Jonathan Margolis - O: The Intimate History of the Orgasm

International Praise for
O: The Intimate History of the Orgasm

You might be forgiven for plunging straight into this hot pink tome with unbridled enthusiasm. After all, it promises nothing less than a ride through the development and quirks of that most sought after and occasionally elusive sensation. Gratifyingly, it delivers. The book will have you guffawing on the tube, but its a double-edged sword; a text which amuses but also illuminates.

The Observer (London)

One of the best books on human sexuality that Ive come across an excellent and very down-to-earth history of human sexuality It also takes a very critical but constructive look at sexuality in our western Christian society and the damage that has been done by religious guilt and repression. If I had any control over the school syllabus, I would make this book required reading for sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds.

Bishop Pat Buckley, News of the World (London)

[Margolis] knows more than you dreamt possible about climaxes. [He] discusses bigger themes, such as how the power of the orgasm, the relentless human drive towards it, has led to a history of religious and political suppression.

The Times (London)

What this rather amazing book is about [is] how our knowledge of, and attitudes to, sex change dramatically with every generation. A serious piece of work. Everything ever written about sex, ever, seems to be referred to in Margoliss 403 pages [though] his style is fluent and light.

The Daily News (New Zealand)

O: THE INTIMATE HISTORY
OF THE ORGASM

Also by the same author

The Hot House People
Cleese Encounters
The Big Yin
Lenny Henry
Bernard Manning
Uri Geller: Magician or Mystic
A Brief History of Tomorrow

Jonathan Margolis

Copyright 2004 by Jonathan Margolis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

First published in the United Kingdom in 2004 by Century,
The Random House Group Limited, London, England

Printed in the United States of America

All quotations are reproduced with the kind permission of the authors.
All works are fully cited in the bibliography.

Every effort has been made to trace all original copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make any necessary changes to future printings.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Margolis, Jonathan.

O: the intimate history of the orgasm / Jonathan Margolis.

p. cm.

Originally published : London: Century, 2003.

eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9916-4

OrgasmHistory. 2. SexHistory. I. Title: Intimate history of the orgasm. II. Title.

HQ12.M346 2004

306.7dc22

2004052387

Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

My grandmother once told my mom that in sixty years of marriage, she and my grandfather never saw each other naked. I never saw my mother naked.

My children, by contrast, are so accustomed to their parents walking around in the nude that they have been known to remind my wife and me to put some clothes on when they have friends to stay.

It goes without saying that the late twentieth century was a time of considerable sexual liberalism. I prefer not to imagine what kind of sex life my grandparents had. I suspect it would have been, like Thomas Hobbes description of primitive life, nasty, brutish and short.

Yet we fall into the trap of generational smugness if we imagine that our particular time or our culture invented sex.

More than a hundred million acts of sexual intercourse take place every day, according to the World Health Organisation. Men and women have practiced procreative sexual intercourse for approximately a hundred thousand years. A back of the envelope calculation suggests, then, allowing for expanding world population since 98,000 BC, that human beings have had sex some 1,200 trillion times to date.

It cannot, surely, have been bad every time.

Sexual history, as a British psychotherapist, Brett Kahr, has put it, is a minefield of progression and regression. Some of the greatest eras of sexual freedom are far in our distant past; some of the most repressed times are within living memory.

What follows is a history not so much of sex, but of sexual pleasure, of sex as the culmination of a bonding process between two people or as a recreational activity that involves reproduction only as an optional by-product.

The orgasm is the ultimate point of such sex. It is what we hope to attain. As any soccer fan will confirm, there is enjoyment to be had from a game that ends in a zero-zero score, but a great match requires goals. And many of the greatest matches, for real connoisseurs, have been high-scoring draws, with equal satisfaction for both sides.

Yet orgasm has a highly paradoxical role within sex. My grandparents, I expect, will have been extremely vague about what an orgasm was. My grandfather was a corporal in the First World War trenches, so he will have had a rough idea that it had something to do with coming off as ejaculation was then known.

I am confident that my grandmother, however, will have died with only the fuzziest notion of what an orgasm was or where or how it was possible to acquire one.

Even growing up in the 1960s, I was fantastically innocent by todays standards. It was the custom then in wholesome boys books like The Hardy Boys series for characters to do almost anything rather than say their dialogue. Frank and Joe and friends like Chet and Biff, would asseverate, smile, chuckle, declare, expostulate, muse, mutter and grin their lines, but most commonly, they would ejaculate them. (As in: What! ejaculated Mr. Hardy. Thats ridiculous! Why would you steal his cane?)

I was vaguely aware that this was a somewhat awkward usage, but I could never understand, until I was long beyond The Hardy Boys, why my parents sniggered at it.

And I wasnt alone in such innocence. Sex in History, a notably progressive 1953 book by a renowned author of the day, Gordon Rattray Taylor, does not contain the word orgasm. Even its polite alternative, climax, only appears twice.

Yet aside from the need to breathe and eat, the pursuit of orgasm has been one of the strongest single determinants of human behaviour throughout history.

Every bit as profoundly as the craving for love (more so for much of humanity) the unquenchable desire for orgasm has made and destroyed marriages and dynasties, inspired poetry, drama and novels, destroyed peoples health through sexual diseases and fired up a world-wide, cross-cultural sex industry. Sex, rather than money, is the most happiness-inducing factor in modern Americans lives, according to economics professor David G. Blanchflower of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, co-author of Money, Sex and Happiness: An Empirical Study, a 2004 survey of 16,000 people for the National Bureau of Economic Research. Blanchflowers study quoted previous work in which 1,000 employed people had been asked to rate nineteen activities for happiness; sex came top, commuting, bottom.