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Orgasmic Bodies This page intentionally left blank Orgasmic Bodies The Orgasm in Contemporary Western Culture Hannah Frith Principal Lecturer in Psychology, University of Brighton, UK © Hannah Frith 2015 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-137-30436-0 ISBN 978-1-137-30437-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137304377 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. With love to Nancy, Melanie, Susan and Roger This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgements x 1 What Is an Orgasm and Why Does It Matter? 1 Orgasmic origins 2 Orgasm, discourse and heterosex 3 The biomedical frame 5 The behavioural frame 10 The experiential frame 14 Contemporary shifts 17 The transformation of intimacy 18 Neoliberalism and postfeminism 19 2 The Orgasmic Imperative 22 Orgasm = good sex = successful relationships 23 Postfeminism and the orgasmic imperative 26 Hegemonic masculinity and the orgasmic imperative 30 Pathologising orgasmic absence 33 Experiencing orgasmic absence 37 Conclusions 41 3 Complicated Women, Straightforward Men 43 The orgasm gap 45 Complicated bodies 48 Orgasmic ambivalence 53 Emotional women, physical men 56 Conclusions 61 4 Coming Together: The Timing of Orgasm 63 Simultaneous orgasm and the ‘timing gap’ 64 Speeding up women, slowing down men 69 Cuming ‘too soon’: premature ejaculation 72 How soon is ‘too soon’? 75 Controlling the body 76 Relational trouble 78 Conclusions 80 5 Orgasmic Labour: Training the Body for Orgasmic Success 83 Working at orgasms 84 vii viii Contents ‘Sexual adventurers’ and the female body 88 Sensate sexpertise 89 Exercising the sexy body 90 Positioning the body 92 Teaching the boys 93 Championing the male body 94 Maintaining sexual health 96 Working out 98 The science of the body 100 Mastering her body 101 Conclusions 103 6 Performing Orgasm: Blurring the ‘Real’ and the ‘Fake’ 105 Faking it happens. A lot 106 Why do women fake? 110 Emotion work 112 Surface acting, ‘sex work’ and faking orgasm 114 Deep acting, the real and the fake 119 Conclusions 123 7 Embodying Orgasmic Sensation 127 Orgasmic ambiguities 128 Embodiment and orgasm 132 Embodied pedagogy 134 You’ll know when you have an orgasm ... 138 A tingling sensation from your head to your toes ... 139 Do you feel like you have to pee? 141 Conclusions 142 8 The Climax: Conclusions and Reflections 147 Orgasmic imperative 148 Orgasmic uncertainty 149 Entitlement and obligation 150 Body and embodiment 153 Orgasmic omissions 154 Orgasmic divisions 155 Men and embodiment 159 Meaning making 160 Appendices 163 Appendix 1 Table of Cosmopolitan Articles 163 Appendix 2 Table of Men’s Health Articles 166 Contents ix Notes 170 References 172 Index 191 Acknowledgements Thanks to all those who have listened to me puzzling about orgasm, including my generous colleagues in the Department of Applied Social Science at the University of Brighton – especially Jayne and Orly. Special thanks to Kate, Thelma, Craig, Cristina, Sarah, Charles, Nicola, Mark, boozy book club and stitching folks for all your love and support. Some of the ideas in this book have been published in a different format and with a different focus as ‘Sexercising to orgasm: Embodied pedagogy and sexual labour in women’s magazines’ in Sexualities (Forthcoming); ‘Visualising the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’: emotion work and the representa- tion of orgasm in pornography and everyday sexual interactions’, Journal of Gender Studies (Forthcoming), and ‘Ejaculatory timing and mascu- line identities: The politics of ab/normalising sexual performance’, in J. Louth (ed.) Edges of Identity: The Production of Neoliberal Subjectivities (2015) Chester: University of Chester Press. x 1 What Is an Orgasm and Why Does it Matter? Explaining what exactly an orgasm is seems to become more elusive even as science tries to specify it more precisely. Indeed, some would argue that orgasm is a mystical and magical thing which should not be subject to too much scrutiny in case this mysteriousness is unravelled and spoiled. But what exactly orgasm is, is perhaps a less interesting ques- tion than why it matters. Scientific work on orgasm focuses on trying to establish definitively what an orgasm is, specifying the biological path- ways