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There was a further subtle twist during the early- to mid-twentieth century in the Western attitude to sexual pleasure, which although it was in fact occurring from the 1920s is purposely considered here as an afterthought. It concerned something which had so far failed to trouble even the sexually aware in previous centuries – the future of sex.

An interest in ‘the future' as a subject worthy of informed scientific speculation and study had been developing across the world from the seventeenth-century onwards, but had never previously touched on sexual relations. As we have seen, sexual freedom and enjoyment was regarded from the time of the first Christians to the Age of Reason as a regressive force, a reversion to the ways of ancient, uncivilised peoples, or even of animals. In the twentieth century came a curious switch, however. As, in the backlash against Victorianism, it became slowly more acceptable for educated, middle-class people to admit to an enjoyment of sex, the notion began to take root that the future might see an increase in sexual fulfilment rather than its withering away. For the first time ever, universal sexual pleasure became an ideal of the future, rather than the past. Advocating sexual freedom was no longer a back-to-Nature argument, but an example of enlightened futurism.

Like most prognostications, predictions of how sex would
be in the future were never less than entertaining, especially as with increased longevity those ‘futures' became knowable and we could in one lifetime measure past projections against contemporary reality.

The most common prediction in literature and film, spurred by liberationist and socialist philosophies, was that the orgasm would become a bodily function about which people would be totally uninhibited – a scenario more reminiscent of the Ancient Greeks than of futuristic predictions of human beings living in Lurex space suits. Sex, it was predicted, would in the future become more of a social, communal event than a personal one.

Some predictions were not an extrapolation or exaggeration of current sexual behaviours, but simply an inversion of them. A good example of this is seen in
Brave New World
, Aldous Huxley's dystopian 1931 novel, which describes a society organised exclusively around the pursuit of pleasure, in which twentieth-century sexual mores were pretty much turned on their head. Promiscuity in this world is promoted as being socially constructive, whilst meaningful sex that encourages emotional attachment is disparaged.

Movies in Huxley's new world were called ‘the feelies', usually with a high sexual content which could be enjoyed sensually by the audience: ‘The plot of the film was extremely simple. A few minutes after the first Oohs and Aahs (a duet having been sung and a little love made on that famous bearskin, every hair of which, could be separately and distinctly felt …'
Brave New World
citizens attended ‘orgy-porgies', where, amongst other things, they would have sex. When one of the characters, Bernard, does not want to have sex with the gorgeous Lenina on their first date, he is deemed extremely odd. Sex, after all, was to be uninhibited and guilt-free, aided and abetted by the mood-altering drug Soma.

Huxley's book was more satire than an attempt at accurate prediction, but while it is true that some of the phenomena he sketched were aspired to and achieved in the free love sixties, it
is always worth remembering in that decade that whatever was happening in enclaves such as Carnaby Street, Haight Ashbury and Greenwich Village, far more numerous than the highly publicised swingers were the equally motivated campaigners for Victorian values, such as the sexually fixated Mary Whitehouse and her National Viewers' and Listeners' Association in the UK, and the right-wing creationist conservatives who, in the 1980s, coalesced into the Moral Majority in the US.

Brave New World
, however, took the inversion of Huxley's contemporary values one step further than woolly declarations of free love for all. He delineated a world in which the great obscenities were love, marriage and parenthood, where pregnancy was the worst humiliation imaginable and, consequently, where reproduction took place not in the womb, but on a conveyor belt. Even sex between children was encouraged.

George Orwell's 1949 novel
1984
, a pessimistic satire of the even nearer future, also contained a vision of how sexual mores might come to affect children. Orwell imagined things turning out a little differently from Huxley, however:

The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it. All marriages between Party members had to be approved by a committee appointed for the purpose, and – though the principle was never clearly stated – permission was always refused if the couple concerned gave the impression of being physically attracted to one another. The only recognised purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party. Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema. This again was never put into plain words, but in an indirect way it was rubbed into every Party member from childhood onwards. There were even organisations such as the Junior Anti-Sex League, which advocated complete
celibacy for both sexes. All children were to be begotten by artificial insemination (artsem, it was called in Newspeak) and brought up in public institutions.

Orwell's Junior Anti-Sex league may seem a future fantasy too far, especially when one considers that he dreamed it up almost at the moment the Kinsey report was launched on a sex-hungry world. Yet in 2003, we have the extraordinary spectre of a high school and campus-organised national abstinence movement in America called True Love Waits, devotees of which sign the following statement: ‘Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, those I date, and my future mate to be sexually pure until the day I enter marriage.' The cult's official website was announcing at the time of writing that True Love Waits will be going global in 2004 and suggests to youngsters worldwide that they ‘… have the chance to be part of an international stand for purity'.

Orwell's
1984
posits a nation where sex for personal pleasure is a crime – investing Huxley's idea this time – and the only sex which is tolerated is intercourse which produces ‘new material' for the Party. The orgasm, too, has become a target, representing as it does the most personal of private passions:

In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy, everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now.

Cinematic representations of sex in the future often suggest that science and technology will find us the ultimate orgasmic satisfaction. Take the fun fantasy of
Barbarella
, Roger Vadim's 1968 film in which a Space Age nymphet heroine played by Jane Fonda has sex by taking a pill – but is also capable of making love in the old fashioned way, as well as having sex with her elbow. She even manages to overcome the ‘Orgasmatron' or ‘Excessive Machine', which is supposed to pleasure people to death. Barbarella, however, proves too much of a woman for any machine and it catches fire.

