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In practice, things are a little more complicated. But as the mythical Tiresius discovered at the cost of his sight, even if reaching orgasm for a woman is a longer and more painstaking process, a sensation that does not simply happen spontaneously but has to be consciously coaxed and cultivated, the neurological reward is much more intense, long-lasting, satisfying – and almost immediately repeatable.

How long does it or should it take? In laboratory experiments – not the most seductive atmosphere for all but the more imaginative among us – a minority of women need to stimulate themselves for an hour or more before reaching orgasm, although, with experience (of the clinical atmosphere of the lab, that is), this time generally reduces. The average time for most women to reach orgasm in the laboratory is twenty
minutes. The shortest time recorded in the research laboratory for a woman to reach orgasm is fifteen seconds, but such alacrity is extremely rare.

Laboratory observation of orgasm, as with clinical studies of any physiological process from sleep to behavioural experiments, is obviously only suitable for a small proportion of people. It may well be that subjects prepared to take part in sex experiments are of a mildly exhibitionist temperament, but this should not affect the physiological processes under examination. And physiologically the female orgasm as observed scientifically is not dissimilar to the male, even to the extent of encompassing an analogue to erection (the swelling and stiffening with arousal of the area surrounding the urethra) and to ejaculation, with the secretion at the moment of climax of a small amount of pale milky-coloured fluid, consisting of the plasma-like product of the Skene's glands surrounding the urethra and the paraurethral gland, mixed in with traces of lubrication, male ejaculate and urine. A major component of female ejaculate is lubrication that pools in the back of the vagina and is expelled by the contractions at orgasm.

Since it is not widely known that female ejaculate exists, even though women are as capable as men of wet dreams, it is generally mistaken for urine alone, and for this reason, in the tense minutes preceding orgasm, women tend instinctively to brace and tighten the vaginal walls and bladder. After she hits the plateau, however, a woman involuntarily releases the tension and experiences swift muscular relaxation; the small amount of ejaculate she was holding in, plus some male ejaculate if any is present, now exits, albeit at a more stately velocity than the male ejaculation.

Some women report that this ejaculatory outward passage of liquid through the urethra during orgasm, combined with the flow of accumulated lubrication from the vagina, contributes to a more powerful and intense sensation, perhaps of the same order of concentrated physical climax men feel from liquid rushing through the penis. It is one of the most
intriguing features of orgasm that we cannot know this for sure because nobody in history has experienced both forms of orgasm. But women's descriptions of orgasm rather suggest to envious men either that females do get a rather better deal from their more complex anatomy – or that they merely feel less reticent about describing their feelings. ‘An altered state of consciousness,' ‘euphoria', ‘a spiritual experience,' and, ‘an oceanic roaring,' are among the more mellifluous of women's representations of their orgasms. The ‘oceanic' metaphor interestingly echoes Freud's belief that such a feeling lies at the root of all religion.

Contrary to the modern trend in thinking that the male and female orgasm are relatively similar in the way they feel, descriptions by women sent questionnaires by cultural historian Dr Shere Hite for her 1976 book
The Hite Report
vigorously support the view that the female orgasm is more powerful and interesting than the male. Hite's book was proclaimed as revolutionary, although strictly speaking what it did more than to pioneer was to popularise material on female sexuality that had been presented more dryly in the 1950s by Professor Alfred C. Kinsey, a zoologist at Indiana University, who before undertaking his sociological studies of human sexual behaviour – work that was the Western world's declaration of sexual independence from hundreds of years of mischief and mythology – was a world authority on the gall wasp.

Both researchers demonstrated that the manipulation of the clitoris was the best or, usually, only way women had orgasms. Hite concluded: ‘Not to have orgasm from intercourse is the experience of the majority of women', while Kinsey held that, ‘The techniques of masturbation and of petting are more specifically calculated to effect orgasm than the techniques of coitus itself. But while Kinsey's solidly academic doorstop works were surprise post-war bestsellers, Hite's slicker style and somewhat arousing anecdotal accounts made her a media favourite.

