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Just as it is almost certain that, however well you believe
you are bringing up your children, you are still probably doing your bit to keep the next generation of psychiatrists in business, the chances are we have it wrong about sex too and will ultimately suffer for it. We always have. The psychiatrist Thomas Szasz bitterly described in 1973 how the misconceptions of his generation had affected them: ‘The modern erotic ideal: man and woman in loving sexual embrace experiencing simultaneous orgasm through genital intercourse. This is a psychiatric-sexual myth useful for fostering feelings of sexual inadequacy and personal inferiority. It is also a rich source of psychiatric “patients”.'

The poet and novelist Al Alvarez made a similar observation in a 1982 book,
Life After Marriage: Love in an Age of Divorce
. ‘At the centre of that religion of marriage was a cult every bit as hallowed as that of the Virgin: the cult of the orgasm, mutual and simultaneous. It descended to the young people of my generation from both Lawrence and Freud as the “Inner Mystery”, something they all aspired to, a sign of grace. Because of it I had impossible expectations of my marriage, my sex life, myself. I was an absolutist of the orgasm before I had had enough experience to ensure even sexual competence.'

While we are fond of congratulating ourselves that the sexual sphere has been revolutionised in the past few decades, there are billions of women around the world who have yet to have the opportunity to enjoy their fair share of orgasm. Even in the sophisticated Western cultures, large numbers of us are still ‘hung up', unfulfilled and embarrassed sexually. Young women continue to be marginalised for perceived ‘sleeping around' whereas young men are not, sexual ignorance is still extraordinarily rife and sexual diseases by and large on the increase.

Sexual enjoyment continues to be significantly skewed towards men's needs, and women demonstrably conspire in this. A question in QueenDom's 1999 survey amply illustrates this. In answer to the question, ‘What do you do if your partner orgasms and you haven't yet?' 52 per cent of men say that
they continue with sexual activity, while just 25 of women keep going; 26 per cent of women said sex usually ends when their partner climaxes, but only 7 per cent of men. When the question was reversed to, ‘What do you do if you have reached orgasm, but your partner hasn't?' 46 per cent of men admitted they stopped, but only 33 per cent of women. Taking all shades of response into account, QueenDom concluded that men are eight times more likely to say that they stop because sex ends with their orgasm, while women are twice as likely to give up and just let their partner come. Men were also three times more likely than women physically to walk out of the bedroom – statistical evidence, this, of the egregious post-orgasmic ‘pork and walk' syndrome.

There has also arisen as a function of widespread sexual knowledge quite an extensive cult of orgasm-faking among women who are sexually educated and aware, but cannot always find as much enthusiasm for sex as men. In 1985 Ann Landers's newspaper column asked female readers what they felt about having sex. Over 100,000 women responded with 72 per cent saying they would rather be doing something else. The point was taken up by a writer who, in a 1995 edition of
Cosmopolitan
, suggested that faking orgasms was a matter of speed and politeness. ‘When you have got to get up for work the next morning, who has two spare hours to make him feel better about not making you feel great?' she asked. In the QueenDom poll, 70 per cent of women and 25 per cent of men admitted to faking orgasm at least once.

A number of American campus questionnaires have revealed widespread faking by women at least some of the time. Male respondents, however, were frequently under the impression that no woman of theirs had ever faked orgasms. The conclusion of one such survey was that, ‘Clearly, the refined performances which women are giving are extremely convincing.' One does not need to be a rigorous feminist to see orgasm-faking as bad both for sexual equality and for the internal dynamics of a relationship. The renowned sex researchers Dr Jennifer
Berman and her sister Laura, of the Female Sexual Medicine Center at UCLA, see women ‘owning their sexual pleasure' as ‘the last frontier of the women's movement'. Their most trenchant and succinct advice to women faking orgasm accordingly is: ‘Don't'.

