A recent national study in the US found that 95% of heterosexual men and 89% of gay men said they always climaxed during sex. For a start, the man is more likely to have had an orgasm than a woman. We can see the physiological process of orgasm: the tensing of muscles, the acceleration of heart-rate, the blood flowing to the genital area, and then the blessed feeling of release and pleasure. We can watch over 30 areas of the brain light up, including ones that govern emotion and joy, and release oxytocin, a feelgood chemical that enables bonding. (Nearly half of the 805 nurses questioned reported multiple orgasms.)īlood flow to the genitals, an important part of orgasm, can now be tracked. even when – as in one survey by Florida State University in 1991 – the respondents were nurses, chosen for their articulacy about body parts.
Before that, researchers were dependent on what women told them, always an inadequate method (as humans don’t tell the truth about sex). Or they said they did: proper analysis of even the single female orgasm has only become possible with the advent of diagnostic tools such as the fMRI scanner or EEG, which can see what happens in the brain. In the 1960s, studies by the superstars of sexology, Masters and Johnson, and others that found 14-16% of women had multiple orgasms. There are just nuggets of information for women: a paper from the 1930s establishing that women reported having several orgasms. The US National Institutes of Health only set up a programme to research vaginal health in 1992 – the male orgasm was first researched a century earlier.
But in the late 1970s, medical men were still having earnest discussions in the pages of medical journals about whether menstruating women emitted a poisonous substance called menotoxin, that made flowers wilt. Things are better than they were in the 19th century, when male gynaecologists examined women while standing behind a cloak. A few things that scientists and academics are still fiercely debating: how a female orgasm is triggered, what it does and what it’s for. We’re still in a black hole of not knowing very much about the sexual health and mechanisms of half the population. But dive any deeper into the science of women’s genitalia, and how they work, and there will be surprises. “A feeling of intense sexual pleasure that happens during sexual activity,” according to the NHS.