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’.
16
A Little Coitus Never
Hoitus*:from Fear of
Flying to Sex and the City
*(Dorothy Parker)
‘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.
If this leads anybody to wonder how India still suffers from an over-population problem, Dr Promilla Kapur, a research psychologist and sociologist at New Delhi’s India International Center, explains that sexual habits are markedly less inhibited in rural villages, where tribal groups, such as the Muria people practise near totally free sex and adults talk loudly and openly about sexual matters in front of children.
Additionally, as Kakar explains, lust finds a way even in prohibitive cultures. ‘Despite these pervasive negative images of the conflict between the sexes in marriage, and the negative view of women and sexuality,’ he writes, ‘it must be pointed out that Indian sexual relations are not devoid of regular pauses in the conflict between man and woman. Tenderness, whether this be an affair with the soul of a Mukesh song, that is much quieter than a plunge into the depths of erotic passion known in Western culture, or sexual ecstasy of a husband and wife who have found their way through the forest of sexual taboos, does exist in India’.
Middle-class India is now adopting more Western (or, strictly speaking, Eastern) ways. There is widespread discussion of sex, especially in relation to getting the best orgasms, in academic journals, in Indian digital media and in the press and broadcasting. Satellite TV in particular has exposed children to sexually related material from an early age. Among children in urban areas, sexual play and exploration have, probably as a result of this, increasingly become a feature of growing up, even though parents are often unaware of it. Teenagers are also increasingly open about kissing and holding hands in public places. A recent sex study has accordingly shown that 30 per cent of respondents experience premarital sex, while 41 percent of men have sex before they are twenty. Unmarried women, too, are gaining sexual experience with male friends and work acquaintances; 43 per cent of women believe casual sex with someone you have no plans to marry is acceptable.
China, with its even sexier distant past than India, is struggling to overcome the puritanism of its immediate past, and succeeding to some extent. Suiming Pan, a sex researcher and Associate Professor of the Department of Sociology at the China Renmin University in Beijing, conducted seven social surveys of sex in the 1980s and 1990s. Investigators found it very difficult directly to elicit information on orgasms, but most couples reported they experienced ‘sexual pleasure’ – kuaigan – frequently. Of 1,279 men and women in 41 cities, Suiming Pan found men reach orgasm 7.2 times out of every 10 attempts, as against 4.1 times for women. In another 20,000-respondent survey by Professor Dalin Liu of the Shanghai Sex Sociology Research Center, a third of urban women and a quarter of rural women claim to experience kuaigan Very often’, while 58.2 and 76.8 per cent respectively enjoyed it ‘sometimes’.
Parallel research in Hong Kong in 1996, however, showed women’s knowledge of their own sexuality was particularly poor. A third of women interviewed did not know where the clitoris was located. It was noted, though, that the better educated people of both sexes were, the more they knew about the difference between female and male orgasm.
Thailand, regarded as something of a sexual paradise by visiting Westerners (and, sadly, by paedophiles, too), has in reality, surprisingly unsophisticated sexual habits. Sex is barely discussed, and not seriously when it is; a newlywed couple will routinely be teased and asked if they ‘had fun’ on their wedding night and how many times they ‘did it’. But such banter distracts from a quite phallocentric society, living under the pervasive myth that men’s sexual desires are boundless and unchangeable. As Sukanya Hantrakul, a noted Bangkok writer and social critic, says: ‘Culturally, Thai society flatters men for their promiscuity … Women’s magazines always advise women to tolerate the situation and accommodate themselves to it.’
In Indonesia, with its similar dichotomy between traditional attitudes (Islamic in its case) and modern, tourism-borne liberality, an analogous tension exists between old and new ways. Young women are increasingly eager to have sex with whomsoever they like without having to love the person, which upsets their parents’ generation. But at the same time, there is a perception that sex is a secretive activity, in which women are like maids, subservient in everything, sex included. Some men make a point of having regular homosexual contacts because of a folk belief that they have supernatural powers which diminish during sex with women.
Indonesia does, however, have what would be regarded in the West as an unusually healthy acceptance of masturbation, which is almost universal among teenagers as a tension release. One study by Professor Wimpie Pangkahila, a reproductive health expert at Udayana University on Bali, found that 81 per cent of male adolescents and 18 per cent of females admitted masturbating. Some parents of young children reported happily watching their children masturbate to orgasm.