through which physical sensation is perceived as pleasurable, and the mechanisms through which this ‘response’ is triggered. But the more interesting question – at least for social scientists – is why orgasm is seen as having such significance, to be worthy of such attention. Orgasm, and female orgasm in particular, has been dogged by scientific and social controversy – from disagreements about whether orgasm originates in the vagina or the clitoris (or any other part of the body), whether or how it serves any evolutionary function, whether it is a necessary part of women’s sexual satisfaction, and whether it is a site of women’s oppres- sion, liberation or both. Orgasms are also big business – for pharmaceu- tical companies desperate to find the ‘pink’ Viagra™ to ‘help’ women orgasm more easily or more frequently, for those who profit from visual representations of orgasm in everything from shampoo adverts to hard core pornography, for sex workers who are paid to elicit orgasms from clients, and for those who trade in creams, gels, toys, self-help books, and therapeutic services designed to enhance orgasmic pleasure. This cacophony of cultural chatter about female orgasm draws attention both to its problematisation and its symbolic significance in relation to a range of competing professional and commercial interests. This book, then, explores the meaning of orgasm. Noisy debates about female orgasm, accompanied by intense scrutiny, monitoring, measurement, 1 2 Orgasmic Bodies and disciplining of female bodies, are not paralleled by similar careful and considered attention to men’s orgasm. Here there is relative silence. This is not to suggest that men’s sexuality or bodies are not subject to the clinical (and other) gaze – the recent commercial success of pharma- ceutical treatments for ‘erectile dysfunction’ and the reshaping of the aging body as ‘forever sexual’ would suggest otherwise. But the bodily location, presence, or availability of men’s orgasm has not been consid- ered controversial or even particularly interesting. This suggests that the meaning of orgasm is heavily gendered, and that the ‘doing’ of orgasm has a bearing on the ‘doing’ of masculinity and femininity. The place of orgasm in heterosex (sexual practices – especially penis-in-vagina inter- course – between men and women) is subject to intense surveillance and offers a focus for this book. Evidence of an ‘orgasm gap’, where men experience orgasm more frequently and reliably than women, is often the focus of social and scientific scrutiny in ways which reaffirm heterosexuality as an institution and reproduce the unequal gendered power relationships on which this rests. Treating orgasm as primarily an embodied sociocultural ‘event’ (rather than a biological response) – something which is experienced in and through the body but which becomes knowable only through its socially embedded meaning – this book uses orgasm as a useful springboard for examining the relation- ships between gender, the body, sexuality, science and consumption. Orgasmic origins One way of exploring the social construction of the orgasm, and unset- tling its status as a biological/medical ‘fact’, is to understand how the meaning of orgasm has changed over time. Laqueur’s (1986, 2009) inval- uable historical analysis of the use of the term ‘orgasm’ is illuminating. For centuries, he argues, orgasm was an allegory of the cosmos and crea- tion, an event of cosmic significance signalling the origin of the soul and its entry into the body during conception. But, between the early 18th and late 19th century orgasm transformed into being understood as ‘simply a feeling’ (1986: 1), something that a body might or might not experience. According to Laqueur, these changes were not the result of new scientific discoveries, but were closely tied to cultural shifts in the status of biology as a science and the social, economic and polit- ical roles of women. He identifies a number of key points at which the meaning of orgasm shifted. In 1556, Realdo Columbus claimed to have discovered the clitoris, which marked a ‘decisive shift from orgasm being understood as pleasure which overwhelms the whole body to a pleasure What Is an Orgasm? 3 fixed primarily on an organ’ (Laqueur, 2009: 429).

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