Through the generations, men - and some women - have speculated on the nature of sexual response, basing their speculations on their personal experience and on the accounts of others who, in turn, have had to rely on personal experience. Out of this vast sexual literature, several myths have arisen, which detailed observations disprove. Among them are:
(1) The myth that a man's sexual performance is related to the size of his penis.
(2) The myth that women can have two kinds of orgasm one clitoral and the other vaginal.
(3) The myth that a woman, like a man, is limited to one climatic orgasm that produces satisfaction.
Many men and boys are worried by the small size of the penis. A man generally reaches the conclusion that his own is small by observing and comparing the non-erect penises of other men in showers, swimming pools, or other places. He assumes that the larger organs he has observed will in, crease in size during sexual stimulation proportionately more than his own smaller penis. The resulting feeling of inferiority is a serious problem for substantial numbers of men.
In reply, Masters and Johnson were the first to point out that a penis which is large in its unstimulated state does not increase in length proportionately during erection. On the contrary, as noted above, short penises as a general rule increase in length more impressively than do long ones. A striking comparison illustrates this point. One man in the study group with an organ less than three inches long in the flaccid state experienced a 120-per cent increase in penile length during erection, so that his erect penis measured nearly seven inches. Another man in the group with a penis half again as long when flaccid (nearly four and one-half inches) experienced an increase in length during erection of only 50 per cent. As a result, his fully erect penis was also a little less than seven inches long. In general, there is significantly less variation in length among erect than among flaccid penises. Penile size, moreover, turned out to have little relationship to a partner's satisfaction in sexual intercourse, for the vagina accommodates itself to the size of the male organ.
This accommodation reaction was repeatedly demonstrated during artificial coition with a plastic artificial penis whose length and diameter a woman could select to suit herself and could change from time to time. "Full accommodation usually is accomplished," Dr. Masters and Mrs. Johnson report, "with the first few thrusts of the penis, regardless of penile size."
The size of the vagina also has little effect on mutual satisfaction in most cases; and accommodation can be helped by suitable timing of the entry of the penis. If the man has a relatively small penis and the woman a relatively large vagina, for example, he can introduce his penis into the vagina earlier in the excitement phase. When this is done the fully erect smaller penis can and does function as a dilating agent as effectively as a larger penis. Conversely, a man with a relatively large penis can help his woman with a small vagina by delaying entry until a more advanced stage of sexual excitation. "It becomes obvious," Dr. Masters and Mrs. Johnson concluded, "the penile size usually is a minor factor in sexual stimulation of the female partner."
More than sixty years ago, Sigmund Freud presented, in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, a theory that women can experience two kinds of orgasm - one clitoral, the other vaginal.
Little girls, he explained, discover that they can achieve orgasm by stimulating the clitoris. Later, in marriage, they must transfer their sexual responses from the clitoris to the vagina. Some women fail to make this transfer. As a result, even though they may continue to have orgasm following stimulation of the clitoris, they are "vaginally frigid."
Since Freud wrote this doctrine of the vaginal orgasm as distinct from the clitoral orgasm, it has penetrated sexual literature and has troubled many women. But there is no real cause for concern.
During ordinary vaginal intercourse a remarkable feature of female anatomy comes into play. The thrusting of the penis, as noted above causes motion of the inner lips, or minor labia, at the entrance of the vagina. These lips come together above the vaginal opening to form the "hood" or prepuce of the clitoris. The rhythmic motion of the inner lips produced by rhythmic coital thrusting slides the hood rhythmically back and forth against the exquisitely sensitive glans of the clitoris, stimulating it lightly but most effectively. Thus the clitoris participates fully in ordinary vaginal intercourse, even though neither man nor woman makes special efforts to stimulate it directly.
From an anatomic point of view, there is absolutely no difference in the response of the pelvic organs to effective sexual stimulation, regardless of whether stimulation occurs as a result of clitoral area manipulation, sexual intercourse, or, for that matter, from breast stimulation alone. The human female's physiologic responses to effective sexual stimulation develop with consistency regardless of the source of the psychic or physical sexual stimulation.
Women concerned by their failure to reach "vaginal orgasm" can thus be reassured. There is neither a purely clitoral orgasm nor a purely vaginal orgasm. There is only one kind of orgasm from the physiological point of view - a sexual orgasm.
Most men, as noted above, experience a "refractory period" following orgasm and ejaculation. They cannot experience a second erection and orgasm for many minutes or even hours. This is not true of women. If a woman who is capable of regular orgasms is properly stimulated within a short period after her first climax, she will in most instances be capable of having a second, third, fourth, and even fifth and sixth orgasm before she is fully satiated. As contrasted with a man's usual inability to have more than one orgasm in a short period, many women, especially when clitorally stimulated, can regularly have five or six full orgasms within a matter of minutes.
