Authors: Tom Hickman
Emperors in ancient China had good reason to learn iron selfcontrol. They were required to keep 121 wives, a precise number thought to have magical properties, and to make love to ten of them every night (their sex secretary kept records), which would have been impossible had they climaxed on every coupling. In more recent times King Ibn-Saud of Saudia Arabia, the first Saudi king, practised the same control – he slept with three different women every night from the age of eleven until his death in 1953. Another was Prince Aly Khan, the international playboy son of the head of the Ismaili Muslims, who in the 1940s and ’50s had more than a thousand affairs in Europe and America and was reputed often to make love to a woman in his car as he was being driven between the flats of two others. Aly allowed himself to climax no more than twice a week for fear of debilitating himself.
In recent decades some European men have claimed to have learnt to become multi-orgasmic, to have several orgasms with the one erection and even to have aspired to true sexual ecstasy – an orgasmic state in which, it’s said, the orgasm flows through not just the genitals but the whole body, even the skin. Tantric sex devotees (notably pop singer Sting and his wife Trudie Styler) are said to be capable of making love for as long as five continuous hours, which most penis-and non-penis-possessors alike might find a tad excessive.
There are times when every penis-possessor wants to prolong his activity. Most usually put a brake on proceedings by stopping
thrusting
, asking their partner to stay still or by thinking of something else, the more mundane the better; or they take the temperature down a notch or two by withdrawing before starting over. More riskily some drive to the crisis point and then attempt to short-circuit their responses by squeezing the base of their penis, or pressing hard on the acupuncture point of the perineum midway between rectum and scrotum, or tugging their testicles to the bottom of the scrotum – the testicles rise up during the climactic process. All of these actions, known for centuries, may help to some degree. A few go so far as to don multiple condoms or a condom treated with a mild anaesthetic to dull sensation – which might be to defeat the object of the exercise. Walt Disney apparently sometimes packed his scrotum with ice to prolong lovemaking with his wife.
But whether a penis-possessor is a good lover who ensures his partner’s satisfaction, or not; or times his lovemaking so that infrequent happening, the mutual orgasm, can happen, or not; or for his own pleasure or hers or both he has held back – the moment comes when he cannot.
A myriad response has been set off in his body. His diastolic blood pressure, normally as low as 65, rises to around 160, systolic from 120 to around 250. His pulse rate, normally 70 to 80 beats a minute, reaches anything from 150 to 250. His breathing is harsh – a shortage of oxygen. His sense of smell and taste diminish, his hearing becomes impaired, his sense of vision narrows, so much so he may not be able to see objects on either side of him. His scrotum tightens, his testicles, swollen by vaso-congestion – often half their normal size again but in some men as much as double – elevate, in many pulling tight against the penis shaft, in a very, very few even disappearing into the abdominal cavity.
His thrusting becomes shorter, quicker, more furious. The first of his sex accessory organs, the Cowper’s glands, come into play. These pea-sized organs, immediately in front of the prostate,
secrete
a few droplets of an alkaline mucus to neutralise the urethra of any traces of urine, which is acidic and could damage the sperm that are about to follow this route. The droplets form at the urethral opening and may carry a few sperm, which can cause pregnancy – those who practice withdrawal before ejaculation may not be safe. (Not without irony was the secretion once called the ‘distillate of love’, as, not without irony, coitus interruptus in our time has been termed ‘Vatican roulette’.) Meanwhile, the prostate and the winglike seminal vesicles attached to it are pumping a milky protein-rich fluid into the firing chamber at the root of the urethra, a suspension medium to carry the sperm that the vas deferens ducts are simultaneously delivering from the comma-shaped epididymis on the top of each testicle, where they’ve matured. The sphincter between the prostate and the bladder clamps down, akin to a train track switching points, so that the semen doesn’t discharge into the bladder.
The prostate spasms.
5
Spinal nerves quiver.
Contractions ripple along the urethra.
And with the last thrusts, semen propels from the penis in three to eight spurts, ‘the sweetest sensation of a man’s life’ (
What Men Want)
.
