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But rather than this nerdish sexual technique making him a joke among Italian women, even if a very bad one, the little man seemed, bizarrely, to have enormous sex appeal. Thousands of letters would arrive every day from women begging him to have sex with them. A schoolteacher in Piedmont wrote requesting Mussolini to exercise the medieval
droit de seigneur
on her wedding night. To this day, Farrell reveals, dozens of people a day pay homage at Mussolini's tomb, which is adorned with the black riding boots he was executed in, a black shirt and a flask containing a piece of his brain. ‘Many of these visitors are young women who perform a Roman salute with yearning in their eyes,' he discovered.

Although no dictator, President John F. Kennedy seems to have been not unlike Mussolini, in both his extremely limited sexual ability and his aggressive sexuality in dealings with women. According to an account by Frank Sinatra's valet and confidant George Jacobs, who was also very close to JFK, the President's lover Marilyn Monroe readily admitted that Kennedy was useless in bed. She said he suffered from premature ejaculation. However, says Jacobs in his book
Mr S: The Last Word on Frank Sinatra
, ‘She tried to take it as a positive, evidence of how she drove him out of control. “Jesus, George, he's got a
country
to run. He doesn't have time for the mushy stuff.” Frank, on the other hand, made time for the mushy stuff. “He's
the best,” Marilyn frequently swooned. “Nobody compares to him. And
I
should know.”'

When he was running for president, Kennedy also told Jacobs, who used to give him massages, a story about Marlene Dietrich masturbating him when he was a boy: ‘“Can you imagine what that was like for a Goddam teenager?” … By the time I rolled him over, Jack had become aroused. He turned beet red, but didn't ask me to stop or stop talking. “We better get you laid, Jack,” I said, “You darn' well better,” he replied.'

Could rape which is, after all, as much an extreme case of pursuance of male orgasm as an issue of control and dominance, be nature's way of efficiently spreading available genetic material as far and wide as possible, as a minority of evolutionary psychologists are now arguing? In humans, conception through non-consensual sex or rape is, sadly, all too common. But, while female orgasm may only play a minor part in conception, it has long been thought (albeit more from anecdotal evidence than hard research) that sex perceived by the female as loving, shared, relaxed and mutually pleasurable is more conducive to successful conception than joyless sex forced by a disagreeable male.

This view may, sadly, be fallacious. Recent research by Jon and Tiffany Gottschall, of St Lawrence University in New York, seemed to show that an act of rape may be more than twice as likely to make a woman pregnant as an act of consensual sex. They found that of 405 women raped between the ages of 12 and 45, some eight percent became pregnant when contraception was factored out of the calculation. They compared this with a separate study which found the proportion of women in a similar age group who got pregnant whilst unprotected from a one-night stand or other one-off act of consensual sex was just over three per cent. The Gottschalls believed one explanation may be that women feel more attractive and sexy when ovulating, and unconsciously give off signals that rapists pick up.

Critics of the Gottschall study mentioned have pointed out
that rape cannot be a very efficient evolutionary strategy when only 38 percent of the conceptions studied led to a live birth, with abortion or miscarriage accounting for nearly two-thirds. The odds, in other words, that a rapist will successfully father a child from a single attack are still less than 1 in 100.

The idea that rape is an attempt at reproductive rather than belligerent behaviour was first mooted in a 1999 book,
A Natural History of Rape
, by a biologist, Randy Thornhill of the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, and Craig T. Palmer of the Anthropology Department at the University of Colorado, and built on the Gottschall findings to construct a theory – or polemic, more properly – that rape is best understood as a behavioural adaptation moulded by sexual selection, a viable alternative to regular courtship. Thornhill and Palmer suggested that all young men be educated frankly about their supposedly genetic desire to rape.

The greatest problem (among many) with the Thornhill and Palmer idea is guessing how it might explain rape of children and elderly women – not to mention rape of men. It is not easy to see how violent paedophilia, for instance, can be construed as even the distant cousin of an evolutionary strategy. Nevertheless, their theory has been praised by the eminent likes of Steven Pinker, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor of Psychology.

