A note about delayed orgasms in mind [mind and body]

David Lodge, Why Some Men Find Orgasms Elusive, NYTimes, Mar. 7, 2025.

The opening paragraphs:

Most men, as many as 70 percent, say they reach orgasm quicker than they’d like. But there is an inverse problem that can set in with age: lasting too long.

For some men, reaching climax can take 30 minutes or more. Sex that lasts this long can be uncomfortable, painful and distressing for men and their partners.

Uh, yes.

Later:

Orgasms are basically a massive reflex, kind of like a “giant sneeze,” Dr. Rubin said. Just one requiring a “perfect genital-brain connection.”

The process starts with visual, mental or physical sexual stimulation, triggering the brain to release dopamine, which increases excitement. After sufficient stimulation, the brain releases a surge of pleasure-inducing chemicals, like oxytocin, creating the sensation we think of as an orgasm.

For most men, ejaculation occurs at the same time, “but they are separate processes,” said Dr. Alan Shindel, a urologist based in San Francisco. While orgasm mostly happens in the brain, ejaculation is a series of involuntary muscle contractions.

Complications affecting the genitals, pelvic floor muscles, spinal cord and brain can make orgasms premature, delayed, muted or even painful, Dr. Rubin said. Given the complexity involved, she said, “it’s actually amazing that more things don’t go wrong.”

I like the sneeze metaphor.

What got my attention is this: “While orgasm mostly happens in the brain, ejaculation is a series of involuntary muscle contractions.” Decades ago Wilhelm Reich argued that ejaculation is not necessarily orgasmic. He had trouble getting that idea accepted, among other things, and in any event his career ended in disaster. But Shindel's statement is consistent with Reich's believe.

On a different note, as it were, I have described how trumpet players sometimes experience something that feels somewhat like an organism, but which has nothing to do with the genitals, at least as far as I can tell. The physiological mechanisms are quite different, having to do with blood flow to the brain. Whether or not oxytocin is involved, I have no idea. But we are talking about music and music may well induce oxytocin secretion; that's what the late Walter Freeman believed.

Lodge’s article goes on to discuss possible causes of delayed orgasm in men, including medications, neurological issues, “partner-related concerns,” by which he the woman experiencing pain or “differences in libido, preferred types of sex acts and performance expectations,” and “psychological factors,” such as “depression, anxiety and stress.” That last category is the most interesting one from my perhaps peculiar point of view. That’s the sort of thing Reich was interested in as well.

The article ends with some short notes on treatments.

The ‘Orgasm Gap’ Isn’t Going Away for Straight Women

Amanda N Gesselman, Margaret Bennett-Brown, Simon Dubé, Ellen M Kaufman, Jessica T Campbell, Justin R Garcia, The lifelong orgasm gap: exploring age’s impact on orgasm rates, Sexual Medicine, Volume 12, Issue 3, June 2024, qfae042, https://doi.org/10.1093/sexmed/qfae042

Abstract

Background

Research demonstrates significant gender- and sexual orientation–based differences in orgasm rates from sexual intercourse; however, this “orgasm gap” has not been studied with respect to age.

Aim

The study sought to examine age-related disparities in orgasm rates from sexual intercourse by gender and sexual orientation.

Methods

A survey sample of 24 752 adults from the United States, ranging in age from 18 to 100 years. Data were collected across 8 cross-sectional surveys between 2015 and 2023.

Outcomes

Participants reported their average rate of orgasm during sexual intercourse, from 0% to 100%.

Results

Orgasm rate was associated with age but with minimal effect size. In all age groups, men reported higher rates of orgasm than did women. Men’s orgasm rates ranged from 70% to 85%, while women’s ranged from 46% to 58%. Men reported orgasm rates between 22% and 30% higher than women’s rates. Sexual orientation impacted orgasm rates by gender but not uniformly across age groups.

Clinical Translation

The persistence of the orgasm gap across ages necessitates a tailored approach in clinical practice and education, focusing on inclusive sexual health discussions, addressing the unique challenges of sexual minorities and aging, and emphasizing mutual satisfaction to promote sexual well-being for all.

Strengths and Limitations

This study is the first to examine the orgasm gap with respect to age, and does so in a large, diverse sample. Findings are limited by methodology, including single-item assessments of orgasm and a sample of single adults.

Conclusion

This study revealed enduring disparities in orgasm rates from sexual intercourse, likely resulting from many factors, including sociocultural norms and inadequate sex education.

The New York Times has an article about the study: Catherine Pearson, The ‘Orgasm Gap’ Isn’t Going Away for Straight Women, August 6, 2024.

Further Impressions: Orgasm and Beyond

I'm bumping this to the head of the queue on general principle. This is from the first year of the blog (August 29, 2010). I'd completely forgotten about this. Nice to be reminded. Here's my first post on the book.

* * * * *

 

I’ve been now reading through The Science of Orgasm from the beginning, but lightly. It’s densely packed with information; real understanding would come slowly. Further, it’s information of different kinds, some technical, some not. And the technical information, well, for example, there’s a good deal about neurotransmitters and hormones, which are at the outer limit of my understanding the and nervous system and bodily regulation and activity. They don’t go into them too deeply, because they can’t. To get deeper, they’d start plunging into molecular biology and biochemistry, and that stuff gets very technical very quickly.

So that’s one thing.

Here’s another: I first started thinking about sexuality I was strongly influenced by a diffuse body of thinking that saw Western culture as suffering from sexual repression. What to do about that? Why let it all hang out. But that didn’t work out like it was supposed to.

Why do I mention this? Because there’s a fair amount of survey information in the book, mostly about attitudes and experiences of adults in Western societies, and I’d think most of these surveys were conducted in the USA or perhaps Western Europe; that’s not entirely clear. And there’s a part of me that seems to be saying: But what’s sex like in a state of nature? And as soon as I say that I have to say: but there is no state of nature, just different cultural experiences.

Thus sexuality is a good test case for what’s known as evolutionary psychology these days. On the one hand, there can be no doubt that sexual behavioral is biologically necessary. On the other hand, there’s the orgasm, the biology and psychology of which are as yet obscure and perhaps beyond the reductive wing of EP.

With that, let’s return to the passage I quoted in the addendum to my first post. It’s from 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 not experience the feeling of orgasm.