The force with which semen exits the penis depends particularly on how powerfully the prostate spasms. Clinical monitoring of men during masturbation has shown that in most the semen merely exudes or spurts an inch or two. In some, however, particularly and unsurprisingly among the young, it can travel two or three feet; Kinsey recorded rare instances of adult males whose ejaculate shot six to eight feet.
Some penis-possessors equate a copious ejaculate with masculinity – just as they might equate a large penis – and consequently have an exaggerated idea about the volume of
their
own; they may even erroneously believe that the greater the volume the greater a woman’s pleasure. A Cruikshank cartoon depicting Sir William Hamilton, his wife Emma and her lover Horatio Nelson catches both notions neatly. As Sir William tries vainly to light a very small pipe and Nelson puffs vigorously on a pipe that is both phallic and reaches to the ground, Emma remarks: ‘Pho, the old man’s pipe is always out, but yours burns with full vigour.’ To which Britain’s naval hero replies: ‘Yes, I’ll give such a smoke I’ll pour a whole broadside into you.’
The 1970s pop group 10cc named themselves after what they thought was the average amount of ejaculate. In fact it’s 2 to 5cc – less than a spoonful.
Post-coitally, for a moment or for minutes, mildly or intensely, the bodies of the partners spasm. A woman’s orgasm may be a passing ripple or a thunderous tsunami outstripping a man’s, which is fairly constant, whatever the quality or intensity of the sex. At its most extreme, men are more likely to flail their limbs, groan or shout as if ‘suffering the extremes of torture’ (
An Analysis of Human Sexual Response
, Ruth and Edward Brecher) – they have very likely put in more effort, however brief, and they have greater muscle mass from which tension must be released. But some women go into the same violent convulsion, rolling their eyes, pounding, punching or kicking their partner, oblivious to pain themselves, flinging themselves feet or yards; a very few intensely reactive individuals lose consciousness for seconds or even much longer – small wonder that the French dub orgasm
la petite mort
(the little death).
So, as the return to normalcy after climax throws the physiological changes into reverse, the neuromuscular tensions abate, pulse and blood pressure subside, blood returns to the circulation and the penis shrinks, simply subsiding or retreating in a series of little hops, like someone crawling backwards, carefully – how was it for him, really? Or her?
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Only he or she
can
answer this and their answers might be different concerning the same occasion, whether the sex is perfunctory or prolonged, routine or rampant, rough or tender of a combination of some or all of these. Words are probably inadequate to capture the convolutions of sex. What words can say is that sex is likely to be at its best for one or the other or both when lust and love are in sync, the brain anaesthetised, the body saturated with feeling, warm skin in contact, limbs entangled, the universe in a lover’s eyes – a state in which, as Alex Comfort described it, ‘while the penis is emphatically his, it also belongs to both of them’.
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Save for the very young male who may maintain an erection for several minutes after orgasm and a very few penis-possessors, of any age, who may maintain full rigidity for up to half an hour and who, if sexual activity resumes, may achieve another orgasm, or several, without ejaculation, virtually all men enter a refractory period after sex during which they can’t respond to sexual stimuli of any kind. And during it, for a while, their penis is so sensitive that further stimulation of it is unpleasant and even painful. Nineteenth-century marriage manuals recommended that a man who reached orgasm before his wife should continue coital movements until she had been satisfied, but for virtually all men that is physically impossible. And here is one of the greatest mismatches between the sexes: women not only can carry on orgasming if stimulated to it, they don’t have a clear-cut non-reactive phase: their descent from the heights follows a fairly gentle curve – and they want to cuddle and talk. Men, on the other hand, whose exertions can sometimes be comparable to heavy labour or the effort of an athlete at full stretch, have fallen off the cliff.
‘I think men talk to women so they can sleep with them and women sleep with men so they can talk to them,’ the novelist Jay McInerney once observed. Of course men can try to be accommodating, to kiss and caress, to murmur sweet nothings;
and
sometimes they do, they do. It isn’t that they don’t have feelings. But unless they have a pressing reason for getting up, they have an overwhelming desire to go to sleep. They can’t help it: the hormone prolactin, released during ejaculation, strongly urges them to sleep so that energy-producing glycogen, depleted by intercourse, can be restored to their muscles. And, too, the more pleased a man is with his performance (his body is flooded with the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine), the more likely he is to drift away.
