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’?
Just as it is almost certain that, however well you believe you are bringing up your children, you are still probably doing your bit to keep the next generation of psychiatrists in business, the chances are we have it wrong about sex too and will ultimately suffer for it. We always have. The psychiatrist Thomas Szasz bitterly described in 1973 how the misconceptions of his generation had affected them: ‘The modern erotic ideal: man and woman in loving sexual embrace experiencing simultaneous orgasm through genital intercourse. This is a psychiatric-sexual myth useful for fostering feelings of sexual inadequacy and personal inferiority. It is also a rich source of psychiatric “patients”.’
The poet and novelist Al Alvarez made a similar observation in a 1982 book, Life After Marriage: Love in an Age of Divorce. ‘At the centre of that religion of marriage was a cult every bit as hallowed as that of the Virgin: the cult of the orgasm, mutual and simultaneous. It descended to the young people of my generation from both Lawrence and Freud as the “Inner Mystery”, something they all aspired to, a sign of grace. Because of it I had impossible expectations of my marriage, my sex life, myself. I was an absolutist of the orgasm before I had had enough experience to ensure even sexual competence.’
While we are fond of congratulating ourselves that the sexual sphere has been revolutionised in the past few decades, there are billions of women around the world who have yet to have the opportunity to enjoy their fair share of orgasm. Even in the sophisticated Western cultures, large numbers of us are still ‘hung up’, unfulfilled and embarrassed sexually. Young women continue to be marginalised for perceived ‘sleeping around’ whereas young men are not, sexual ignorance is still extraordinarily rife and sexual diseases by and large on the increase.
Sexual enjoyment continues to be significantly skewed towards men’s needs, and women demonstrably conspire in this. A question in QueenDom’s 1999 survey amply illustrates this. In answer to the question, ‘What do you do if your partner orgasms and you haven’t yet?’ 52 per cent of men say that they continue with sexual activity, while just 25 of women keep going; 26 per cent of women said sex usually ends when their partner climaxes, but only 7 per cent of men. When the question was reversed to, ‘What do you do if you have reached orgasm, but your partner hasn’t?’ 46 per cent of men admitted they stopped, but only 33 per cent of women. Taking all shades of response into account, QueenDom concluded that men are eight times more likely to say that they stop because sex ends with their orgasm, while women are twice as likely to give up and just let their partner come. Men were also three times more likely than women physically to walk out of the bedroom – statistical evidence, this, of the egregious post-orgasmic ‘pork and walk’ syndrome.
There has also arisen as a function of widespread sexual knowledge quite an extensive cult of orgasm-faking among women who are sexually educated and aware, but cannot always find as much enthusiasm for sex as men. In 1985 Ann Landers’s newspaper column asked female readers what they felt about having sex. Over 100,000 women responded with 72 per cent saying they would rather be doing something else. The point was taken up by a writer who, in a 1995 edition of Cosmopolitan, suggested that faking orgasms was a matter of speed and politeness. ‘When you have got to get up for work the next morning, who has two spare hours to make him feel better about not making you feel great?’ she asked. In the QueenDom poll, 70 per cent of women and 25 per cent of men admitted to faking orgasm at least once.
A number of American campus questionnaires have revealed widespread faking by women at least some of the time. Male respondents, however, were frequently under the impression that no woman of theirs had ever faked orgasms. The conclusion of one such survey was that, ‘Clearly, the refined performances which women are giving are extremely convincing.’ One does not need to be a rigorous feminist to see orgasm-faking as bad both for sexual equality and for the internal dynamics of a relationship. The renowned sex researchers Dr Jennifer Berman and her sister Laura, of the Female Sexual Medicine Center at UCLA, see women ‘owning their sexual pleasure’ as ‘the last frontier of the women’s movement’. Their most trenchant and succinct advice to women faking orgasm accordingly is: ‘Don’t’.