So, at this early point in the book the authors have distinguished between ejaculation and orgasmic feeling. In chapter 19, “Atypical Orgasms,” they come very close to thinking of sexual orgasm as a family of experiences within a larger class of experiences sometimes known as peak experiences, the term Abraham Maslow gave to them:

Peak experiences are described by Maslow as especially joyous and exciting moments in life, involving sudden feelings of intense happiness and well-being, wonder and awe, and possibly also involving an awareness of transcendental unity or knowledge of higher truth (as though perceiving the world from an altered, and often vastly profound and awe-inspiring perspective). They usually come on suddenly and are often inspired by deep meditation, intense feelings of love, exposure to great art or music, or the overwhelming beauty of nature.

Before going there, however, let’s return to more mundane matters for a moment. It would be nice to have a behavioral reference point for female sexual behavior that is as specific as ejaculation is for male sexual behavior. As far as I can tell, there isn’t one, which is why, I suspect, that female sexual experience has seemed more problematic than male. Because men ejaculation, we can say, ‘yeah, it’s happened,’ whenever a man ejaculates. Without that marker, it’s harder for a woman to know whether or not it’s happened. If by ‘it’ we mean orgasm, and male orgasm isn’t equivalent to ejaculation, then perhaps it is as elusive, or not, for men as for women. Which is where I began over thirty years ago.

It turns out that the physiology of that marker is elusive. In Chapter 3, “Bodily Changes at Orgasm,” we learn (p. 24):

In a review published in 2005, Levin stated that “remarkably, a detailed, non-disputed physio-anatomical description of the mechanism of human ejaculation has still to be produced.” Two main questions have evidently not been resolved. How exactly are the spurts of semen produced? And, is the pleasurable sensation of orgasm a consequence of the sensory activity produced by the ejaculation mechanics, or is it primarily a brain phenomenon that is additively and pleasantly enhanced by the sensory activity generated by the expulsive flow of semen at ejaculation?

On the first question, I’d think that one day we’ll have an answer. The second question, involving pleasure as it does, is rather more interesting. Given my own belief that pleasure is a function of overall activity in the nervous system I think their second alternative is more likely correct.

And, by the time Chapter 11, “The Effects of Medication,” rolls around, Komisaruk, Beyer-Flores, and Whipple are singing the holistic song (p. 123):

Kinsey and his colleagues stated in 1953 that sexual arousal and orgasm involve the entire nervous system and thus all parts of the body. Although this statement may seem exaggerated, recent studies of brain activity by functional magnetic resonance imaging . . . and positron emission tomography . . . indicate that in both men and women, a large number of brain structures are activated, others inactivated, during orgasm. This reveals the complexity of the neural circuits participating in orgasm and the many neurotransmitters and neuromodulators that could be involved.

Now we’re ready to look at atypical orgasms, by which the authors mean “orgasms that occur under atypical conditions, apparently independent of genital stimulation (which generates ‘typical orgasms’)” (p. 199). They consider orgasmic feelings while dreaming, orgasmic feelings in people with spinal cord injuries, and orgasmic feelings as the result of electrical and chemical stimulation of the brain and electrical stimulation of the spine. And then there’s epilepsy (p. 214):

Much of what is known about how the brain produces orgasms is based on studies of epileptic seizures. There are numerous reports of men and women who describe orgasmic feelings just before the onset of an epileptic seizure. This experience has been termed an “orgasmic aura.”

After discussing several cases we get to this key paragraph (p. 216):

The reports that epileptic seizures can generate orgasmlike feelings suggest a basic commonality between the two phenomena. Epileptic seizures are characterized by abnormal synchronous activation of large numbers of neurons, followed by their synchronous inactivation, then shortly by the synchronous reactivation. It is likely that the rhythmical and voluntary movement-generated timing of genital stimulation that ultimately generates orgasm also produces synchronous activation of large numbers of brain neurons, although in a more precisely regulated pattern. . . . Thus, the mass neuronal activation that characterizes an epileptic seizure bears a resemblance to the mass neuronal activation that characterizes orgasm. It is perhaps this similarity that can generate the orgasmlike feeling during epileptic seizures.

Makes sense to me. But then, I didn’t need to be convinced. Discussion of epileptic seizures is common in the literature on altered states of consciousness, as is the similarity between sexual orgasm, epileptic auras, and altered states.

I’m not quite done with this topic, nor the book, but I don’t quite know where I’m going to go next. For now, let me end this post with a statement from my post on sexual metaphysics:

While ecstasy and transcendence are available anytime, anywhere, while doing anything — so sayeth the Zen masters ZAP! — they’re most likely to sneak up on us during sex. If so, then, one would like to know why.

That WHY? is as much a question about the nervous system in general, and its curious relationship to the mind, as it is about sex.

Maestero, the marriage, really? [Media Notes 102b]

I feel I’ve got to say a bit more about Maestro, as my previous post said a lot about Bernstein the musician, but little about his marriage to Felicia Montealegre. This conversation between Bradley Cooper and Steven Spielberg, who produced the film (along with five others), goes through all that.

At about 4:16 Spielberg says that this is not a standard biopic, which is what he would have done if he’d directed:

This is an anatomy of a marriage and also an anatomy of looking into yourself. How do you represent yourself to yourself and to the world, even though you and Felicia and your family, eventually, knew exactly who Leonard Bernstein was. So this became a story about a marriage.

Well, if it’s an anatomy of a marriage, then why not make just that film? Get rid of the Great Lenny-the-Musician story and concentrate on the marriage. Make it a complete fiction, one about a gay man gets married really loves her but has affairs with men they have three wonderful kids loving family closeted life Oh it’s so complicated. Why not make that film?

It could be done, of course, but the reason we care about this marriage is because it is the marriage of a man, a musician, who led a very public life. As Cooper says later in the interview, Bernstein was “probably the most [visible musician] in the 20th century.” Not sure what James Brown or the Beatles would say about that, but putting that aside, Bernstein did have a public life, it was the public life of a very charismatic musician. As Spielberg said, it’s about how “you represent yourself to yourself and to the world.” And to the world. It’s both, the private and the public, a duality Bernstein emphasized in a famous interview, re-staged for the movie, where he contrasted the two, finally declaring himself to be, half in jest, schizophrenic. He’s the prototypical 20th century schizoid man.

Now, back to the music. Starting at about three minutes into the interview Cooper explains how he’d asked Santa Claus for a baton when he was eight because he was fascinated with the idea of making music by waving your hands around. At about 17 minutes we learn that, on two occasions, Cooper was with Gustavo Dudamel when he rehearsed and performed Mahler’s Second Symphony, the one featured in the movie, which Cooper conducted live with the London Symphony over a two-day shoot. He also spent 4 nights a week for 3 ½ years watching Bernstein tapes in the library of the New York Philharmonic. That’s a lot of preparation for 6:23 seconds of film.

