Free O by Jonathan Margolis

erection after orgasm or ejaculation. A controversial (and lately fashionable) body of opinion exists that orgasm and ejaculation in men are quite separate functions; that physiologically, ejaculation is simply a reflex that occurs at the base of the spine, an involuntary muscle spasm resulting in the ejection of semen and felt only in the penis, whereas orgasm is somehow much more than that, an unspecified ‘whole body experience’ produced by clenching muscles throughout body to avoid the penis being sensitised.
    Multiple orgasm, in which ejaculation is not necessarily involved, is according to some modern research and ancient texts on sex something of which men are physiologically capable only by the application of learned techniques. Researchers William Hartman and Marilyn Fithian of the Center for Marital and Sexual Studies in Long Beach, California were the first sexologists to present scientific data on the existence of multi-orgasmic men. They monitored the orgasms of 282, of whom 33 proved multi-orgasmic. Their most prolifically orgasmic subject was an athletic young man who consistently managed sixteen orgasms or thereabouts in less than an hour. Sex researchers Beverly Whipple and colleagues, writing in the
Journal of Sex Education and Therapy
, have for their part reported on a man who had six orgasms in thirty-six minutes with no erection loss.
    The secret to men achieving multiple orgasms, according to Hartman and Fithian, is nothing more spiritual or arcane than learning to control ejaculation via the PC muscle, also known as the voluntary urinary sphincter muscle, that starts and stops the flow of urine. Once strengthened, it can provide the same sort of control over ejaculation. ‘Just prior to the moment ofejaculatory inevitability, you clench the PC tight and hold it until the urge to ejaculate passes – roughly fifteen seconds,’ Hartman reports.
    Another modern researcher, Barbara Keesling, who has worked as a surrogate sexual partner, has moreover identified three distinct patterns of male multiple orgasm: one, she calls non-ejaculatory orgasm (NEO) in which a man has an orgasm but inhibits ejaculation using the PC muscle, and only allows himself to ejaculate (‘release the hounds’) after several orgasms. Keesling’s second model is multi-ejaculation, in which a man has several partial ejaculations in succession. Her third pattern is for the man to have one intense orgasm and ejaculation, followed by less intense ‘aftershocks’. All of these patterns, says Keesling, can occur without loss of erection. Other researchers speak of a phenomenon called ‘injaculation’, whereby semen is retracted by force of will into the bladder instead of out through the penis. (‘Injaculation’ is one of the Holy Grails of practitioners of ‘Tantric sex’, an offshoot of Buddhism which explores sexuality, as we will see later, as a way of transcending the limitations of ordinary life. But it is worth noting that backwards-flowing semen is elsewhere regarded as a male sexual dysfunction.)
    Men who can achieve multiple orgasm, Keesling reports, say –
say
being the important word, since one always suspects a measure of one-upmanship in this field, as in ejaculatory volume and trajectory measurements – that they feel energised rather than depleted after orgasm, and that their climaxes are stronger and more intense. She writes: ‘I describe orgasms on a continuum from a localised genital sensation that is mildly pleasurable to a full-body orgasm with intense psychological sensations and all the fireworks – the kind of orgasm one of my clients calls “the psychedelic jackpot that lights up the universe”.’
    The most significant feature of an apparently sophisticated sexual technique practised by men, however, is not that it may or may not be more imagined than real; nor that it may bedestined to become a debunked myth to equal that