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None of the manifestations of the permissive society improved men's image particularly in women's eyes. ('When did God make men?' ran a feminist joke of the period. ‘When She realized vibrators couldn't dance.') It was more as consumers of pornography and the sex industry than as ‘sex gourmets' of the kind Dr Alex Comfort idealised, that male sexuality developed in the seventies and eighties. So we see the Pussycat chain of ‘adult' cinemas in Britain thoughtfully removing every second seat so men can masturbate in privacy, and VCR sales simultaneously booming principally for the viewing of porn in the home. Masturbation, similarly, was the embarrassing and unacknowledged motor force behind the exponential growth of the World Wide Web as somewhere that the likes
of the American porn star Annie Sprinkle could offer a global audience ‘room cervix' – a photographic tour of the interior of her vagina.

‘Pornography is the only place where “real” orgasm is found on screen,' explained Penman in his
Independent
piece on orgasm in the cinema. ‘Porn itself is a strange hybrid of the real and faked. Its narratives are patently absurd; the real frisson comes from the hard fact that the bodies actually did what you see them doing. As a record of something that “really happened” it's a perverted, hijacked form of documentary. In hardcore porn nothing is left out, or, in one sense, left in: what, in the trade, is inelegantly known as the “Come Shot” is the leading member's contractual obligation – proof that the End really was reached. The women participants might pant away for the duration – faking it or not – but it is down to the male outburst to validate the act as fact.'

‘Come shots' are still a little way off for the developing world's biggest cinema audience, in India, but Mumbai's Bollywood film industry, which entertains an audience of fifteen million paying customers per day, is currently turning its attentions to superseding the rose-petal-tinted, romantic but chaste view of sex it has peddled for decades. A new, raunchier Bollywood is leading the charge towards a franker sexuality for all Indians, not just the Mumbai elite. Sexually explicit Hindi films released or due to be released at the time of writing include
Oops
, an Indian version of
The Full Monty
, set among the world of Mumbai toy boys and male strippers,
Jism
– ‘Body' – which replaces the traditional sari-clad, sexually subservient Bollywood heroine with a bold, sexually aggressive female career-girl lead, and
Khwahish
– ‘Desire' -which features seventeen kissing scenes.

Film sex, of course, relies on effectively conjuring up sexual feeling by visual means. Donald Symons, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California and author of the renowned
The Evolution of Human Sexuality
, was impressed by a research finding which demonstrates the extent
to which men can be sexually aroused by quite different stimuli from women.

‘The profoundly different natures of men and women are dramatically illustrated by Bryant and Palmer's 1975 study of masseuses in four “massage parlours”,' Symons writes. ‘The primary service these women offer their male clients is masturbation, but in the process the clients are allowed to massage or fondle the naked masseuses. The purpose of this is to arouse the clients sexually as quickly as possible and hence to generate maximum business: the masseuses' motto is “get ‘em in, get ‘em up, get ‘em off, and get ‘em out”. Although masseuses regularly look at, masturbate, and are masturbated by naked men, and although most of the women expressed a positive attitude toward their clients, only one masseuse reported that she herself experienced sexual arousal during her work, and this apparently occurred as a result of being massaged rather than massaging. To overcome her arousal, she would stand up, look at her client, and lose interest.

‘The ability to engage in these activities without being sexually aroused represents a uniquely female adaptation,' observes Symons. ‘It represents this ability not to become sexually aroused simply by the stimuli of male bodies
per se
. Few heterosexual men could massage and masturbate naked women without being themselves sexually aroused.'

Another unconventional form of one-way sexual pleasure distinctly more popular with men than with women is sex with animals. Kinsey's discovery about American males' sexual experimentation with farm animals is, as we have seen, the stuff of legend, but it may be that simple sex with sheep and goats represents only the more conservative end of the scale. We heard earlier about the practice of avisodomy, which involves a man putting his erect penis into a hen's anus and then breaking its neck. The poor creature's death spasms are said by aficionados to feel uncommonly pleasant to its torturer. The Marquis de Sade claimed that turkeys were used for the same purpose in Parisian brothels, and, according to
the encyclopaedia, famous practitioners of the same practice have included Tippoo Sahib, an eighteenth-century Sultan of Mysore, also famous for introducing the British to the use of rockets as military armaments.