No, the music is central to the film, as important as the marriage. To the extent that the film has a plot, it’s provided by the marriage. But the marriage winds its way around the music.

As for the music, here’s why Bernstein is so important. This is a passage from Helen Epstein, Music Talks: Conversations with Musicians (1987) p. 52, where Bernstein is talking with students at Tanglewood:

I don’t know whether any of you have experienced that but it’s what everyone in the world is always searching for. When it happens in conducting, it happens because you identify so completely with the composer, you’ve studied him so intently, that it’s as though you’ve written the piece yourself. You completely forget who you are or where you are and you write the piece right there. You just make it up as though you never heard it before. Because you become that composer.

I always know when such a thing has happened because it takes me so long to come back. It takes four or five minutes to know what city I’m in, who the orchestra is, who are the people making all that noise behind me, who am I? It’s a very great experience and it doesn’t happen often enough. Ideally it should happen every time, but it happens about as often in conducting as in any other department where you lose ego. Schopenhauer said that music was the only art in which this could happen and that art was the only area of life in which it could happen. Schopenhauer was wrong. It can happen in religious ecstasy or meditation. It can happen in orgasm when you are with someone you love.

BTW, I’ve collected a bunch of similar anecdotes in, Emotion and Magic in Musical Performance, 50 pages worth.

Cross cultural expression of pain and pleasure

Chaona Chen, Carlos Crivelli, Oliver G. B. Garrod, Philippe G. Schyns, José-Miguel Fernández-Dols, and Rachael E. Jack, Distinct facial expressions represent pain and pleasure across cultures, PNAS published ahead of print October 8, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1807862115.

Significance

Humans often use facial expressions to communicate social messages. However, observational studies report that people experiencing pain or orgasm produce facial expressions that are indistinguishable, which questions their role as an effective tool for communication. Here, we investigate this counterintuitive finding using a new data-driven approach to model the mental representations of facial expressions of pain and orgasm in individuals from two different cultures. Using complementary analyses, we show that representations of pain and orgasm are distinct in each culture. We also show that pain is represented with similar face movements across cultures, whereas orgasm shows differences. Our findings therefore inform understanding of the possible communicative role of facial expressions of pain and orgasm, and how culture could shape their representation.

Abstract

Real-world studies show that the facial expressions produced during pain and orgasm—two different and intense affective experiences—are virtually indistinguishable. However, this finding is counterintuitive, because facial expressions are widely considered to be a powerful tool for social interaction. Consequently, debate continues as to whether the facial expressions of these extreme positive and negative affective states serve a communicative function. Here, we address this debate from a novel angle by modeling the mental representations of dynamic facial expressions of pain and orgasm in 40 observers in each of two cultures (Western, East Asian) using a data-driven method. Using a complementary approach of machine learning, an information-theoretic analysis, and a human perceptual discrimination task, we show that mental representations of pain and orgasm are physically and perceptually distinct in each culture. Cross-cultural comparisons also revealed that pain is represented by similar face movements across cultures, whereas orgasm showed distinct cultural accents. Together, our data show that mental representations of the facial expressions of pain and orgasm are distinct, which questions their nondiagnosticity and instead suggests they could be used for communicative purposes. Our results also highlight the potential role of cultural and perceptual factors in shaping the mental representation of these facial expressions. We discuss new research directions to further explore their relationship to the production of facial expressions.

Family Problems: From Greene to Shakespeare

This is revised and adapted, from a post I first published at The Valve and have since republished in a working paper which is available at my SSRN page HERE and also at Academia.edu.  

I want to examine two literary texts, a familiar one and a strange one. The familiar text I have in mind is Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. The strange one is Robert Greene’s Pandosto. While they are very different at the level of language—words, phrases, and sentences—at the level of plot and character they are much alike. That’s what makes the comparison interesting. You can line them up, character for character, and incident for incident, and they match pretty well. But not completely. It’s those few differences that made the comparison an interesting one.

Family Problems in the Early Modern Era

Greene first published Pandosto: The Triumph of Time in 1592 while The Winter’s Tale was written in 1611, almost twenty years later. The similarities between the two are so striking that it is all but certain that Shakespeare derived his plot from Greene’s. But they are not quite the same. In fact, since The Winter’s Tale ends in happy triumph while Pandosto’s ending is, at best, bittersweet – Pandosto commits suicide even though the young lovers are united – one might reasonably judge them to be quite different. That is what makes these two texts so interesting. 

This table lays out the correspondence between the characters in the two texts:

Neutral           Pandosto       Winter’s  Tale
King              Pandosto       Leonates
Queen             Bellaria       Hermione
King’s son        Garinter       Mamillius
King’s daughter   Fawnia         Perdita
King’s Friend     Egistus        Polixenes
Friend’s son      Dorastus       Florizel
Shepherd          Porrus         Old shepherd

The first part of the story goes like this: The King and Queen have been married for a number of years and have a son. The King’s childhood friend is visiting and the King decides that his wife, the Queen, has been having an affair with this Friend, who is also a king. The Queen denies it as does his kingly friend, but the King is convinced they’re lying. The Friend leaves and the Queen is imprisoned. A messenger is sent to consult an oracle on whether or not the Queen is guilty. In Pandosto, it is the Queen who requests this; in Winter's it is the King. Meanwhile, the Queen gives birth to a daughter who is brought before the King. The King denies his daughter. The infant daughter is set adrift in the ocean. Meanwhile, the messenger returns from the oracle and declares the Queen to be innocent. The son dies and, upon hearing that news, the Queen faints. In Pandosto Bellaria, the Queen, dies. In Winter’s Hermione does not, she hides away. The audience knows this but Leontes, the King, does not.

In Greene, the oracle says:

[Para. 29] The Oracle.
 Suspition is no proofe: Jealousie is an unequall judge: Bellaria is chast: Egistus blameless: Franion a true subject: Pandosto threacherous: his babe an innocent, and the King shall live without an heire: if that which is lost be not founde.

In Shakespeare, this:

Officer

[Reads] Hermione is chaste;

Polixenes blameless; Camillo a true subject; Leontes

a jealous tyrant; his innocent babe truly begotten;

and the king shall live without an heir, if that

which is lost be not found.

