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Not all the evidence for orgasm being a cultural construct is to be found in literature or art, however, nor even in the peculiar moral blanket with which myriad cultures and religions
have attempted down the years to smother orgasm and try to suppress or kill it off altogether. The most telling way in which we have built a cultural superstructure on the foundations nature gave our species is to be seen in the manner in which we have succeeded, through contraception, in separating the natural coincidence between sexual climax and babies.

It is remarkable that today heterosexuals barely think about squalling, puking, doubly incontinent infants when they have sex. Sex is primarily seen as being about romance, glamour, pleasure, good living, happiness – almost anything other than nappies, sleepless nights and teething rings. To the straight couple having wild sex in the dunes or simpering at one another in an expensive restaurant, it might even seem ‘unnatural' and strange that what they are doing has the slightest connection with baby production. This interest in pure eroticism, in sex as a leisure pursuit, is fundamentally human – a primary symptom of civilisation in the way it presupposes that basic survival needs have been taken care of, and that there is now time and energy to spare for fun for fun's sake.

Professor Richard Dawkins of Oxford University, one of the world's leading thinkers and writers on evolutionary biology, points out that contraception appears to overturn the most fundamental Darwinian dictates by offering the pleasure of sex without the reproduction. He suggests that the explanation for this is that the human brain has evolved its own, advanced, ameliorated spin on survival; in sex-for-pleasure, the brain is seeking and experiencing pleasure as another method of aiding survival. The civilised activity of sex for fun may well go back further than we imagine, too. According to a book by Jeannette Parisot,
Johnny Come Lately: A Short History of the Condom
, a fresco in the Dordogne, France, dating from 10-15,000 BC, provides the (literally) sketchy first record of a sheath being used for sex.

Human culture meanwhile, rather than evolution, dictates even the times when we indulge in the pleasure of sex. Oestrogen and testosterone levels are at their highest at dawn, yet the most
common time for lovemaking in modern Western civilisations is 11 p.m., between the smoochy dinner date and the need to get to sleep so as to be up for work in the morning.

So what about the more difficult question of the physical feeling of orgasm, and how we might assess whether that too has a history? This is bound to be a tricky question, given that even sexually aware men and women have never quite managed to impart to the opposite sex what their version of orgasm feels like. Greek myth, informed as it was by the experience of Greek mortals, had it that a man called Tiresius was privileged to spend seven years as a woman, and then invited to Mount Olympus to be debriefed by Zeus on his experiences. Tiresius's principal conclusion was remarkable; after taking seven years to ponder on the huge number of differences between the sexes, he summed up his observations in one line. Women, he informed Zeus, enjoy sex more than men. For being the bearer of this unwelcome message for men, Tiresius was blinded.

In the modern world, transsexuals who have undergone surgery or hormone therapy offer us a hint, possibly, of what Tiresius might have experienced had he actually existed. Even without surgery, an FTM (female-to-male transsexual) can possess both a penis produced by testosterone acting to enlarge the clitoris, and the vagina he was born with. Several people with these characteristics have reported on Internet message-boards a sensation that they describe as a simultaneous male and female orgasm in the same body — two distinct and ‘definitely different' sensations. When pressed to differentiate between the sensation these ‘competing' orgasms offered, one respondent reported that the only difference he could describe was that while the penis contracted from base to tip, the vagina did the reverse, contracting inward, from outside to inside.

As for gauging what were the sexual feelings experienced by prehistoric men and women, let alone their simian grandparents, we are obviously confined to informed guesswork. It is perfectly plausible that the greatest sexual difference between prehistoric men and women was the same as, according to
Irma Kurtz, it is today: when it comes to sex, Kurtz wrote in a 1995 book,
Irma Kurtz's Ultimate Problem Solver
, the male's greatest fear is of failure, while the female's is of not being loved.

But we are not completely without biological evidence on which to base our conjecture about what sex was like thousands of generations ago. Desmond Morris contends that man's basic sexual qualities come from his ‘fruit-picking, forest ape ancestors', and according to the American anthropologist Helen Fisher, too, the physical facility for orgasm had already evolved before our ancestors came down from the trees.

