O by Jonathan Margolis Read Free Book Online

were identified as prostitute users in two relatively small northern cities, Leeds and Bradford – this in spite of it being well known locally that men’s car numbers were being tracked, a circumstance that that might have cut the numbers significantly.
    The desire for ejaculatory release by brain damaged and mentally ill men suggests how elemental the need for orgasm is in the human male. When all else is stripped away, the desire to masturbate for comfort sometimes seems to remain. This syndrome of compulsive, neurotic masturbation was movingly portrayed by the novelist John Irving in
The World According to Garp
. The hero’s father, a brain damaged US Air Force sergeant whose vocabulary has been reduced to one word – ‘Garp’ – does only one thing incessantly, which is to masturbate. Garp’s sexually reticent mother, Jenny, ‘harnesses’ one of Garp’s readily available erections to impregnate herself and produce a son, T.S. Garp.
    A broadly equal distribution of desire for sex is, nonetheless, borne out by ethnographic research. People in 72 of 93 societies studied in the 1970s believed that both sexes have anapproximately equal sex drive, and that either is equally likely to begin sexual advances. In many societies, the Maoris of New Zealand being one, women more commonly initiate sex than men. It is implausible, given the brief five million years
Homo sapiens
has been around, that equality of sex drive was not also the case for our Flintstone ancestors – who, even though they did not actually live in caves, we prefer to believe did because we tend to find their belongings preserved mainly within such temporary, natural shelters.
    It is also highly likely that the outline script for orgasm that follows was similar or identical in many particulars for early human beings. There simply has not been time for it to be otherwise. It is the all-important overlay of subsequent cultural development that has refined (and sometimes coarsened) the
dance à deux
that leads to orgasm, and has given this sublime bodily function its mystique and its history.
    The all-important pre-copulatory phase, which barely exists in even the highest primates and is another sign of our stellar sexiness, can begin without sexual contact of any overt kind. A shared meal is a popular starting point for sex in human beings; it is interesting that oxytocin, the hormone of coupling and togetherness, flows almost as easily during an enjoyable dinner, thanks to the variety of sensual and intellectual pleasures on offer in ‘intimate dining’, as during sex and subsequent orgasm.
    A great deal of the forgotten sense, touch, dominates the next stage of the precopulatory ballet. Again, this need not be overtly sexual; fingers brush backs of hands or entwine over the table, hands are held tenderly. ‘At times we focus in sex upon the most minute motions,’ the late Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick wrote, ‘the most delicate brushing of a hair, the slow progress of the fingertips or nails or tongue across the skin, the slightest change or pause at a point. We linger in such moments and await what will come next. Our acuity is sharpest here, no change in pressure or motion or angle is too slight to notice. And it is exciting to know another is attuned to your sensations as keenly as you are.’
    The skin is the largest organ and as, Lionel Tiger has written, skin ‘is not only an envelope containing a person; it is also a means of communication’. Pre-sex touching continues to involve many body parts other than the genitals; experienced lovers will take care to avoid making direct contact with the vagina or penis or even the crotch area in the very early stages of coitus. Touch is such an erotic sense that pre-sex caressing can be an inadvertent shortcut to orgasm. Some people of both sexes can climax from a simple stroking of the back or feet.
    Hand-to-face and face-to-face