It’s... it’s... unspeakable...
Tuesday August 28, 2001
This all comes rather liberally from a footnote written by Anang Saighal to Leopold Roth’s unfinished translation of and commentary on the Kama Sutra. Said footnote cites “Written Descriptions of Orgasm: A Study of Sex Differences,” by E.B. Vance and N.N. Wagner, as a notation to an ancient debate between Vatsyayana and Auddalaki as to whether men and women feel the same sensation upon orgasm, or fundamentally different sensations. Forty-eight descriptions of the sensation of orgasm written by Psych 101 students (twenty-four men and twenty-four women, natch), carefully expunged of any reference to specific anatomy, were presented to seventy professional consultants who acted as judges: gynecologists, urologists, psychologists and psychiatrists. Saighal notes that one of the most frequently used words in describing orgasm is “indescribable” (though “tension,” “relief,” “spasm,” “tingling,” “fluttering,” “pulsating,” “explosion,” “flash,” “vibration,” “surge,” and “rush” were also popular), and muses a moment on the inherent peculiarity of describing an experienced event (orgasm) by referring to events no one has ever experienced first-hand (volcanoes erupting, cannons firing, clouds bursting, etc.). And then we get the money shot:
In writing about sex generally, but about orgasm specifically, we encounter the limitations of what words can do, the impotence of the lover who dares to write, the ultimate failure of language and the emptiness of the literary endeavor. Writing about love and sex is not so much writing about love or sex as it is, and cannot escape being, writing about writing.
In other words, of course: masturbation.
But—is this necessarily true? Is it an actual limitation? Is it impossible to capture the flavor of orgasm using nothing but words? (Is the literary endeavor truly empty?) That it is hard, I’ll grant: writing about sex is some of the most coded writing we can do—there are any of a number of phrases that are used not because they describe something we actually felt or experienced, but because they were used by another writer we read when writing about sex, and even if you make a conscious effort to reach beyond the standard incredible indescribable (unspeakable) blasting pulsating fucking spasms and “Ohhh Godddd, I’m cuuummmminnggg!”s (and what does that sound like? “God-duh-duh-duh-duh?” What is that?), it’s all too easy to end up cannibalizing oneself; certainly, I’ve got to do something about all those damn hills my characters seem to climb, and that desperate grasping at the present tense. —But I balk at saying it’s impossible. Then, I don’t think the literary endeavor is empty, either. Far from it.
It’s interesting, in this context, to note a thread on the alt.sex.stories.d Usenet discussion board (for those who didn’t buy a program: a Usenet board for writers and readers of mostly free porn) in which writers are taking turns describing their various strengths and weaknesses. A strong undercurrent is the number of writers who claim to find writing sex scenes dull, boring, a chore, or especially frustrating; also, those who compartmentalize writing the sex scenes from writing the other portions of a story. Which does beg a number of questions: Why write sex stories if you don’t like writing the actual sex? What are you getting out of it? What’s going on?
(Of course, by way of a partial answer to those rhetorical questions, there’s the old chestnut: I don’t like writing so much as having written.)
What, the study? You want to know what happened with the study? The seventy professionals, reading descriptions written by forty-eight undergrads, half male and half female?
They couldn’t tell the difference. Take that, Dr. John Gray.
Of course, you should keep a few things in mind: Anang Saighal and Leopold Roth don’t exist; they’re characters in a novel by Lee Seigel. (Vatsyayana and Auddalaki probably existed; no one knows for sure.) (But the Kama Sutra is as real as anything like that can be.) The study really was done—E.B. Vance and N.N. Wagner do exist, and you can find the write-up in Archives of Sexual Behavior 5, ppg 87-98. But it was published in 1976, and my (admittedly cursory) research has turned up no follow-up studies, though the conclusions certainly seem to have percolated as gospel into the Cecil-Adams-Straight-Dope level of common sense. And come on: we’re talking about judging something terribly fundamental based on the reactions of 118 people, tops. All of them in academia. (Anyone want to fulminate on the mind-body split as experienced by Psych 101 students ca. 1976?) And is the question even a sensible one in the first place? Women have orgasms during heterosexual intercourse less frequently than men—doesn’t that affect the way they anticipate and think of and conceptualize orgasm, and doesn’t that affect how they experience it? Does it make more sense to postulate a difference between a straight man’s orgasm and a gay man’s orgasm? (And what about the bisexuals?) Do smoking-jacketed professors of either sex experience fundamentally different orgasms than grease-engrimed truck drivers, ditto? And hell—think of the difference between, say, a heel-pounding teeth-grinding sheet-clenching screamer and, say, a furtive quickie squeezed off in the bathroom because some tension built up like a sneeze and, like a sneeze, is easily if shamefully wiped away and forgotten. —I mean, do you ever really experience the same orgasms your own damn self?