Beyond Orgasmatron

All you ever wanted to know about orgasm.

By Barbara Keesling, published on December 31, 1999 - last reviewed on August 14, 2009

In her excellent book, The Technology of Orgasm (Johns Hopkins, 1999), Rachel Maines describes the double standard of female orgasm in the Victorian era. Orgasm was considered both the cause and cure for hysteria, the latter assumption leading to the development of the vibrator. Also in the Victorian era, Sigmund Freud differentiated between what he called a clitoral orgasm and a vaginal orgasm. Female infants and children could masturbate by stimulating the clitoris and experience orgasmic sensations, he posited. By contrast, adult women could experience a vaginal orgasm (described as a deeper sensation) during intercourse. Failure to achieve vaginal orgasm in adulthood, he said, signaled psychological immaturity due to fixation at the phallic stage of psychosexual development.

Alfred Kinsey, in his monumental work Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, also held that as a girl grew up, her clitoral orgasms somehow evolved into vaginal orgasms. "The vagina itself should be the center of sensory stimulation and this, as we have seen," he said, "is a physical and physiologic impossibility for nearly all females."

Taking cues from Kinsey, Masters and Johnson concluded that, regardless of the source of the stimulation, all orgasms happened because they somehow activated the clitoris, either directly or indirectly, and caused PC muscle spasms. The clitoris then became the gold standard of female orgasm. I remember countless magazine advice columns from this era urging men to find "the man in the boat."

A problem with Masters and Johnson is that their studies focused on such minute physical details of arousal and orgasm that a lot of people started missing the big picture. For example, they said the clitoris retracts before orgasm. I knew several women who thought they had a problem because they approached orgasm with their clitoris waving in the breeze. Just because most people in a sex laboratory experience phases of excitement, plateau, orgasm and resolution doesn't mean that's the best or only way to make love.

With the publication of The G Spot (Reinhart and Winston, 1982), Alice Ladas, John Perry and Beverly Whipple demonstrated that the vagina contains at least one area that is sensitive and can trigger orgasm in some women. They also demonstrated the existence of female ejaculation. (This phenomenon was already known to individual women, many of whom thought they had lost control during sex and peed on their partner.) Research continues on the exact nature of the fluid contained in these ejaculations, but, in a radical change from only 15 years ago, sex researchers now assume that all women ejaculate, but often in amounts too small to be noticed.

In my book Discover Your Sensual Potential (HarperCollins, 1999), I explained how to stimulate an area in the upper rear of the vagina known as the culde-sac, also called the fornix. I relied on Masters and Johnson for a phenomenon called "tenting," in which, when a woman becomes really aroused, the muscles and ligaments surrounding the uterus lift it up and allow penetration into this extra inch or so of space behind the cervix, resulting in some incredible orgasmic sensations.

I also relied on a little-known article from the Journal of Sex Research published in 1972. In "Types of Female Orgasm," researchers Singer and Singer described vulval, uterine and blended orgasms. A vulval orgasm resembles what we consider a clitoral orgasm, with spasms of the PC muscle. The uterine orgasm results from stimulation deep inside the vagina. A blended orgasm (although it sounds like a designer coffee drink) combines the two.

The publication of The G Spot led the way for a continued alphabet soup approach to female orgasm: The U spot is the sensitive opening to the urethra; Debbie Tideman, in The X Spot Orgasm, describes stimulation of the cervix; I find that stimulation of the PC muscle that surrounds the opening of the vagina is very successful in enhancing orgasm. And in Are We Having Fun Yet? (Hyperion, 1997), Marcia and Lisa Douglas claim that the female genitals form an "orgasmic crescent" composed of erectile tissue--including the clitoris, the part of the clitoris that extends into the body, the G spot and the area surrounding the urethra--which swells with arousal in a sort of female erection.

Today, female orgasm still suffers from a kind of double standard: On one hand, we have new and expanded information about orgasm triggers. On the other hand, many women are still 'not regularly orgasmic and feel cheated, left out, inferior or resigned, because their expectation of having an orgasm is so low.

Feminist thought suggests that this history amounts to a conspiracy to prevent women from experiencing sexual pleasure, or at the least, a series of value judgments about the female body. But the picture reveals no conspiracy. What we have here is researchers starting out literally "in the dark." Rather than rendering this history obsolete, I see us building on it to discover stronger and more frequent female orgasms.

The Male Orgasm

Male orgasm is not without controversy. The prevailing view only several years ago was that orgasm and ejaculation were one and the same, and that men were not capable of multiple orgasm except in rare cases.

Several years ago, when I trained to be a sexual surrogate partner, what struck me most was that the male surrogate partners I met had that ability. And as a surrogate partner, I found that men I treated for premature ejaculation would, as an unexpected "side effect" of learning ejaculation control, experience spontaneous multiple orgasms.