There is even, within the modern annals of the still weirder, evidence of men attempting to have sex with animals on a supposed basis of mutual orgasmic pleasure. The question of whether animals can enjoy sex at all is moot; zoologists have ample evidence that male animals enjoy ejaculation for its own sake, or at least find it pleasantly tranquillising. Male elephants stimulate their penis with their trunk. Male porcupines have been observed walking on three legs, with one forepaw on their penis, and male dolphins have been known to hold their erect penis in the jet of a water intake in their pool, and also to attempt homosexual intercourse. As for female animals enjoying sex, we can only be sure of the famously sexy bonobo ape, whose womenfolk give every impression of enjoying prolonged bouts of sex for the pure pleasure of it; other primates have been observed to give an orgasm-
like
response, but only after prolonged laboratory stimulation.

This leaves the interesting question of female dolphins. According to the anecdotal accounts of some students of cetaceans, female dolphins have been observed to manoeuvre themselves into a position in which they
appear
to be masturbating to orgasm. And this seems to have been enough to encourage the mermaid fantasies of some disturbed male individuals.

One such (literal) animal lover, an anonymous veterinary student when he was writing in 1996, maintains on a still extant website,
www.dolphinsex.org
, that he has loving relations on a continuing basis with female dolphins. ‘I have been extremely lucky on two occasions with wild dolphins, and my current mate is a dolphin who lives in the harbour of my resident city,' he reported, going on to detail how he brings female (and male, too) cetaceans to orgasm – and they, him.

The sexual marketplace seems almost too crowded in these
busy times for Victorian attitudes to sex even to get a look in any more; yet right up to the present day, a chill wind still blows from time to time over the orgasmically literate modern West. Legislatures are still distinctly nervous of public displays of orgasm. In April 1998, Alabama passed an addition to the state's obscenity law making it ‘unlawful to produce, distribute or otherwise sell sexual devices that are marketed primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs'. The law maintained that such sex toys are obscene and appeal to a ‘prurient interest'. There is, State officials argued, ‘no fundamental right to purchase a product to use in pursuit of having an orgasm'.

Masturbation in other forms, too, has continued even into the twenty-first-century to be a source of enormous cultural and moral awkwardness. Almost at the very moment that President Clinton was being fellated by Monica Lewinsky at the expense of the taxpayer (the lights were on and someone was paying his salary, after all), Clinton was obliged to fire the US Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, after months of controversy over her remarks at an AIDS conference that masturbation ‘is part of human sexuality and it's a part of something that perhaps should be taught'.

Elders maintained that she meant that children should be taught about masturbation in sex education courses – something a highly respected academic anthropologist at Rutgers University, Lionel Tiger, had been saying for years. Tiger has written amusingly, yet with an edge of common sense, about his own first experience of masturbation as a boy in 1940s Montreal.

The truth has to be told that I was a sexual success that night. I mastered myself during an act of theft from a gloomy culture that embargoed pleasure. The earnest student became an auto-erotic autodidact. And the question of who has a right to pleasure and how much and why, and what communities think about all this and under whose control, has vexed and interested me
ever since. Why are high-school students induced to enjoy Elizabethan drama but in virtually no school system offered helpful hints on enjoying physical pleasure by themselves, at no economic cost, without fear of unwanted pregnancy, without interfering with someone else's schedule of homework?

The future of sex continued to be perceived in technological terms as Huxley and Orwell had suggested. The Orgasmatron remained a frustratingly distant prospect, but, mindful of Desmond Morris's sixties observation that even in a technological age we remain essentially the same animals - ‘The space ape still carries a picture of his wife and children with him in his wallet as he speeds towards the moon,' Morris wrote – attempts to help humankind restyle the orgasm for the space age continued apace.

