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Rather closer to the ‘traditional' notion of the Orgasmatron, in 2001 Dr Nicolae Adrian Gheorghiu, from the town of Voluntari, near Bucharest, Romania, claimed he had invented a device that can give a woman sixteen orgasms in a minute.
He said the machine had been tested on women whose only complaint was that the thrill was too strong. ‘It's more effective for a woman than having thirty men', Gheorghiu said.

In the same year, the
New Scientist
magazine carried a report on an electronic implant which would enable women to orgasm whenever they wanted. The device, patented in America, was aimed at those who found it difficult to achieve orgasm naturally, although, as with Viagra for men, it could also be used for those wanting to further boost an already healthy sex drive.

Stuart Meloy, a surgeon at Piedmont Anaesthesia and Pain Consultants in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, came upon the idea by accident. During a routine operation to give pain relief to a patient with a bad back, he was implanting into her spine a device with electrodes designed to emit an electrical pulse that normally interferes with pain signals. However, in this case, due to an electrode making contact temporarily with the wrong nerve, the device caused her, to use Meloy's coy description, to start ‘exclaiming emphatically', before adding, ‘You're going to have to teach my husband to do that.' Meloy expounded on how the device, a titanium-cased generator with more than forty electrodes and almost the size of a pack of cigarettes, could be suitably modified, inserted in the buttocks and controlled by a hand-held remote. Meloy conceded that his implant might need also to be programmed to limit its use.

There was a predictably ribald response to news of Dr Meloy's invention. The novelist Jeanette Winterson, in an article for the
Guardian
, predicted that electronic sex was just ‘another way of faking it'. And she went on to consider some of the possible technical snags. ‘Electrical pulses are sensitive to their environment. At the moment of ecstasy, will you set the car alarm off? Will the car alarm set you off? I don't want to be routinely doing the beep in Waitrose carpark, only to find myself writhing over the windscreen like a photo shoot for Nude Readers' Wives.

‘I have not read whether the device comes with a timer,' Winterson added. ‘Could you programme it like those burglar
light switches that go on and off at random? That would at least leave the element of surprise that comes with real sex. It might be a turn-on, wondering where you'll be, and with whom, when the first tingle starts.'

Germaine Greer was even less bowled over by the concept: ‘Giving yourself a few jolts from a titanium implant is about as bad as sex can get,' she commented.

Men around the world were less dismissive of the prospects of electronic orgasm implants for women, sensing that the technology would relieve them of an onerous duty. One US website largely aimed at men prefixed a report on the Gheorghiu Orgasmatron with the comment, ‘No pushing now, get in line. Have your check books ready …' Of course, the enthusiasm
may
simply have been that the prospect of women becoming as effortlessly orgasmic as men appealed to men's sense of fair play.

Electronics and sex in equal measure continue to fascinate the stranger religious cults: the egregious Quebec-based Raelians, for instance, believe that one day, all our sexual needs will be attended to by microscopic, nanotechnology robots. It is interesting that in Japan, normally first in line for any robotic technology, there is no discernible market or research interest in Orgasmatron-type advances; sex dolls are the limit of technological invasion of the sexual sphere there.

Understandably less bullish than either Stuart Meloy or the Raelians about the prospects for Orgasmatron machines was a German electrician, Manfred Lubitz, who spent years perfecting a device for men. It incorporated a vibrating mat, massage pads and electrodes wired directly to the penis. Mr Lubitz was found dead in 2003 at his retirement apartment in Malaga, Spain. A police source quoted by the
Sun
in London said: ‘He was watching a film called
Hot Vixen Nuns
. Unfortunately there seems to have been a power surge. And the flat was damp.'

On the less technological side, an interesting development in the institutionalisation of masturbation – especially surprising
in light of the contemporary momentum for a pharmaceutical approach to improving women's orgasmic pleasure – was the low-key launch in the UK in 2003 of a new mass-market sex aid for women with the commercial name Vielle.

