O

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

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

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

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 History
, 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.