The Guide to Getting It On (22 page)

“WOW! Her face got all twisted and contorted when she came. She looked like she was on an extreme acid trip. She must have had a major orgasm. Maybe I’m not so bad in bed after all....”

Of course, there are plenty of people who have sensational orgasms but hardly show it at all. Their orgasms are an internal phenomenon that remains hidden from the outside world. Unfortunately, many of us assume that women are supposed to make noise when they are coming, even though there is no correlation between decibels and delight. Some women sound like freight trains when they orgasm; others become completely quiet except for an occasional twitch and sigh. The same is true for men. If your partner comes in a quiet way and you would like to know more about it, why not ask?

Keep in mind that many of us learned to come quietly at a very young age. That’s because there might not have been much privacy where we masturbated; letting out a large bellow would have informed the entire household. This was particularly true if you shared a room with siblings, and even worse if you had the top mattress in a bunk bed. The same difficulties are faced by people living in dorms, sororities, fraternities, and military barracks, where roommates often sleep only a few feet away. In these situations, we pretend to be asleep when masturbating —a funny notion when you consider that our roommates are probably pretending that they are sleeping as well.

The great sex-noise dilemma is also faced by parents while making love (or trying to) when there’s a household full of kids. Depending on the ages of the children, their response to hearing mom and dad can range from “Mommy sounds upset” to “That’s SO gross, turn up the stereo!”

Is It Possible to Have Too Many Orgasms?

Some of the Tantric types nearly hemorrhage at the notion of a man ejaculating more than twice every ten years. They think that the male body is depleted when it ejaculates. As a result, they hoard the white sticky stuff like generals do weapons-grade plutonium. Some even teach themselves to have dry orgasms.

Is there much reality to this seed-spilling fear? It has been written that the Nazis pondered this same question. To test it out they forced a prisoner of war to masturbate every three hours, day and night, for the duration of World War II. Thanks to the Allied invasion, the prisoner finally got to stop jerking off. He apparently went on to father several children and lived to a ripe old age, certainly as old as most seed-retaining monks if they didn’t fib about being 128 when they are really only 55. As for other living examples, one friend of Goofy Foot Press is now in his early 70s, but his mind is incredibly sharp, and he doesn’t look a day over 50. He currently has at least five ejaculations per week, down from the ten or so he had been having since he was a teenager. According to semen-retention theories, he should either be dead or a zombie. On the other hand, Doug Abrams, one of the healthier-looking guys on the planet, has co-authored a book on the Tantric position of coming without squirting. Doug practices what he preaches, and it is our hope that his prostate doesn’t suddenly explode one day.

Regarding women and orgasm: nobody in his or her right mind has ever worried about a woman having too many orgasms, except for the people who live next door or in the apartment below.

Where Does Coming Come From?

The following quote is from a woman who had a spontaneous orgasm while riding public transit — a rather scary thought if you have ever taken the bus in places like Los Angeles or Detroit:

“I’ve perfected this wonderful ability to orgasm without touching myself. It started one day on the commuter train when I was ovulating, and I felt myself throbbing. I started running a fantasy in my mind and discovered I could bring myself to orgasm. The only trouble with a public place is you have to control your breathing....” [A former high-school homecoming queen from the Midwest, as found in Julia Hutton’s
Good Sex,
Cleis Press.]

Sex therapist Herbert Otto writes about the time in college when he and his friends were talking about different ways of masturbating. One fellow said that he could ejaculate without touching his penis. Naturally, bets were made. The room became quiet, and Mr. Spontaneous Combustion whipped his penis out of his pants. After his eyes were closed for a while, his penis became erect. Eventually, he began breathing faster, and suddenly he had an ejaculation.

Not only is it possible for some people to have an orgasm without genital stimulation, but it can even happen without sexual thoughts. For instance, some women have spontaneous orgasms during highly charged debates or intellectual discussions that have nothing to do with sex. One female reader had her first orgasm as a teenager while her hair was being brushed, and as a 40-year-old she still has orgasms when her hair is brushed.

While not many of us are able to have orgasms without genital stimulation, the existence of hands-free orgasms does suggest that there is more to orgasm than genital contact. For instance, there are plenty of people who have suffered nerve injuries and can no longer feel sensation in their genitals, yet they learn to have orgasm feelings in other parts of their bodies, such as their faces, arms, necks, lips, chests, and backs. This indicates that the power to experience an orgasm resides somewhere in the senses and not simply in the groin. (One woman whose clitoris and vagina were removed due to cancer was able to experience the same kind of intense multiple orgasms after the surgery as before.)

People who have lost one of their senses do not suddenly grow new ones to compensate. Rather, they are forced to better use the senses that remain. This suggests that many of us could achieve greater sexual pleasure from other parts of our bodies if we learned to allow it. One way of doing this is mentioned later in this Guide, where the woman stimulates her partner’s penis with one hand while using her other hand or lips to caress another part of his body not normally associated with sexual feelings.

Orgasm-Chapter Letdown

One of the failings of this book is that it doesn’t define “orgasm” more broadly. For instance, in talking about male orgasm, it is assumed that this happens when a penis is squeezed, stroked, fucked or sucked. But what if a man has an intense full-body orgasm when his partner kisses his neck for hours? In assuming that an orgasm needs to squirt out of our genitals, we keep ourselves from exploring other possibilities. But to include the full range of possibilities would add another hundred pages to this book, and if that doesn’t make you cry out in horror, nothing will.

