The State of the Orgasm.

Who wants to fuck an old wrinkled body? Answer: Another old wrinkled body.

From Arianne Clement’s The Art of Aging.

The first time I had multiple orgasms, I was in my early 50’s.

I’ve said before that my body was pretty good at doing what it was supposed to do. I never had a problem having an orgasm. But not multiples. Never. Every time I had an orgasm, I was so clearly done right after. Like, let’s watch TV and eat a sandwich and please don’t touch my clit again for like a day, thank you done.

When David and I first met, I was 38. Sex, as it is for many new couples, was a cornerstone in our relationship. We were banging each other in bathroom stalls because we couldn’t wait to get home. Making out like teenagers on barstools as if we were alone. We couldn’t help ourselves. There is something glorious about that kind of lack of control. It was head spinning. We spent whole weekends in bed, cooking breakfast sandwiches between bouts under the sheets, and then shower, rinse, repeat. realizing later it had been days since we left the apartment. It was heady and there were thoughts that this could go on endlessly. We could never lose this. This rapture would be our lives now.

Of course it wasn’t. And never could be.

When I look at my journals from that period, it’s clear we had a lot of sex. I devoted paragraphs to my orgasms, to his orgasms, the tangle of legs, the feel of his arms, the way his muscles rippled when he was on top of me, how deeply intimate it was to see him lose complete control under me, the things he said and what I said back to him, the way I could examine him, and us, up close, right in front of me. The way everything was bathed in soft candle lights, orchestrated, gentle touches, mood music, sometimes driving and strobing, other times soft and encompassing, my bed sheets smelled of him. I wore his shirts when he wasn’t with me.

It was perfect and new. Spun from something deeply miraculous and singular. No one has ever loved this much, fucked this much, cared this much, were into each other this much. We have reinvented love! I was explicit in my writing because the newness of our relationship was about explicitness. It was in the details of every interaction. Every look meant something, every touch, every little sonic tone in our voices. We were both looking for signs and for transcendence and connection of the ultimate kind.

From a now-cringy journal entry from 2004:

Then we made love. Very close. I was on top of him. We clutched each other, like this sex was the only sex worth having. We came together, our first time. I hadn't expected the synchronicity so early, so choreographed, so perfect. But it confirmed to me that something about us was in lock step.

The next day, he wrote: “Can’t stop thinking about last night.”

I haven’t stopped either.

Coming together feels like becoming together. I want to know more. Something special is happening.

Orgasms Rule the World (or the case for why they should).

Babies can have orgasms in utero and have been documented stimulating themselves to orgasm in ultrasounds. Humans, functionally alive but experiencing brain stem death, are thought to be able to be brought to orgasm through the Lazarus sign. We know that lots of mammals have orgasms, although we don’t have a sense of what orgasm feels like for them (obviously) and how orgasms express themselves in their bodies. Monkeys and humans make weird, shrieking ecstasy faces, while dogs step in place with their back legs. Fruit bats orgasm and even engage in oral sex. Dolphins have clitorises that have nerve bundles, and are thought to help them experience pleasure, possibly even orgasm.

Orgasming is not just part of our humanity. It’s part of being alive.

I love how the French call orgasm, Petite Mort, or the little death, a reference to the swoon that comes with losing full control, the descent into being fully sublimated by feeling, otherness, tuning out, falling away, leaving life and dying just a little in the throes of sex. It is a kind of unwinding of our usual disguises that separate us from other people. Orgasm, a real orgasm, isn’t performance. It’s not faking, which is a way to stop sex, make it end, be done without hurting someone’s feelings or without wanting to make them pissed off and dangerous. Most of us women have faked an O at some point to just be done with it. Where faking one is a deception, sometimes required, the real ones offer vulnerability, a consensus, even in the most transactional and soulless (consensual) of sexual exchanges.

Although orgasms can be perfunctory and emotionless, a kind of rote release, they are often associated with a flood of chemicals and brain changes. Dopamine, which gives you that feeling of pleasure and reward. Oxytocin, especially for women, which brings in feelings of love and a desire to bond. (For men, oxytocin is mitigated a bit by testosterone) And prolactin, which promotes a feeling of safety, decreased stress and well-being. People who have them in their sex tend to be more bonded in the day-to-day. Orgasm inspires post-sex talking, connection and communication. They can actuall relieve pain.

But for a lot of people orgasms remain elusive. And past generations did not excel at passing down tips, tricks and bits of wisdom. This is why I am constantly having frank, and often awkward conversations with my adult daughters about their sex. Not because I am boundary-less, or even because its my business, but because I want them to feel like it’s normal to talk about sex, to have agency in their sex, to priotitize their pleasure and their orgasms, to be unabashed and unashamed to ask for, to require, pleasure. Subjects that are couched in privacy are sometimes really couched in shame, and this is an existential tumor that needs to be excised.