The Orgasmatron had a guest comeback role in Woody Allen's 1973 film
Sleeper
, which was predicated on Allen re-materialising in 2173. Here, the Orgasmatron was a home appliance that provided instant pleasure, bringing to mind the multi-tasking vibrator-cake mixer combination marketed in turn-of-the-twentieth-century women's magazines.

What, it may validly be asked, was happening to the orgasm's status outside the Western world during the early part of the twentieth-century? For the greater part, with so much of the world under colonial sway, the unsteady Western path from Victorian hangover to cautious advance was similarly followed. In the communist world, as it expanded from the USSR to take in Eastern Europe and China, a rigid prudery steamrollered any remaining tradition of sexuality which had previously survived the Western influence. Yet in the kind of colonial outposts that would have been regarded in the West until the 1960s as ‘uncivilised' or ‘primitive', a certain unfettered delight in orgasmic pleasure had been quietly continuing.

The sexiest area in the world was unquestionably French Polynesia, as Westerners
en masse
would learn in the early 1960s musical
South Pacific
, even if anthropologists were already infesting the region before Rogers and Hammerstein had given it much thought. The sexual Nirvana that Yale University psychologists Clellan Ford and Frank Beach discovered in the Pacific was eyebrow-raising stuff, even in the era of Kinsey. Among the Pukapukans and Marquesans,
they reported, discussions about sex with children were so open and frank that all children were aware of orgasm, and the role of the penis
(ure)
and the clitoris
(tira)
in sexual arousal. Delayed ejaculation was a valued expertise because of the way it facilitated female pleasure. Multiple orgasms were also sought by both partners. The Marquesans were particularly keen on cunnilingus and fellatio, while the Pukapukans, unusually for a traditional society, had no preference between sex during the day or at night; each was equally popular.

A few years after Clellan and Beach, another American anthropologist active in French Polynesia, Robert I. Levy, found sex in the Pirae area of Tahiti to be centred on the female orgasm. A man would be humiliated if he failed to bring his partner to orgasm. The women boasted about what they believed was their unique capability to contract and relax the vaginal muscles during coitus – an ability also known in the Hawaiian islands as amo' amo – the ‘wink-wink' of the vulva, that could ‘make the thighs rejoice'.

‘Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP'

Philip Larkin,
‘Annus Mirabilis'

‘The deli scene' in Rob Reiner's Nora Ephron-scripted 1989 film
When Harry Met Sally
, in which Meg Ryan spectacularly fakes an orgasm for the benefit of an embarrassed Billy Crystal, was very funny. It is also iconic in the history of the orgasm.

As the journalist Ian Penman explained, in a contemporary article in the London
Independent
on the genre of cinematic portrayal of the orgasm: ‘The man is incredulous but the woman proves it to him – right in mid-bite, in the middle of this crowded deli – girls fake it all the time. It's something learnt, known by heart (cruel expression), second nature, like ironing out skirts and dented egos. It comes naturally (even
crueller expression). Faked orgasm is convenient, like microwave food – the same result (same satisfied partner) with half the time and bother. The laughter provoked by the scene is as much one of release as recognition.'

The fact that audiences laughed at the scene – that it was the main selling point of the film, indeed – makes it more important for our purposes here than bolder instances of celluloid sex such as those in
Last Tango in Paris, 91/2 Weeks
and so on. For the late-twentieth-century was the era when women in significant numbers finally confirmed the nightmares of the ancient patriarchs that females were not less but
more
sexual than men – and dangerously demanding with it. For the first time in history, outside of isolated pockets of female sanctuary in settings like Ancient Athens, women in large areas of the world were free to express their sexuality fully.

Now they wanted clitoral orgasms, and lots of them. This new mood of acquisitiveness was reinforced by regular, highly publicised interventions by sexologists such as Carol Travis and Carole Wade, who declared in 1984 that ‘during masturbation, especially with an electric vibrator, some women can have as many as fifty consecutive orgasms'. No wonder that the orgasm, according to the American sociologist Daniel Bell, had ‘overtaken Mammon [i.e. the false god of riches and greed] as the basic passion of American life'.

The new sense of orgasm as a woman's right was not just a Western phenomenon, either; nor in other parts of the world was it an exclusively middle-class, aspirational phenomenon. In the Indian magazine
The Week
, Mumbai sex specialist Dr Prakash Kothari was quoted in 1998 as saying: ‘Women are increasingly demanding to know why they too are not reaching a climax. It is not just the convent-bred, pizza-gorging types who are curious about climax. A woman from the slums came to me and said her husband finished very fast and she does not get
nasha.'

India provides one of the most interesting arenas for the introduction of more Western-style patterns of sexual behaviour –
even if such a concept is inherently ironic, since Indian culture has long forgotten more about rampant, unrestrained sex than the West has ever known.

Twentieth-century sex in India prior to the Western-influenced ‘sexual revolution' was regarded predominantly as a shameful affair, summed up by Sudhir Kakar, the pre-eminent Indian psychoanalyst and
Kamasutra
translator as, ‘No sex in marriage, we're Indian.' Kakar explains how the ludicrous prohibitions on when one could have sex in Medieval Christian Europe live on in Hindu tradition, and are still followed by millions in India. According to this tradition, a husband may only approach his wife during her
ritu
(season), a period of sixteen days of the month, but not on six of these. Of the remaining ten, only five are truly acceptable because sons can only be conceived on odd days – or rather nights, since daytime sex under these codes is completely beyond the pale. Then again, moonless nights and full moons are also off limits for sex, as are festival days for gods and ancestors. Kakar has conducted surveys among ‘untouchable' women in Delhi as well as with religious Hindus of higher castes. The lowest caste women only have sex clothed, under sufferance and in fear of beating.