Most futurists interested in space travel gave over some time during the permissive society's heyday to having great thoughts about sex in space, according to a 1983 article by the scientist Robert A. Freitas, Jr in the journal
Sexology Today
. Isaac Asimov, Freitas reported, wrote an article entitled ‘Sex in a Spaceship' in 1973, and Arthur C. Clarke once commented, ‘Weightlessness will bring new forms of erotica. About time, too.' In 1992, Elaine Lerner, a Sunday school teacher in Easton, Massachusetts, patented a system of straps and loops that would allow one partner to exercise control of the movements of the hips of the other partner during astronautic love-making. Raymond Noonan of the Sex Institute in New York argued that in-flight intercourse using Lerner's system would help relieve astronauts of in-flight stress. And the science writer G. Harry Stine recounted a rumour of one couple's attempts at sex in a NASA weightlessness test; they found they needed a third party close at hand, Stine said, ‘… to push at the right time and in the right place'. At the time of writing, thirteen years later, Lerner was still awaiting an official response from NASA to her invention.

Pierre Kohler, a respected French scientific writer, reported
in a book published in 2000,
The Final Mission: Mir, The Human Adventure
, however, that both American and Russian astronauts have had sex in space as part of research into how human beings could survive for years on lengthy interplanetary missions. Kohler cited a confidential NASA report on a project codenamed STS-XX, which was supposedly carried out on a space shuttle mission in 1996. The project's objective was to explore the sexual positions possible in a weightless atmosphere. Twenty positions were tested by two astronauts, the results allegedly videotaped but considered too sensitive to release. The conclusion: that only four positions were achievable without the kind of ‘mechanical assistance' suggested by Elaine Lerner. The other sixteen positions required as sex aids a special elastic belt and an inflatable tunnel, like an open-ended sleeping bag. ‘One of the principal findings,' said Kohler, ‘was that the classic so-called missionary position, which is so easy on Earth when gravity pushes one downwards, is simply not possible.'

With the success in 1998 of Viagra, the first oral medication designed to overcome impotence (it works by enhancing the effects of nitric oxide, a chemical that relaxes muscles in the penis during sexual stimulation, allowing increased blood flow to erectile tissue in the penis), a stream of attempts – some reportedly successful – to prescribe the drug or its variants for women were made. (Viagra for women is not universally regarded as an orgasmic cure-all, however. Dr Rosie King, a leading sex therapist and author who treats couples at the Australian Centre for Sexual Health at St Luke's Hospital in Sydney, has been involved in the international clinical trials of the drug for women, and has her doubts. ‘Women's sexuality is a lot more complicated than popping a pill,' Dr King says. ‘No amount of medication can make up for an unhappy relationship, poor sexual technique or a tired, exhausted, stressed-out woman. … There is no pill yet that will create sexual arousal. But there is one sure aphrodisiac – love.')

A current frontrunner, Dr. King's caution aside, as the female
Viagra equivalent is the provision of testosterone supplements for women lacking sexual desire or experiencing weak orgasms. In a study reported in the
New England Journal of Medicine
, of 75 women aged 31-56 and suffering from lack of libido, those given extra testosterone were two to three times more likely to have sexual thoughts and actions.

Nonetheless, supposed orgasm pills and creams continue to appear, all predicated on the masturbatory idea that modern women, in the main, prefer sex as a soloist than with a man. Cybersex, too, represents nothing less – or more – than a huge and eloquent global statement of the primacy of masturbation at this stage in human development. Jane Brody, writing in the
New York Times
in 2000, quoted a psychologist who styled Internet sex ‘the crack cocaine of sexual compulsivity'.

If watching sexual images from the Internet is as compulsive as crack, then we can be confident that Virtual sex', with the assistance of the panoply of orgasm-inducing body suits and the like that have been promised for the past twenty years, would be the most addictive leisure pursuit ever invented. There is no prospect yet of the kind of virtual sex beloved of science-fiction writers, but one of the world's most ardent propagandists for robotics, Kevin Warwick, Professor of Cybernetics at Reading University, has not only had an experimental computer chip surgically inserted in his own arm, but persuaded his wife to have such an implant too. By streaming the information from the two chips over the Internet, the couple have achieved a measure of interaction a little reminiscent of telepathy. Professor Warwick believes that there will in the future be sexual possibilities within such man-machine robotics. If we could reliably monitor by electronics exactly what a sexual partner is feeling, there could be some extremely interesting ramifications for sex.