What, then, might be said about the orgasm’s future in this era of closure?
• Implants and artificial, pharmacological methods, especially Viagra for women, will not work. Orgasmatron-like devices will always be a joke.
• The worldwide battle over sex between men and women will continue. It may be inherent in our design that there be a continual tension between the sexes.
• There will be, however, a levelling of the psychological battleground; women and men will increasingly understand what one another needs and require from sex. The media will continue to have a huge part to play in propagandising this process.
• The conquering, or, perhaps, mere disappearance of AIDS will trigger the biggest explosion in sex since the Pill in the 1960s.
• Some form of male pharmacological contraception will exacerbate this – but at the expense of sexual health, which will deteriorate even if AIDS disappears.
• Virtuality – cybersex and various remote methods of promoting orgasm – will become the masturbation aid of the masses. Orgasm will thus become an ever more lonely pursuit. The middle class, however, will be very superior about having ‘natural’, non-aided sex – with a live partner.
• The orgasm and sexual pleasure will continue to be the number one subject in everyone’s life, to dominate the media, the arts, and most people’s every waking moment.
• The elderly will stake out their right to join in the fun.
• Women in the Third World and fundamentalist regimes will begin, very slowly, to make progress towards getting their share of pleasure from sex, too. The Internet and satellite TV will play a major role in this, just as they have in the spread of democratic ideals, which are more common now than at any time in history.
• A dampening down of male aggression will accompany this sexualisation of women in developing countries. Much crime in the Western world is caused by sexually inadequate and unfulfilled men, and much of the raw violence in fundamentalist societies, too, must stem from male sexual frustration; in keeping women down, men in such societies have deprived themselves of the joy of shared orgasmic pleasure. When the blinkers come off, the world will become a calmer, better place. Orgasm, which has caused such trouble for so long, may yet be a powerful force in mankind’s mental wellbeing.
Early in this full and, I hope, quite illuminating history of the orgasm, I put forward the proposition that the compound C19H28O2 – better known as testosterone, the primary generator of sexual desire for both males and females – has been the single most influential chemical in human history.
For some, this may seem a hyperbolic claim. Other compounds, such as H2O, or the complex of hydrocarbons which comprise gasoline, or a range of explosives, or even the simple element Au – gold – have had not exactly has an unprofound effect on everything from personal psychology to global geopolitics.
Yet I would urge readers at this late stage to reflect again, in the light of the proceding pages, on the extraordinary, unique power the desire for orgasm has exerted over the course of history.
From the Roman general Antony, who abandoned his career to pursue sexual pleasure with Cleopatra; to Edward and Mrs Simpson; to almost the entire Kennedy family; to Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas; to Mata Hari (the Dutch Nazi spy who secured sensitive military information by seducing senior Allied officers); to John Profumo (the British defence minister who was found to be sharing a prostitute, Christine Keeler, with a naval attache at the Soviet Embassy in London, and ultimately brought down a government); to Prince Charles (who baffled most of mankind by abandoning marriage to one of the most desired women in the world in favour of a sexual liaison with a far older woman, who to most of the world looked exactly like a horse); in each case, the desire for sexual pleasure has significantly altered outcomes. There are many hundred similar examples that could be advanced.
Consider, too, the tidal pull that the urge for sexual delight has brought to bear on billions of ordinary people’s lives. It is one of those easily overlooked but incontrovertible facts that every single one of us who has ever lived on Earth – some 110 thousand million souls, it is currently estimated – is the result of at least one person having wanted and achieved an orgasm. Even test tube babies owe their existence to a man masturbating quietly in a clinic booth somewhere.
Imagine for a moment, furthermore, that each baby born is in reality the result of on average – what? – a hundred, a thousand, sexual acts and we begin to appreciate that, if sexual energy could somehow build up in clouds, as that ludicrous charlatan, Wilhelm Reich, firmly believed, we could be shrouded in a permanent fog of the stuff. We would live and breathe orgasmic longing, orgasmic tension and orgasmic release; we would be surrounded by a sort of orgasmic ectoplasm, all day every day of our lives.
A civilisation living and breathing orgasmic longing, orgasmic tension and orgasmic release? Preposterous. Yet look around the world and what do we see? Funnily enough, it is billions of people entranced, obsessed, fixated on sex, spending large portions of their lives being dominated by the thought of having orgasms, of not having orgasms, of being desperate to have orgasms like the ones they read about all the time, of being medically or psychologically unable to have orgasms -or being forbidden by religious codes to have orgasms.
Even though Reich’s ‘Orgone’, as he termed the physical matter of sexual energy, was patently a fantasy prompted by heaven knows what personal psychiatric crisis, there is a sense in which the old fraud may have had a point.
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Additional Reading
Iwan Bloch, Anthropological Studies in the Strange Sexual Practices of all Races in All Ages, Anthropological Press, 1933
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