O (45 page)

It is hard, with the best will in the world, to escape the conclusion that enlightened authors penning such accounts, as well as progressive doctors and sexologists endlessly promoting simultaneous orgasm late into the century, had either never had sex as they describe it – or, in the case of men like Lawrence, were mistaken, or even gulled by a well-meaning conspiracy among women by which they would attempt to please their men (or at least appear modern) through the skilful faking of orgasm to look something like Lawrence's fanciful description.

Marie Stopes idealised mutual orgasm as ‘the co-ordinated
function'. Dr Eustace Chesser in
Love without Fear
(1939) stated, ‘Both parties should, in coitus, concentrate their full attention on one thing: the attainment of simultaneous orgasm.' But the greatest and most passionate twentieth-century advocate of the simultaneous orgasm fantasy was the most outspoken, radical, influential and successful (though long forgotten) sex manual writer of the period, a Dutch gynaecologist called Theodore Hendrik van de Velde.

Van de Velde's extraordinarily explicit book was called
Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique
and first appeared in Holland in 1926, in the days, or so we are assured by a lot of elderly people today, when most people knew as much about orgasms as they did Microsoft Windows. The real extent to which sexually active people in the early twentieth-century were ignorant of the potentiality for both sexes to enjoy sexual pleasure is impossible to gauge; there were no surveys on the matter, no magazines urging women to demand the Big O every time.

At best, assessing this important matter is a judgement call. The only empirical evidence is that sex was not discussed in public, that it did not figure in the mass media, that literature which dealt with sex was marginalised and banned – and that activists like Marie Stopes gained the strong impression that both women and men were, for the most part, sexually ignorant. It is credible – and some literature, diaries and letters support this – that there was a body more substantial than we smugly acknowledge today of ‘underground' knowledge and experience of sex, especially among the middle class and members of the intelligentsia who had secreted away copies of the
Kamasutra
and
Married Love
. But the dour decades that led Philip Larkin to conclude, however facetiously, that ‘sexual intercourse began in 1963' cannot be said to have seen a democratisation of orgasmic pleasure to compare with that which unfolded in the mid- to late-twentieth century.

Unlike with
Married Love
or
Lady Chatterley
, there was no public fanfare or attempted prosecution when
Ideal
Marriage
slipped out in the UK in 1928. The ostensibly low profile of the Dutch book was accounted for by its being an import published by Heinemann's medical books division, which made it nominally an obscure textbook for doctors. It had barely any illustrations, and was therefore unlikely to appeal to or fall into the hands of schoolboys. And as a further safety measure, in case the book, with its deceptively bland title, might yet attract the wrong sort of reader, it was emphasised inside that the author's observations and advice applied solely to married people. For good measure, the author came close in his introduction to apologising for the book's very existence. Like the early researchers on female sexuality mentioned previously, he found it prudent to publish his book when he was old. In a notably downbeat personal introduction, he explained from his retirement home in Switzerland that he was only able to write it because he was close to the end of his life.

News of van de Velde's book nevertheless travelled quickly. It was reprinted forty-three times in English alone, as late as 1960 – when it was still the only manual of its kind, with the comparable (but in many ways more inhibited)
The Joy of Sex
still some years away. In 1928,
Ideal Marriage
was the only modern book to date by an authoritative male to endorse cunnilingus and fellatio. Van de Velde advocated monogamy, but believed the way to make fidelity work was for husbands to learn to satisfy their wives in bed.

Van de Velde left nothing to the imagination. Neither
Lady Chatterley
nor, for that matter
Fanny Hill
, written in 1749 (neither of which could be read uncensored by the general public before the 1960s), had much to say, for instance, on oral sex – there was one fleeting allusion in Cleland's work and none at all in
Lady Chatterley
.