As regards the aggression/sex relationship, it must also be remembered that anger can be a two-sided coin. For some people, both women and men, aggression can cause such strong emotional feelings against a partner as to inhibit orgasm; in others, meanwhile, it can provide positive stimulation. This is why for some couples, fighting is a form of foreplay, and leads often to satisfying, mutually orgasmic sex. There have even been reported instances or couples seeking therapy to end their fighting, and, duly cured, as a result, in the absence of any other erotic stimulus, promptly ending their relationship; as soon as the well of emotional energy dried up, the fighting stopped – but so did the sexual attraction.

The sex/aggression connection greatly intrigues anthropologist Lionel Tiger, because in male masturbation, he sees an easy, natural way in which excess-to-requirements belligerence in young males can be calmed – in a cheaper and safer way, one might add, than drugs like Ritalin and tranquillisers, which are routinely prescribed for such antisocial behaviour. The fact that successive societies have so strenuously outlawed such masturbation fascinates and perplexes Tiger. In the introduction to
The Pursuit of Pleasure
, he writes: ‘… while male sexual intercourse usually causes an increase in bodily testosterone, which is associated with assertion and aggression, masturbation leaves the level of this influential substance unchanged. It may actually reduce the tension and sense of frustration adolescent males often experience.' Tiger might have added that women who are accomplished masturbators are also familiar on a daily basis – hourly in times of stress -with a similar tension and aggression-dousing effect from, you might say, a quick twiddle.

There is a special orgasmic consideration too in the sex/aggression nexus, which is sadomasochism. Why do sadomasochists need to give and experience pain to enjoy the pleasure of orgasm? Tiger in
The Pursuit of Pleasure
suggests it could be that they were beaten as children by parents whose attention they craved, and thus associate love with pain; or, he speculates, they are people who view their lives as worthless and find in hurting others some relief to this sense of valuelessness. One gay US writer, Edmund White, argues that the sadists he knows are gentle pacific types outside the sexual arena. He concludes in his 1981 book
States of Desire
that: ‘S&M sex may merely be a more frank expression of the dynamics underlying
all
sex; perhaps gay liberation has merely given the leather boys permission to make manifest what is latent in everyone.'

A still more extreme manifestation of the link men may feel between orgasm and aggression is provided by professional fighters. Boxers, in particular, seem prepared to keep fighting
through any pain, any degradation, to have one more one chance at the championship belt. It was former
Sports Illustrated
boxing writer Mark Kram who suspected this masochistic behaviour may have sexual connotations for some fighters – that they outwardly abjure pain while secretly warming to it. ‘Old trainers used to tell me that they had known fighters who got hit so much that it became [so] pleasurable, they even ejaculated,' he wrote.

Despite pervasive cultural myths that only males set in train the procedure that leads to the more conventional, intercourse-related orgasm, the probability is that either the man or the woman will have initiated the above scenario. The modern assumption that men have a greater sex drive while women need to be coaxed and often coerced into sex may be faulty. One of the confusing factors in this is the wide difference in the ages at which men and women reach their peak of sexual desire and ability: nineteen in men, close to forty in women. The idea that women are intrinsically less interested in sexual pleasure may also be self-fulfilling – that they absorb societal notions of what their sexual desire
ought
to be.

It is also arguable that anatomy (with a bit of help from evolution, as we shall see) has conspired to make sexual delight a little more elusive for women. The concealed position of the vagina and clitoris is in stark contrast to the more obvious and convenient placement of the penis. A clitoris can be aroused without its owner, if she is not attuned to its moods, knowing it; it is less easy to ignore an erection. Men are, as a result, the more likely to masturbate and become aware of the possibilities of sexual pleasure.

