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Men certainly imbue Tantric sex practices with some ambitious hopes. It is claimed that adept Tantric lovers can bring one another to orgasm simply by staring intently across a room. One current Japanese website, publicising what its
author Houzan Suzuki calls Zen Tantrism, argues that even the supposedly sublime delights of the ejaculation-free, wait-for-it orgasm are not the final aim of Tantrism: ‘Through these experiences of orgasm at multiple levels, the ego and sense of individuality will disappear in the end, and there will be no more distinction of male or female. There will be perfect state of “Union”. However … the ultimate goal of sex is the vanishing away of the Union-Existence itself. Therefore, the ultimate sex goes beyond the transcendence of gender and the union of man and woman. It aims at the same thing as Zen: the transcendence of the existence, in other words, “Nothingness”. “The death of ego”.'

There is, it has to be said, no definitive ‘truth' yet regarding any aspect of Tantric sex, even the basic principle that orgasm and ejaculation in men are separate events. Many men in a scan of websites advocating Tantrism report that their orgasms are not as intense as the exploding sensation of orgasm with ejaculation – more like a quiet, ‘held-in' sneeze rather than a full-blooded
ker-chow
.

One authority, the British psychosexual counsellor and writer Julia Cole, points out that the Holy Grail of delayed ejaculation is otherwise well-known as a sexual dysfunction, in which, as she explains, ‘He simply never quite gets there despite thrusting inside the woman for a very long time, during which the poor woman can be getting sore and uncomfortable.

‘I think that it is true that the moment of orgasm and the moment of ejaculation, biologically in men are separate,' Cole argues, ‘but the distance is so infinitesimal most men wouldn't be able to tell the difference; it can be something like half a second, a tiny time lapse. But some men do believe that through holding on and holding on and holding off the orgasm for as long as possible, they can achieve orgasm without ejaculation, and I think for some men that is what they are actually experiencing. Or they might have a release of a small amount of ejaculate and then be able to hold back. That
could
be nice for their partner, because they would be able to go on and stimulate her more, but I am not fully convinced, reading the material that I have, that these men are having a full orgasm without ejaculation, because as far as a man is concerned, the prostate is such a big part of the sexual response that not to have any release of liquid at all at orgasm is really difficult and I wouldn't think that most people could do it. Anyway, the myth about the man being erect for hours or whatever, and that this must be what women want, is not really the case. It is the use of hands and lips that is much more important.'

Tanya Corrin examined the Tantric sex fad in an article for the New York
Observer
in 2003, and drew a similar conclusion – that the sex can become a little burdensome for the woman but was often seen as a great achievement (and, to be fair, a rewarding one) for men. ‘It was break-up sex with a former girlfriend of mine,' one male Tantric enthusiast, a thirty-five-year-old university professor in New York, told Corrin. ‘I knew we were saying good-bye, but subconsciously I didn't want to say good-bye. I wanted it to last. And I lasted for a mighty long time. I think we made love for one and a half hours. And then I had this warmth going up my spine. I was thinking, “Hey, wait – something else is happening here! I think it's similar to what women have”.' But another interviewee, a twenty-nine-year-old yoga teacher and graphic designer, had failed to get his girlfriend at all interested in his Tantric practices. ‘It becomes a drag,' he confessed to Corrin. ‘She'll have an orgasm, and then she'll be like, “Are you done yet? What the hell is wrong? What's wrong? Why didn't you come? Could you please stop with all this?”'

‘I think what men are talking about with this is that it makes them feel more competent. Men want to feel competent, in control and powerful,' Dr Frederick Woolverton, a clinical psychologist and director of the Village Institute for Psychotherapy, told Corrin. ‘Women are far more enthusiastic about intimacy than men are. This has just been demonstrated to me
so many times. But despite everything, men yearn for intimacy. The problem is, when they get it, they don't know what to do with it. Intimacy, while desired, becomes threatening, and men.sort of have to find their way out of that conflict.'