This is critical because orgasms are often elusive little fuckers for some people. Do a simple Reddit search and you will find lots of people struggling with their orgasms and teams of people in comments giving advice and sharing stories. What jumps out at me is one particular Reddit thread called Becoming Orgasmic. In it, lots of young women in their 20’s and 30’s are searching for their orgasm.

Is the clitoris supposed to feel like….nothing?

What does an orgasm feel like?

On a mission for vaginal orgasms…. Help!

Can’t orgasm with my partner.

Dying for sex (and an O)

Do you think there’s a link between mental blockages and orgasms and patriarchy/fear of men?

The Orgasm Gap.

There is a well-documented and researched orgasm gap.

In straight relationships, the research is clear: Men tell us they have orgasms 90% of the time, while women are more like 54%. And this becomes more stark when you look at lesbians and bisexual women, where women are reporting orgasms about 75% of the time, and men in gay and bisexual relationships at about the same as straight men.

Here is the gap: women having straight sex are not getting the attention and care they need to cultivate orgasming.

Several readers, who wrote their stories, talked of having lots of sex in their 20’s and 30’s, sometimes in terribly compromising or unhealthy situations. These folks learned to orgasm later in their sex lives. The sexual experience got better as their healthiness got better, as they worked through trauma and family history. As they made peace with sex later in life.

Culture, religion, race and ethnicity play a factor, too. Across the board, most men all orgasm at the same rate. White and Black women orgasm at similar rates, although Black women are slightly higher. Latinas are the most prolific at orgasm, while Asian women orgasm the least.

So why these differences? They are mostly cultural.

Conservative and religious cultures tend to place a higher value on men’s orgasm and pleasure. (Judaism is an outlier here, which boasts ancient scripture that calls for women to orgasm before their men finish.) Devout Christians tend to focus on intercourse as their big moment. We know many women, about 75%, cannot orgasm through penetration alone, requiring clitoral stimulation. Which means the man has to get off his ass and serve instead of being served. Conservative Christianity is not a culture where female orgasms flourish.

This Slate piece Jesus Loves You and Your Orgasm illustrates this:

A Christian wife, if she wants to keep her husband's mind off porn and his hand off his own penis (onanism is still a big no-no), will have to be a 24/7 tootsie. She is advised to wear sexy lingerie and to keep her legs shaved and her nether region douched at all times…And she has to give it up whenever her man comes calling. "[My husband's] purity is extremely important to me, so I try to meet his needs so that he goes out each day with his cup full. During the earlier years, with much energy going into childcare and with my monthly cycle, it was a lot more difficult for me to do that. There weren't too many 'ideal times' when everything was just right. But that's life, and I did it anyway."

Black women orgasm more than white women, research suggests, for two reasons. 1) Black women tend to have more postive images of their bodies, and 2) Black men see their partners orgasm as a part of their own sexual competence.

Latinas have more orgasms than others, because they tend to have more oral sex. Culturally, the giving and receiving of oral sex happens more robustly and this is simply better for female orgasm. Why are Asian women trailing in orgasms? Only 31% report reaching orgasm during sex, with 13%, around the world, having never reached an orgasm.

There is good reason to believe this is highly cultural, as Asian women who have interracial relationships with white, Black and Latino lovers tend to orgasm significantly more. This is can be partially attributed to a lack of sex education and communication in more traditional long-standing cultures, where young women might not even be exploring their own bodies through masturbation. Although I couldn’t find direct research, I’d also bet that the way Asian women are highly-fetishisized, infantilized and hyper-sexualized across cultures also contributes to a lack of agency around climaxing and pleasure.

Even transgender women (biological men who gone through vaginoplasty and hormonal treatments to transition to biological women) achieve orgasm at 87%, while transgender men (who have had metoidioplasty and hormones) achieve orgasm at around 70%. In fact, orgasm is so important to overall sexual well-being for trans people that achieving orgasm is built into the success of the treatment. Trans people who previously were unable to achieve orgasm have sometimes been able to do so post-transition.

Boomers + Gen X: Having all the Big O’s

The bracket of people who seem to be having most of the fun in bed, turns out, are us old folks. The over 50’s.

But how could this be? Aren’t we inundated with chemical and hormonal slippage? Aren’t we losing our erections and our sex drives? Aren’t our vaginas drying into brittle unusable flesh tunnels? Don’t we experience greater physical disability and mental instability as we make our way to death, making pleasure unimportant or even fanciful at our age? Aren’t the old people so cute trying to still have the sex?

Who wants to fuck an old wrinkled body anyway?

The answer: Another old wrinkled body.

Lynette, 74. From Arianne Clement’s The Art of Aging.