This seems to be judicious advice. Of the women among QueenDom’s 15,000 respondents, 73 per cent claimed they can tell if their partner fakes it, but only 61 per cent of men notice women faking. However, since it is manifestly easier for a woman to fake orgasm right down to the vaginal contractions, it is not surprising that only 23 per cent of women confirmed that their partner can tell the difference between a real orgasm and a fake. The predominant reason cited for faking orgasm in the poll was selflessness and making a partner happy. But the figures also showed eloquently that faking orgasm is likely to make both partners feel worse about themselves and each other. And when asked directly how they would feel about a partner faking, 95 per cent of women and 92 per cent of men said that they would not welcome it at all.
It could be argued that the culture of hedonism, sexual equality, sexual licence – whichever you choose to style it -has spread to good effect from the spoiled, gluttonous West to the rest of the world. Sex advice and a focussed seeking to improve orgasms is a boom industry in countries like India, Russia, China and Indonesia, where there is an ever-swelling surfeit of agony aunts, sexual studies centres, sex manuals, pornography and shops selling sex aids. The problems that agony aunts in the developing world encounter, however, can make Western sex advice columns seem a little trivial by comparison. Although in fashionable Mumbai or Moscow society there is plenty of angst about the quality and quantity of orgasms, in China, the country’s first agony aunt, Xinran Xue, was more likely to find among the two hundred anguished letters a day that flooded into her show, Words on the Night Breeze, harrowing accounts by women of being continually raped by their father or a party official. So moved was Xue by the letters that she compiled them into a book, The Good Women of China. It was first published in the West in 2002, and was due to appear in mainland China in 2004.
Globally, though, the trend towards wanting to live one’s sex life to the full is inexorable. There is clearly both the potential and the impetus for humanity to become a great deal more orgasm-literate and, ultimately, to regard orgasm as a fundamental human entitlement on a par with legal and political rights.
One rarely reported modern instance of orgasm coming to be regarded as a right was seen in Switzerland in 2003, where disabled people in Zurich were offered professional sexual services as part of a trial project. ‘There is a very big demand for this,’ commented Angela Fürer, local director of a social welfare organisation, Pro Infirmis. ‘We have been hearing about the problem for years, both from disabled pe
ople and from those working with the disabled.’ Her organisation was recruiting ten ‘touchers’ to offer sexual and emotional relief to Zurich’s disabled. Full sex and oral sex was not going to be included in the pilot scheme, but Fürer said registered prostitutes might be included in the service at a later date. ‘For now, we will just be offering massage, body contact, stroking, holding and bringing people to orgasm, if that is what they wish.
‘It can be very difficult for some disabled people to take off their clothes and show a body which is deformed and I feel you can only expect people to put that kind of trust in you and offer their vulnerability when you yourself are willing to be vulnerable. On the whole, though, the response we’ve had has been extremely positive with many disabled people calling us to say how happy they are. These are people who don’t just want to spend their lives breathing and eating and being cleaned up. They have souls and feelings like everybody else and sexuality is a part of their lives, just as it is with any other human being.’ It should be noted that Pro Infirmis’s brave advocacy of the sexual rights of the disabled was suspended four months after it was announced, having provoked fury and threats of funding withdrawal from the good burghers of Zurich.
Another positive benefit of the current era’s sexual liberation has been a perceptible trend towards a limited ‘feminisation’ of men. This is more than a merely stylistic fashion, with celebrities such as the footballer David Beckham openly adopting more feminine styles; nor is it a function of more inclusive attitudes towards gay men. The more hidden signs of feminisation are to be found in traditionally heterosexual men. These indications range from increased interest in personal grooming, to acceptance of a greater role in childrearing to a greater willingness to discuss personal feelings and the intricacies of loving relationships. While men are still by far the more likely sex to pursue better and different orgasmic experiences in opportunistic extra-marital sexual relationships, that situation too is shifting seismically.
O Page 40