B. Houck. ‘The best strategy for men to increase their gene pool,' explains Houck, ‘is to father as many babies as possible with as many women as possible, trusting that some will survive to adulthood and produce more offspring. This leads a man to be prepared to have as many orgasms as possible. In contrast, the best genetic strategy for a woman is to form a relationship with a man and get him to protect and provide for her and her children, since without modern fertility drugs, she can usually have only one child a year, and needs to extend every effort for those children to grow to adulthood and reproduce. This leads a woman to be focussed on her relationship with a man, to be turned on when she feels safe, protected and provided for, and not turned on when she doesn't.'

Houck concludes: ‘From whatever perspective we come from, it is clearly more important for most women to have more time to feel safe, protected, loved, cared for, and special, in order for them to reach orgasm. Foreplay for many women starts a day or two before the sex act, with the man showing them special attention and love, which begins to put them in the mood for love. Men usually do not need such a long time to get ready.'

‘Orgiastic potency is defined as the capacity for complete discharge of all damned-up sexual excitation through involuntary pleasurable contractions of the body'

Wilhelm Reich,
Function of the Orgasm, 1942

Many ancient cultures believed their orgasms were mystical experiences, and there can be little doubt that such a perception had its roots in the accumulated folk wisdom of the ancient people's own distant ancestors. It should be of no wonder, really, that the rapturous sensation of the immediate aftermath of orgasm was revered as something on a parallel with a religious experience from the moment human beings began to develop spirituality – the belief, often prompted by times of crisis, that there is meaning, purpose, inspiration and answers about the infinite to be had in life.

The most common word that even atheists exclaim when they have an orgasm is ‘God!' It is that easy,
in extremis
, with the oxytocin and other pleasure-inducing chemicals flowing, to confuse an exceptionally pleasant bodily sensation with an awed, revelatory, mystical metaphysical feeling of harmony with the universe.

Even today, there is a wide and sometimes slightly woolly literature arguing the case for orgasms as a mystical experience. Long before the current ‘Tantric' cult, a lot of psychedelic bric-à-brac from the sixties had pioneered a school of
thought that the ancient Hindus, Mayans, Aztecs, Egyptians and so on had better and more meaningful orgasms than modern, consumerist man. Here, for instance, is Elizabeth Gips, a leading voice of the sixties ‘counterculture' in her memoir called
Scrapbook of a Haight Ashbury Pilgrim: Spirit, Sacraments and Sex in 1967/1968
. She recounts thus a particularly splendid orgasm she experienced on New Year's Eve 1966: ‘Male and female are one body that is no body in the time before time when God/me gave birth, created itself. An orgasm beyond orgasm that shakes loose streams of energy which become space, stars, planets, trees, bugs and people. RAPTURE. Am God, energy or whatever, me/you/they. Everything. Created creator.'

The importance of a neo-mystical feeling of post-orgasmic rapture is discussed a little less excitably by clinical psychologist John B. Houck. ‘The spiritual dimension of sexuality is very important,' he says, ‘since sexuality can lead people into powerful spiritual experiences, including the ecstatic experience of unity with the divine, with each other, and with all of creation.'

To those brought up in the modern Christian world in which sexual pleasure was, as a matter of policy, to be imbued with guilt as a way of asserting man's superiority over animals, thinking of sexual and religious rapture in the same breath is, of course, anathema – which is obviously what attracted the hippy movement to it. But in pre-Christian days, most notably in the Old Testament millennia, there was nothing un-Godly about enjoying sex; in fact, to do so was rather religious. An historian, R.C. Zaehner, in a 1957 book
Mysticism Sacred and Profane
, wrote: ‘There is no point at all in blinking at the fact that the raptures of the theistic mystic are closely akin to the transports of sexual union, the soul playing the part of the female and God appearing as the male. The close parallel between the sexual act and the mystical union with God may seem blasphemous today. Yet the blasphemy is not in the comparison, but in the degrading of the one act of which man
is capable that makes him like God both in the intensity of his union with his partner and in the fact that in this union he is co-creator with God.'

Or as George Ryley Scott, an historian, sociologist and anthropologist, put it in 1966 in his book
Phallic Worship:
‘… the more abstract, intangible and symbolic becomes the cult, the more likely is sexual indulgence to prove the only possible outlet for what would otherwise result in a sense of frustration … Once it was thoroughly realised where lay the responsibility for the pleasurable Nature of the sex act, it was perfectly natural that the organs concerned in this sensation should be treated with the greatest respect and adoration … sexual indulgence had a magical effect. It was always, and is, to some extent, even to this day, imbued with mystery.'

