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Psychologically, overwhelming emotional feelings, with outbursts of laughing (or weeping), are normal post-orgasm, and both sexes will typically enter a giggly, agreeably childlike state that makes them more receptive to the oxytocin effect, with its attendant feelings of attachment, tenderness, affection and calm – all highly beneficial to bonding a relationship.

But that parallel feeling of undefined sadness after orgasm, the post-coital
tristesse
encompassing mild disappointment mixed with anticlimax, is never far from the surface, as we know from common experience as well as much literature and popular song. Some of this post-orgasmic feeling of exhaustion is physiological in nature, the physical concomitant of feeling ‘spent'. But there is an important cultural or social feeling that frequently impinges here – one of regret.

Post-orgasmic regret, the kind of mournful sensation that seems to be alluded to in a thousand miserable Country and Western songs, may be occasioned by a simple factor such as the copulation having been illicit or adulterous, especially in social systems where this can lead to grave, even fatal, legal consequences. But there are more subtle and complex factors at play, too.

Women may find themselves wondering quite why they had sex with the man lying beside them, and even be seized by the idea that they have ‘wasted' themselves on an unworthy mate. The man who seemed attractive hours ago has lost his lustre with the dissipation of sexual fervour and the resultant orgasm.

The woman's occasionally inescapable feeling of post-orgasmic
regret seems from common experience to be at its most intense when she has had sex with someone she is not committed to, either because the relationship is new and unsure – or because it is old and worn out. The regret is quite separate from the familiar disappointment that ensues (all too often) from her not having reached orgasm at all in a sexual session. Neither is it necessarily associated with guilt stemming from religious or social injunction or indoctrination against sex, especially illicit sex.

Anecdotal accounts again suggest that such a regretful sentiment is more likely to come instead from a sensation of misdirection – that the woman has followed her perceived biological destiny to be as sexually predatory as the male, but she is not quite sure why she has done so. Being as driven as any man towards orgasm-seeking may be the true state of the human female, or it may be a modern feminist construct. But a 1962 sex manual,
Woman and Love
, by Dr Eustace Chesser, could have touched closer to the truth of the matter than we like to think in a more liberated age. Chesser argued that women are biologically programmed to view intercourse not as the pursuit of a single, isolated, hedonistic moment, but as a series of such moments to be celebrated, embracing ‘courtship, wooing, sex act, conception, gestation, childbirth, lactation and maternity'.

In a tougher, more feminist-inclined world than Chesser's, post-orgasmic regret has become something of a political football in the long-running grudge match between angry men and angry women. The point of contention is whether post-orgasmic regret on a woman's behalf is sufficient grounds for a complaint of rape. This is something of a one-sided argument, because most women, naturally, would contend that ‘rape is rape' and can never be mistaken for consensual sex. A small but noisy ‘men's movement', however, believes a minority of women interpret their post-coital regret as an indication that they were raped, when, perhaps, they were only a little ambivalent about a sexual encounter after it was over.

Furthermore, now that the ‘post-coital regret' basis for a rape complaint has become a popularised theory, women are starting to allege that male detectives investigating rape claims are openly suspicious that they really had sex consensually, but because they were, for some reason, disappointed by experience, they have decided to press charges.

In a speech to a gender issues forum in Seattle in 1993, a men's activist, Rod Van Mechelen, put the controversial case thus: ‘In the US and Canada, misandrists – those who hate men – are working hard to make it easy to convict men of rape if they have sex with women who are under the influence of alcohol, women who experience post-coital regret, or with women who were reluctant to have sex.

‘Years ago, when I was in college,' Van Mechelen continued, ‘my buddies used to speak of a secret fear. The fear that they would go to a bar one Friday night, get drunk, and then wake up the next morning in the arms of some female equivalent of a “dirty old man”. I had friends this happened to, and they felt pretty bad about it. Like these women had taken advantage of them. Were they raped? No. College boys can't be raped because only women will be protected by law.'