Notice that Shakespeare retained the phrase, “the king shall live without an heir, if that which is lost be not found.” This seems quite important, both for its import—the continuity of the King’s bloodline—and for its form, the phraseology is the same. If the King is without heir, then his family is at an end.

In both stories the daughter miraculously ends up in the country of the King’s childhood friend where she’s raised by an old Shepherd and his wife. In time the daughter matures and falls in love with a prince, who returns her love. The prince is none other than son to the King’s childhood friend. The prince’s father finds out about his beloved and forbids them to marry; after all, she is but a shepherd’s daughter. So the prince and the daughter decide to flee the country. They end up back in the King’s land where the daughter’s true identity is discovered. Now that she is known to be of noble birth, the marriage can proceed. 

In Pandosto, the King commits suicide. The Winter’s Tale ends quite differently. Paulina has Hermione mount a pedestal and brings her out of hiding as a mere statue. And then the statue comes alive. And all are amazed. The King is thus reunited with his Queen and his daughter is about to marry her prince.

That’s most, but not all, of the pattern that interests me. Obviously, Pandosto cannot be reunited with Bellaria because she is dead. That is, when Shakespeare allowed the queen to live, but in hiding, he created an option not open to Greene. When Greene had Belleria die he blocked any possibility of Pandosto being reunited with her.

 

But why does he have Pandosto commit suicide? Couldn’t he have him remarry, have another child? Or kill him off in battle? Well, I suppose he could have—for all I know he may have considered such possibilities. All we know is what’s in the text we’ve got. 

And in that text Pandosto commits suicide out of shame, in part over the compounded mistakes he made long ago. But there is another reason for shame. When he first saw his daughter, whom he did not recognize as such, he experienced sexual desire for the young woman, and even propositioned her. Thus, the desire:

[Para. 101] Having thus hardly handled the supposed Trapalonians, Pandosto contrarie to his aged yeares began to be somewhat tickled with the beauty of Fawnia, in so much that hee could take no rest, but cast in his old head a thousand new devises: at last he fell into these thoughtes.

The proposition:

[Para. 105] Fawnia, I commend thy beauty and wit, and now pittie thy distresse and want: but if you will forsake Sir Meleagrus [Dorastus in disguise], whose poverty though a Knight, is not able to maintaine an estate aunswerable to thy beauty, and yeld thy consent to Pandosto, I wil both increase thee with dignities and riches.

She refuses him. 

The point is that he had the desire, and he made public expression of it. One of reasons he gave for his suicide was thus “that contrarie to the law of nature hee had lusted after his owne Daughter.”

And that’s the difference that I find most intriguing. In Winter’s Leontes does not proposition Perdita, nor does he even formulate explicit sexual desire for her. There is a hint of such desire in words he speaks upon first seeing her, but only a hint (act 5, scene 1, near the end): 

PAULINA

Sir, my liege,

Your eye hath too much youth in't: not a month

'Fore your queen died, she was more worth such gazes

Than what you look on now.

LEONTES

I thought of her,

Even in these looks I made.

But nothing comes of this. If Leontes felt sexual desire for Perdita, he gave no public expression of it, much less asked for her hand in marriage. Thus, when the truth was revealed, he was able to take pleasure in regaining his daughter, having a son-in-law, and in regaining his wife.

We have now counted four plot differences between Pandosto and The Winter’s Tale: 

1. Bellaria dies; Hermione does not.
2. Pandosto propositions Fawnia; Leontes does not proposition Perdita.
3. Pandosto is overcome with shame at having desired his daughter (though he gave up the pursuit when he knew who she was) and his shame drives him to suicide. Leontes has nothing to be ashamed of in his relationship to his daughter.
4. Pandosto is not reunited with Bellaria; Leonates and Hermione are reunited.

It is my intuition, my contention, that these four differences follow from a single factor in the logic that underlies the actions in these two stories. These are not independent plot points. There is, as I’ve said, an obvious connection between 1 and 4. If the Queen is dead, then the King cannot be reunited with her.  But what connects them with 2 and 3?

A Look into the Future

Before attempting an answer, I need to 1) emphasize an incident from the story that I had passed over without comment and 2) supply some socio-historical context. The incident concerns the King’s son, Garinter in Pandosto, Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale. In both stories he dies. News of his death reaches the King and Queen just as they’ve heard the oracle’s proclamation. As I’ve already indicated, it’s this news that distresses the two Queens, causing one to faint and the other to die. Greene gives no reason for the boy’s death, but Shakespeare does: “The prince your son, with mere conceit and fear/ Of the queen's speed, is gone” (III.ii. 144-145).

What’s the significance of the boy’s death? If the point of marriage is to forge an alliance and to produce an heir, and that certainly was the point of aristocratic marriage in Shakespeare’s day (our bit of context), then the death of the only son brings an end to the lineage and weakens the alliance with the spouse’s clan. Unless, of course, another male heir can be produced. The death of the wife forecloses that possibility. Unless, of course, the man can find another wife and produce an heir with her, though this might displease the first wife’s clan.

In Greene’s version of the story, then, we can read the King’s lust for the young woman, who just happens to be his daughter though he doesn’t know it, as also being consistent with a desire to continue his lineage by producing a male heir, though he says nothing about begetting an heir. In any event it shows that he hasn’t learned anything in the years since his wife died. Back then he let his imagination get away with him and lost his wife and son in consequence. Now he lets his libido run riot in his brain and again finds himself deeply in the wrong.

In Shakespeare’s version, though...Let’s step out of time for a moment.

Let us imagine, counter-factually, that marriage was conceived and lived differently in Shakespeare’s day, that it wasn’t all about alliance and lineage. Consider this passage from Milton's Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, published in 1644:

...God in the first ordaining of marriage taught us to what end he did it, in words expressly implying the apt and cheerful conversation of man with woman, to comfort and refresh him against the evil of solitary life, not mentioning the purpose of generation till afterwards, as being but a secondary end in dignity.

This conception was not commonplace in Milton's time, much less Shakespeare's - recall the many references to procreation which are part of the explicit ideology of marriage in Shakespeare. But we can find a similar sentiment from Shakespeare's time, in John Donne's "The Extasie." Using sexual orgasm as his vehicle, and after asserting that "Wee see by this, it was not sexe," Donne goes on to assert that

When love, with one another so

         Interanimates two soules,

That abler soule, which thence doth flow,

         Defects of lonelinesse controules.