This worship of sex among the very earliest civilisations and neo-civilisations is seen in phallic symbols such as the men with enormous, erect penises carved into chalk downs in Southern England. A visceral, Neanderthal reverence for the bodily joys to be had from the penis (and the vagina, to a lesser extent) survives, it might be argued, in the toilet-wall daubings of less articulate members of modern societies, where both men and women of limited potentiality draw dripping, orgasmic penises (vaginas for the more artistic) as a statement of – what? Exultation? Rapture? It barely matters, but there is a remarkable constancy in the phenomenon from culture to culture – a feeling that these are authentic, albeit inelegant, echoes of voices from the distant past.

We now know that the pleasant mental and physical experience of orgasm is primarily a chemical one, caused by the release of a cocktail of neurotransmitters throughout the nervous system, namely the two catecholamines, noradrenaline and dopamine, plus the indoleamine, serotonin. Serotonin and dopamine in particular are said by scientists to release the pleasure-stimulating compounds called endorphins in the brain. These essentially pain-relieving molecules have a similar structure to the morphines.

That numbing, mildly narcotic, tranquillising sensation alone, the sense of comfort and temporary disconnection from reality, may well explain the eternal appeal of orgasm to humans. The famous French description of orgasm as ‘
le petit mort'
– the little death – is a little hyperbolic, but is no more than an elaboration of the same theme, acknowledging as it does the edge of self-destructiveness that characterises any voluntarily taken narcotic. Algernon Charles Swinburne, for example, a poet who, rarely for a Victorian, celebrated carnal passion, could scarcely separate the idea of sexual satisfaction from pain and death. Sexual yearning cannot even be satisfied on earth, according to Swinburne's poetry. And a slight (yet slightly gratifying) feeling of loss, of emptiness and sadness -or of a minor death to the dramatically inclined – is for many people as much an integral part of the sexual climax as the preceding euphoric sensation.

Some sexual theorists have argued that the perceptual link between orgasm and death is traceable to the elevated state in which orgasm in a rare few cases is accompanied by a loss of consciousness. Another explanation for the
petit mort
idea is inherent in a rare but persistent folk belief, of uncertain origin but found in cultures from Europe to the Far East, that a person is born with a certain number of orgasms in him or her, and that when the last is used, the person dies.

The death and orgasm link pervades popular culture. It is found throughout Shakespeare, as we will see later. A Swedish-born German poet, Ernst Moritz Arndt, in an eighteenth-century letter to one of his sexual conquests, writes: ‘A divine fire consumes my soul, I melt, I die of rapture, I am quenched like lightning in the radiance of the day.' It appears too in common ditties, such as this anonymous male orgasm poem of the same period:
Stand, Stately Tavie:

Stand, stately Tavie, out of the codpiece rise
,

And dig a grave between thy mistress' thighs;

Swift stand, then stab ‘till she replies
,

Then gently weep, and after weeping die
.

Stand, Tavie, and gain thy credit lost;

Or by this hand I'll never draw thee, but
against a post
.

The root of the death-orgasm idea may be nothing more complicated, after all, than the fact of the male erection literally ‘dying' after ejaculation. This action may also account for historical taboos against masturbation. Ideas of sperm dying a pointless death are one thing, but could the ancient suspicion of masturbation be nothing more than a disapproval of suicide? If a little bit of us dies for each orgasm, is not a ‘fruitless' ejaculation then a minor suicide attempt?

Men and women have not always resorted to florid images of life and death when describing orgasm. W.H. Auden memorably, and more effectively than the death-by-orgasm brigade, described the sexual craving as ‘an intolerable neural itch'. But the satisfaction of having scratched that itch certainly makes humans behave very differently from the way they do in the run-up to intercourse – and very differently from any other occasion. First they fall into a limp but exquisite state of relaxation, the pain-relieving endorphins providing relief and release, along with gratifying feelings of diminished control and, in some, an altered state of consciousness.

The man's erection will, in all but a handful of cases, have subsided within seconds of ejaculation, leaving him temporarily spent and incapacitated for further sex, and sometimes in a little pain from the end of his penis and his testicles. If anyone is liable to want to recommence sex quickly, it is the woman: Sherfey wrote in a 1966 essay, ‘A Theory of Female Sexuality', ‘Theoretically, a woman could go on having orgasms indefinitely, if physical exhaustion did not intervene.'

Physically, there is an unravelling of nearly all the signs of the excitable pre-copulatory fever pitch and a return to the normal, quiescent physiological state, with an overlay of sleepiness. The sexual flush abates, vanishing in reverse order to its sequence
of appearance. There will often be an outbreak of copious sweating in both sexes, regardless of how much physical effort went into the preceding sexual activities. This sweating is related more to the intensity of the orgasm than the real amount of aerobic exercise involved. A film of perspiration forms on the back, chest, shoulders and thighs, the palms of the hands and soles of the feet, the face, forehead and upper lip. Sweat may also run from the armpits.