Female orgasms wander through the news media like the Loch Ness monster,
glimpsed now and then, but never quite surfacing. Now we have two more
sightings, thanks to the latest book by Fay Weldon and a new film about the
Rabbit vibrator. In What Makes Women Happy? Weldon recommends that a
good woman should fake her orgasms “and then leap out of bed and pour him
champagne, telling him: ‘You are so clever’. ”
Meanwhile, the new film, Rabbit Fever (in which I make a cameo
appearance), launches next week, purporting to tell the story of the sex
toy’s rise and its tendency to create orgasm addicts. What is it about the
female orgasm nowadays? The O-word itself is horrid and its meaning is
confused; the root is the Greek word for tumescence or engorgement, not for
the spasm that invariably accompanies ejaculation in the male, of which
something similar can be produced in the female, but less reliably and with
rather more effort. Candles and carrots used to be credited with more
potency in triggering female orgasm than the male member but the march of
technology has produced a purpose-made pleasure-tool, namely the vibrator,
of which the market leader is the Rabbit.
For a mere £30, any woman can acquire a “good-sized Rabbit vibrator with an
extra: the beads can move up and down for pure pleasure whilst the rabbit is
teasing your cl*t”, according to the advert. The rabbit is a two-eared
projection on the upper side of the shaft of the instrument. And there’s
more: “The shaft has a number of pleasure beads and the touch control allows
you to choose between vibrate, pulse, escalate or multi-speed”, all
accompanied by the kind of droning buzz you associate with a cordless
hedge-clipper. You can get silent Rabbits, but they cost more and they’re
more of the squirmy type. Eventually men will have penile inserts that give
them a similar range of extras, vibrating eggs in the penis head, jelly
spikes, rotating beads. But a man takes more looking after than a Rabbit and
today’s women don’t have the time.
In modern consumer society the name of the game is instant gratification and
the paradigm of all pleasure is solitary. Sole users guarantee the widest
volume of sales of any appliances, hence the iPod and the Rabbit.
Apparently Fay Weldon did not watch Sex and the City, which is what
launched the Rabbit into every boudoir in the Western world. Women no longer
expect men to supply orgasms, if they ever did. It’s only the men who expect
to supply orgasms; their penis gives them so much pleasure that they can’t
imagine it not doing the same for their sexual partner.
Most of us do fake orgasm, often, but we could do without Weldon betraying our
little secret. In every porn video the whores are whimpering, snorting and
panting from the git-go, at the merest touch in vaguely the right area from
a even the rubberiest of male organs. Faking it is de rigueur. Most women do
it because given their workload they need to get the sex over with in the
nicest way and get some sleep. It’s called “keeping everyone (but yourself)
happy”. That principle is a chief mechanism in women’s oppression and I am
saddened but not surprised to hear Weldon upholding it.
If you’re Paris Hilton — hugely rich, entirely self-willed and don’t give a
damn whether the people around you are happy or not — you can skip the whole
performance. In a porn video made by some hustler when Hilton was only 18,
he crouches head-down between her thighs, snuffling like a trufflehound,
while she lies back, staring expressionlessly at the ceiling.
The sequence lasts about 20 minutes. I almost expected her to ask the famous
question from Deep Throat: “Do you mind if I smoke while you eat?”
But she remains mute and motionless throughout. She could be asleep.
Attagirl.
The rest of us wouldn’t dare to be so disobliging. We moan and groan to make
our man feel good, much as a man will tell his date that she’s the prettiest
girl in the room. It’s just good manners.
And as for telling him how clever he is after sex and pouring him a rewarding
glass of champagne, it’s hard to do that if he’s flat on his back snoring.
Most of us are too insecure to be upfront about our failure to respond. Weldon
is wrong: men are not expected to supply women’s orgasms. These days women
are expected to produce orgasms on demand. Regardless of age or fitness or
the tedium of the relationship, we’re all supposed to be hot, up for it, in
all circumstances, at all times. The insertion of the penis is tantamount to
lighting the blue touchpaper. If we don’t go off like a fire-cracker, it’s
not the man’s fault but ours. The most potent cause of so much faking it is
fear of appearing frigid, of being a “dud bash”.
Mid-20th-century marriage manuals encouraged men to be patient, to stimulate
their partners in a host of different ways, and to delay their own
gratification as long as possible. The woman was to be the violin; the man
the virtuoso. With a man who knew what he was doing, a woman could
experience multiple orgasms, remaining in an orgastic state for many
minutes. Alas, the multiple orgasm has proved even more elusive than the
mutual orgasm.
Sexualities have many forms of expression and those forms are continually
changing. From 1927, when Wilhelm Reich first published The Function of
the Orgasm, orgasms have been represented as essential to mental health.
In the beginning these weren’t just any orgasms; the essential orgasms were
those that eliminated tensions, leaving the individual in a state of
equilibrium, self-regulating and therefore capable of freedom.
Oppressive political systems, it was claimed, induced mindless servility and
impotence by censoring free sexual expression. Unfulfilled subjects
sublimated their frustrations in militarism, racism and genocide. If Hitler
had had the right orgasms the Holocaust would never have happened. “Right
sex” was a purifying ritual; masturbation was discouraged.
For women, the right orgasm was vaginal; orgasms deriving from stimulation of
the clitoris were thought to be superficial, inferior, typical of the
narcissistic immature personality. Better understanding of female anatomy
brought the awareness that there were few nerve ends in the vagina, despite
the myth of the G-spot. Proper study of the ramifications of the clitoris
revealed that it was not so much a localised button as the outcropping head
of a deep neural network involving the whole pelvis, including the vagina.
The truth was out: women did not need men’s help to reach orgasm. Indeed,
men could get in the way. The more they fiddled and twiddled, the more in
the way they were.
Fay Weldon is probably right to say that sex without orgasm can be perfectly
pleasurable, but making love is even more deeply satisfying than simply
having sex, with the female orgasm as an optional extra.
Weldon is certainly right to say that there is no point in a woman demanding
an orgasm from her man. If an orgasm is what she wants, rather than
intimacy, there’s always the Rabbit.
What Makes Women Happy? (Fourth Estate, £12.99) is available from Times
Books First at £11.99 (p&p free).
Rabbit Fever is in cinemas from September 22
