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A British writer, Toby Young, gives a poignant autobiographical description of the male experience of post-orgasmic delight in a 2001 book,
How To Lose Friends And Alienate People
. Young's on-off girlfriend, Caroline, whom he loves profoundly, finally accepts his proposal of marriage and in
celebration, the couple sleep together for the first time in a long while.

‘Suddenly, everything seemed to shrink in size, as if I was travelling away from the scene at a hundred miles an hour. Except it wasn't a spatial sensation, not a linear movement. It was as if the gravity that kept my emotions in check had disappeared. It was like being in the swell of the sea, but not quite. Above all, there was the feeling of being outside time, what Freud called “the sensation of ‘eternity'”. It was like touching something with a part of myself I wasn't normally aware of. I felt as if I'd made contact with the very essence of the universe.'

A 2002 book called
The Joy Of Writing Sex
, by Elizabeth Benedict, a US author and fiction-writing teacher, is notable for the absence among a plethora of fine literary sexual writing of a solitary instance of a writer describing the male experience of orgasm. The finest female description is from Toni Morrison's novel
The Bluest Eye
, in a passage where the character Pauline describes sex with her husband Cholly:

I pretend to wake up, and turn to him, but not opening my legs. I want him to open them for me. He does, and I be soft and wet where his fingers are strong and hard. I be softer than I ever been before. All my strength is in his hand. My brain curls up like wilted leaves … I know he wants me to come first. But I can't. Not until he does. Not until I feel him living me. Just me. Sinking into me. Not until I know that my flesh is all that be on his mind. That he couldn't stop if he had to. That he would die rather than take his thing out of me. Of me. Not until he has let go of all he has, and give it to me. To me. To me. When he does, I feel a power. I be strong, I be pretty, I be young. And then I wait. He shivers and tosses his head. Now I be strong enough, pretty enough, and young enough to let him make me come. I take my fingers out of his and put my hands on his behind. My legs drop back onto the bed. I don't make no noise, because the chil'ren might hear. I begin
to feel those little bits of colour floating up into me – deep in me. That streak of green from the june-bug light, the purple from the berries trickling along my thighs, Mama's lemonade yellow runs sweet in me. Then I feel like I'm laughing between my legs, and the laughing gets all mixed up with the colours, and I'm afraid I'll come and afraid I won't. But I know I will. And I do. And it be rainbow all inside. And it lasts and lasts and lasts.

What is most interesting to the student of the orgasm about Benedict's collection of examples of what she regards as good sexual literature is that in the rare cases where a male author has gone the distance in attempting to provide a proper description of orgasm, it is not to explain what his own climax feels like, but what his female partner's orgasm feels like to him. John Casey, in his novel
Spartina
, provides a good example of this:

He turned his head so his cheek was flat against her. He could feel her muscles moving softly – her coming was more in her mind still; when she got closer she would become a single band of muscle, like a fish – all of her would move at once, flickering and curving, unified from jaw to tail …

The most common description of the physical sensation of orgasm, male and female, in both literature and everyday conversation is, paradoxically, that it is ‘difficult to describe', or ‘indescribable'. W.C. Fields expressed this paradox when he observed: ‘There may be some things that are better than sex, and there may be some things that are worse. But there is nothing exactly like it.' We frequently follow our dumb-foundedness when it comes to describing sex by comparing it to things we have almost certainly never experienced – volcanoes erupting, cannons firing, ‘paradise', an explosion, the earth indeed (with due respect to Ernest Hemingway) moving. Germaine Greer once likened orgasm to childbirth; she is
childless. It was Greer, however, who was on hand to rap another writer, Sean Thomas, over the knuckles when he described male lust in
Cosmopolitan
magazine. ‘Male lust is like a great river crashing down to the sea – put an obstacle in its path and it will merely find another route,' said Thomas.

Greer commented acidly: ‘It is one of the commonplaces of pornography grossly to exaggerate the volume of ejaculation. Male sexuality is more like a sluggish trickle meandering across a delta, dissipating its force in trillions of channels; twentieth-century men are like De Sade's jaded aristocrats, so sated with sexual imagery that they must behold ever more bizarre and extravagant displays before they can achieve potency.'