This seems to be judicious advice. Of the women among QueenDom's 15,000 respondents, 73 per cent claimed they can tell if their partner fakes it, but only 61 per cent of men notice women faking. However, since it is manifestly easier for a woman to fake orgasm right down to the vaginal contractions, it is not surprising that only 23 per cent of women confirmed that their partner can tell the difference between a real orgasm and a fake. The predominant reason cited for faking orgasm in the poll was selflessness and making a partner happy. But the figures also showed eloquently that faking orgasm is likely to make both partners feel worse about themselves and each other. And when asked directly how they would feel about a partner faking, 95 per cent of women and 92 per cent of men said that they would not welcome it at all.

It could be argued that the culture of hedonism, sexual equality, sexual licence – whichever you choose to style it -has spread to good effect from the spoiled, gluttonous West to the rest of the world. Sex advice and a focussed seeking to improve orgasms is a boom industry in countries like India, Russia, China and Indonesia, where there is an ever-swelling surfeit of agony aunts, sexual studies centres, sex manuals, pornography and shops selling sex aids. The problems that agony aunts in the developing world encounter, however, can make Western sex advice columns seem a little trivial by comparison. Although in fashionable Mumbai or Moscow society there is plenty of angst about the quality and quantity of orgasms, in China, the country's first agony aunt, Xinran Xue, was more likely to find among the two hundred anguished letters a day that flooded into her show,
Words on the Night Breeze
, harrowing accounts by women of being continually raped by their father or a party official. So moved
was Xue by the letters that she compiled them into a book,
The Good Women of China
. It was first published in the West in 2002, and was due to appear in mainland China in 2004.

Globally, though, the trend towards wanting to live one's sex life to the full is inexorable. There is clearly both the potential and the impetus for humanity to become a great deal more orgasm-literate and, ultimately, to regard orgasm as a fundamental human entitlement on a par with legal and political rights.

One rarely reported modern instance of orgasm coming to be regarded as a right was seen in Switzerland in 2003, where disabled people in Zurich were offered professional sexual services as part of a trial project. ‘There is a very big demand for this,' commented Angela Fürer, local director of a social welfare organisation, Pro Infirmis. ‘We have been hearing about the problem for years, both from disabled people and from those working with the disabled.' Her organisation was recruiting ten ‘touchers' to offer sexual and emotional relief to Zurich's disabled. Full sex and oral sex was not going to be included in the pilot scheme, but Fürer said registered prostitutes might be included in the service at a later date. ‘For now, we will just be offering massage, body contact, stroking, holding and bringing people to orgasm, if that is what they wish.

‘It can be very difficult for some disabled people to take off their clothes and show a body which is deformed and I feel you can only expect people to put that kind of trust in you and offer their vulnerability when you yourself are willing to be vulnerable. On the whole, though, the response we've had has been extremely positive with many disabled people calling us to say how happy they are. These are people who don't just want to spend their lives breathing and eating and being cleaned up. They have souls and feelings like everybody else and sexuality is a part of their lives, just as it is with any other human being.' It should be noted that Pro Infirmis's brave advocacy of the sexual rights of the disabled was suspended
four months after it was announced, having provoked fury and threats of funding withdrawal from the good burghers of Zurich.

Another positive benefit of the current era's sexual liberation has been a perceptible trend towards a limited ‘feminisation' of men. This is more than a merely stylistic fashion, with celebrities such as the footballer David Beckham openly adopting more feminine styles; nor is it a function of more inclusive attitudes towards gay men. The more hidden signs of feminisation are to be found in traditionally heterosexual men. These indications range from increased interest in personal grooming, to acceptance of a greater role in childrearing to a greater willingness to discuss personal feelings and the intricacies of loving relationships. While men are still by far the more likely sex to pursue better and different orgasmic experiences in opportunistic extra-marital sexual relationships, that situation too is shifting seismically.

In the macho society of Argentina, it has been noticed by researchers recently, oral sex and anal intercourse have lost their status, especially among younger male Argentines, and come to be thought of as activities to be indulged in with prostitutes. Mutual masturbation with a female partner is increasingly viewed as a means of sharing pleasure and orgasm without penetration.