Like Milton, Donne is concerned with loneliness, the evil of solitary life. That is a question of attachment, not of sexuality. Yet the fact that Donne used sexuality as his poetic vehicle suggests that what he was after was a union of sexuality and attachment, of affection.

If that’s where we are, then Shakespeare’s version of the story is looking more interesting. Not only does it affirm the intrinsic importance of the relationship between man and wife by having Hermione return at the end, almost as a goddess on her pedestal, but it does so in a way that all but explicitly rejects procreation to extend the lineage as the end of marriage. Leontes’ lineage is over; he will not have a male heir to take over the kingdom. But he’s got his beloved wife back. 

Obviously, if this is our story, then incestuous desire from father to daughter would just be awkward. Oh I suppose Shakespeare could play it as Greene did, with the hot glances and the proposition. Then he could have Leontes get flummoxed and embarrassed and fall all over himself with a long and confused speech about what a sinful man he is and how sorry he is and so forth. But that would only serve to emphasize his illicit lust and so make it that much more difficult to put Hermione on that pedestal and bring her out for the happy ending. So Shakespeare has Leontes cool his jets.

The love between Long Lost Daughter and Son of Long Estranged Friend can now serve as a bridge between the husband and his estranged wife AND his childhood friend into the bargain. They walk across the bridge and Shakespeare gets his happy ending. And so do we.

We now, after all this work, have a way of thinking about the connection between the King-Queen relationship (1 and 4 above) and the King-Daughter relationship (2 and 3 above). The King’s suspicion of his wife is excessive; he’s out of control. In Greene’s story the King remains that way so that when, years later, he sees a comely young woman, who happens to be his daughter, he again lets his emotions get the better of him. When he learns the truth, more excess. Though he didn’t actually commit incest with her, he’s so overcome with shame that he kills himself. What a waste.

In Shakespeare’s version, the King changes, perhaps through years of mourning. When his daughter appears, he admires her beauty and even notes her similarity to his deceased (he thinks) wife. But that’s as far as it goes. Thus when he learns the young woman’s identity he has no reason to be ashamed. On the contrary, he can be happy that what’s lost has been found, and that she can reunite him with his old friend, Polixenes, whom he’d wronged many years ago.

For being so much alike, these two stories are quite different. 

Now, imagine you’re living a prosperous middle-class life in, say, the early 18th century. You love your spouse and kids, you understand that, yes, it’s important to have heirs, but you also feel, somehow in a way you can’t quite grasp, the your relationship with your spouse is very important. Even as important as leaving heirs, maybe…uh oh! dangerous ground here…even a bit more important. Who’s going to support you, Greene or Shakespeare? Who’s going to help you sort out these feelings?

What’s Going On?

THAT, I believe, is what’s really going on between these two texts, a major change in the emotional tenor of family life. But I certainly can’t present a strong argument in a blog post, and I’ve been working on this one for a long time. Nor, alas, anywhere else.

The argument I’d like to present would have two aspects, one of them looks to socio-historical context and the other looks to the mind and to the intrinsic integrity and elasticity of ‘texts.’ The contextual aspect would be about how people in fact live their marriages. We know that the social construction of marriage has changed over time, and that it was changing in Shakespeare’s time, but slowly. This kind of change doesn’t happen over night. 

In a paper I published some years ago (At the Edge of the Modern, or Why is Prospero Shakespeare’s Greatest Creation?) I follow Lawrence Stone on this. In The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500 – 1800 he argues that the English family was reconstructed to accommodate affective individualism during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Affective individualism stressed autonomy, privacy, and long-term emotional commitment. This reconstruction happened in three over-lapping phases from the Open Lineage Family (1450 - 1700), to the Restricted Patriarchal Nuclear Family (1550 - 1700), and finally to the closed Domesticated Nuclear Family (1640 - 1800) - note the overlap in the dates. The evolution is gradual and affects different strata of society in different ways. 

Greene and Shakespeare are writing in the middle of this evolution. Green wrote a text that speaks to the emotional structure of the Open Lineage Family while Shakespeare, somehow anticipated Milton’s sentiment, and wrote a text that’s neither here nor there in the Open Lineage context—and may, in fact, be a bit odd—but that’s on the money for the Domesticated Nuclear Family. His text made the emotional arrangements of that family available, in effect, for trial runs.

But just what IS going on in the mind? That is, how do plays accomplish this magic? What are the concepts we’re going to use to craft an account? In particular, what terms will be commensurate with the words and events in the play?

We are now back where Lévi-Strauss was when confronted with all those myths, so alike one another overall, but pair by pair, different and different in apparently systematic and coordinated ways. While I’ve talked my way through the parallels between the plays and how they are consistent to different conceptions of marriage it’s not clear that that explains much even if you are willing to take those stories at face value which, of course, I am prepared to do, at least for the duration of this essay. Where does the original jealously come from in the first place? And why make that the centerpiece of a play? 

I deal with that question in the essay I mentioned above, At the Edge of the Modern, and I deal with it in psychoanalytic terms, but also the terms of contemporary evolutionary psychology. There I recount evidence that sexuality is handled by one behavioral system while attachment and affection are handled by a different and independent system. Coordinating these two systems so that they converge on one and the same object—“a virgin/ whom he has whored,” to quote William Carlos Williams, Patterson V—seems to be difficult and a great deal of cultural energy must be expended on it.

I won’t repeat that material here as THAT’s not quite the point of this particular exercise. My point is simply that there’s something biological going on, that it’s complicated, and we have to take account of it. And we’re going to need some kind of computational model both to explicate the biology—as a set of innate programs, if you will—and to organize it into stories. 

What I have in mind is that, for example, when the son dies, a switch gets tripped in the reader’s mind, when Pandosto propositions Fawnia a different switch gets tripped, and when Hermione comes down from her pedestal, that’s a different switch as well. What are these switches, and just how do they get tripped? How are they interlocked so that tripping one switch disables another?

Those are the kinds of questions we’ll need to answer in order more deeply to understand how these stories work, both discursively in real time, and how many tellings over social time and space provide a means through which people reorganize their personal, emotional, and social lives. While we know enough about psychology and computation to think about such models, we certainly don’t have any at hand.

Toward a Morphology of Texts

But we do have texts at hand, and we can certainly describe and analyze them in terms similar to those I’ve used with Pandosto and The Winter’s Tale. I’ve already done some work comparing The Winter’s Tale with Othello, a tragedy, and Much Ado about Nothing, a comedy (At the Edge of the Modern). Those other two plays also feature a man who mistakenly believes that his beloved is unfaithful to him. In the comedy the mistake happens between betrothal and the marriage ceremony; in the tragedy it happens between the ceremony and the consummation; and in the romance it happens after the marriage has born an heir. In the comedy the protagonist is a junior officer; in the tragedy he’s a senior commander; and in the romance he’s the king. Is there a pattern here? If so, how does it work? 

