Epilogue: Sex and Science Don't End at Orgasm
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Epilogue: Sex and Science Don’t End at Orgasm I remember the night I was introduced to the former professional cyclist Peio Ruiz Cabestany. It was summer and I was spending a few days in Zahara de los Atunes, trying to disconnect from the process of writing this book. But it was no use, my mind was possessed—academically—by sex, and I soon found myself excitedly explaining to Peio a scientific study about women who had orgasms while exercising, which said that it often happened when riding a bicycle. Peio was disconcerted by my unexpected comment, and I told myself that I should tone down my scientific sexual asides, but then all of a sudden he answered in a faint voice, “well… that’s happened to me several times, especially going uphill.” We’ve come to the end of the book and I still feel I have so many curious things to tell you about this peculiar intersection between science and sex. How could I leave out the orgasms induced by exercise! The study I cited to Peio was published in late 2011 by Debby Herbenick of Indiana University, whom I interviewed during my visit to the Kinsey Institute. Conducted with 246 women who sometimes felt intense sexual arousal when practicing sports, and another 124 who had even had orgasms, the first thing that Debby pointed out to me was that “it doesn’t seem to be anecdotal, since when we started looking for women to take part in the study we found many, in just a few weeks.” What’s more, at first the researchers thought that it was an almost exclusively female phenomenon, but “when we published the study, men started to get in touch with us to say that it happened to them too, and we are investigating that now,” explained Debby, citing the case of a college student on the track team who always did his abdominal exercises at home because he was occasionally surprised by an embarrassing ejaculation. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 329 P. Estupinyà, S=EX 2, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31726-7 330 Epilogue: Sex and Science Don’t End at Orgasm In fact, doing abdominals was the most frequent physical activity that women said gave them spontaneous orgasms, followed by climbing, lifting weights and riding a bicycle. Most women assured researchers that they were not having any erotic fantasies or feeling any arousal when the genital stimula- tion appeared, and they simply had the sensation that if they continued the repetitions of the exercise they were doing they would reach orgasm. They explained that it could be embarrassing if they were with other people, but that it was very pleasurable. The average age of the first “orgasm induced by exercise” was 19, and for many women it only happened a few times, but in almost half it had happened more than ten times. A few even said that they could make it happen if they tried to. For Debby it is an extremely interesting phenomenon because it represents a new example of spontaneous orgasmic reflex unrelated to desire or sexual activity, such as orgasms pro- duced by electrical stimulations on specific points of the spine, those that happen while sleeping and those induced after taking certain drugs. The team at Indiana University is investigating which physiological mechanisms could be involved, and while the most logical assumption is that muscular tension in the pelvic region could press on the internal part of the clitoris and be the origin of the arousal, Debby suggests that the activation of the sympathetic nervous system due to physical stress could also be the orgasm trigger. Her idea coincides with Peio’s experience. He explained that erections on the bicycle were relatively frequent but that the “orgasms came in extreme situations of almost agonizing suffering.” Joking about how much fun he had on his bike, Peio told me: “I remember one quite intense orgasm I had on a steep slope in Lasatte heading toward Donosti, while making an enormous effort to stay drafted.” The study of orgasms induced by exercise may seem fairly anecdotal, but Debby reflects on a very interesting point: if it is found that the muscular mechanisms involved are the same as the typical pelvic movements carried out during the sexual act, this could indicate that, in addition to clitoral stimula- tion, for some women the abrupt, almost spasmodic swaying increases arousal and is necessary for reaching orgasm. “And this could lead to the design of new exercises—in addition to kegels—in order to facilitate orgasmic response,” Debby tells me. After consulting more people about this issue, I realized that—especially in women—genital arousal during intense physical activity is something rela- tively common. So is arousal during sleep, even though on many occasions we don’t notice it. Another study that I can’t leave out is the fascinating review of scientific bibliography on abnormal sexual behavior while sleeping, published in 2007 by specialists in sleep disorders. Among the numerous cases discussed Epilogue: Sex and Science Don’t End at Orgasm 331 we find a 27-year-old woman who several times a week would start moaning with pleasure after 15–20 minutes of sleeping, another—26 years old—who, in the middle of the night, would take off her clothes and start masturbating and scream angrily without being aware of it, and yet another woman who sometimes stroked and played with her boyfriend’s genitals, and when he responded and she woke up she would accuse him of taking her by force while she was sleeping. In fact, there were countless cases of somnambulistic sexual activity: men who touch the breasts and buttocks of their partners while sleeping, others who moan and make pelvic movements, and still others who turn aggressively toward their partners and try to penetrate them. There are curious testimoni- als, such as the woman who tells of how her husband was much more affec- tionate and tender with her while he was sleeping than awake, a man who always avoided having sex with his wife when she was menstruating but didn’t seem to mind that when he was asleep, and even a woman who swore that her husband snored while they were having sex. There are also unpleasant situations documented, of forced contact, women shouting obscenities they would never dare to say while awake, and very legally problematic cases of sleeping men who have tried to abuse their partners’ teenage daughters. It seems there is an absolute loss of control, as reflected in the case of a 27-year-old man who broke two fingers when, while sleeping, he tried to free himself from the knots he himself had tied to keep him from the masturbation and ejaculation that had woken him up almost daily over the prior 5 years. The scientific information on sexuality is limitless, and this book would never end if we kept adding more and more studies to the many already cited. We could discuss a scientific article that describes a woman who was capable of having more than a hundred orgasms in each sexual session, or reports of people who go to hospitals with amnesia after a sexual encounter. It is more frequent than we imagine and, in fact, in 2006, doctors from Zamora and Salamanca described in the Revista de Neurología [Neurology Journal] the case of a 57-year-old woman who was brought to the emergency room by her husband after becoming disoriented and losing her memory for an hour and a half after having sexual relations. The woman could only remember that she had started intercourse, but not whether she had washed up after, or how she had gotten to the hospital. Episodes of transient global amnesia can appear after intense physical exercise, situations of emotional stress, metabolic altera- tions and the consumption of toxic substances, but occasionally also imme- diately after sex. They usually last for a few hours and are believed to perhaps be due to small ischemias in the thalamus or hippocampus during an abrupt 332 Epilogue: Sex and Science Don’t End at Orgasm rise in blood pressure, as happens during orgasm and extreme physical activ- ity. Who knows, maybe when we wake up in the morning in someone else’s house and don’t remember how we got there it could be due to something more—this is just gratuitous speculation—than the alcohol we consumed or a defense mechanism that forces us to forget what happened. In medical literature we can find more dramatic clinical cases of intense pain or depression following orgasm (post-orgasmic illness), articles on aller- gic reactions to semen, and see images ranging from men with two penises and women with two vaginas to clitoral atrophy or boys with aphallia, where you see two testicles with no penis above them. I’m not trying to overwhelm you with half-told curiosities, but rather to show you that science is an inex- haustible source of novel, interesting, singular and thought-provoking infor- mation in all realms of knowledge, including, of course, human sexuality. Actually, scientists’ real secret is—besides their methodology—in something very simple that I recommend you take to heart: being more interested in the unfamiliar than in what we already know. In that way we will constant experi- ence the intellectual stimulation of new knowledge, be encouraged to learn continuously, assuming that doubts are more interesting than certainties, and we will be predisposed to our ideas evolving instead of remaining stagnant. With regard to the constant renewal of preconceived ideas, allow me to mention a recent study whose design I found fascinating.