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If this leads anybody to wonder how India still suffers from an over-population problem, Dr Promilla Kapur, a research psychologist and sociologist at New Delhi's India International Center, explains that sexual habits are markedly less inhibited in rural villages, where tribal groups, such as the Muria people practise near totally free sex and adults talk loudly and openly about sexual matters in front of children.

Additionally, as Kakar explains, lust finds a way even in prohibitive cultures. ‘Despite these pervasive negative images of the conflict between the sexes in marriage, and the negative view of women and sexuality,' he writes, ‘it must be pointed out that Indian sexual relations are not devoid of regular pauses in the conflict between man and woman. Tenderness, whether this be an affair with the soul of a
Mukesh
song, that is much
quieter than a plunge into the depths of erotic passion known in Western culture, or sexual ecstasy of a husband and wife who have found their way through the forest of sexual taboos, does exist in India'.

Middle-class India is now adopting more Western (or, strictly speaking, Eastern) ways. There is widespread discussion of sex, especially in relation to getting the best orgasms, in academic journals, in Indian digital media and in the press and broadcasting. Satellite TV in particular has exposed children to sexually related material from an early age. Among children in urban areas, sexual play and exploration have, probably as a result of this, increasingly become a feature of growing up, even though parents are often unaware of it. Teenagers are also increasingly open about kissing and holding hands in public places. A recent sex study has accordingly shown that 30 per cent of respondents experience premarital sex, while 41 percent of men have sex before they are twenty. Unmarried women, too, are gaining sexual experience with male friends and work acquaintances; 43 per cent of women believe casual sex with someone you have no plans to marry is acceptable.

China, with its even sexier distant past than India, is struggling to overcome the puritanism of its immediate past, and succeeding to some extent. Suiming Pan, a sex researcher and Associate Professor of the Department of Sociology at the China Renmin University in Beijing, conducted seven social surveys of sex in the 1980s and 1990s. Investigators found it very difficult directly to elicit information on orgasms, but most couples reported they experienced ‘sexual pleasure' –
kuaigan
– frequently. Of 1,279 men and women in 41 cities, Suiming Pan found men reach orgasm 7.2 times out of every 10 attempts, as against 4.1 times for women. In another 20,000-respondent survey by Professor Dalin Liu of the Shanghai Sex Sociology Research Center, a third of urban women and a quarter of rural women claim to experience
kuaigan
Very often', while 58.2 and 76.8 per cent respectively enjoyed it ‘sometimes'.

Parallel research in Hong Kong in 1996, however, showed women's knowledge of their own sexuality was particularly poor. A third of women interviewed did not know where the clitoris was located. It was noted, though, that the better educated people of both sexes were, the more they knew about the difference between female and male orgasm.

Thailand, regarded as something of a sexual paradise by visiting Westerners (and, sadly, by paedophiles, too), has in reality, surprisingly unsophisticated sexual habits. Sex is barely discussed, and not seriously when it is; a newlywed couple will routinely be teased and asked if they ‘had fun' on their wedding night and how many times they ‘did it'. But such banter distracts from a quite phallocentric society, living under the pervasive myth that men's sexual desires are boundless and unchangeable. As Sukanya Hantrakul, a noted Bangkok writer and social critic, says: ‘Culturally, Thai society flatters men for their promiscuity … Women's magazines always advise women to tolerate the situation and accommodate themselves to it.'

In Indonesia, with its similar dichotomy between traditional attitudes (Islamic in its case) and modern, tourism-borne liberality, an analogous tension exists between old and new ways. Young women are increasingly eager to have sex with whomsoever they like without having to love the person, which upsets their parents' generation. But at the same time, there is a perception that sex is a secretive activity, in which women are like maids, subservient in everything, sex included. Some men make a point of having regular homosexual contacts because of a folk belief that they have supernatural powers which diminish during sex with women.

Indonesia does, however, have what would be regarded in the West as an unusually healthy acceptance of masturbation, which is almost universal among teenagers as a tension release. One study by Professor Wimpie Pangkahila, a reproductive health expert at Udayana University on Bali, found that 81 per cent of male adolescents and 18 per cent of females
admitted masturbating. Some parents of young children reported happily watching their children masturbate to orgasm.