A variant on post-orgasmic regret is reported in gay male culture, too. Dan Savage, writer of a sex-advice column, ‘Savage Love', which is syndicated is the US alternative press, has described a liaison gone badly wrong due to regret. ‘He was a beautiful AmerAsian boy,' Savage recounts in an interview, ‘and once I put him in drag he looked like a girl. It was one of those experiences where you go, “OK, this isn't my boner, but this is never gonna happen to me again.” We didn't do anything that was unsafe and I didn't do anything in which he didn't take the lead because I didn't want to spook him. But he had the post-orgasmic regret that people can get when they're just starting out. The moment he came, he wanted to leave. He left in such a hurry that he left behind his panties and his watch. I called him and he said, “Don't call me.” I said, “I'm just calling to tell you …” And he hung up on me
before I could say, “… you left your watch in my apartment.” It was pretty weird'.

Heterosexual men, while a little less prone to post-coital regret – or even a great deal of thoughtfulness – commonly suffer a complementary sensation nonetheless, that once the oxytocin-induced post-orgasmic ‘coupling moment' has passed, they urgently need to be elsewhere – a feeling that has been charmingly described as ‘pork and walk syndrome'. Those who feel compelled physically to vanish post-orgasm are thought by some psychologists to be anxious that they have not suddenly been trapped in an unwanted relationship, that they have not, to use a phrase that crops us frequently throughout the history of sex, ‘swallowed bait'.

Women sometimes experience the post-orgasmic ‘swallowed bait' slump, but rather than experiencing a need to distance themselves from the lover, become overwhelmed instead with a feeling that they have been seduced or used. Their anxiety may manifest itself as a sudden, urgent need for verbal reassurance that they are loved. Some researchers observing small children have suggested that these post-coital emotional patterns start early. Boys, it is said, tend to avoid eye contact with maternal figures as a way of stating their need for separation, while girls seek eye contact for reassurance – a yearning arguably reflected later in life by the desire for close contact with lovers.

If one sensation, however, were to characterise male post-orgasmic
tristesse
it would be a non-specific perplexity, a kind of generalised numbness, a spell during which the man cannot quite recall just why he was so anxious hours or minutes before to have sex with the woman. The novelist Jonathan Franzen captures this moment exquisitely in
The Corrections:
Alfred's wife, the neglectful and cold Enid, is crying after having brief and highly unsatisfactory sex with him. The moment is all the more traumatic because Enid is pregnant and neither she nor Alfred believes it is right for them to have sex. ‘Why did wives choose night to cry in?' Franzen writes. ‘Crying at night was
all very well if you didn't have to catch a train to work in four hours and if you hadn't, moments ago, committed a defilement in pursuit of a satisfaction whose importance now entirely escaped you.'

A lot of this feeling has to do with men's ability to exaggerate in their minds the attractiveness of a female partner -until they have actually had sex with her, whereupon, post-orgasmically, the ‘scales fall from their eyes' in an equally exaggerated, hormone-fuelled manner. Studies carried out in singles bars, and quoted by the University of Texas psychology professor David M. Buss in his 1994 book,
The Evolution of Desire
, suggest that men find the same women progressively more attractive and desirable over the course of an evening. This increase in perceived attractiveness appears to be independent of how much or little alcohol men have consumed – the proverbial ‘beer goggles' which can, in crude common parlance, turn a dog into a fox.

It may instead be, as Buss puts it: ‘attributable to a psychological mechanism sensitive to decreasing opportunities for casual sex over the course of the evening. As the evening progresses and a man has not yet been successful in picking up a woman, he views the remaining women in the bar as increasingly attractive, a shift that will presumably increase his attempts to solicit sex from the remaining women in the bar.

‘Another perceptual shift may take place after men have an orgasm with a casual sex partner with whom they wish no further involvement. Some men report viewing a sex partner as highly attractive before his orgasm, but then a mere ten seconds later, after orgasm, viewing her as less attractive, or even homely,' writes Buss. ‘It is not unreasonable to believe that mechanisms attuned to reaping the benefits of casual sex without paying the costs have evolved,' he concludes.