First made public in a several-page article in the
Daily Mirror
, the Vielle's marketing slogan was ‘Discover yourself'. It was a non-vibratory masturbation aid for women. Made of PVC, the new device is in the form, the
Mirror
explained, of a rubbery finger puppet designed to enhance the effect of a mere digit. Most remarkably, the Vielle, it was reported, was expected to be stocked by high street stores such as the Boots chain.

The Vielle was invented by Liz Paul, a middle-class mother of three living in the sedate country town of Ilkley, West Yorkshire. Its development – noteworthy again considering that the Vielle would have been unmentionable and even illegal just a few years earlier – was partly funded by a loan from Yorkshire Enterprise, a venture capital group partly owned by five local councils. Most astonishing of all, a few days after the
Mirror
made public the invention, Mrs Paul was presented with the British Female Inventor of the Year (Health Section) award at a lunch at the Café Royal in London. (The overall winner however, it may be noted, was a new, lightweight fork for mucking out stables.)

The Vielle is worn on the index finger of a woman or her partner and has a circle of eight nodules protruding from the pad of the fingertip. These are located to ensure that they stimulate the sides and top of the clitoris. ‘A finger alone would normally reach only the top,' explained the
Mirror
. ‘There is also a dip in the middle of the nodules where, if needed, a lubricant can be applied.'

A trial on the Vielle by Alan Riley, Professor of Sexual Medicine at the Postgraduate School of Medicine and Health of the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, showed that orgasm rates were improved from 82.8 per cent to 95.3 per cent, and the time taken to achieve orgasm was reduced
from, typically, 13.57 minutes to 5.05. According to the trial results on the company's website (
www.vielle.info
), 68.75 per cent of subjects reported that using the Vielle made orgasm attainment easier, while 31.25 per cent felt it made no difference to their ease of orgasm. (These figures look slightly less impressive when it is noted that the trial consisted of just 16 women, meaning that the device worked for 11 and did not for 5.)

The marketing approach for the Vielle was, interestingly again, hybrid; it was offered both as a traditional sex aid and to women suffering from various forms of female sexual dysfunction (FSD), from Orgasmic Disorder – difficulty in having an orgasm even when a women is stimulated and aroused – to Sexual Arousal Disorder – in which sex is not pleasurable due to a lack of vaginal lubrication – to Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder – a simple lack of libido.

The Vielle may ‘work', but the problem, from the perspective of the
British Medical Journal
, as outlined in an article appearing in 2002, is whether FSD itself is ‘real' or, as the journal argued, ‘a corporate-sponsored creation' invented by drugs companies to make money. A typical medical products company claim, it was said, is that 43 per cent of women suffer from an FSD.

The commentator Christina Odone, writing in the
Observer
, supported the
BMJ's
view and examined one such claim: ‘… there is something distinctly suspect about the figures they've come up with,' Odone wrote. ‘This figure is based on a sample of just 1,500 women, who were asked whether they had experienced any of the symptoms of FSD for two months or more. If they answered yes to just one symptom they were categorised as “dysfunctional”. This isn't just dodgy science: it's part of a dangerous tendency to “medicalise” the female condition. In recent years scientists have outlined a host of new “illnesses” from GAD (Generalised Anxiety Disorder) to FAD (Freefloating Anxiety Disorder). Far more women than men are diagnosed with
these conditions … The truth is, feeling stressed, like losing interest in sex, is just part of life. Turning these ordinary emotions into “conditions” will only make women feel even more inadequate than they already do.'

New FSDs continue nonetheless to be identified, and not necessarily by ‘Big Pharma', as the medical version of Dwight Eisenhower's ‘Military Industrial Complex' tends to be known today, but by disinterested medical academics. Professor Riley in Preston, for example, in his
Daily Mirror
interview, said: ‘A relatively new cause of orgasmic dysfunction affecting women in their early-twenties is a fear of letting go. Often they say they have seen women having orgasms in blue movies and find it disturbing. This is a new attitude which certainly didn't crop up when we started studying orgasms in the late 1960s. There are now far more sexually explicit films.'