The dogged attempt by Indonesian young women to do their damnedest to strip emotion out of the sex equation, to take control and demand their due orgasmic pleasure, represents a significant change that characterised sex across the world in the very late-twentieth century – as evidenced by Frasier Crane's chastisement of the promiscuous Roz in one
Frasier
episode: ‘Didn't your mother tell you that sex leads to things like dating?'

In 1973 Isadora Wing, heroine of Erica Jong's landmark tale of female sexual liberation,
Fear of Flying
, decides that she has come to ‘that inevitable year when fucking [your husband] turned as bland as Velveeta cheese', and searches for the respon-sibility-and-guilt-free sex she calls ‘the zipless fuck'. Also published in 1973 was
My Secret Garden
, a compilation of female sexual fantasies collected by Nancy Friday. In an NBC radio discussion at the time of its launch, Dr Theodore Rubin said to Friday: ‘Your book
My Secret Garden
reduces women to men's sexual level.' Her response: ‘Aren't women entitled to a little lust too?'

A woman as well as a man in this sexualised (and very slightly Huxley-esque) New World of Orgasm could be ‘serious about her relationship with a partner', as Lionel Tiger explains in his history of pleasure, ‘and yet have no intention of conceiving, or even having more than a semi-durable relationship based on playful pleasure-seeking. Neither is it inconceivable to us that a one-night stand might be the arena for thoughtful, considerate, generous sexual dialogue – an extraordinary advance, that, on animal behaviour, and very probably on early human conduct too.'

The New Woman – a cliché, yet justified in the late-twentieth century – developed a sexual acquisitiveness and outspokenness that would have astonished even Chaucer's Wife of Bath. Here is Germaine Greer, a respected Warwick University academic as well as a professional controversialist, in hearty
voice in her 1970 book
The Female Eunuch
. ‘At all events a clitoral orgasm with a full cunt is nicer than a clitoral orgasm with an empty one, as far as I can tell at least.'

While
Cosmopolitan
et al made commercial hay by turning the pursuit of the ‘Big O' into a glossy monthly serial – which still continues – feminism, some of the quite prim Mary Wollstonecraft-ish hue, also got to work on the orgasm. Heedless of the mocking of Camille Paglia, who opined that, ‘Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermists', feminists asserted that the primary cause of women's oppression lay in men's sexual dominance. The most vehement, such as Valerie Solonas in her 1970
SCUM Manifesto
(SCUM was the ‘Society for Cutting Up Men') went further, arguing not merely that women should withdraw from sex with men, but that heterosexual women were as ‘dangerous' as men.

It was only a matter of time before male-style competitiveness about the female orgasm began to enter the picture. With the spotlight glaring on the orgasm there was an almost tangible media and peer pressure at large to be having them more frequently, or at least talking about them if you were not enjoying them. This new, almost consumerist, spirit can be found in the most diverse societies, often overriding deeply held taboos. In hygiene-obsessed Japan,
The Weekly Post
, the country's most widely read magazine, recently published a survey of 2,000 readers. Of the male respondents 51 per cent said they practise oral sex, and 8 per cent replied that they practise anal sex. Additionally, only 8 per cent of the women in the sample said they never experience orgasm.

Neither are just any orgasms good enough in much of the world today; orgasms have to be earth-shattering, mind-boggling, if a women is not to feel guilty of short-changing herself, and the rest of womanhood by extension. ‘The discipline imposed is the discipline of the orgasm, not just any orgasm, but the perfect orgasm, regular, spontaneous, potent and reliable,' Germaine Greer has commented.

A glamorous young feminist sex-researcher came splashily on to the scene in 1976 to dampen down the flames of this cult of unrealistic expectation. The former Shirley Gregory from Missouri, a one-time model who appeared topless (albeit on a single occasion) in
Playboy
, had pursued an academic career between photo shoots, achieved two degrees and a PhD, and rebranded herself every bit as brilliantly as Max Factor would a new cosmetic. The name of the new product was ‘Shere Hite'.

