It took us a few million years, but we have finally reached the Age of the Almighty Orgasm.
Most women in times past, blissfully unaware that females were even capable of this physiological response to proper stimulation, loved their husbands, raised their families, and went about their lives with an orderly minimum of fuss and bother. In their ignorance they were happy. If men were careless clods and jackrabbits in bed it didn't really matter, because their wives didn't know there was any more to it. If sex was naughty, even for married people, if it was performed under heavy blankets and with the lights out, it was all right.' The man got what he wanted, and the woman, having performed her wifely duty, could busy herself with important things like laundry, raising children, and cooking. Most wives loved their husbands dearly and existed with them in a close-knit family environment. But those were the good old days.
Then came the sexual revolution. Some idiot, somewhere, had discovered (or rediscovered) the fact that women could have orgasms, probably while browsing through an ancient copy of The Memoirs of Casanova. Worse still, he let word of his discovery leak out. It wasn't long before romantic novels began alluding to the earth shaking, the sky falling, bells ringing, and lightning bolting. Women who read these novels began to wonder what it all meant, because the sky never fell when their brutish husbands made love to them. The discontent was vague, rambling in the distance like a far-off thunderstorm, but it was there.
Things might have eventually reverted to normal, had it not been for the movies. They took the ball from the novelists and started showing shots of puffy clouds floating through azure skies just at the crucial moments of their love scenes. Again the women wondered, perplexed because they had never seen any clouds wafting over their four-posters.
Then came the final and most telling blow; doctors, smelling money in sex the way a whore can smell a John with a bankroll, began writing books. "The Climax!" they screamed. "The climax is the be-all and end-all of marital bliss." And not just a climax, but mutual climax. They were still afraid to use the word orgasm because puritanical censors might confuse pontification with pornography. However, they described the sensations in terms so glowing that the earthquakes of the novels and the clouds of the movies paled by comparison.
Women by the millions began to read these books, and the more they read, the more they felt cheated by never having had a climax, much less a mutual climax. So, for the first time in modern history, the female began to make sexual demands upon the male. There was only one small problem: the male, used to pleasing himself alone, was not up to meeting these demands. Women who had always thought of themselves as happily married began to see their husbands in a new light of glaring sexual truth, as ineffectual climax givers. Ladies who had been completely happy never having had an orgasm began to develop the "frustrations" of which the books spoke. Formerly contented housewives began to see psychiatrists, the marriage-counselor business started booming, and divorces for "incompatibility" mushroomed. As time went on the authors became braver and started discussing orgasms instead of climaxes. Medico sexual fad developed. The idea of the vaginal versus the clitoral orgasm, which reigned for some years, was finally blown out of the saddle by Masters and Johnson. Mutual orgasm as an ideal fell into disrepute.
But the Cult of the Orgasm continued to grow, and as women's demands upon men increased, interesting side effects developed. Impotence among healthy young men reached epidemic proportions because the figure roles in sex had nearly reversed. Women wanted their orgasms, they insisted upon them, and when the men, as was to be expected, didn't deliver, the girls let them know about it by challenging their manhood and their ability to perform. As a result, otherwise normal men have become impotent due to their fear of failure. A man's ego is as delicate as a flower, and when trampled it is often some time before the flower is able to rise again.
Another effect has been the turning inward of hostility by women upon themselves. After all, don't the books say that Any Woman Can? And if a woman can't, doesn't that prove that there's something fundamentally wrong with her? Could any normal woman, bombarded by an orgasm-mad media, live with an image of herself as a frigid lover? How many millions of women, plagued by self-doubt, have faked orgasms? And for whose emotional benefit? Their lovers' or their own?
A man doesn't feel like a man anymore unless he can bring his girl off with regularity, and a woman doesn't feel like a woman unless she can go off like a Chinese New Year celebration. And just as people, being human, can't measure up to the expectations of the other religions, we now find millions made guilty by the dictates of Orgas-molo-gy, whose goals they can't fulfill, either. As a result, these people walk around with all kinds of fears, neuroses, feelings of inadequacy and self-hatred. They read books, go to shrinks, submit to horrible character mutilation in encounter groups, pay handsome prices at fancy new sex clinics, get driven into alcoholism and drug dependence, all in the fruitless quest for that elusive orgasm.
Then came the books written by people who have initials instead of names. According to them, if you weren't spending half your life in the throes of sexual delirium you were doing something wrong. They promoted making love with the emotional attachment of attending a bowling league, all in a carefree spirit of good, clean fun.
Yet, despite all of the publicity, despite the now generation getting rid of all their hangups and letting it all hang out with a right on attitude, despite the psychiatrists and the psychologists and the marriage counselors and the encounter groups and the sensitivity training and the sex clinics and the plethora of books and movies on the subject, a sizable percentage of our female population is still not able to achieve orgasm, including the so-called liberated females. In spite of all this, the rate of impotence and premature ejaculation among men is very high. Even today, the chances that a woman will find an inadequate lover are much better than the chances that she will find a good one.
Are the statistics trying to tell us something? Are they trying to tell us that orgasms, after all, just aren't that important? Is it time for women to go back to not knowing that this great, good feeling exists? Would they be happier in their ignorance?
Although I can't argue with the fact that sexual adjustments in the preorgasmic age were more childish and backward than they are today, neither can I dispute the fact that man-woman relationships in toto rested upon much firmer foundations than the fleeting ecstasy of a singular, titillated nervous system. I am not advocating that we return to this condition, the past is irretrievable in any event. But what I do suggest is the real message, the real purpose, of this book.