Here, then, is Dr van de Velde in the midst of a scholarly medical discourse on vaginal lubrication; the language may be dated in parts, yet it is far too fruity for a modern tabloid newspaper: ‘… the most simple and obvious substitute for
the inadequate lubricant is the natural moisture of the salivary glands … and during a very protracted local or genital manipulation, this form of substitute must be applied to the vulva not once, but repeatedly. And this may best, most appropriately and most expeditiously be done without the intermediary offices of the fingers, but through what I prefer to term the genital kiss, by gentle and soothing caresses with lips and tongue … Lack of local secretion ceases to be a drawback, and even becomes an advantage … The acuteness of the pleasure it excites and the variety of tactile sensation it provides, will ensure that the previous deficiency is made good – i.e. that sexual excitement and desire reach such a point that -either by these means alone or aided by other endearments -distillation [orgasm] takes place, heralding psychic and bodily readiness for a sexual communion successful and satisfactory to both partners.'

Van de Velde's was an evangelistic, and also a remarkably humane work. If a wife, the doctor wrote, ‘chooses not to give access to the husband's caressing hand', and consequently that, ‘there is not the necessary excitement and desire on her part to cause swelling of the labia, dilation of the vulva and erection of the clitoris, then, as these manifestations are both normal and desirable before coitus, it is both stupid and grossly selfish of the husband to attempt it if they are absent'.

Yet even in this astonishing early textbook on orgasm, for
Ideal Marriage
was no less, the most fundamental premise was quite hopelessly incorrect. In van der Velde's book, not only was the importance of simultaneous orgasm paramount, but some women (supposedly) quoted claimed they could
only have
an orgasm once they had felt their partner's seminal fluid released. One elucidated in what was a startling explicit manner for the era: ‘Then, I feel the liquid torrent of the ejaculate, which gives a perfectly distinct sensation, as gloriously soothing and refreshing at the same time.'

This is odd in the extreme. While a very few women in other studies have occasionally confirmed, or believed, that
they can just about make out, as if it were a distant radio signal, their partner's ejaculation, the idea of a woman's orgasm being dependent on the sensation is so unusual as to prompt the modern reader to wonder whether Dr van de Velde made it up – that it was his own fantasy.

A lot of the work for even mid-twentieth-century sexual pioneers consisted of a simple naming of parts. Helena Wright, a British gynaecologist, published
The Sex Factor in Marriage
in 1930, and then revised it in 1947 to take up the cause of the clitoris with even greater precision. The earlier instructions, she had realised, were simply not encouraging enough for women whose socialisation had forbidden them to touch themselves at all. ‘Arrange a good light and take a mirror,' Dr Wright instructed: ‘The hood can be gently drawn backward by the finger tips and inside will be seen a small, smooth, rounded body … which glistens in a good light.' Then touch it, she advised. ('Any small, smooth object will do.') She promised that ‘the instant the clitoris is touched, a peculiar and characteristic sensation is experienced which is different in essence from touches on the labia or anywhere else.'

Even with such specific anatomical information becoming available, however, the old propagandists for synchronised mutual orgasm were still not quite dissuaded. In the same way as Freud's view persisted among Freudians for fifty years, as recently as the 1970s, old-school doctors and newspapers articles on sex were still reassuring men that a woman who failed to achieve orgasm with him was suffering from a physical or a psychological problem. It was not until the emergence of Dr Alfred C. Kinsey in the late-1940s and early-1950s that the reality was finally laid bare that penetrative sex rarely, if ever, produces female orgasm – and that simultaneous orgasm is a myth.

‘There cannot be many who would hesitate before admitting that the present age is, in the sexual sense, a period of freedom'

Burgo Partridge,
The History of Orgies
, 1958

Alfred Kinsey's name is practically synonymous with the post-Second World War liberation of sex in the West. His achievement at the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, the painstaking delineation and mapping of a generation's and a culture's hitherto unknown private sexual beliefs, experiences, predilections and practices, was a landmark in social science. Yet Kinsey was by training a zoologist who had taught in his core discipline and biology at Harvard and, by the age of thirty-five, was the world's foremost authority on the gall wasp.

