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Body&soul
Faking it? The tyranny of the female orgasm
Yes, yes — well, no. Germaine Greer, who’s in a film about vibrators, cuts the Big O down to size
Female orgasms wander through the news media like the Loch Ness monster, glimpsed now and then, but never quite surfacing. Now we have two more sightings, thanks to the latest book by Fay Weldon and a new film about the Rabbit vibrator. In What Makes Women Happy? Weldon recommends that a good woman should fake her orgasms “and then leap out of bed and pour him champagne, telling him: ‘You are so clever’. ”
Meanwhile, the new film, Rabbit Fever (in which I make a cameo appearance), launches next week, purporting to tell the story of the sex toy’s rise and its tendency to create orgasm addicts. What is it about the female orgasm nowadays? The O-word itself is horrid and its meaning is confused; the root is the Greek word for tumescence or engorgement, not for the spasm that invariably accompanies ejaculation in the male, of which something similar can be produced in the female, but less reliably and with rather more effort. Candles and carrots used to be credited with more potency in triggering female orgasm than the male member but the march of technology has produced a purpose-made pleasure-tool, namely the vibrator, of which the market leader is the Rabbit.
For a mere £30, any woman can acquire a “good-sized Rabbit vibrator with an extra: the beads can move up and down for pure pleasure whilst the rabbit is teasing your cl*t”, according to the advert. The rabbit is a two-eared projection on the upper side of the shaft of the instrument. And there’s more: “The shaft has a number of pleasure beads and the touch control allows you to choose between vibrate, pulse, escalate or multi-speed”, all accompanied by the kind of droning buzz you associate with a cordless hedge-clipper. You can get silent Rabbits, but they cost more and they’re more of the squirmy type. Eventually men will have penile inserts that give them a similar range of extras, vibrating eggs in the penis head, jelly spikes, rotating beads. But a man takes more looking after than a Rabbit and today’s women don’t have the time.
In modern consumer society the name of the game is instant gratification and the paradigm of all pleasure is solitary. Sole users guarantee the widest volume of sales of any appliances, hence the iPod and the Rabbit.
Apparently Fay Weldon did not watch Sex and the City, which is what launched the Rabbit into every boudoir in the Western world. Women no longer expect men to supply orgasms, if they ever did. It’s only the men who expect to supply orgasms; their penis gives them so much pleasure that they can’t imagine it not doing the same for their sexual partner.
Most of us do fake orgasm, often, but we could do without Weldon betraying our little secret. In every porn video the whores are whimpering, snorting and panting from the git-go, at the merest touch in vaguely the right area from a even the rubberiest of male organs. Faking it is de rigueur. Most women do it because given their workload they need to get the sex over with in the nicest way and get some sleep. It’s called “keeping everyone (but yourself) happy”. That principle is a chief mechanism in women’s oppression and I am saddened but not surprised to hear Weldon upholding it.
If you’re Paris Hilton — hugely rich, entirely self-willed and don’t give a damn whether the people around you are happy or not — you can skip the whole performance. In a porn video made by some hustler when Hilton was only 18, he crouches head-down between her thighs, snuffling like a trufflehound, while she lies back, staring expressionlessly at the ceiling.
The sequence lasts about 20 minutes. I almost expected her to ask the famous question from Deep Throat: “Do you mind if I smoke while you eat?” But she remains mute and motionless throughout. She could be asleep. Attagirl.
The rest of us wouldn’t dare to be so disobliging. We moan and groan to make our man feel good, much as a man will tell his date that she’s the prettiest girl in the room. It’s just good manners.
And as for telling him how clever he is after sex and pouring him a rewarding glass of champagne, it’s hard to do that if he’s flat on his back snoring.
Most of us are too insecure to be upfront about our failure to respond. Weldon is wrong: men are not expected to supply women’s orgasms. These days women are expected to produce orgasms on demand. Regardless of age or fitness or the tedium of the relationship, we’re all supposed to be hot, up for it, in all circumstances, at all times. The insertion of the penis is tantamount to lighting the blue touchpaper. If we don’t go off like a fire-cracker, it’s not the man’s fault but ours. The most potent cause of so much faking it is fear of appearing frigid, of being a “dud bash”.
Mid-20th-century marriage manuals encouraged men to be patient, to stimulate their partners in a host of different ways, and to delay their own gratification as long as possible. The woman was to be the violin; the man the virtuoso. With a man who knew what he was doing, a woman could experience multiple orgasms, remaining in an orgastic state for many minutes. Alas, the multiple orgasm has proved even more elusive than the mutual orgasm.
Sexualities have many forms of expression and those forms are continually changing. From 1927, when Wilhelm Reich first published The Function of the Orgasm, orgasms have been represented as essential to mental health. In the beginning these weren’t just any orgasms; the essential orgasms were those that eliminated tensions, leaving the individual in a state of equilibrium, self-regulating and therefore capable of freedom.
Oppressive political systems, it was claimed, induced mindless servility and impotence by censoring free sexual expression. Unfulfilled subjects sublimated their frustrations in militarism, racism and genocide. If Hitler had had the right orgasms the Holocaust would never have happened. “Right sex” was a purifying ritual; masturbation was discouraged.
For women, the right orgasm was vaginal; orgasms deriving from stimulation of the clitoris were thought to be superficial, inferior, typical of the narcissistic immature personality. Better understanding of female anatomy brought the awareness that there were few nerve ends in the vagina, despite the myth of the G-spot. Proper study of the ramifications of the clitoris revealed that it was not so much a localised button as the outcropping head of a deep neural network involving the whole pelvis, including the vagina. The truth was out: women did not need men’s help to reach orgasm. Indeed, men could get in the way. The more they fiddled and twiddled, the more in the way they were.
Fay Weldon is probably right to say that sex without orgasm can be perfectly pleasurable, but making love is even more deeply satisfying than simply having sex, with the female orgasm as an optional extra.
Weldon is certainly right to say that there is no point in a woman demanding an orgasm from her man. If an orgasm is what she wants, rather than intimacy, there’s always the Rabbit.
What Makes Women Happy? (Fourth Estate, £12.99) is available from Times Books First at £11.99 (p&p free).
Rabbit Fever is in cinemas from September 22