As a young boy living in the Age of the Orgasm I was made aware of my sexual duty to women. It was nothing overt, nothing actually stated and spelled out for me. Rather, it was the attitude of the girls and women I had known which told me, if even in a subliminal way, that I was expected to please. Ellena, the girl who picked me up at a Greek wedding, telling me that after I had made her come the only reason she allowed me to continue was because she wanted to see what I felt like inside of her, is a good example. The only thing she really cared about was her orgasm; the rest, including myself, was unimportant. It was a complete reversal of historic roles; a full swing of the sexual pendulum. Then, after being trained by Mora, I felt that the only way I could be accepted by women was by giving them orgasms. It became a matter of pride, and of conceit, with me. Why did I really seduce all of those little high-school girls? Because as Mora, in her conceit, wanted me to remember her, I, in mine, wanted those girls to remember that I had been the first one to make them come, even if they didn't know what was happening and even if it was against their will. If I couldn't make a girl come, I felt a terrible sense of failure. My preoccupation with climaxes had gone so far that it wasn't even the seduction of these little girls I wanted, as an act in itself; it was their orgasms. Because their orgasms proved not my value to them, but my value to myself. In the final analysis, women were only objects from which I extracted orgasms to feed my own ego.
I am not a superstud. I am not tall, nor terribly handsome. Unlike heroes of the porno novels, I am not capable of performing ten times a night, nor five, nor even four. I was trained to be a sex machine, trained to be all of the things that most of the men in the world wish they could be, but can't. It took the love of a good woman to make me realize that my ability to please was relatively unimportant.
It was Susan, lovely Susan, who, by her gentle and giving attitude, taught me the truth. Orgasms last for only a few seconds and feel good, but that's all. The earth never trembles, the sky never falls, and the clouds never float, not even for the very best of orgasms. So am I saying that they aren't important? The answer is no. What I am saying is that they are not all that important. Millions upon millions of women lived happy, reasonably well-adjusted lives without them before the medicoliterary-in-duced Age of the Orgasm, and I believe that they can again, without having to waste their time sitting in a psychiatrist's office or wandering from man to man, looking for their own version of Norman Mailer's Perfect Come.
The answer is that people must learn how to become lovers, instead of merely orgasm-inducers. What Mora taught me still remains true, up to a point. I wish that every man could be taught to make love to a woman by a lesbian; be taught to make love like a lesbian. For one thing, this would completely remove the pressure to perform that has made so many men impotent and caused countless others a loss of esteem not only to themselves but also to their sexual partners. Because, finally, both sexes must learn that they can live without the squeeze technique, or the bumping and other techniques found in this book and the rest of the orgasm-oriented books. It's not important whether a man is capable of sawing hi and out of a woman's vagina for hours. It's not even important that he ever put his penis into her vagina, unless, of course, children are desired. Nor is it important if the man maintains his erection all, some, or none of the time. As long as there are lips, tongues, fingers, vibrators, and dildoes, any man, even an impotent one, should have no trouble making his lover climax often enough that she won't build up excess frustrations, assuming that she herself is capable of climax. And if she isn't, that's all right, too. Of course, a woman gets a great deal of emotional satisfaction from feeling her lover's organ inside of her body, but the organ itself is not necessary for sexual relief nor for sexual fulfillment, because these are two different things. A woman may masturbate for relief, but for fulfillment she needs a lover who is gentle and patient, a lover who appreciates not only her body but also the person she is, and knows how to show it; who savors the sensuality of her arms, the tiny hairs at the small of her back, the smooth, taut ligaments behind her knees, the gentle, giving pressure of her belly against his face, the sweet warmness at the back of her neck, the incessant beauty of the hundreds of areas of her body that are never discussed in sex novels and the how-to sex books. A real lover can make love to a woman every night for fifty years, and each time find new areas of pleasure to delight him, and her.
And therein lies sexual fulfillment for both, not in the highly touted orgasm, which simply feels extra good for a minute or so and relieves sexual tension, but in the sharing, the touching, the being together, the interaction of mutual warmth and trust, the tenderness, the giving, the respect, and even the humor, for it is these that truly satisfy.
Susan taught me that to a real lover orgasms are not the end of sex; they are simply a series of small hills traversed while on the way to a more distant, more worthy object. From the day that she straddled me on that kitchen chair, insistent upon pulling the sperm from me before I could satisfy her, I began to learn what love, both physical and spiritual, was really all about. Many evenings we made love for hours, without ever touching each other's sex organs. Sometimes we fell asleep doing this, and other times we finished by quickly relieving ourselves or each other, just to bring the tension level back to normal. Otherwise, orgasms wouldn't even have been important to us. On other occasions we would start by getting sexual relief quickly and then we would begin to make love; me with a soft penis and Susan already completely satisfied. Both of us had a sex-hormone level of zero, but we would make love, and it would be beautiful, with no objective left for either of us except love itself.
People who are easily capable of achieving orgasm should do so, keeping in mind that the feeling produced is only a temporary relief of tension and has nothing to do with either love or fulfillment. Women who cannot achieve orgasm and men who are impotent or who ejaculate prematurely should forget every book, every magazine article, every movie they have ever seen on the subject. People should love each other with all of the care, with all of the tenderness, with all of the compassion that is in them, fully, and without guilt or shame or embarrassment because they share their humanness with each other. They should live their lives together in happiness and pay no attention whatever to the hucksters who would have them believe that their relationship is inadequate if certain transitory physical sensations are not experienced. Then, with all artificial pressures removed, they should learn the joy of giving and of receiving true fulfillment.
It may take time.
But it's worth the trip.