Bonk (22 page)

I tell Sipski she should do a study.

“
You
get the human subjects committee approval for that one.”

o
kay!” It’s Gwen’s voice over the intercom. “I’m finished.” She has a soft, swaying Alabama accent, “okay” pronounced UH-KAI. Paula tells Gwen to lie quietly for a few minutes and watches the monitor. She is looking for the abrupt drop-off in heart rate and blood pressure that signals that an orgasm has come and gone.

Gwen has agreed to talk with us for a few minutes before she leaves. She sits in a chair and looks at us calmly. If you did not know what she had been doing, you would not guess. Her hair is neat and her clothes are unrumpled. Only her heart rate as the experiment began (117 beats per minute) betrayed her unease.

Gwen was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1999. (Sipski began collecting orgasm and arousal data on MS patients earlier this year.) Her beauty and poise belie the seriousness of her condition. She says she is tired all the time, and her joints hurt. Her hands and feet sometimes tingle, sometimes go numb. She has trouble telling hot from cold and must have her husband check her baby’s bathwater. People with MS develop lesions along their spinal cord that affect their mobility and their skin sensations. Lesions also affect the pathways of their autonomic nervous system. Gwen’s illness has affected her bowel and bladder functions as well as her sexual responsiveness: the sacral triumvirate.

“I can’t feel inside,” she explains. “I can’t tell that I’m being penetrated I guess is what you’d say. And sometimes I can’t feel stimulation on my clitoris.”

Yet only six minutes had passed when she pressed the intercom button. The power of vibration to trigger orgasmic reflexes is a mystery and, as we have seen in chapter 10, an occasional boon. Sometimes you don’t even have to use it on the usual location. People with spinal cord injuries may develop a compensatory erogenous zone above the level of their injury. (Researchers call it “the hypersensitive area”—or, infrequently, “the oversensitive area.”) Applying a vibrator to these spots can have dramatic effects, as documented by Sipski, Barry Komisaruk, and Beverly Whipple, at the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in Miami, where all three used to work. “My whole body feels like it’s in my vagina,” said the subject, a quadriplegic woman who had just had an orgasm—evinced by changes in blood pressure and heart rate—while applying a vibrator to her neck and chest. Komisaruk and Whipple’s book
The Science of Orgasm
includes a description of a “knee orgasm” experienced by a young (able-bodied) man with a vibrator pressed to his leg. “The quadriceps muscle of the thigh increased in tension…. At the reported orgasmic moment, the leg gave an extensor kick…and a forceful grunt was emitted.” (In the interest of full disclosure, the young man was stoned.)

I ask Gwen how she made the decision to be part of Sipski’s study. “When I first heard about it from my neurologist,” she begins, “I thought, Yes, I want to do this. And then I started thinking what the situation was going to be like. And I thought, Well, I don’t know if I want to or not. But me and my husband talked it over, and we thought y’all could probably help me.” Gwen gets to take a vibrator home with her. The study for which she is a subject includes a treatment component comparing the two stars of the last chapter: the FertiCare (modified with a Woog head) and the Eros. The hope is that vibration (or suction/vibration) therapy can help retrain the sacral reflex arc so that women with spinal issues can reach orgasm more easily.

Gwen retrieves her purse. She asks if we have any other questions for her.

I have one. “Did you hear a loud crash while you were in there?”

“Uh-huh. And talking.”

“Sorry about that.”

s
ipski and I are eating at a suburban Birmingham restaurant where couples drink wine at lunch and seem to have nothing to say to each other. Or maybe they’re eavesdropping. I would be.

The lunch conversation has drifted to the topic of nongenital orgasms. The ones that wake you up from dreams. The ones some epileptics
*
experience just before a seizure (and that occasionally motivate them to go off their meds). The “thought-orgasms” that ten women had in Beverly Whipple and Barry Komisaruk’s Rutgers lab. The individuals Alfred Kinsey interviewed who “have been brought to orgasm by having their eyebrows stroked, or by having the hairs on some other part of their bodies gently blown, or by having pressure applied on the teeth alone.” Though in the Kinsey cases, presumably other body parts had been stroked or blown just prior, and the eyebrow and tooth ministerings merely, as Kinsey put it, “provided the additional impetus which is necessary to carry the individual on to orgasm.”