Some fascinating data unearthed by Dr Shirley P. Glass, a clinical psychologist from Baltimore, in a 2003 book on infidelity, provided evidence that men are looking for more from such affairs. ‘The old “sex first” definition of men's affairs is changing,' said Dr Glass. ‘In this new crisis of infidelity, more men are now following what has traditionally been a female pattern, that of emotional bonding first and sex later … an increased number of unfaithful husbands have deep emotional connections to their affair partner.'

‘In my clinical sample,' she wrote, ‘83 per cent of involved women and 61 per cent of involved men characterised their extramarital relationship as more emotional than sexual.'

The trend was almost as marked in a poll Dr Glass conducted in 1980 at Baltimore Washington International Airport. Here, she handed out 1,000 questionnaires to travellers. An amazing 300 mailed them back. Of the airport sample, 71 per cent of involved women and 44 per cent of involved men described their extramarital affair as ‘more emotional than sexual'. Dr Glass went on to characterise such relationships as more dangerous to marriages than old-style affairs between, typically, older men with time, money and opportunity to spare and younger, sometimes vulnerable, single women curious to experiment. ‘The most threatening kind of infidelity combined a deep emotional attachment with sexual intercourse,' she commented.

Hand in hand with such feminisation of men came what critics such as Shmuley Boteach have described as a masculin-isation of women. Shirley Glass noted in her book that, ‘In a sexual addiction recovery program, 16 per cent of all of the sex addicts were women', but Boteach has publicly taken issue with the sexually rapacious ethic exemplified by the women characters in
Sex and the City
. He believes that ‘women can be everything men are, and more', but argues that in ancient times women were lauded for their power and sexual prowess, and that the fight for equality has lost them their souls. Equality for women, Boteach says, was a step back for women. ‘Real greatness,' he says, ‘is where you don't have to prove yourself constantly.'

It is interesting, incidentally, that in order to make the
Sex and the City
women plausible as sexual huntresses with the pursuit of orgasm their ultimate goal, the show's creators had to insulate them from any intrusive sense of reality. They live in the rarefied upper echelons of Manhattan, never worry about money, never seem to do much by way of work and have little to do but eat and drink endlessly (but naturally, never put on an ounce in weight). A shard of the reality normal women face, one can easily conclude, would be like a piece of broken glass under their delicate feet. Yet, as evidenced by sentiments such
as the
Cosmopolitan
writer who fakes orgasms to save time, or Ann Landers's 72 per cent of a huge sample of women who would really rather be doing something other than having sex,
Sex and the City
was never anything more than make believe.

Better supported by real-life evidence, however, is a profound shift in older people's attitudes towards sex. If you use the media as your sole indicator, it would appear that something quite drastic happened to all the longhaired lover boys and mini-skirted chicks of the 1960s when they hit sixty; they seem by most accounts to have lost their prodigious former libido. The orgasm must surely, a flick through any newspaper or magazine will show, be exclusively the privilege of young, firm-fleshed people.

Yet an ICM poll of 1,000 married couples published by the
Reader's Digest
in 2003 showed that sexual satisfaction was more important during mid-life than in early marriage, and was ‘surprisingly important' during a couple's oldest years. The survey discovered that those aged 24-34 were the
least
concerned with sexual satisfaction, while those of both genders between 35-44 placed a higher value on having good and frequent sex – with wives rating it more highly than husbands. There was a dip in interest in sex (but not in love) for the 45-65 age group – but every aspect of a sexual relationship was still more important to men over 65 than it was to the youngest husbands.

Shere Hite made the point too in
The New Hite Report
(2000) that older women are more likely than younger ones to enjoy more multiple orgasms. ‘Confusion between reproductive activity and sexual pleasure is playing havoc with our lives,' Hite wrote. ‘It is true that the capacity to reproduce ends at menopause, and that vaginal lubrication can decrease, but women's sexual arousal or orgasm capacity actually increases.' Hite added that Hormone Replacement Therapy, which boosts oestrogen levels to pre-menopausal strength, can overcome the dryness question. Hite was writing before some of the negative aspects of HRT were widely known.