‘The orgasm itself reminds me of a dam breaking. I can feel
contractions inside me and a very liquid sensation. The best part is the continuing waves of build-up and release during multiple orgasms,' reported one of Hite's respondents. Another wrote: ‘My vaginal and clitoral area gets absolutely hot and I seem to switch into a pelvic rhythm over which I have no conscious control; every contact with my clitoris at this point is a miniature orgasm which becomes more frequent until it is one huge muscle spasm!' Another still: ‘First, tension builds in my body and head, my heart beats, then I strain against my love and then there is a second or two of absolute stillness, non-breathing, during which I know orgasm will come in the next second or two. Then waves, and I rock against my partner and cannot hold him tight enough. It's all over my body, but especially in my abdomen and gut. Afterwards, I feel suffused with warmth and love and absolute happiness.'

Needless to say, ejaculation is not the major component of female orgasm. For women, sexual Nirvana is primarily a variable peak muscular experience accompanied by involuntary, rhythmic contractions of the vaginal walls, the uterus, rectal sphincter and urethral sphincter, all allied to the partial dissipation of the muscular tension of sexual arousal and the parallel release of vaso-congestion – but, critically, not as complete a release as men undergo.

It remains a moot point whether the vagina itself is sensitive to sexual friction. Kinsey was adamant on this: ‘The vagina walls are quite insensitive in the great majority of females … There is no evidence that the vagina is ever the sole source of arousal, or even the primary source of erotic arousal in any female,' was his verdict. Germaine Greer, however, in
The Female Eunuch
, published in 1970, wrote: ‘It is nonsense to say that a woman feels nothing when a man is moving his penis inside her vagina. The orgasm is qualitatively different when the vagina can undulate around the penis instead of a vacancy.' If only as a modern woman, not merely as a pioneering theorist on female sexuality, Greer might be expected to know better than the decidedly odd figure of Kinsey, whose
position is, as will be examined later, today being critically reappraised in a rather negative light.

The muscular vagina certainly has a fundamental role in sexual response, whether or not it is sensitive. As orgasm approaches, there is swelling of the vaginal barrel's contracting outer third, and during orgasm itself there is a two- to four-second muscle-spasm in this region, followed by rhythmic convulsions at intervals of 0.8 of a second. There are from five to eight major rhythmic contractions in each orgasmic experience, followed by nine to fifteen minor ones. The total duration of these muscle contractions has been measured as lasting between 13 and 51 seconds, although women reporting their subjective perceptions state that orgasm lasted between 7 and 107 seconds. During these contractions, the heart races and the arms and legs spasm more or less out of control. There is slight expansion of the inner two-thirds of the vagina, a contraction of the uterus and, frequently, strong muscular contractions in many parts of the body. Respiratory and heart rates approximately double.

The woman's face may remain composed quite rigidly until the beginnings of her orgasm, at which point her composure breaks and the features become mobile and distorted. Her breathing in and out loudens and accelerates and the nostrils flare, while extra saliva flows in the mouth, which can make her tongue react by lolling and contorting. The pupils of the eyes dilate and temporary photophobia along with the delirious pleasure of the moment may cause her to shut them. As the climax of orgasm continues, disjointed words, highly charged with emotion, may come from her mouth, coalescing into a single long cry expressive of sublime pleasure.

One orgasm is seldom sufficient. Women are naturally multi-orgasmic. ‘A woman will usually be satisfied with three to five orgasms,' stated William Masters and Virginia Johnson in their 1966 book
Human Sexual Response
. ‘That is,' they added, ‘if a woman is immediately stimulated following orgasm, she is likely to experience several orgasms in rapid
succession. This is not an exceptional occurrence, but one of which most women are capable.'

An interesting variation on the multi-orgasmic woman theme emerged in 2003 when Professor Sandra Leiblum and psychologist Sharon Nathan of the Centre for Sexual and Relationship Health at the MMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey, reported a previously unknown affliction they called Persistent Sexual Arousal Syndrome, PSAS. This is
constant
desire for orgasm that has to be dealt with one way or another for the women to function normally. PSAS, Leiblum said, has been identified in some 50 women worldwide. One woman suffering PSAS reports that she needs as many as 800 orgasms a day.

