First Impressions: The Science of Orgasm

Barry R. Komisaruk, Carlos Beyer-Flores, and Beverly Whipple. The Science of Orgasm. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

Sometime early in my graduate studies I gave a • r a t h e r  •  l o n g talk in which I argued that orgasm was a cultural creation, or something to that effect. That was three decades ago and, consequently, I don’t remember just what I argued. But I was certainly arguing that, whatever orgasm is, it doesn’t seem to be so biologically-given as we seem to think.

Why would I argue such a thing? After all, isn’t orgasm central to sex, and sex central to reproduction? No sex, no fertilization. No fertilization, no kids. No kids, no more people. No?

Well, no, not quite. Yes: no ejaculation, no fertilization. But is ejaculation always orgasmic? That depends on how you define orgasm. Consider these gender-disguised descriptions (from The Science of Orgasm, p. 5):

A sudden feeling of lightheadedness followed by an intense feeling of relief and elation. A rush. Intense muscular spasms of the whole body. Sense of euphoria followed by deep peace and relaxation.

The period when the orgasm takes place—a loss of a real feeling for the surroundings except for the other person. The movements are spontaneous and intense.

Basically it’s an enormous buildup of tension, anxiety, strain followed by a period of total oblivion to sensation then a tremendous expulsion of the buildup with a feeling of wonderfulness and relief.

If that’s what you have in mind when you think of orgasm, then, I gotta’ tell you, ejaculation is not necessarily like that. It can be, but by no means always. So do we count ejaculation as orgasm, or not? Well, it depends on how you want to define orgasm, no?

Yes. And there’s the rub. But let’s side-step that issue and consider only one issue that’s at stake. If ejaculation is not synonymous with male orgasm, then is it in fact the case, as commonsense seems to have it, that men achieve orgasm more readily than women? Maybe not, maybe not. And if that’s the case, then the commonsense sexual score card is all shot to hell, isn’t it?

That’s one of the things I had on my mind when I gave that talk three decades ago. That’s not the only thing, but it’s enough to give you a sense of what I was thinking about.

The question before me now is whether or not I could make a similar argument today. Three decades is a long time in today’s research environment. And, while a generally conservative political climate has put a damper on some lines of research, still, much has been learned in the last three decades.

And so I ordered The Science of Orgasm a week ago. Tt arrived two days ago, with a dust jacket tastefully designed to mimic a brown-paper wrapper. I’ve not had a chance to read the book, but I have leafed through it to get an impression of what the book’s like. My initial impression is favorable. There’s lots of stuff here, and the book seems readable enough.

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The first thing I did was check the index and the bibliography for Wilhelm Reich. Not there. Hmmm. If Reich had been mentioned, then I would have looked to see what the authors had to say about him; that would give me a quick ‘read’ on the book’s overall posture.

Why Reich? Yes I know that he wasted a lot of time worrying about some mythical orgone energy. But before he got lost in the pseudo-science he did realize that there was a distinction to be made between orgasm considered as a full-body ‘discharge’ and ejaculation, a ‘sneeze’ in the male genitals that results in the expulsion of semen. That distinction is problematic in umpteen different ways, but there is an issue there—one having to do with mind and body and, when you get down to it, being human (sexual metaphysics again)—and Reich’s insistence on it rippled through subsequent work on male sexuality through Kinsey in the 1950s and at least into the early 1970s if not beyond. In that it marches alongside the psychoanalytic distinction between clitoral and vaginal orgasms in women. As such it is one of the primary provocations in a long and inconclusive discussion about just what the hell do we mean by orgasm anyhow? [Note: see addendum added after posting.]

So that’s why I looked for signs of Reich. Not finding any, I browsed here and there and eventually caught this clause in Chapter 22, “Imaging the Brain during Sexual Arousal and Orgasm” (p. 256): “While there is no evidence of orgasm in female rats . . . “ That’s enough for now, the diagnostic phase of my reading.

Why’d that phrase catch my mind? Well, imagine that, instead, the authors had said there is no evidence of a seventh cervical vertebra female rats. Whoa! Seven cervical vertebrae is deeply embedded in the mammalian body-plan. As evolution is very conservative – conserving structures across related species – one would expect all mammals to be alike on such a basic matter. Indeed, all but a few mammalian species have seven cervical vertebrae. That the female rat, and only the female rat should have only six cervical vertebrae, that’s rather striking indeed, and just begs for some kind of explanation.

But orgasms are not physical structures, like neck bones; they aren’t part of our anatomy. They belong to our behavioral repertoire and our psychological repertoire. They don’t seem so rock-solid as anatomy. The apparent lack of orgasms in female rats tells us just that, that this behavioral trait doesn’t seem to be rock-solid across mammalian species.