Chiara Simonelli, Associate Professor in Clinical Sexology at the Sapienza University in Rome, has a different, but still sceptical, slant on Tantric sex: ‘Unsatisfied people look for easy solutions to difficult problems,' said Professor Simonelli. ‘It is very difficult to use a Tantric vision as a mere technical manual. Many Tantric sexologists are very simple-minded people who use Tantra as many have already tried to use other Eastern philosophies like Buddhism and Daoism.

‘There is a common problem in our culture of people escaping from pleasure and being more interested in power and performance. A lot of male ejaculations seem to me to be realised with little pleasure, sometimes none at all, even in the absence of specific male sexual dysfunctions. Many young men prefer to be engaged in other activities – meeting friends, playing with computer games, watching TV, drinking or dancing – and sex is not in pole position for them: they have good erections and ejaculations, but not what could be called a good orgasm, because they don't realise that quality of contact is more important than the number of ejaculations, their size and so on.

‘So the problem for me with Tantric sex is that in our culture the body seems to be a tool for performance rather than a way to exchange pleasure and love with another person. The extreme lack of time we suffer in Western countries leads us to improve and organise every human activity, and too many of us try to find a place in their agenda for sex simply because it seems to be important for their health.'

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the American writer on sex, is more positive than others about Tantric practices. ‘I have spoken to many Tantric practitioners and they can't get enough. It's not just about semen retention, but rather the erotic thrill of sex having no culmination, the delight of living in passion rather
than building up to climax. There are actually people who believe in passion and welcome it rather than feeling it to be a burden. And women love a man who is continually excited about them. An all-out night of sex shows a women that he is so excited about her that he can't calm down.'

Perhaps the very last word on Tantric sex should come from Sting, the pop singer who in the 1990s did the most to popularise it when he made it known that, thanks to Tantric practises, he and his wife were able to enjoy eight-hour sex sessions. During a drunken night out in 2003 with fellow singer Bob Geldof, according to Geldof, Sting finally confessed: ‘I think I mentioned I could make love for eight hours. What I didn't say was that this included four hours of begging and then dinner and a movie.'

The conviction amongst modern Tantrists that they have ‘discovered' some absolute, eternal truth about sex, nonetheless, is very typical of a widespread modern belief that evolution has somehow finished its course, that the development and maturing of the human orgasm is no longer a work in progress but a done deal, a process that has reached its terminal velocity.

Such ‘arrogance of the present', as this author terms it, or ‘the snobbery of chronology' as C.S. Lewis described the syndrome, is endemic to every generation, and, in practically every case, wrong. We have seen how the Christian suspicion of sex and revulsion at orgasmic pleasure was the intellectual modernism of its day. Victorian prudery and shrinking from sexual pleasure too, hypocritical and sometimes insane though it seems to us, was the ‘political correctness' of its day. Freud, at the turn of the century, seemed to be quite deluded and working from his own distinctly ‘male chauvinist' agenda -yet was a revolutionary in the cause of orgasmic enjoyment. The fixation on simultaneous orgasm in the Freud-influenced first half of the twentieth-century, similarly, seems almost embarrassing now in its naïvety, yet was an enormously progressive social and political ‘cause' too in its time.

In the same way as the Victorian world view on almost every subject from empire to engineering is continually up for revision, if we can be sure of one thing, it is that our twentieth and early-twenty-first century smugness about sex will be the subject of academic theorising and counter-theorising for many decades yet. One pervasive contemporary idea about sex that could, for example, be due a rethink is the perception that we have sex as much as we say we do.

In a survey in 2001 of 18,000 people across 27 countries by the condom manufacturer Durex, respondents claimed they were having sex typically twice or thereabouts a week. Annual ‘scores' ranged from 132 times a year in the US, to 122 times in Russia, 121 in France, 109 in the UK, 98 in Australia, 86 in New Zealand, down to 37 times in Japan. But these figures are, naturally, self-reported and hence unreliable for any number of reasons. Just one of these is that modern people tend to have ‘binge sex', doing it every day or more for a short while, then going weeks or months without.