Pain Next to Pleasure

Receptors for pain and pleasure are located next to each other throughout our bodies. These receptors often fire at the same time. It is our brain’s job to decide whether the overall experience feels good or bad. To make such a decision, our brain will sort through its data base of everything from whether we are ticklish to how we feel about people with brown hair and green eyes who are trying to get us off. As a result, our brains each make their own decisions about what is pleasurable and what is painful.

For instance, while one person might enjoy masturbating to the fantasy of seeing Johnny or Amber naked, the mere hint of Johnny or Amber’s presence might make another person feel sick to his or her stomach. Or one person might find spanking to be painful and a turn-off, while another might find spanking to be painful and erotic. The stimulus is the same, but how we feel about it depends on how our brain interprets it.

The way we interpret pain is also impacted by our level of sexual arousal. For instance, people who enjoy an occasional slap on the rear during sex usually don’t like the pain unless it’s done when they are sexually aroused. Being aroused can cause the brain to throw routine caution to the wind, converting feelings that are otherwise painful into feelings of pleasure.

Possible Assist for Women’s & Men’s Orgasms

When women are about to come they often pull in or tighten their pelvic muscles. Yet doing just the opposite, pushing out, might make their orgasms more intense. Some women will hesitate to do this from fear that it might cause them to pass gas, but what the heck, you’ll both live if she does. And if you consider the gas-passing habits of most couples, chances are she owes him a few.

Whether you are male or female, you might occasionally experiment with relaxing the muscle tone in your pelvis when you come. For instance, some men find that they can prolong the feelings of orgasm if they relax their crotch and anus as orgasm is about to come.

What Was It Like?

Lovers sometimes ask each other if they came, but not what coming feels like. Granted, sexual experiences are hard to put into words, since they often exist on the cusp between physical and emotional sensation. But asking a partner to describe what an orgasm feels like might lead to some interesting insights and discussions.

Guys Faking Orgasm?

Back when the first edition of the Guide was published, the section on faking orgasms assumed that it was women who did the faking. Not anymore. It seems that up to 30% of young adult males have faked orgasms at one time or another. These are men in the middle of their so-called sexual prime.

Researcher Karen Yescavage found that guys fake orgasm for reasons like: “I was tired,” “I faked it so she wouldn’t see me go limp,” “So she would think she was doing a good job,” or “I wanted to get it over with.” The reasons women gave for faking tended to fall into the—“I-was-tired-bored-or-it-was-hurting”—category.

The good news is that even the people who admitted to faking orgasms didn’t fake them very often. Also, a number of people who faked felt it helped increase the intimacy in sex. For them, the intimacy was more important than whether they really came or not. Other people feel that deceiving a partner is wrong no matter what the justification. They can’t see how you can lie and feel more intimate at the same time.

Interestingly, lesbians faked orgasms as often as straight white women, while straight white women faked orgasms twice as often as Hispanic women. One possible conclusion is that lesbians and white males may expect their partners to have more orgasms than Hispanic males do, and so the white females and lesbians felt more compelled to fake orgasms.

If Your Partner Fakes Orgasms

One of the worst things you can do when a partner fakes an orgasm is to go on a mission to help him or her have real orgasms. This usually makes matters worse.

When it comes to orgasms, there is sometimes a fine line between helpful concern and obnoxious fretting, especially if the reason you need your partner to have an orgasm is for your own reassurance that you are a good lover.

Rather than trying to help your partner have an orgasm, why not try to discover the things that give him or her pleasure and comfort? Contrary to what you think, this might simply be holding each other for an extended time or not grabbing for your lover’s crotch the minute you feel horny. If your partner has suggestions about technique, all the better, but this might not be where the issue lies.

Far more relationships crumble from a lack of emotional pleasure than from a lack of orgasms. As long as you are able to give each other emotional pleasure, there are plenty of ways to achieve orgasm. This book lists several hundred of them.

Orgasm Dementia

Sometimes it’s fun to count orgasms and go for it like pigs to mud. But for some people, orgasm production and/or procurement has a suspicious edge. Here are a few reasons why:

Some people get a sense of smug superiority by claiming how many orgasms they either had or “gave” a partner. They confuse sex with pinball.

Some people use pleasure-giving as a way of controlling a partner. They might hardly come at all while making sure that a partner comes several times. While this might not sound like such a bad problem, keep in mind that partners who won’t surrender the reins sexually are sometimes very controlling in other aspects of life as well.

There are people who expect their partners to supply them with constant orgasms. This can breed resentment over time, as the other partner starts to feel used.

Some people need to have sex or masturbate several times a day to help numb a chronic sense of anxiety or ease feelings of deadness. Having a constant stream of orgasms can be their way of keeping an emotional funk at arm’s length. Do not confuse this with sexual pleasure, even if they do.

Reinventing the Sexual Wheel — Marketing & Orgasm

In order to sell books and tapes on sex, publishers want us to feel sexually inept if we don’t buy whatever sexual experience they are hawking. For instance, during the last couple of years we were supposed to buy books and DVDs on G-spot orgasms, female ejaculation, extended orgasms, one-hour orgasms, Tantric-sex orgasms, extraordinary orgasms for boring people, and now, orgasms through herbal enhancement. It’s only a matter of time before publishers start to sell
Better Orgasms for Your Dog and Cat,
and try to make you feel like a pet sadist if you don’t plunk down $29.95 for the DVD.

Many of us would enjoy having bigger and better orgasms if we could. But sometimes the consumer simply has to say, “Enough is enough.”

Readers’ Comments

For men: What does an orgasm feel like?

“My knees get weak and I tingle everywhere. It feels like I am numb all over.”
male age 21