The prodigiously intelligent Hite then spent six years quietly sending out a 100-question sex survey to 3,000 American women and then collated the results into a modern, sexily written and presented version of Kinsey's second report.
The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality
was regarded as being revelatory and sensational, with its evidence that nearly 12 per cent of American women never had orgasms of any shape or size, and that only 30 per cent of those who did orgasm could do so without extra clitoral stimulation.

It was welcome re-confirmation at a timely moment that women's sexual satisfaction had failed to keep pace with the sexual revolution. But, as Naomi Wolf and others pointed out, it represented nothing remotely new, other than extremely clever marketing and a more attractive, TV-ready protagonist than was Alfred Kinsey. True pioneers of the same century, from Stopes to van de Velde to Helena Wright, Wolf reminded us, had said the same, even if Hite's book was ‘somewhat less explicit than theirs'.

But with that irresistible combination of sexy looks, name and brain, Shere Hite was widely greeted as a pioneer rather than an inspired repackager, and even credited by some as having ‘discovered' the clitoris. Criticism of her methods and credentials was discounted as so much sexist scattershot, pelted at her because she happened to be beautiful; Hite's supporters cleverly argued that her detractors simply objected to her conclusions as ‘anti-male' – when, ironically, Hite may have
over
estimated the extent to which American
men were managing to satisfy women. Her conclusion that even 30 per cent of women were able to orgasm without extra stimulation of the clitoris seems, after all, to err heavily in men's favour.

The Hite Report
was nonetheless nominated in London's
Times
at the turn of the millennium as one of the hundred key books of the twentieth century. Even so, Anthony Clare, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Trinity College, Dublin, must surely have regretted such tabolid hyperbole as his statement in the
Daily Telegraph
that, ‘Western society owes a debt to Shere Hite that will be well nigh impossible to repay.' The Reuters reviewer who commented that ‘Hite's work has left an indelible mark on Western civilisation' was nearer to a fair assessment.

In concert with Shere Hite's singularly unremarkable but disproportionately influential deductions, the sexual practice that was the greatest beneficiary of the post-sixties sex boom was female masturbation, which became positively respectable. Vibrators first went properly public (as opposed to being disguised as vacuum cleaner attachments, orange juicers and the like) in 1973, when Betty Dodson, PhD, author of a new book called
Sex For One
, led a female masturbation workshop at a sexuality conference in New York. Earnest young women across the States began attending masturbation classes. A woman who took part in one of these in Berkeley, California, in 1973, remembers the group members being taught to inspect and manipulate their vaginas and bring themselves to orgasm. One woman admitted that her husband would have found it easier to cope with her being unfaithful than knowing she had learned to provide her own orgasms.

The following year, the sex therapist and author Helen Singer Kaplan was moved to write: ‘The vibrator provides the strongest, most intense stimulation known. Indeed, it has been said that the electric vibrator represents the only significant advance in sexual technique since the days of Pompeii.' In 1983,
Playboy
commissioned a survey of 1,207 women that
showed masturbation was ‘the most reliably orgasmic sexual practice'. But female masturbation's real moment in the sun arguably came in 2001, when a Dutch mobile phone dealership, Tring, came up with the offer of a free vibrator with every vibrating Nokia 3330 phone when connected to the KPN network. Nokia and KPN soon persuaded Tring to drop the offer, Nokia calling it ‘disgusting'.

Women, then, for the first time openly celebrated the wonders of the clitoris, flaunted their own superior orgasms, and (although probably
not
for the first time) openly laughed at men's failings. Larkin's words at the head of this chapter express a measure of pathos at being left behind by the sexual revolution, and this sense of climb-down by men to accompany the new female triumphalism is equally symptomatic of the spirit of the post-sixties age.

As Ian Penman, writing in 1989, pointed out: ‘Male orgasm as represented in the movies is nearly always a cause for hilarity in a way that the female response just isn't. An endless hydraulic drollery, the slapstick of male orgasm consists not in faking but delaying it – the oscillation between arousal and deferral summed up by Madeline Kahn's chanteuse in [the Mel Brooks film]
Blazing Saddles:
“They're always coming and going and going and coming … and always too soon”.'