Let's consider another case of the two-generation plot: Wuthering Heights. Roughly speaking, the first generation story centers on a close relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, who were raised as brother and sister. Since there is no genetic relationship between them it would have been permissible for them to marry. But they did not. Rather, they became painfully estranged at adolescence and parted ways. In time, Catherine died in childbirth, thus eliminating any (apparent) possibility of a reconciliation with Heathcliff. Her daughter, Catherine Linton, eventually marries Hareton Earnshaw (they are cousins), and that marriage allows Heathcliff to die a happy man. That is to say, Heathcliff is like Pandosto in that he dies at the end of the story, but he is like Leontes in that he is happy at the end. The actual configuration of relationships is rather more complicated than that, there are more players, and another marriage. Those details are important, but more than I need to spell out here and now.

But there is another matter that must be mentioned. Wuthering Heights displays a complex narrative strategy that is quite unlike either Greene’s comparatively simple novella or Shakespeare’s four romances. The stories in Wuthering Heights are presented to the reader through a complex double narration. Nelly Dean lives in the world of the Earnshaws and the Lintons, observing all, and even meddling a bit. She narrates those events to Mr. Lockwood, an outsider, and he, in turn, narrates them to us. I am, by way of general principle, sure that this narrative strategy is crucial to the novel’s effects. Just how this narrative strategy bears on the intricate events in the two-generation plot, I haven’t got a clue.

I am, however, confident that we can unravel them, slowly, carefully. We will have to pay close attention to the text—closer even than so-called close reading—and to rest content with good descriptive and analytical work, as generations of naturalists were able to content themselves with accurate analysis and description of flora and fauna. If we undertake this kind of work we’re not going to be answering the Big Questions in every essay. More accurately, we wont’ be parroting and reconfiguring The Answer provided by some Star Critic so that it fits the text under discussion.

What I’m proposing, and what I’ve been doing for some time now, is a way of proceeding that isn’t obsessed with ferreting out hidden meanings. Nothing’s hidden, but there’s much that we don’t understand, mechanisms we can’t see directly. But we have no hope of understanding those mechanisms if we cannot even describe their traces, that is, the texts they produce. We must learn more effective descriptive methods, and nothing is so effective as comparing texts to highlight similarities and differences. We all know that, we’ve been doing it for years. Would it hurt us to return, albeit, with a bit more care and precision?

Pleasure and Anxiety [neural flow]

Thursday, in a post on The Science of Orgasm, I mentioned that I’d developed an argument that pleasure is a function of all the activity in the nervous system. In this post I present a slightly revised version of my discussion in Beethoven’s Anvil (Basic Books, 2001), pp. 84-88. You can find the citations in that book, as well as the immediately preceding argument, on why it doesn’t make sense to talk about pleasure centers.

Go With the Flow

In The Sweet Spot in Time John Jerome was interested in the pleasures of athletic excellence and proposed an informal theory about what he calls the Sweet Spot Theory of Performance. By “sweet spot” he means that spot on a baseball bat, tennis racket, or golf club that affords the squarest contact with the ball, transfers energy to it most efficiently, and thus minimizes jarring transmitted back to the hands. That spot, he assures us, is not myth but a mechanical fact. Generalizing from that, he argues that the superior athlete “is the one who in effect reaches the sweet spot of the arc for each segment of his or her skeleton as he or she goes through the athletic motion.” The pleasure of sport—at any rate, the pleasure that derives from the activity itself, rather than from beating someone else in competition—is simply the feeling one gets when the body is working at its best.

The pleasure of music, I submit, is like that. Musicians certainly know the kind of physical pleasure that Jerome talks about, as do dancers. But so do people who only listen.

Jerome is focused on the smoothly functioning athletic body. But muscles cannot contract and flex in just the right way unless the nervous system controls them just so. The smooth motion is in the body, but the pleasure is in the nervous system. Even if a listener does not move his body, his nervous system does have to follow the sound. I am suggesting that a great deal of the pleasure we take from music lies in overall dynamic character of the activity itself—it is a property of the neural weather. Some weather feels better than other weather. This is not a matter of some brain center detecting some property in the neural weather and signaling good or bad. Rather, we are talking about the overall state of the brain. You don’t need to detect this state because this state is you; it is your mind.

We are now in familiar territory. The idea that music is linked to motion is an old one, one explored by Charles Keil in his essay “Motion and Feeling through Music” and validated by studies that show activity in motor areas of the brain when people are listening to music. Musical pleasure is an example of flow, a term coined by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow is not special either to music or athletic performance, but is a capacity inherent in the nervous system and can happen during a wide range of activities. In Csikszentmihalyi’s model, flow is a function of the conditions of task performance. Where one’s skill exceeds the demands of a task by a considerable margin, the task is boring. Where task demands exceed one’s skill by a considerable margin, the task provokes anxiety—which we’ll examine in more detail in the next section. One feels flow only when the task demands are just a little beyond one’s current skill. In that situation one must be fully alert and attentive in order to perform the task and, if one is so, then it is possible to perform the task well. Thus flow represents a style of action, not some specific set of activities.

The idea of musical pleasure as flow does not preclude the possibility that music stimulates specific “pleasure centers,” especially if theose centers then emit neurotransmitters which further enable well-coordinated activity. Any such centers that are activated through music will contribute to that music’s pleasure. But musical pleasure does not depend on such centers. In general I would expect that music is pleasurable in proportion to its capacity for exercising the inherent properties of the brain, especially the rhythmic properties. Thus:

Pleasure as Coherence: Musical pleasure is the subjective awareness of overall neural flow where that flow is well-timed and coherent.

Further, this musical flow is not under the control of any particular brain system but reflects the joint interaction of all active neural systems, at all levels of interaction. The pleasure-center view would have us believe that musical flow is regulated by those specific pleasure centers. If musical pleasure is not localized in a few centers, it follows that musical flow is not regulated by those centers. We have mutual adjustment and interaction here and there, indeed everywhere, but no omniscient master dictating the terms of the neural dance. Music’s pleasures have no master.