Her gynaecologist, the afflicted woman wrote in the London
Sunday Telegraph
told her, she was, ‘every man's dream'.'I wanted to punch him. I said, “How would you feel if you had a permanent hard-on all day long?” That shut him up.'

The physiological similarities between male and female orgasm notwithstanding, there is also an enormous difference. It is not merely that males have fewer orgasmic contractions – three or four at best – or that, unlike her mate, the female's genitals retain their engorged blood on orgasm so she can climax again and again if she wishes. Nor is it just that the contractions of female orgasms last longer, while men's most intense pleasure lies in the first few spasms. The biggest difference is, rather, that orgasmic feelings in men are localised in the immediate genital area of penis and testicles, while for women orgasmic sensations are felt throughout the pelvic area.

Anatomically, the female orgasm is a more widespread phenomenon than the male. And that is why sexually aware women have such an enormous appetite for orgasm and the capacity to climax repeatedly without tiring. As Dr Mary Jane Sherfey, a radical feminist psychiatrist, asserted in a 1973 book,
The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality
, because of the way women are constructed, it is wrong to expect them to be satisfied by one orgasm: the more orgasms a woman has,
the better they become, and the more she wants. The greater scale and complexity of the female orgasm, it is thought, is also the reason why it is so important in the evolutionary scheme of things.

Sherfey argued that the female capacity for sexual pleasure is more fundamental than even the extraordinary existence of the clitoris – a bundle of nerves designed solely for sex – would suggest. The woman's hedonistic potential is, she explained, a function of the structure of a woman's lower pelvis, the whole of which she described as an extensive ‘erotic network', in which the clitoris, labia and perineum, the outer vagina, anal region and G (Gräfenberg) spot (of which more shortly), all serviced by four or five dense masses of veins and nerves, congregate into one integrated, hyper-responsive sexual organ with the potential to out-perform the simpler male sexual apparatus.

The combined array of female genitals has similarly been described by other researchers as forming an ‘orgasmic crescent' of erectile tissue. Dr Sherfey also asserted that the network of blood vessels which creates the female's extreme potential for sexual responsiveness becomes more complex after each birth and with age. In other words that, again contrary to what might seem necessary to a strict Darwinian, women are biologically designed to get keener on sex the further they advance into their childbearing years – and beyond.

The size and range of organs involved in the woman's ‘erotic network' makes it unsurprising that at various times theorists have posited that there is more than one kind of female orgasm. Freud's ‘vaginal orgasm' is discredited. Sigmund Freud theorised, or more likely fantasised, that females were biologically inferior to males and live their lives tormented by feelings of inferiority and ‘penis envy'. His theory was all the more outrageous because it was accepted as the gold standard for most of the twentieth-century. Freud asserted that clitoral orgasm was a sign of sexual immaturity, suitable only for young girls. A mature woman, he pronounced, should be able to have a
quite superior vaginal orgasm. By making the distinction, of course, he gave legs to the male-dominated (‘androcentric' or ‘phallocratic' in the argot of gender studies) notion that a woman must respond to the kind of sexual activity that happens to be the most swiftly gratifying for a man. If she failed to achieve orgasm from penetration alone, she was worse than anatomically defective, which would suggest a level of blamelessness; she was sexually
infantile
.

The Harvard palaeontologist and biologist Stephen Jay Gould, in a celebrated essay, ‘Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples', pointed out the pain and anxiety that Freud caused to women, which remained fashionable – a cult, almost – as late as the 1960s. Gould wrote: ‘As women have known since the dawn of our time, the primary site for stimulation to orgasm centres upon the clitoris. The revolution unleashed by the Kinsey report of 1953 has, by now, made this information available to men who, for whatever reason, had not figured it out for themselves by the more obvious routes of experience and sensitivity.' Gould suspected further that part of the reason for Freud's assertion about infantile and mature orgasms may have flowed from male vanity – from an angry rejection of the idea that a woman might get sexual pleasure without the need of a man.