His first book,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
appeared in 1948 in a welter of publicity. It ran to eight hundred pages of tinder-dry statistical and scientific material and commentary, with not a line of unseemly passion or a tendentious remark that strayed beyond commentary on the evidence. Yet ‘the Kinsey report', as it was called by a sex sensation-hungry media, sold half a million hardback copies in the US,
even at the price of $6.50 – the same as ten or fifteen paperback novels. A single copy reputedly found its way to the Soviet Union, where there was a room in the Kremlin in which authorised personnel could study the decadence of the West. Even books
about
the Kinsey report sold in hundreds of thousands. The subject patently lit a fuse with publics far away from America; even reading at an ocean's distance about the behind-the-drapes goings-on in American bedrooms seemed to titillate. Kinsey's follow-up,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
, came out five years later. It did not sell as well, but only because huge excerpts were published by newspapers and magazines whose editors knew from the experience of 1948 that the very word ‘Kinsey' in a headline could guarantee extra sales.

Kinsey appeared to approach his research entirely free from moral bias. Like Desmond Morris in the next decade, he regarded
Homo sapiens
as just another species which, in the case of the male, seemed to display as a primary behaviour the pursuit of orgasm. In a decade of evidence-gathering for their two books, Kinsey and his team interviewed (unlike Shere Hite in the 1970s, who sent out questionnaires) over 12,000 men and women on 200 separate areas of their sexual history. The interviews could take several hours, after which the numbers were processed by a punch-card-reading computer.

The conclusions of
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
would not even make the cover story of a women's magazine today. Up to 70 per cent of the population, Kinsey found, used the missionary position exclusively. Yet overall people were having more sex and of more adventurous varieties than was thought. It was revealed ‘… that there is no part of the human body which is not sufficiently sensitive to effect erotic arousal and even orgasm for at least some individual in the populace'. The average man, it emerged, reached the peak of virility at 16 or 17. Males between 16 and 20 typically sustained an erection for 42.88 minutes. The time declined immediately after that. Men who had sex early continued having it later in life.
Over a third of the men questioned had ‘some homosexual experience between the beginning of adolescence and old age', yet only ‘about 6.3 per cent of the total number of orgasms is derived from homosexual contacts'. Educated men were more likely to perform cunnilingus than uneducated. Working-class men had extramarital affairs early in marriage when they were healthy and virile, whereas white-collar men had them later, when they had fat stomachs but fat wallets to match. And, the figure most enjoyed by successive generations of schoolboys and students, some 17 per cent of boys raised on farms in the US in the 1930s and 1940s admitted to having experimented sexually with livestock.

The second study proved more of an aphrodisiac for the 1950s man. Kinsey's comments, never less than academically rigorous, were nonetheless perceptibly bolder. One of the most surprising findings of
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
was that of 5,940 American women questioned, 62 per cent admitted to masturbating: ‘We have recognised very few cases, if indeed there have been any outside of a few psychotics, in which either physical or mental damage had resulted from masturbatory activity,' Kinsey commented.

His other remarks were equally incendiary in their dry way: ‘There were wives and husbands in the older generation who did not even know that orgasm was possible for a female; or if they knew that it was possible, they did not comprehend that it could be desirable.' Then there was: ‘All orgasms appear to be physiologically similar quantities, whether they are derived from masturbatory, heterosexual, homosexual, or other sorts of activity. For most females and males, there appear to be basic physiologic needs which are satisfied by sexual orgasms, whatever the source.'

Kinsey's second study was a perfect example of fieldwork demonstrating how, whatever the posturings of medical professionals, moralists and churchmen, ordinary people frequently draw their own conclusions as to what is and is not pleasurable and/or advisable to do with their own bodies. ‘It cannot
be emphasised too often,' Kinsey concluded at one point from the data crunched from his team's interviews, ‘that orgasm cannot be taken as the sole criterion for determining the degree of satisfaction which a female may derive from sexual activity. Considerable pleasure may be found in sexual arousal which does not proceed to the point of orgasm, and in the social aspects of a sexual relationship. Whether or not she herself reaches orgasm, many a female finds satisfaction in knowing that her husband or other sexual partner has enjoyed the contact, and in realising that she has contributed to the male's pleasure.'