On benefits
The penis erect not only gives sexual gratification but, as numerous studies show, can contribute to the health and well-being of both giver and receiver. Various hormones and other chemicals released before and during orgasm help to lower blood pressure, decrease bad cholesterol, improve circulation, mediate pain, and ward off stress – one study suggests that intercourse can be as much as ten times more effective than Valium. Lovemaking can also help to repair tissue, promote bone growth and burn off calories (an average of 85–150 in 30 minutes of activity), as well as dampen food cravings by increasing an amphetamine that regulates appetite. And having sex can even improve brain power – intense intercourse encourages brain cells to grow new dendrites, the filaments attached to nerve cells that allow neurons to communicate with each other; there is some evidence that older people who are sexually active are less likely to have dementia.
Women gain additional benefits: intercourse helps to keep their skin elastic, meaning fewer wrinkles, stabilises their menstrual cycles and reduces hot flushes during the menopause – women who have sex age more slowly than women who don’t. But men gain additional benefits of their own. Regular sexual activity reduces the risk of prostate cancer and, in older
men
, the likelihood of developing benign enlargement of the prostate. And regular activity is an aid to their longevity: a study which tracked the mortality of about a thousand men over a decade concluded that those who had sex twice a week had half the risk of a fatal heart attack compared with those who had sex once a month.
THE ‘PRECIOUS SUBSTANCE’ REVISITED
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SCROTAL SKIN IS
thinner than the skin anywhere else on the body – indeed it’s translucent against a light shone on it from one side in the dark. A woman contributor to
FHM
magazine wrote that she liked to crawl under the duvet with a torch to watch ‘how the skin gently shifts and crawls, forming and reforming in mesmerising goose-pimply patterns’.
The cerebellum of the brain is ‘corrugated’, to increase its surface area and allow more cognitive RAM; the skin of the scrotal sac has similar corrugations (which in
Fanny Hill
Cleland dubiously described as ‘the only wrinkles that are known to please’) but with a different purpose: to assist heat loss and keep sperm at three degrees below body temperature. The corrugations almost double the scrotal sac’s surface – Rabelais poked fun at this when Panurge meets the noble Valentine Viadiere rubbing ‘his ballocks, spread out upon a table after the manner of a Spanish cloak’.
Inside the scrotum, the testicles produce spermatozoa at the astonishing rate of seventy million a day. They are the only human cells designed to travel outside the body and
constitute
only 1–5 per cent of ejaculate, the rest being the fluids from the prostate and seminal vesicles that give them the energy for their journey. To the touch, the testicles seem to be solid lumps, but these two hard glands are like the inside of golf balls, comprising a mass of tiny tubes where sperm are manufactured, a process that takes between two and three months. If unravelled and laid end to end the tubes inside a testicle would stretch over a quarter of a mile.
Sperm are continuously being shuttled from the testicles to the epididymis where they mature, gain motility and the biochemical properties to fertilise an egg, and are then held in a staging area awaiting orders. If not ejaculated they undergo autolysis: they dissolve and are reabsorbed into the body – so much for Baden Powell in the 1920s telling young males who masturbated that ‘You are throwing away the seed that has been handed down to you as a trust, instead of keeping it and ripening it for bringing a son to you later.’
Lifespan of a sperm: a month in the staging area, two days inside a woman’s body, perhaps two minutes on the sheets.
A healthy sperm consists of a head, a mid-piece, which is its powerhouse, and a tail. Inside the head, which is paddle-shaped, oval in outline but flat, is its package of DNA. The head wears a kind of cap containing enzymes to melt the membrane surrounding the female egg.
On ejaculation the oldest sperm are first out, but the youngest at the back – arriving in the later spurts – beat them to the cervical mucus. If a woman is not ovulating, the juices in her vagina, cervix, uterus and fallopian tubes are acidic, and acid kills sperm. But for the short period when she is ovulating, the normally thick juices clear and become alkaline, giving sperm the green light.