The dogged attempt by Indonesian young women to do their damnedest to strip emotion out of the sex equation, to take control and demand their due orgasmic pleasure, represents a significant change that characterised sex across the world in the very late-twentieth century – as evidenced by Frasier Crane’s chastisement of the promiscuous Roz in one Frasier episode: ‘Didn’t your mother tell you that sex leads to things like dating?’
In 1973 Isadora Wing, heroine of Erica Jong’s landmark tale of female sexual liberation, Fear of Flying, decides that she has come to ‘that inevitable year when fucking [your husband] turned as bland as Velveeta cheese’, and searches for the respon-sibility-and-guilt-free sex she calls ‘the zipless fuck’. Also published in 1973 was My Secret Garden, a compilation of female sexual fantasies collected by Nancy Friday. In an NBC radio discussion at the time of its launch, Dr Theodore Rubin said to Friday: ‘Your book My Secret Garden reduces women to men’s sexual level.’ Her response: ‘Aren’t women entitled to a little lust too?’
A woman as well as a man in this sexualised (and very slightly Huxley-esque) New World of Orgasm could be ‘serious about her relationship with a partner’, as Lionel Tiger explains in his history of pleasure, ‘and yet have no intention of conceiving, or even having more than a semi-durable relationship based on playful pleasure-seeking. Neither is it inconceivable to us that a one-night stand might be the arena for thoughtful, considerate, generous sexual dialogue – an extraordinary advance, that, on animal behaviour, and very probably on early human conduct too.’
The New Woman – a cliché, yet justified in the late-twentieth century – developed a sexual acquisitiveness and outspokenness that would have astonished even Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. Here is Germaine Greer, a respected Warwick University academic as well as a professional controversialist, in hearty voice in her 1970 book The Female Eunuch. ‘At all events a clitoral orgasm with a full cunt is nicer than a clitoral orgasm with an empty one, as far as I can tell at least.’
While Cosmopolitan et al made commercial hay by turning the pursuit of the ‘Big O’ into a glossy monthly serial – which still continues – feminism, some of the quite prim Mary Wollstonecraft-ish hue, also got to work on the orgasm. Heedless of the mocking of Camille Paglia, who opined that, ‘Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermists’, feminists asserted that the primary cause of women’s oppression lay in men’s sexual dominance. The most vehement, such as Valerie Solonas in her 1970 SCUM Manifesto (SCUM was the ‘Society for Cutting Up Men’) went further, arguing not merely that women should withdraw from sex with men, but that heterosexual women were as ‘dangerous’ as men.
It was only a matter of time before male-style competitiveness about the female orgasm began to enter the picture. With the spotlight glaring on the orgasm there was an almost tangible media and peer pressure at large to be having them more frequently, or at least talking about them if you were not enjoying them. This new, almost consumerist, spirit can be found in the most diverse societies, often overriding deeply held taboos. In hygiene-obsessed Japan, The Weekly Post, the country’s most widely read magazine, recently published a survey of 2,000 readers. Of the male respondents 5
1 per cent said they practise oral sex, and 8 per cent replied that they practise anal sex. Additionally, only 8 per cent of the women in the sample said they never experience orgasm.
Neither are just any orgasms good enough in much of the world today; orgasms have to be earth-shattering, mind-boggling, if a women is not to feel guilty of short-changing herself, and the rest of womanhood by extension. ‘The discipline imposed is the discipline of the orgasm, not just any orgasm, but the perfect orgasm, regular, spontaneous, potent and reliable,’ Germaine Greer has commented.
A glamorous young feminist sex-researcher came splashily on to the scene in 1976 to dampen down the flames of this cult of unrealistic expectation. The former Shirley Gregory from Missouri, a one-time model who appeared topless (albeit on a single occasion) in Playboy, had pursued an academic career between photo shoots, achieved two degrees and a PhD, and rebranded herself every bit as brilliantly as Max Factor would a new cosmetic. The name of the new product was ‘Shere Hite’.
The prodigiously intelligent Hite then spent six years quietly sending out a 100-question sex survey to 3,000 American women and then collated the results into a modern, sexily written and presented version of Kinsey’s second report. The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality was regarded as being revelatory and sensational, with its evidence that nearly 12 per cent of American women never had orgasms of any shape or size, and that only 30 per cent of those who did orgasm could do so without extra clitoral stimulation.
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