place, with vibrators and other sex toys forming the basis of a large global industry. A national survey in the UK found that almost half the respondents had used sex toys to enhance the pleasure of sex and one in six had taken drugs for the same reason.
The vibrator was invented in the late nineteenth century by a British doctor named Joseph Mortimer Granville. He had been searching for a better way to treat ‘hysteria’ – the quasi-medical term that was applied then to what we would now regard as suppressed female sexuality. A common remedy for hysteria at the time was for the doctor to massage the woman’s genitals until she experienced a ‘hysterical paroxysm’, or what we would now recognise as an orgasm. This practice, which was known as ‘medical massage’, had been used by doctors since the time of Hippocrates to give relief to female patients. Administering a ‘medical massage’ could be tiring work for the doctor, and Granville was keen to find a modern, technological way of speeding it up. In 1883 he published a book entitled Nerve-Vibration and Excitation as Agents in the Treatment of Functional Disorder and Organic Disease, in which he described the use of his new ‘Percuteur’ electrotherapeutic device. It was the original vibrator.
Within a few years, cheap electromechanical vibrators were being widely advertised to the general public. Their ostensible purpose was the relief of muscle pains, headaches, poor circulation, wrinkles, or indeed almost anything that had no explicit link to sex or pleasure. By the 1920s, however, the public connection had been made between vibrators and sexual pleasure, with the result that they rapidly became shameful and virtually disappeared from view until the second half of the twentieth century.
The use of penis-shaped sex toys to enhance sexual pleasure has a very long history. The antiquities section of any good national museum should contain at least a few artefacts decorated with images of dildos. References to dildos can also be found in the literature of ancient Greece; for example, the anti-war comedy Lysistrata, written by Aristophanes around 411 BC, contains a scene in which Lysistrata and her women friends complain that their husbands are always away fighting wars, leaving them feeling sexually frustrated:
And not so much as the shadow of a lover! Since the day the Milesians betrayed us, I have never once seen even an eight-inch dildo to be a leathern consolation to us poor widows.
The ‘Milesians’ were the inhabitants of Miletus in Asia Minor; they were renowned in Aristophanes’ day for manufacturing a tip-top type of leather-covered dildo known as an olisbos, which was used with olive oil as a lubricant. Two thousand years later, William Shakespeare made this thinly veiled reference to the sexual function of dildos in The Winter’s Tale:
He hath songs for man or woman, of all sizes; no milliner can so fit his customers with gloves: he has the prettiest love-songs for maids; so without bawdry, which is strange; with such delicate burdens of dildos and fadings, ‘jump her and thump her’.
The innocent reader could choose to interpret Shakespeare’s words as an allusion to music, since ‘dildo’ also meant the chorus of a song. However, ‘fading’ was contemporary slang for orgasm and ‘jump and thump’ was innuendo for the process by which ‘fading’ is usually achieved. Shakespeare’s real intention is clear, even if his words are deliciously ambiguous.
Detailed practical advice on hardware for enhancing sexual pleasure could be found in the Kama Sutra, a Sanskrit treatise dating from the fourth century AD. Among other things, it suggests that a man may improve his partner’s pleasure by fitting devices, or Apadravyas, to his penis to supplement its length or thickness. These devices, it says, should be made of gold, silver, copper, iron, ivory, buffalo horn, tin or lead; they should also be ‘soft, cool, provocative of sexual vigour and well fitted’. In the absence of expensive raw materials, various makeshift alternatives are recommended, including the tubular stalk of the bottle gourd or reeds softened with oil and tied to the waist. The Kama Sutra also explains how a man can insert solid objects into the shaft of his penis to stimulate his partner. The ancient practice of using penile nodules continues to this day in parts of Southeast Asia, central Europe and the Middle East. In the 1990s, a medical journal recorded the case of a Fijian man who had got into difficulties after whittling his own penile nodules out of a plastic toothbrush handle.
One of the most imaginative applications of technology in the service of sexual pleasure has to be the Anal Violin. This ingenious contraption is featured in a nineteenth-century anthropological treatise written by a French army surgeon under the pseudonym of ‘Dr Jacobus X’. The good doctor, who spent much of his career in Asia, encountered the Anal Violin whilst visiting a Chinese male brothel in what is now Vietnam. He described it as long, thin and oval-shaped, about five inches in length and just over an inch in diameter at its widest. It was hollow and made of very thin silver, with the back end open and flared outwards, like a child’s trumpet. A thin metal cord, like a piano string, was fixed inside the front end and extended out of the open back for about three feet, terminating in a handle. The device was deployed by inserting it into the anus of the kneeling ‘erotic melomaniac’. The Anal Violinist then proceeded to play the instrument by rubbing the string with a metal bow to create pleasant harmonies and good vibrations. According to Dr X, ‘this Chinese symphony produces the most peculiar physiological sensations, and is certain to cause an erection in the old, worn-out debauchee who uses it.’
Sexual pleasure obviously amounts to more than just the creation of orgasms. That said, orgasms do have a lot to recommend them. An orgasm is one of the most intense, if regrettably brief, forms of pleasure a human can ever experience. It is pleasure, distilled. Every one of the 6.6 billion or so humans currently alive on our planet was the result of at least one orgasm, and between us we notch up several hundred million new orgasms every day. Even allowing for the pitifully short duration of an orgasm, this still amounts to a fabulous quantity of pleasure.
How long does an orgasm last? Scientists have attempted to answer this question objectively, confirming along the way that women’s orgasms generally last longer than men’s. Researchers in one study monitored young women who gave themselves orgasms in the laboratory. Measurements of their vaginal blood flow indicated that these lasted on average 20 seconds, although half the women felt subjectively that their orgasms were of shorter duration. Incidentally, Meg Ryan’s legendary fake orgasm in the film When Harry Met Sally also lasted 20 seconds, making it convincing even in its duration. Many women experience longer orgasms. According to physiological measures and women’s own subjective estimates, these longer orgasms may last between 30 and 60 seconds, with some going on for up to two minutes. Much depends, of course, on where you judge an orgasm to start and end. Even so, a 60-second full-on orgasm would make most men’s year. The typical male orgasm is much shorter, at around 10–15 seconds.
Some women are able to reach orgasm using mental imagery alone, without any physical stimulation. Scientists have verified this by demonstrating that imagery-induced orgasms are accompanied by more or less the same physiological reactions as mechanically induced orgasms, including the characteristic increases in heart rate, systolic blood pressure, pupil diameter and pain threshold. The ability to have an orgasm without the help of mechanical stimulation is not as remarkable as it might seem, since most men and women are quite capable of having orgasms during their dreams. However, the evidence indicates that fewer than one in a thousand men are capable of achieving orgasm when they are awake without some mechanical assistance.
Many women also experience the delights of multiple orgasms, something that few men even pretend they can do. Of the few men who are capable of multiple orgasms, most do not ejaculate until the final orgasm in the sequence. There has, however, been at least one documented case of a man who could achieve multiple orgasms, each of which was accompanied by ejaculation. The man in question demonstrated this extraordinary ability to scientists in a laboratory, ejaculating six times in 36 minutes while maintaining