Of course, we know nothing about the rat’s subjective experience. It’s not as though one can put on a Barry White voice and ask the rat, “Hey, baby, was it good for you?” And the quoted sentence goes on to assert that female rats do exhibit a pattern of brain activation that is, in some ways, similar to that observed in human females during orgasm. So maybe . . . .

Yes, maybe . . . Three decades ago when I surveyed the existing literature on primate sexual behavioral I found accounts of intercourse among some primate species—perhaps rhesus macaques—that depicted the females as being pretty blasé about it. The male would mount, pump away, ejaculate, and then leave. As for the female, she might as well have been reading the obituary page of the newspaper, or knitting baby booties, for all the interest and excitement she displayed about the activities of the male attached to her rump. That report may well be out-dated, but it’s what came to mind when I read about the apparently non-orgasmic female rat.

That makes me curious about orgasm across all mammalian species. Ejaculation is necessary, but orgasm, perhaps not. If not, then what?

And this brings me to the final chapter, number 24, “Consciousness and Orgasm.” Whoa! Another slippery fellow, consciousness. Here’s their second paragraph:

Where in the brain orgasm is produced is a fundamental and unanswered (but, we hope, not unanswerable!) question. If orgasm is a phenomenon of the brain that is more than the sum of the reafferent sensory activity generated from the smooth (involuntary) and striated (voluntary) muscles activated activated during orgasm—and we believe it probably is “more” than this—we are led inexorably to the question of which neurons generate our experience of pleasure and how they do so. The answer must lie in a realm requiring conceptualization beyond imaging technologies such as PET and fMRI.

Well, I should think so. The opening sentence of the third paragraph is a bit of a shocker: “We have used terms such as pleasure and pain loosely through the book, as if we know what they mean.” You mean we don’t? They don’t go on to say that. Instead they sorta’ evade the issue and simply assert that it thereby raises the question of consciousness, which it does.

I want to go back to pleasure and pain, as I spent some time on them in Beethoven’s Anvil, devoting chapter 4 to musical pleasure. What I argued in that chapter is that, while the brain does have pain centers and a pain system (pp. 86-87), the brain doesn’t have pleasure centers (pp. 82-86). Yes, there has often been talk of pleasure centers, but I argue that such talk misinterprets the observational evidence (citing three prominent neuroscientists, Walter Freeman, Jaak Panksepp, and Karl Pribram).

But pleasure is certainly real. If it’s not something that happens in discrete centers in the brain, what is it? I argue that pleasure is a function of all the activity in the nervous system. When everything is lined up an running smoothly, that’s pleasure, it feels good. When things aren’t running smoothly, we feel anxious. Anxiety, in this view, is more properly the opposite of pleasure than is pain.

That, in brief, is what I argued. I regard it as speculative. But, as far as I know, there is no consensus view on the neural foundations of pleasure. Speculation of one kind or another is all we’ve got.

With that in mind, let’s continue on. Or rather, back, as I want to look at that paragraph I quoted. It opens with the phrase, “Where in the brain orgasm is produced.” Given their subsequent discussion, the phrase would seem to designate some brain center where we FEEL orgasms, and perhaps other things as well. They conclude that sentence by asserting that such a place hasn’t been found. If I’m right about pleasure, there may not be such a place. Rather, orgasmic pleasure, like any other pleasure, is a function of how the whole system operates.

But that phrase could have another meaning. It could mean the brain center that organizes the behavior that results in orgasm. At the moment, pending a full reading, I’m guessing that they haven’t found that kind of center either. Rather, various brain centers are involved in orgasm in various ways, but none is the master organizer coordinating the activities of all the others. As far as I can tell, language and music are like that. Lots of structures are involved, but no one structure is calling all the shots for the others. So why not orgasm?

Is there no one brain structure calling the shots? Is it a group effort, a cooperative enterprise? Could it potentially involve all of our being?

* * * * *

So, I’ve not read the book in detail, but I’ve skimmed it and have some rough impressions. What about the question that prompted me to order the book in the first place? Is there room for cultural shaping this deep in our biology, in the moments when sperm is released into the vagina? Is orgasm as much a metaphysical as a physical act?

Addendum, added after posting: Reading around a bit more, I find this on page 12:

However, there is a big difference between the physical act of ejaculation and the feeling of orgasm. While seminal emission and ejaculation are essential to pregnancy, the feeling of orgasm is not. There is no inherent imperative that the feeling of orgasm must be linked to ejaculation. Indeed, ejaculation of viable, pregnancy-producing sperm can occur in men with spinal cord injury who do noe experience the feeling of orgasm.

The authors go on to discuss whether or not there is a biologically adaptive function for orgasm, male or female, and suggest that orgasmic pleasure "helps to reinforce the performance of sexual intercourse, thereby promoting procreation." Could be. What interests me is simply the distinction between a physical act, such as ejaculation, and orgasm as a feeling.