And aware of those possibilities – obsessed with them, no less – men demonstrably are. It is hard to exaggerate the male sex's single-mindedness when it comes to ejaculating as often as possible in as short a time as feasible. After the comedian Bob Hope's death in 2003, a story emerged of his and his professional partner Bing Crosby's insatiable appetite for sex.
According to the London
Sunday Times
, Crosby, while recovering in hospital from an appendectomy, spoke of the unusually attentive post-operative care he was receiving in the form of one nurse who, he said, ‘gave me the greatest blow-job of my life.' The next day, according to the story, Hope checked himself into the hospital, pleading ‘shattered nerves'. He got the same room, the same nurse – and the same unorthodox treatment.

The whole prostitution industry, of course, is predicated on the ease with which men can reach orgasm – and the urgency with which they seek it, especially for enjoyment in emotionally undemanding conditions. A rare, stark and alarming quantification of the scale of demand for easy sex by men was made by an undercover police operation in northern England in the 1970s. A serial killer of prostitutes – the Yorkshire Ripper -was at large and officers were logging car registrations of regular ‘punters'. Over 21,000 men were identified as prostitute users in two relatively small northern cities, Leeds and Bradford – this in spite of it being well known locally that men's car numbers were being tracked, a circumstance that that might have cut the numbers significantly.

The desire for ejaculatory release by brain damaged and mentally ill men suggests how elemental the need for orgasm is in the human male. When all else is stripped away, the desire to masturbate for comfort sometimes seems to remain. This syndrome of compulsive, neurotic masturbation was movingly portrayed by the novelist John Irving in
The World According to Garp
. The hero's father, a brain damaged US Air Force sergeant whose vocabulary has been reduced to one word – ‘Garp' – does only one thing incessantly, which is to masturbate. Garp's sexually reticent mother, Jenny, ‘harnesses' one of Garp's readily available erections to impregnate herself and produce a son, T.S. Garp.

A broadly equal distribution of desire for sex is, nonetheless, borne out by ethnographic research. People in 72 of 93 societies studied in the 1970s believed that both sexes have an
approximately equal sex drive, and that either is equally likely to begin sexual advances. In many societies, the Maoris of New Zealand being one, women more commonly initiate sex than men. It is implausible, given the brief five million years
Homo sapiens
has been around, that equality of sex drive was not also the case for our Flintstone ancestors – who, even though they did not actually live in caves, we prefer to believe did because we tend to find their belongings preserved mainly within such temporary, natural shelters.

It is also highly likely that the outline script for orgasm that follows was similar or identical in many particulars for early human beings. There simply has not been time for it to be otherwise. It is the all-important overlay of subsequent cultural development that has refined (and sometimes coarsened) the
dance à deux
that leads to orgasm, and has given this sublime bodily function its mystique and its history.

The all-important pre-copulatory phase, which barely exists in even the highest primates and is another sign of our stellar sexiness, can begin without sexual contact of any overt kind. A shared meal is a popular starting point for sex in human beings; it is interesting that oxytocin, the hormone of coupling and togetherness, flows almost as easily during an enjoyable dinner, thanks to the variety of sensual and intellectual pleasures on offer in ‘intimate dining', as during sex and subsequent orgasm.

A great deal of the forgotten sense, touch, dominates the next stage of the precopulatory ballet. Again, this need not be overtly sexual; fingers brush backs of hands or entwine over the table, hands are held tenderly. ‘At times we focus in sex upon the most minute motions,' the late Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick wrote, ‘the most delicate brushing of a hair, the slow progress of the fingertips or nails or tongue across the skin, the slightest change or pause at a point. We linger in such moments and await what will come next. Our acuity is sharpest here, no change in pressure or motion or angle is too slight to notice. And it is exciting to know another is attuned to your sensations as keenly as you are.'

The skin is the largest organ and as, Lionel Tiger has written, skin ‘is not only an envelope containing a person; it is also a means of communication'. Pre-sex touching continues to involve many body parts other than the genitals; experienced lovers will take care to avoid making direct contact with the vagina or penis or even the crotch area in the very early stages of coitus. Touch is such an erotic sense that pre-sex caressing can be an inadvertent shortcut to orgasm. Some people of both sexes can climax from a simple stroking of the back or feet.