It is important to mention at this point that the healthy, fulfilled physical sensation men and women can safely be assumed to have experienced in the afterglow of orgasm since the beginning of time has a basis in modern medical research.
Orgasm, it seems, along with being rather pleasurable, is good for you, subverting for once the maxim that everything enjoyable is either illegal, immoral or fattening.

An orgasm is said to be as mentally and physically beneficial as a five-mile jog, thanks to the raising of heart rate, which is equivalent to an energetic aerobic workout. Its less obvious benefits have been shown by various research efforts (of differing degrees of scientific rigour, one suspects) to be manifold. Orgasms apparently improve our breathing and circulation, cardiovascular conditioning, strength, flexibility and muscle tone. They are also said to result in bright eyes, facial glow and shiny hair, and to relieve the symptoms of menstrual problems, osteoporosis and arthritis. Orgasms may even help us lose weight. The adrenaline released by orgasm allegedly helps break down glucose and prevents it being stored as fat.

Two studies – one of couples in Edinburgh, the other of middle-aged men in Wales – have suggested that regular sex, either within or outside stable relationships, may be a significant factor in preventing premature death from a variety of causes, and can additionally make individuals and couples look as much as ten years younger than their real age. There seems to be no specific anti-ageing mechanism involved, but rather an especially benign combination of emotional and physical wellbeing.

Additionally, Australian research published in 2003 suggested that frequent male orgasm helps prevent prostate cancer. A team led by Professor Graham Giles, Director of the Cancer Council Victoria's Cancer Epidemiology Centre in Melbourne, concluded from a study of over 2,000 men that the more ejaculations men aged between 20-50 enjoy, the less likely they are to develop prostate cancer. Men who, in their twenties, ejaculated more than five times a week were a third less likely to suffer aggressive prostate cancers when they were older.

The Melbourne study attracted particular attention because it specified that masturbation was more likely to act as a cancer-preventative than intercourse, because of the way sexual
infections tend to increase the chance of prostate cancer. Professor Giles speculated that masturbatory ejaculation prevents a key carcinogen in prostate fluid, 3-methylcholan-threne (also found in cigarette smoke), from building up. ‘It's a prostatic stagnation hypothesis,' he told
New Scientist
magazine. ‘The more you flush the ducts out, the less there is to hang around and damage the cells that line them.' Associate Professor Anthony Smith, of the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at La Trobe University in Melbourne, commented to the magazine: ‘If these findings hold up, then it's perfectly reasonable that men should be encouraged to masturbate.'

Then there are the immune system benefits from orgasm that are believed to contribute to disease resistance. The endorphin release following orgasm has been shown to boost immunoglobulin A (IgA), an antigen found in saliva and the mucus in the nasal passages, and which binds to bacteria, prompting the immune system to attack them. The emotional and physical bond wrought by orgasm through the agency of oxytocin forges, additionally, a strong basis for maintaining good mental health.

The flow of endorphins resulting from orgasm, too, may also have a positive mental health payoff, relieving anxiety and depression and increasing vitality. Some research has suggested that women's mere contact with semen through the vaginal wall can help them experience a kind of post-coital bliss.

A Canadian professor of psychiatry, Philip Ney, documented in 1986 in an obscure journal called
Medical Hypotheses
a depressed woman whose symptoms subsided after she had sex. Then, in 2002, a study of 293 female students aged 18-35 by a psychologist at the State University of New York, Dr Gordon Gallup, found that those who always had sex without a condom were quantifiably happier according to a standard psychological questionnaire, the Beck Depression Inventory, than those who had protected sex or abstained.

Those who used condoms sometimes, Gallup found, came
in second on happiness scores, while the least happy women were those whose partners always or usually used condoms. Women who were not having sex scored between the ‘always' and the ‘usually' groups. Such obvious distorting factors as the effects of oral contraception were apparently ruled out by the experimental design, leading to the psychologists' conclusion that mood-altering hormones in the semen, especially testosterone, oestrogen and prostaglandins, were entering the woman's body topically through internal tissues and going on to act as an antidepressant. Gallup reported at the time of announcing his findings that a similar test on a group of 700 women had shown the same trend.