I brought along a copy of a letter to the editors of the
British Journal of Psychiatry
entitled “Spontaneous Orgasms—Any Explanation?” The author was inquiring on behalf of a patient, a widowed forty-five-year-old Saudi mother of three, who had “complained bitterly of repeated uncontrolled orgasms.” They happened anywhere, at any time, up to thirty times a day, “without any sort of sexual contact.” Her social life had been ruined, and she had, understandably, “stopped practicing her regular religious rituals and visiting the holy shrines.”

When I look up from the page, the waiter is standing with my gumbo, waiting for me to move my papers. Earlier he came over with the iced teas while Sipski was describing the bulbocavernosus reflex, which tells you whether the sacral reflex arc is intact. The test entails slipping a finger into the patient’s rectum and using the other hand to either squeeze the end of the penis or touch the clitoris. If the rectum finger gets squeezed, the reflex is working. The waiters are different in Birmingham than they are in San Francisco, where I eat out. This one said simply, “Who had the unsweetened?”

Sipski’s explanation for nongenital orgasms is this: You are triggering the same reflex, just doing it via different pathways. “There’s no reason why the impulses couldn’t travel down from the brain, rather than up from the genitals.” The input would be neurophysiological in the case of epilepsy patients and the Saudi woman, psychological in the case of the Kinsey folks.

Sexual arousal, not just orgasm, reflects this bidirectional split. Here again, spinal cord injuries have helped researchers tease apart the two systems: There is “reflex arousal” and there is “psychogenic arousal.” If you show erotic films to someone with a complete injury high up on the spinal cord, the person may say they find the images arousing, but that psychogenic input will be blocked from traveling down the spine, and thus no lubrication (or erection) will ensue. These people can, however, get erections or lubrication from physical, or “reflex,” stimulation of their genitals.

Very low spinal cord injuries create the opposite dichotomy: the person can only become lubricated from seeing (or reading or listening to) something erotic. Physical “reflex” arousal is blocked by the injury. Able-bodied men and women respond to both kinds of input (though in women, as we’ll see in the next chapter, the head and the genitals are often at odds). Their orgasms can be triggered by a single type of input, or a combination. Barry Komisaruk calls the latter “blended orgasms.” This might explain why the single-malt orgasms—vaginal, clitoral, nongenital—all feel somewhat different.

There’s one more varietal orgasm I want to ask Sipski about: the kind some kids have climbing the ropes in gym class. Sipski wasn’t one of those kids. “I have never heard of this.” We both look at each other like we’re nuts. I explain that it isn’t from contact with the rope, but more from the lifting of your body. Sipski replies that this makes sense, as orgasms from squeezing the pelvic and/or buttock muscles are not unheard of. Kinsey mentions having interviewed some men and “not a few” women who use this technique to arouse themselves and who “may occasionally reach orgasm without the genitalia being touched.”

Sipski suspects that this might be how the hands-free orgasm women in the Rutgers lab were managing it. She doesn’t know that three weeks before I had lunch with her, I went out for sushi with one of those women. Kim Airs, whose contact information I got from Barry Komisaruk, happened to be in my city visiting friends and agreed to meet to talk about her unique skill set. Airs is a tall, ebullient woman in her forties whose past employers include porn production companies, an escort service, and Harvard University, where she worked with then president Lawrence Summers. Airs learned the “hands-free” technique in 1995, in a breath-and-energy orgasm workshop taught by sex-worker-turned-sex-educator Annie Sprinkle.
*
It took her two years to master the craft. Now she can do it easily and upon request, which she does in workshops and talks and, occasionally, on sidewalk benches outside sushi bars.

It was nothing like the
When Harry Met Sally
scene. The people walking past had no idea. She closed her eyes and took some long, slow breaths and after maybe a minute of this, her face flushed pink and she shuddered. If you weren’t watching closely, you’d think she was a runner who’d stopped on a bench to catch her wind.

Like the orgasms of Sipski’s subjects, those of Airs and Komisaruk’s other volunteers were verified by monitoring heart rate and blood pressure. Definitively verifying someone’s claim to an orgasm is more difficult than Masters and Johnson would have you believe. The duo described telltale muscle contractions, but Sipski found that not all women have these.
†
The steep rise and abrupt postorgasm drop-off in heart rate and systolic blood pressure are the closest there is to a reliable physiological marker. Airs made the grade.