Another novel, if arguably gimmicky, approach to FSD -or simply to improving existing orgasms – is being pioneered by cosmetic surgeons. It involves ‘plumping up' the G-spot (or the area where it is expected to reside) with injections of hyaluronic acid, a chemical widely used in anti-aging procedures. The results of the ten-minute ‘Gr-Delight' operation, as it is known in the US, last for several months. Some women report becoming so sensitised that they start having orgasms simply by walking. Amy Anderson, a professional woman in her thirties who wrote about her experience of the procedure for the London
Evening Standard
, reported: ‘I had sex with my boyfriend 48 hours later, and experienced the most intense orgasms I've ever had … My orgasm was longer, deeper and stronger than I have experienced before. I found I was much more sensitive during sex, and it was much easier to reach orgasm through intercourse. I found that I was also more sexually aroused before sex began – it was what I imagine taking Viagra must be like for men … it made me feel more aroused while I was going about my everyday business, such as driving to work.'

A psychosexual counsellor from RELATE appended to
Anderson's
Evening Standard
article the advice that the £850 G-Delight operation was still to be regarded as controversial; equally likely to succeed to some degree in improving orgasm, she wrote, were pelvic-floor exercises, vibrators, a good run, a ride on a roller-coaster or a cup of coffee (all of which kick start the central nervous system with a shot of adrenaline) -or even long baths, scented oils and a bit of massage.

It was not that male sexual dysfunctions, principally erectile problems, were being ignored in some sort of pharmaceutical conspiracy to blame women for their own lack of fulfilling orgasms. Business in the last part of the twentieth-century was working hard at inventing solutions to men's sexual problems, too, if not fabricating the problems themselves. For men who did not benefit from Viagra, there was Penile Injection Therapy – the injection by fine-gauge needle directly into the side of the penis of a combination of drugs prescribed by a urologist. The drugs relax muscles and increase blood flow to create an erection. The treatment produces in 80 per cent of men a firm erection within ten to fifteen minutes which can last up to an hour.

PIT and Viagra aside (as well as the
eight
so-called ‘me-too' Viagra-like drugs for erectile dysfunction in development by Big Pharma at the time of writing), commercial prescriptions for male sexual dysfunctions of various sorts tended strongly towards gadgetry. They ranged by the start of the twenty-first-century from the Vacuum Constriction Device (a non-surgical, external implement that induces erection by applying negative pressure to fill the penis with blood and then trapping it with a rubber ring at the base of the penis), to the Implanted Penile Prosthesis (a simple, semi-rigid device that produces a permanent erection), to the Inflatable Penile Prosthesis (a more complex system with inflatable cylindrical balloons in the penis that can be pumped up or deflated on demand), to microvascular surgery (correction of erectile dysfunction by correcting abnormal blood flow to and from the penis).

It is clearly as a response to the embarrassment felt by men about their sexual dysfunction that the boom in ‘Tantric' sex techniques occurred from the 1980s onwards. As we have discussed earlier, the premise of Tantrism, revived in its many forms from Ancient Indian and Chinese roots, is that male ejaculation can and should be consciously withheld to prolong erection and give women a better penetrative sex experience. The
coitus obstructus
technique, as it was known before ‘Tantra' became the buzz phrase, was seen in various other parts of the world before its orientalist-inspired revival. It was practised by Turks, Armenians, the islanders of the Marquesas in the Pacific, and the North American Cherokees. Masters and Johnson, in the late 1970s, also argued the benefits of men training themselves to orgasm – preferably several times -without ejaculation.

The charge against such practices in the modern era is that Tantra is really an under-the-duvet power politics play, the long-lost cousin of Viagra and therefore, rather too often, amounts to not a great deal more than male egoism and competitiveness thinly disguised as sensitivity to women. Like taking Viagra, men are inclined to practise Tantric techniques less to combat impotence than premature ejaculation, and from the desire to keep an erection at all costs even after orgasm -based on the very male conception that what women want is to be incessantly humped by a penis like a piston in a cylinder. One construction that can be placed on Tantric sex makes it appear as just another way for men to exercise their sexual selfishness; a lot of the modern Tantric literature emphasises not so much the added enjoyment it might provide women, but the enhanced experience it affords men – the idea, in other words, of travelling in hope rather than suffering the disappointment of arriving.