Of course, we have no preserved soft tissue from prehistoric times to prove conclusively that pleasure has always been sought through sexual intercourse. But it is highly unlikely that the clitoris, the only organ in the human being that exists purely for pleasure, with no known anatomical role, has suddenly developed in the brief five million years of human evolution as a response to our growing social and intellectual sophistication.

An outstanding piece of biological evidence for prehistoric man and woman having been rather erotic beasts is measurable with a ruler. It is the simple fact that the human penis is enormous in proportion to the rest of a man's body, dwarfing by far even that of the gorilla, whose organ is a puny two inches erect. Only the barnacle, improbably, has a larger penis in relation to its body size. (Owing to the barnacle's somewhat sedentary lifestyle, its penis has to be capable of searching the area around it to find a receptive female. It also throws its penis away once a year and grows a new one.)

Not only do human males have gigantic sexual organs, but they flaunt them, too. Gorillas might argue that they do not need such a huge penis because they show off by means of their body size. But human men demonstrably announce their sexual power by displaying their penis – or, if one might lapse for a moment into barroom Freudianism, a symbol thereof, such as a gun or a car with an extravagantly long hood and a
name such as
Testarossa
, a real name, chosen without apparent irony by Ferrari. Additionally, any man who has felt under his fig leaf can attest to feeling as if he has as many highly tuned nerve endings down there as lucky women with their clitorises, even though anatomists claim these have 8,000 nerves – twice as many as the penis. This is not to forget the labia, which for 10 percent of women have even more nerve endings than the clitoris. The clitoris is also understood today to be bigger than was once thought; it seems to have two previously undetected ‘arms' extending some nine centimetres back into the body and up into the groin.

Another key exhibit in the case of whether prehistoric humans had the ability and desire to enjoy sex for its own sake is to be found in the existence of a substance called oxytocin, or ‘hormone of love' as it has been called. Oxytocin is a neurotransmitter synthesised by the hypothalamus or ‘master gland' at the base of the brain and stored in the posterior pituitary, from which it pulses out when required, which is during sexual activity and later in childbirth. At the end of a pregnancy, oxytocin stimulates uterine contractions and milk production. Immediately after a woman has given birth, it also prompts the desire to nuzzle and protect infants. This effect of the hormone, its tendency to prompt sensuality, helps us understand its role in promoting the pleasurable feelings of sex.

Oxytocin, which we have no reason to assume is anything new in the body's inventory of catalytic chemicals, induces feelings of love and altruism, warmth, calm, bonding, tenderness and togetherness, of satisfaction during bodily contact, sexual arousal and sexual fulfilment. And it is during orgasm in both men and women that oxytocin floods through our bloodstream more notably than at any other time besides the peak of childbirth.

As with most other bodily substances, oxytocin has more than one job. It makes us feel warm, content and at one with our partner. It also coordinates the sperm ejection reflex with
the male orgasm, and, it is believed, the corresponding sperm reception reflex that operates in the female orgasm. As part and parcel of inducing an altered state of consciousness, oxytocin released by female orgasm helps women lie still for a while after orgasm. This crucially increases the likelihood of conception – as well as making it probable that women will seek further coitus because they enjoyed it so much the last time.

Oxytocin is, then, far more than a side effect of orgasm, or a necessary component in the formula that produces successful reproduction. It is what makes orgasm nature's sugar coating to disguise the bitter pill of reproduction, the chemical basis for our capacity and longing for romantic attachment. It is the molecule that for 100,000 years or more has made us want to have sex face-to-face, adoring one another, and to live in permanent, monogamous couples -the latter otherwise done only by one species of ape, the bonobo, an endangered chimpanzee existing in small numbers in the Congo and believed by some naturalists to be the closest primate to humankind. Albatrosses, swans, a handful of crustaceans and a rare New Zealand songbird called the hihi also ‘mate for life' – but not for remotely ‘romantic' reasons.

‘But did thee feel the earth move?'

Ernest Hemingway,
For Whom The Bell Tolls

What actually happens to men and women when they reach orgasm, as the process initiated in nervous and psychogenic centres translates itself into the vascular and muscular?