Anxiety

Pleasure, of course, has its opposite in pain. So far as we can tell, the nervous system doesn’t have anything that can be called a pleasure system. By contrast, the nervous system certainly does have pain receptors, a pain system, and pain centers, though the exact workings of this system are mysterious. The basic purpose of the pain system is to warn the organism about (possible) physical damage, which is detected by receptors in the skin. The neurology of pain is thus quite different from that of pleasure, its nominal opposite.

I believe that, in fact, the functional opposite of pleasure is not pain but anxiety. Just as pleasure is the subjective experience of a coherent overall pattern of neural activity, so anxiety is the subjective experience of an incoherent pattern. In Csikszentmihalyi’s formulation of flow, anxiety is the overall pattern of neural activity that occurs when you try to perform a task that is far too difficult. You simply have not mastered the necessary mental or physical routines. You fumble and fidget, lose track of where you are, and can’t think of what to do next. This is all quite uncomfortable; you feel anxious.

Trumpeter’s Delight

This is related to yesterday’s impressions of The Science of Orgasm and to earlier posts on sexual metaphysics and mystical oblivion.

Bright Moments

I don’t know exactly when it first happened to me, but let’s say I was 12 or so. That seems about right.

I was in my room practicing my trumpet. All of a sudden I felt light-headed, warm & fuzzy, everything went white on me, and for perhaps a split second I fainted – it’s hard to tell about these things, especially when they happened so long ago. When it was over, I sat down on my bed – for I’d been standing while playing – and pondered. I was OK, it had felt good, but did I have some disease? Maybe a strange and awful disease? Maybe even cancer, whatever that was?

So I didn’t tell anyone. Who could I tell, after all? Who could I talk to about something like that?

And it happened again. Just how long after that first time, I don’t know. I wasn’t keeping a diary. But soon enough that I remembered the first time. Maybe within a week, a month, probably not much more. Was I sick? And then again. Felt good, but still the worries?

And it’s been happening to me ever since. For fifty years or so there’ve been these delightful moments during trumpet playing. At its most intense I feel dizzy and very light, warm, and bathed in bright white light. Then, a few seconds later, I come down. Still feeling good, feeling strong and rested.

I long ago stopped worrying about whether or not I was sick. I wasn’t. In fact, such ‘bright moments’ are fairly common among trumpet players. It’s something that just seems to happen every now and then. In fact, one can even find more or less standard physiological explanations of it. It has to do, in one version, with constricting the veins in the neck, making it difficult for old blood to leave the head and thus for new oxygenated blood to get to the brain. I’ve also read that it happens when blowing pressure converges on the diastolic blood pressure in the neck arteries; presumably this restricts blood flow to the brain and induces momentary oxygen debt.

Whatever.

Comparison

Let’s set that issue aside for a moment and compare my description of the subjective experience with yesterday’s descriptions of orgasm, you find similar phrases:

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.

I find that overlap must interesting, most suggestive. But there are obvious differences. Those descriptions of orgasm also talk about “intense muscular spasms of the whole body” and “an enormous buildup of tension, anxiety, strain.” My description didn’t have anything like that.

But then I didn’t describe everything. While playing the trumpet is not the same as having sex, it can be fairly strenuous. Simply getting a sound out of a trumpet is difficult. It takes a great deal of muscular control. Consider the facial muscles, the ones that control tension in the lips. Those muscles are relatively small, they work hard, and one practices long hours to train them to the flexible rigors of trumpeting.

 

But blowing the trumpet involves more than the facial muscles, for which trumpet playing is cruel and unusual punishment. It’s about breath, and breath control. That involves the large muscles of the trunk, the diaphragm, and the supporting muscles of the hips and legs. When you take into account the use of the arms in holding the trumpet and the fingers in manipulating the valves, it becomes clear that you play the trumpet with your whole body, not just fingers and lips.

And when you move into the upper register, which is when these bright moments are most likely to happen, that’s when total body tension is at its highest, though, if you want the music to sound like, well, music, with life and grace, there’s got to be relaxation at the center. If all you want to do is make a loud noise, don’t bother with the relaxation. But if you want the resilience and flow of song, then you have to relax. And, at the same time, keep the tension in the trunk.

My point then is simply that trumpet playing, like orgasmic sex, does involve the whole body, and, in upper register playing, it can involve a great deal of tension and strain. And, in my experience, these bright moments are most likely to happen when I am playing a sustained upper register passage, the sort of work that makes the face red, the neck distended.

But they’ve also happened while playing rapid complex, but not particularly high, lines. And, mere effort isn't sufficient. You have to be in a groove, the playing must have life and feel natural, not just playing the notes. In that context, you can do it. On a reasonable number of occasions I've been able to bring on the warmth and lights simply by playing high, or fast/complex, and bearing down on the sound, working with chest and abdomen. But, without the groove, it doesn't make any difference what I do; it doesn't happen.

Which is to say, you can’t will it to happen. You can’t make it happen on cue. All you can do is set the scene, go through the motions, with all your heart and will and soul, and sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t.

Fake it till you make it

What we have before us, then, is two very different behaviors, trumpet playing and sex, which can produce similar subjective experiences under certain circumstances. Just what’s going on in the case of these trumpeting experiences, who knows? They happen to trumpeters, there’s a bit of lore about them, but, so far as I know, there’s been no scientific investigation of them. Whatever’s going on in the trumpeter’s brain when this happens, that’s a complete mystery. But I rather doubt that anyone would try to argue that it’s in our biological nature to have such experiences. Trumpeting certainly isn’t in our biological nature, so how could certain kinds of trumpet-playing experiences be in our biological nature?

Sure, there’s a biological substrate to trumpet playing, as there is to everything. These experiences happen when this that and the other are recruited into precisely coordinated activity that allows a little ‘spark’ to ‘catch fire,’ as it were, and become amplified into a bright orgasmic moment. It just happens.

And so it goes with sexual orgasms. The brain doesn’t have a central orgasm coordinator whose function is to cause orgasms. When the circumstances are right, they happen.

* * * * *

Finally, I want to note that these bright trumpeting moments are not the same phenomenon as the ego loss I described in It Shook Me, the Light. That’s something else. Sless likely, more delicate, and more powerful.

Finally, if you want to hear delicacy and grace executed from within tension and effort, listen to the trumpeter in this performance of Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto (1st and 3rd movements). Astounding!

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.

* * * * *

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.