As for more experiential descriptions of orgasm: an expulsion of tension, a total release, a big shiver, a glorious sneeze, a spasm, a fluttering, a pulsating, a flash, a surge and a rush are among the less prosaic. Kenneth Mah at the psychology department of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, collected descriptions of orgasm for his PhD dissertation. He offered participants a rich variety of adjectives to choose from in describing their orgasms, among them, ‘pulsating', ‘erupting', ‘quivering' and ‘rapturous'. But among his respondents, the distinctly dowdy ‘powerful' ‘intense' and ‘pleasurable' were by far the most popular.

In a 1998 article in the Indian magazine
The Week
, writer Stanley Thomas garnered a unique description of female orgasm, best known in India by the Hindi word
nasha
. ‘People describe orgasm in different ways,' Thomas wrote, ‘and they call it by different names, climax in English,
sukun
in Urdu,
trupti
in Tamil. Describing it is the hard part, because there are so many descriptions. One woman describes the feeling as that of a hot chocolate egg breaking inside her.

‘Others liken it to a hiccup, a ripple or a peaceful sigh. Orgasm,' concluded Thomas, quoting Dr Prakash Kothari, head of sexual medicine at the King Edward Memorial Hospital in Mumbai, ‘is like a sneeze. If a woman has had one
she will know about it. Otherwise any attempt to explain it will be like explaining a rainbow to a blind man.'

Some impressive descriptions of orgasm were collected in 1999 from members of the public by a Montreal-based Web magazine,
www.QueenDom.com
– not, as the name may suggest, a gay publication, but part of a respected and very popular psychological testing site, Plumeus Inc. QueenDom is aimed principally at educated Western women from 25-45 years old.

Among the best female descriptions were these:

It begins in my vaginal region and moves through my whole body, and I have an uncontrollable urge to moan or scream. I also twitch a lot, experiencing muscle spasms all over and I feel really warm ‘down there'.

I feel like I've been hit by lightning or touched an electrical socket, but after about ten seconds, I relax quickly and the tension flowing out of my body is such a relief.

I first feel my toes and head tingle, then two waves in my body swell, race towards each other then crash. That is orgasm.

Indisputably male descriptions were rarer, which is interesting considering that men are presumed to be so fixated on acquiring orgasms. This was one man's lyrical account of his, however:

I hit an egoless space and see a rush of rainbow colours, sometimes little electric swirly things in my vision. I feel white-gold explosions in my prostate and testicles, spreading up my penis, a soft golden feeling all over my body.

Most interesting, though, were the descriptions that are quite difficult to place. Could anyone be absolutely sure which sex provided these reports? They
seem
to be female, because
we are accustomed to women being more poetic about their feelings, – but it might be foolish to place bets on which is which.

It feels like electricity running through every vein of my body.

I see lights, feel like exploding, hear acutely, heat rises from my feet and a tingle rushes up my legs through my thighs, up my torso and throughout my upper body. A feeling of euphoria releases in my abdomen just before what I call ‘falling off the mountain'. I can hardly move for the ecstasy I experience.

I see a bright light and hear a roar like the ocean.

I feel like I am going to explode, and then a great relief -often like I am floating down through the air. My body often trembles and shudders. I see stars.

Such academic research as there has been suggests that in fact orgasm may be more similar than we imagine for men and women. In 1976, researchers E.B. Vance, and N.N. Wagner took written descriptions of the sensation of orgasm from 24 male and 24 female psychology students at an American university. They carefully removed from each account any reference to specific body parts and presented the results to a group of 70 gynaecologists, urologists, psychiatrists and psychologists. Vance and Wagner's conclusion, as reported in
Archives of Sexual Behavior
, was that guesswork was the only way possible to establish which descriptions were by men and which by women.