The spasm lasts a few seconds to a minute at the most, but is accompanied by intense physiological activity. Genitals swell with blood, the pulse races, muscles contract involuntarily. Some people's mouths open. Others' faces contort. Many women's toes curl. In men, big toes often stiffen as their little toes twist. Both partners' feet may arch and shake. Sweat typically surfaces on both participants' brow, the heart pumps frantically, and breathing becomes fast and shallow. Both partners' nostrils may flare and seem to heat the air as it surges through them. With climax, each partner is clenched by contractions at consistent 0.8-second intervals. The human sexual summit is a paroxysm of pleasure. A warm glow envelops the waist and chest. The toes relax.

The emotions, too, generally go into a seismic convulsion. For attempting, or pretending to attempt, to add to the species, both parties have received their reward. A mist of goodwill, wellbeing and lazy relaxation temporarily obscures reality. Both men and women may laugh or cry, or become uncommonly
ticklish, although all these reactions are less common for men on the basis that they tend to show their feelings less anyway. Both sexes may experience a burst of creative thought since orgasm produces a near lightning storm in the right, creative-thinking, side of the brain. Biological duty fulfilled, there normally follows a lengthy period of exhaustion, rest, and frequently sleep.

Orgasm is so powerful an emotional and cultural icon that it can even be experienced in some cases by people who strictly speaking cannot ‘feel it'. Descriptions of orgasm by male and female participants in one study of people with spinal cord injuries transcended accounts of mere ejaculation and muscular contractions. Their focus was on ‘warmth', ‘tingling', ‘energy releasing' and ‘energies merging'. The essence of the orgasmic experience, it would seem, survives even sensory disconnection of the genitals from the brain. This happens because the brain is not solely responsible for sexual arousal; the spinal cord is also important. Independent activity in the spinal cord also explains why disabled men can often have erections and father children, although normally cannot feel sexual sensations.

Descriptions of how the outer symptoms of orgasm appear to the other party in a sexual coupling are, curiously, more commonly found than subjective reports of sex as it feels to the participant him or herself. The fact that this is so is an interesting commentary on the bipartisan nature of orgasm, as opposed to the essentially lonely nature of, say, drug taking. People will always describe their own feelings on taking LSD, but focus on their partner's outward appearance when they orgasm, largely because (they hope) it was their unique blend of charm and skill that created the orgasm their partner is enjoying.

There is, then, bound to be a slight element of bragging in a description of female orgasm such as that of the fifth-century Greek author of erotic romance Achilles Tatius in his
Adventures of Leucippe and Cleitophon:
‘When the sensations
named for Aphrodite are mounting to their peak, a woman goes frantic with pleasure, she kisses with mouth wide open and thrashes about like a mad woman'.

As for personal, experiential accounts of the sensations they themselves feel when they orgasm, men's are, tellingly, much rarer and more laconic than women's – an indication, perhaps, of the accuracy of a clutch of folk sayings found the world over, all to the effect that the male orgasm was invented by God, but the female's was the work of the Devil. It is notable that in the eighteenth-century pornographic novel
Fanny Hill
, although it is written by a man, John Cleland, all the (highly fanciful) descriptions of orgasm are of the female variety. Additionally, the most obvious physicality of the male orgasm, the rush of liquid through the penis, practically never features in men's descriptions of their orgasmic experience. The question is often raised of whether either gender's orgasm, although particularly the male's, can adequately be described using language.

The American novelist, Jonathan Franzen, in his celebrated 2001 work
The Corrections
, appears uncharacteristically lost for words to cover the moments between a lyrical description of one of his male characters entering his wife and the gratifying aftermath of his orgasm: ‘… with a locomotive as long and hard and heavy as an O-gauge model railroad engine, he tunnelled up into the wet and gently corrugated recesses that even after twenty years of travelling through them still felt unexplored … he no longer felt depressed, he felt euphoric … She rose and dipped like a top on a tiny point of contact, her entire, sexual being almost weightless on the moistened tip of his middle finger. He spent himself gloriously. Spent and spent and spent.'