Sipski is right that at least some of the thought orgasms were helped along by internal muscle flexing. At the end of their paper, Whipple and Komisaruk state that some of the women were making “vigorous muscular movements,” and concede that the others may have been doing so more subtly. A how-to Web article under Annie Sprinkle’s byline includes directions to squeeze the pelvic floor muscles in order to “stimulate the clitoris and G spot.” (Arnold Kegel years ago found that diligent Kegelers tend to have an easier time of orgasm.)

Airs herself, however, described a process involving chakras and waves of energy, but no interior calisthenics. She appeared to be taking herself into an altered state, which makes sense, because that seems to be where people go during an orgasm. Scans show that the brain’s higher faculties quiet down, and more primitive structures light up. As in most altered states, people tend to lose their grip on time. In 1985, sex physiologist Roy Levin brought twenty-eight women into his lab and timed their orgasms. After they’d finished, he asked them to estimate how long the orgasm had lasted. With only three exceptions, the estimates were well under the real duration—by an average of thirteen seconds. Orgasm appears to be a state not unlike that of the alien abductees one always hears about, coming to with messy hair and a chunk of time unaccounted for.

What is life like for someone who can discreetly trigger an orgasm with a few moments of mental effort? Airs insists she rarely undertakes it in public. “Sometimes on long plane flights,” she said. The last time was while riding the Disneyland tram.

Nor is it, in the privacy of her home, a nightly occurrence. “Usually when I get home I’m too tired.”

Mind over Vagina

Women Are Complicated

t
he human vagina is accustomed to visitors. Even the language of anatomy imbues the organ with an innlike hospitality, the entrance to the structure being named the “vaginal vestibule.”
Take off your coat and stay awhile
. Gynecologist Robert Latou Dickinson, circa 1910, documented its wondrously accommodating nature, using his fingers as a measuring tool. The volume of the virgin vagina is “one finger”; the married woman rates “two full fingers.” Once the babies start coming, it’s “three fingers” and up, all the way to Subject No. 163, whose vestibule (and parlor) appear in a pen-and-ink rendering in Dickinson’s
Atlas of Human Sex Anatomy
with the doctor’s entire hand submerged.

There is no reason why a visit from the acrylic probe of a vaginal photoplethysmograph should be cause for alarm. It’s small. It has no sharp edges. It doesn’t
do
anything in there except beam a ray of light onto the walls of the vagina. (It does this to measure arousal. The amount reflected back tells you how much blood is in the capillaries; the more light reflected, the more arousal.) There is no reason to say no to an invitation to participate in a photoplethysmograph study at the Female Sexual Psychophysiology Laboratory. And so I have said yes. (Observing someone else who said yes was not an option, because of human subjects review board rules.)

The Female Sexual Psychophysiology Lab is part of the psychology department at the University of Texas at Austin. Its goal is simple but complicated: to untangle the complex, quixotic interplay of body and mind as they pertain to female sexuality. You have no idea what a perplexing mess is female arousal. When a woman is turned on by something or someone, her brain sends a signal to open up more of the capillaries in her womanly recesses. This ups the amount of blood in her vaginal walls, and some of the clear portion of it seeps through the capillaries and coats the vagina. Hello, lubrication. This much we know. But just because a woman is a little moist, that doesn’t mean she’s going to report feeling aroused. Unlike a man. If a man has an erection, or even half of one, as part of a sex study, he will almost always report that he’s aroused. Partly, this is because a boner is easier for its owner to detect than is a damp vestibule. It may also have to do with men’s greater skill at detecting subtle physical changes. A 1992 study showed that men were more accurate than women at picking up changes in their heart rate and blood pressure.

Conversely, when a woman
isn’t
damp, it needn’t mean she’s unaroused. To quote Dickinson on the topic of vaginal lubrication,
*
“Unwise stress has been laid on mucous flow as an adequate gauge of…readiness for the entry of the male…. For it must not be overlooked that there are women of strong passion, capable of vigorous orgasm, who show little or no mucous flow.” In other words, there can be a puzzling disconnect between mind and body.