Whether Vance and Wagner's was a rogue finding or not, there is a significant difference in the range of stimuli capable of setting each gender on the path to orgasm. While a number of ‘romantic' stimuli can expedite orgasm in women, one in particular, which seems only very distantly related to sex, can nonetheless spark orgasmic feelings in men. This is aggression.
Aggression and male orgasm are closely connected; nerve tissue in the brain associated with aggression is reportedly so closely intertwined with that carrying sexual messages that it is difficult to separate the two. Fulfilling the sexual urge and the aggressive urge can become confused for men. In
Pumping Iron
, the 1977 documentary on Arnold Schwarzenegger, the performer now known as the Governor of California admits that flexing his biceps is as satisfying for him as ejaculating. Furthermore in a wide variety of men, the compulsion to dominate, humiliate and subdue through sex can, additionally, override the desire for orgasm.

The murderer Jack Henry Abbott, who was briefly lionised by literary New York after Norman Mailer championed his writing from jail, once described his sexual thrill on stabbing a man through the heart: ‘You can feel his life trembling through the knife in your hand. You must
masturbate
to the violence taking place inside your mind.'

The seemingly inextricable correlation between sex and violent aggression is no better demonstrated than in the behaviour of conquering armies. Not the first such instance by any means, but by far the best documented, was the Soviet Red Army's advance toward Berlin in 1945. By historian Antony Beevor's calculation, the Red Army's 2.5 million men were responsible for the ferocious gang and individual rape throughout eastern Prussia of two million German women. The key question so far as the subject of this book is concerned is, was the raping Soviet soldiers' primary motivation the satisfaction of sexual desire through easily obtained orgasm? Or the gratifying, temporary dousing via orgasm of anger-fuelled aggression? The answer surely has to be the latter, just as in ordinary criminal cases of rape, aggression, with a desire for domination and control, fuelled by a childhood pattern of exposure to violence plus a history, real or imagined, of sexual rejection and inadequacy, are clearly the most important elements for the rapist – rather than some sudden, urgent desire to behave in a sensual manner.

In the case of the Red Army in 1945, Beevor believes, sexual opportunism, enhanced by the feeling among the Russians that they were already effectively dead men with nothing to lose, also played a part.

There is also a small, new revisionist movement afoot in evolutionary psychology arguing that rape, whatever its immediate motivation, is at root no less than an evolutionary strategy. The Greeks often portrayed the god Zeus raping women, and some scholars have argued that rape was the Ancient Greek man's ‘right of domination'. Any libidinous male politician or CEO, furthermore, even if he is ugly, will confirm that aggression in males tends to beget a surfeit of sexual partners. This applies even though the more ‘red-blooded' type of male is typically a selfish and incompetent lover, often, as we commonly read in anecdotal accounts of alpha-male men in possession of great political power, something close to a licensed rapist.

We have no such anecdotal evidence of sexual proclivities in the case of, to name but one powerful political figure, the late President Mobutu of Zaire. But most people will draw their own conclusions on learning that the dictator's official name, Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, translates as ‘the cock who goes from hen to hen knowing no fatigue'. When we look at a dictator like Benito Mussolini, however, we start to get a distinct picture of super-priapic behaviour, poor sexual technique and huge political power going hand in hand.

A New Life
, the 2003 biography by Nicholas Farrell of the Italian Fascist leader, reveals that Mussolini managed to have sex with a different woman every day for fourteen years, more than 5,000 in total from September 1929 to the collapse of his regime in July 1943: yet, far from being a successor to Casanova, he was in such a hurry to relieve himself sexually that he rarely bothered to remove his trousers. Mussolini was nicknamed by in-the-know Italians, wrote Farrell, ‘Phallus in Chief. He would spot beauties in the street from his red Alfa
Romeo, have them stopped and checked out by the police, then summon them to the Palazzo Venezia in Rome. There, in his marble-floored office, he would rip off a woman's clothes and have urgent, rough sex with her in seconds – on a stone window seat, against a wall or on the carpet. One woman reported his sexual technique as consisting of squeezing her breasts as if they were ‘rubber automobile horns'. After he ejaculated, he would throw the woman her underwear and rarely see her again; one complained of being dismissed without so much as the offer of ‘coffee, liqueur or even a piece of cake'.