The possibility of multiple orgasms in women was not a new discovery, of course; 14 per cent of the women interviewed by Alfred Kinsey and his associates reported that they sometimes had multiple orgasms. But these findings were often dismissed as unreliable by male writers who referred to multiple orgasms as "minor," and who even called multi-orgasmic women anorgasmic and incapable of experiencing true orgasm.
This kind of nonsense has now been laid to rest by laboratory observations. Multiple orgasms do not differ physiologically in any significant respect from single orgasms, they report, except in their multiplicity. And they are not "minor" experiences: when female study subjects were interrogated in the laboratory after multi-orgasmic experiences, the second or third orgasmic episode usually was identified subjectively as more satisfying or more sensually pleasurable than the first orgasmic episode.
The physiology of multiple orgasm in women can be simply explained. Three events in the genital region occur rapidly after a woman's first orgasm: her clitoris descends to its resting position overhanging the pubic bone, the orgasmic platform relaxes and loses its engorgement with excess blood, and her outer and inner lips (major and minor labia) also lose their engorgement. All three of these events, however, are reversible. With renewal of erotic stimulation or with continuing stimulation - the clitoris again elevates, the veins refill with blood, the muscles again contract, and another orgasm is initiated. Some women prefer continuous stimulation, going from one orgasm to another with practically no time lapse; others prefer to fall back to the plateau or excitement phase before stimulation is renewed.
Masters and Johnson reported that multiple orgasms are more apt to occur with masturbation than with intra-vaginal coition. The reason should be obvious: few men can maintain an erection long enough to produce multiple orgasms in their partners. The limit is not the woman's responsivity, but the man's erectile endurance. In sexual cycles produced by direct stimulation of the woman's mons area, in contrast, her responsivity is the sole limit and she can match her self-stimulation to her responsive needs. Under such circumstances, Masters and Johnson reported, a woman may "experience five to 20 recurrent orgasmic experiences with the sexual tension never allowed to drop below a plateau phase maintenance level until physical exhaustion terminates the session."
The belief that masculine endurance rather than feminine responsivity limits a woman's coital responses is confirmed by another remarkable set of Masters-Johnson findings. Five of the men seen in their clinic for infertile couples, they reported, were fully potent sexually in all other ways, but were unable to ejaculate into a vagina. As a result of this male sexual dysfunction, these five men "can and do maintain coital connection for 30 to 60 minutes at any given opportunity." In three of the five cases, the wives reaped the full benefit. They were "multi orgasmic as a result of the constant opportunity for long maintained coition." As in the case of other women in self stimulatory episodes, these women have one orgasm after another until "sex is terminated by the female partner's sexual satiation." Multiple orgasm, in short, is not a characteristic of self-stimulation; it is a characteristic of any effective stimulation sufficiently prolonged to trigger multiple responses.
Dr. Masters and Mrs. Johnson indicated just how far this process can go. They claimed the average woman with optimal arousal will usually be satisfied with 3-5 manually induced orgasms; whereas stimulation with a vibrator is less tiring and induces her to go on to long simulative sessions of an hour or more during which she may have 20 to 50 consecutive orgasms. She may stop only when totally exhausted. Such sessions, occurring as often as 2-3 times a week, create chronic passive congestion of the pelvis. A psychiatrist confirmed: "In clinical practice a number of married and single women using the vibrator to achieve up to fifty orgasms in a single session have come to my attention in the past few years. From the standpoint of normal physiological functioning, these women exhibit a healthy, uninhibited sexuality - and the number of orgasms attained, a measure of the human female's orgasmic potentiality."
In the past it was reasonable to believe that the capacity for multiple orgasm was limited to a minority of women - thirteen or fourteen out of every one hundred. The Masters-Johnson work indicates that this is not true. In addition to their research with erotically responsive subjects, Masters and Johnson treated married couples, and some of the wives in this treatment group were anorgasmic by even the strictest standards. They were incapable of achieving orgasm by any means whatever, and had never achieved orgasm throughout their lives, including five years or more of marriage. All of them had received prior medical or psychiatric treatment without results. These women, in short, were as far removed from the rapidly multi-orgasmic women as could possibly be imagined. Yet following successful short-term therapy, they began within ten days to three weeks to experience not only orgasm but, in many cases, intense multiple orgasms; and once this capacity was achieved they were able to respond with increasing ease and rapidity. Even the seemingly most anorgasmic women are in fact capable, under suitable conditions, of experiencing intense multiple orgasms.