We know from research studies that people over 50 are having the best sex of their lives, even if they have it less often.

This is not the same sex David and I were having in the beginning of our relationship, fucking and sucking each other until we were raw and delirious. It also wasn’t the sex we had when we were the parents of young kids and had to quickly get the job done on the bathroom floor before the episode of Pink Panther ended and they came clamoring in to find us. This also isn’t perimenopausal sex, where I struggled to find my libido, and struggled with the shape and contours of my body, and how foggy and off I felt, and where I wondered if I’d ever feel whole again.

Our sex, and our orgasms, now reflect having older children, a more balanced life with work and obligations. Our sex reflects hustle, but a do-able hustle. David isn’t out late every night, drinking copiously, catching last minute flights to Europe, traveling around the world for shows. We priotize what feels good, what is right for ourselves and the family. Our world is smaller. We have fewer strangers in our lives, and more family and close friends and neighbors, who tend to be the same people, over and over. Our world has gotten smaller but also calmer, more healthy and our focus is on longevity and health - the right hours of sleep, good food we cook and eat at home, no/little alcohol, regular medical testing, exercise, family time, reading and discussing books, time together as people who have warmed into being best friends.

Let me say this: There was a time when I would’ve balked at saying David was my best friend. Like it meant we weren’t lovers. That we settled into something platonic. Flat mates, as David would say. (He’s Australian) But these days this feels silly. An orgasm given to you by your best friend makes perfect sense. It is that level of intimacy that reigns here in the Third Life. And this will come in handy as sex will inevitably change and require more creativity, patience and adaptation. Deep connection and intimacy - being friends - is going to make all these physical and mental changes manageable.

Another thing?: I don’t remember sex ever being as funny as it is now. This is part of the subversion of aging that I wrote about a few weeks ago. When things don’t work seamlessly, we have to shift our thinking. Our bodies are forcing us to not take ourselves so seriously. Low libido? Forplay all day in preparation. Dry vagina? The ridiculously-humungous, Costco-sized bottle of lube next to the bed. Difficulty orgasming?: Using techniques like edging as a way to intensify orgasm, or heading out to the sex store for a new vibrator or just taking your fucking time. When missionary no longer works?: Buy a sex swing and enjoy the weirdness and hilarity of trying it out for the first time. Like one of my readers - her husband is a disabled vet and they swear by the swing!

I love that David and I talk about sex more now. We make fun of each other. There is relief in not treating sex so seriously. And every experience as we get older - from the ones that refuse to work at all, to the ones that work brilliantly - will be fodder for our connection to each other.

And this is one of the reckonings of getting older. Our orgasms can be what we want them to be. Or even vanquished to obscurity. We can leave a partner and find another aftr years of misery, apathy or boredom. We can look into consensual non-monogamy (CNM), a negotiation that allows partners to consensually explore other relationships as a way to fortify their own. We can look back on a life of toxic, unsafe, obligatory sex and be happy to never orgasm again. We can decide that masturbation is the most efficient method to get release and enter into a best friends relationship with our vibrators or our rubber blow-up doll vaginas. We can have hot sex with the person down the hall at the retirement home or our partner of 50 years. We can explore sex and orgasm with a new gender or with someone with a different sexual identity. Fuck it, we can come out of the closest as whatever lights us up. We can never think about orgasm, not even once, and feel absolutely fine about it.

As long as we don’t hurt anyone else, ourselves, or wind up arrested (this would be something to laugh about) we can have whatever relationship we can imagine with orgasms, with our bodies and with the people who matter.

The last third of life is wide open. We are wide open.

About My Multiple Orgasms.

I was 52 when I started - to our complete shock - to have multiple orgasms, usually three or four every time we have sex. So much so, it is now a game for David, to best his score. Another thing we laugh about.

And yes, it could be the flush of HRT on my system, or David honing his techniques across decades, and if so, we’ll take it. But it also could be a confluence of things coming together that only aging gives us, namely: my brain might be ready for multiples in the right setting. Research suggests that women who orgasm in multiples have slower alpha waves than the average woman. Ladies with these quieter brains had more room to let pleasure in. Is my brain quieter now? Is aging responsible? Life changes? And scientists believe that all that talking about sex and conspiring and laughing with each other, our focus on taking care of ourselves and making each other feel good in non-sexual ways, is making room for multiples, or for your first orgasm, or for your seven-thousandth.

Turns out, investing in our partners, working actively on intimacy and vulnerability, and laughing at the dumbness of it all, might be the best sex toy on the market.

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Thanks to all the folks who wrote about their orgasms (I think I included you all!). Please feel free to talk about your own experiences in comments. The active comment section (free to everyone) is truly the best part of this newsletter!

And as always, thank you, for reading. xo Kim