A reaction to the assumption that we are all having sex all the time was already underway at the time of writing. Indeed, the competitive conversation in which couples, citing work, children and tiredness, try to out-brag one another over the time since they last had sex – longest since wins – had almost become a standard feature of the modern thirty- and forty-something dinner party. The jokey acronym DINS – Double Income No Sex – was increasingly being touted across the Western world in 2003, and only semi-ironically.

This candid twenty-first-century admission that we are usually too tired for adventurous, multi-orgasmic sex – or any sex at all – is remarkably uniform across cultures. Research in 2001 for
Top Santé
magazine in Britain showed one in five women said they were too tired or busy for sex. The figure was one in three in a survey the following year for the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Only 16 per cent of women in the
Top Santé
figures said their sex life was ‘fantastic', the highest proportion – 32 per cent –
characterising it as ‘OK'. The National Sleep Foundation in the US polled 1,004 adults in the same year to discover 52 per cent have less sex than they did five years ago, 38 per cent have sex less than once a week – and 12 per cent of married couples sleep separately.

Lack of sex and a resultant slump in the birth rate is seen as a national crisis in Singapore, one of the world's wealthiest countries. Women are having an average of just 1.4 children, against the 2.1 demographers say is necessary for a population to replace itself. The government there has tried a variety of schemes to boost sexual activity, from tax breaks for married couples to a speed-dating service sponsored by an official government matchmaking agency, the Social Development Unit.

But Professor Victor Goh, from the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the National University of Singapore, in a 2002 study of 133 men and 460 women aged 30-70 found Singaporeans aged 30-40 still have sex only some six times a month, and from 41-55 four times. ‘At the end of the day, when all their other responsibilities have been fulfilled, Singaporeans just feel too tried to perform,' reported Professor Goh. Yet his research showed that most Singaporeans were happy with this. Only 25 per cent of men and 10 per cent of women under 40 said they wanted more sex.

The problem even pervades societies thought of as being more sensual than most. The top sexual problem reported in Hawaii in 2002, according to an article in the
Honolulu Advertiser
, was women confessing to therapists that they are too tired for sex. In Italy, the polling institution IPSA has found women allowing less than an hour for lovemaking every fifteen days and 40 per cent of wives unhappy in their marriages. The spectre of the Platonic marriage is as common in India and the Indian diaspora, according to
Desi Match Maker
, a web magazine on marriage for South Asians living in the US. Professor Aroona Broota, a clinical psychologist at Delhi University, comments on the site that long-term lack of
sex can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: ‘Infrequency leads to a fear of performance. People forget a marriage is about partnership.'

In Australia expectations of sexual delight have a habit of disappointing people. Dr Rosie King, speaking to the
Sydney Morning Herald
in 2001, talked about what she saw as a new myth that everybody must want and enjoy sex, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and the perception that sex is an Olympic sport where everybody should go for gold on every occasion. ‘People can get uptight about their sense of entitlement to sex,' commented Dr King. ‘It's a bit like salaries. Everyone thinks everyone else is getting more than they are.'

Despite such evidence that there is no great evolutionary call for better and more rampant sex, it is conceivable that, five million years down the evolutionary road, both human genders could be evolving a mechanically more efficient orgasmic response, with women better adapted to receive orgasmic pleasure and males developing, after generations of cultural pressure, the ability to slow down their hair-trigger ejaculatory mechanism. There is an argument that the species would benefit from bodies better built for sexual pleasure; an equal, speedy sexual response, whereby the majority of humans could copulate face-to-face and both sexes orgasm swiftly, reliably and simultaneously, would arguably be as beneficial a development as the entire world population speaking a common language.

What, on the other hand, do we
really
have by way of demonstration that our practice and appreciation of orgasm have improved significantly – or that the sex experts of today are not disseminating as much nonsense as they were fifty, a hundred, or a thousand years ago? And if they are, what unimagined and untold damage could we be doing to ourselves by believing we finally know ‘everything we ever wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask'?