Sex and Metaphysics

It may be a bit of an exaggeration to say that we humans are obsessed with sex, but only a bit. The question is: Why? Yes, sex is necessary for reproduction and, in consequence, sexual feelings are very strong and insistent. Sex is often, though not always, pleasurable.

But that’s not enough. Oh, it may be enough for evolutionary psychologists, but they don’t demand much of their psychology. Even at that, the biological rules of sex are, still, a bit obscure. The cultural games we play with them, they are infinitely varied.

Take that Shakespeare sonnet I’ve been exploring, 129, The expense of spirit. That’s about sex. But it’s also about desire, pleasure, guilt, will and reason. All of those things intermingled. It’s about metaphysics.

There’s the rub: How’d sex become metaphysical? Just what is the knowledge in carnal knowledge?

Consider this Wikipedia passage about Tantric ritual; notice all the technical terms (in Sanscrit):

When enacted as enjoined by the Tantras, the ritual culminates in a sublime experience of infinite awareness for both participants. Tantric texts specify that sex has three distinct and separate purposes—procreation, pleasure, and liberation. Those seeking liberation eschew frictional orgasm for a higher form of ecstasy, as the couple participating in the ritual lock in a static embrace. Several sexual rituals are recommended and practiced. These involve elaborate and meticulous preparatory and purificatory rites. The sexual act itself balances energies coursing within the pranic ida and pingala channels in the subtle bodies of both participants. The sushumna nadi is awakened and kundalini rises upwards within it. This eventually culminates in samadhi, wherein the respective individual personalities and identities of each of the participants are completely dissolved in a unity of cosmic consciousness.

What are they talking about? Liberation — from what? Cosmic consciousness — what’s that? What’s this about dissolving? Whatever this is, it isn’t monkey glands on overdrive, it’s something else. Those Tantra adepts are using biology for something that transcends biology. But what?

‘Transcend’ — that’s a term that comes up often in such discussions, along with ecstasy, union, dissolution. All are common to the discourse of mysticism as well. Sex and mysticism, two peas in a pod — whoops! there’s a biological metaphor. Mystics use sexual metaphors, and sexuality drives even the prosaic among us to the edge of mysticism.

* * * * *

I’ve got two guesses. One: While ecstasy and transcendence are available anytime, anywhere, while doing anything — so sayeth the Zen masters ZAP! — they’re most likely to sneak up on us during sex. If so, then, one would like to know why.

My other guess is not unrelated to the first, but it’s more complicated.

The basic circuits for sexuality, like other biological drives, is located deep in the core of the brain in the limbic system. Except for sexuality, those drives are active from birth. But much of the brain is quite immature at birth, especially the neocortex, which is phylogenetically the newest part of the brain. And it’s where our ‘higher’ capacities are more or less localized. All the other emotional and motivational equipment becomes integrated into the ever more sophisticated patterns of thought, desire, and action that are realized in the maturing cortex.

Along comes adolescence and WHAM! the whole system becomes unglued. All of a sudden distinctly new feelings and motivations have to be integrated into one’s repertoire of thoughts and actions. Even if you grow up in a culture that more or less “makes room” for sexuality, it still comes as a shock. Knowing it's going to happen, play-acting at more adult behavior when you're a child, that doesn't really prepare you for having to deal with a whole new hormonal riot. What’s new and confusing is the riot itself.

Now, let’s put sexuality aside for a moment and look at cognitive development. Jean Piaget, the Swiss developmental psychologist, worked out the theory of stages on cognitive development starting with sensorimotor, then pre-operational, concrete operations, and then, at adolescence, formal operations. Formal operations allows for abstract thought, thoughts about god and country, but also mathematics and philosophy.

And that leads to my second guess. Sex becomes intertwined with metaphysics because our sexual impulses become active during the same period in development that abstract thought emerges. For reasons I've never really attempted to work out, I suspect that if the capacity for abstract thought becomes established before hormonal puberty, there's a chance that the new feelings and motives will be treated as foreigners, strangers that have taken refuge in one's own body.

And that's what's so freaky about sex. None of our feelings and emotions are under control of the will. But they’re all familiar to us as we move into adolescence. We’re used to them. They have their homes in our lives, their paths and hangouts. We know them even if we cannot control them.

Sexuality is a stranger.

In that strangeness it, more than any other behavioral system, links our most basic and primitive capacities with our most abstract. At once act and thought, deed and desire, it is metaphysics in life.

Note: These two posts aren't quite about sex. But they're in the same neighborhood: bundling, romantic love.

Why I Love Antony and Cleopatra

I am talking, of course, of Shakespeare’s tragedy, Antony and Cleopatra. Shakespeare presents us with two mature adults, world-wise and at the height of their powers, who are as head-over-heels in love with one another as Romeo and Juliet, callow youths in their mid-teens. That those youngsters should defy family and custom, what’s surprising about that? They know little of the hard business of making a life, they’re still under parental care. But Antony and Cleopatra, they’re different. She’s the ruler of Egypt and has had lovers both for pleasure and for politics, the great Julius Caesar among them. Antony’s a skilled general and a triumvir, one of three rulers of the Roman Empire.

Here’s how Antony’s friend, Enobarbus, described Cleopatra (Act 2, scene 2):

The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar'd all description: she did lie
In her pavilion--cloth-of-gold of tissue--
O'er-picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature: on each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-colour'd fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did.

And then, one of the most famous passages in the play:

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women cloy
The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies; for vilest things
Become themselves in her: that the holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish.

“Riggish,” what a word, riggish. My copy of the play glosses it as lewd. And I suppose Cleopatra was. But I like the sound of the word, two syllables to lewd’s one, and the sibilant ending that just flows away rather than the hard thud of lewd’s “d.” A woman who could dance like Josephine Baker and yet had the political craft and steel of Margaret Thatcher. Could such a creature exist?

And here’s Cleopatra on Anthony, after he’s died and she’s been seized by the minions of Octavius Caesar (Act 5, scene 2):

His legs bestrid the ocean: his rear'd arm
Crested the world: his voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,
There was no winter in't; an autumn 'twas
That grew the more by reaping: his delights
Were dolphin-like; they show'd his back above
The element they lived in: in his livery
Walk'd crowns and crownets; realms and islands were
As plates dropp'd from his pocket.

Yes, “his legs bestrid the ocean,” a mighty man indeed. But “his delights were dolphin-like,” what is that? If you want to see it on film, go see Miyazki’s Ponyo, it’s there, I kid you not. Miyazaki knows that joy. To couple such joy with the power to shake the world, what was Cleo thinking?