The Intelligent Universe

December 12, 2002 by Ray Kurzweil
Original link:  http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-intelligent-universe
Orginally published on Edge Nov. 7, 2002. Published on KurzweilAI.net on Dec. 12, 2002.
On July 21, 2002, Edge brought together leading thinkers to speak about their "universe." Other participants:

The Computational Universe by Seth Lloyd
The Emotion Universe by Marvin Minsky
The Inflationary Universe by Alan Harvey Guth
The Cyclic Universe by Paul Steinhardt
Within 25 years, we’ll reverse-engineer the brain and go on to develop superintelligence. Extrapolating the exponential growth of computational capacity (a factor of at least 1000 per decade), we’ll expand inward to the fine forces, such as strings and quarks, and outward. Assuming we could overcome the speed of light limitation, within 300 years we would saturate the whole universe with our intelligence.

The universe has been set up in an exquisitely specific way so that evolution could produce the people that are sitting here today [at Edge's REBOOTING CIVILIZATION II meeting on July 21, 2002] and we could use our intelligence to talk about the universe. We see a formidable power in the ability to use our minds and the tools we’ve created to gather evidence, to use our inferential abilities to develop theories, to test the theories, and to understand the universe at increasingly precise levels. That’s one role of intelligence. The theories that we heard on cosmology look at the evidence that exists in the world today to make inferences about what existed in the past so that we can develop models of how we got here.

Then, of course, we can run those models and project what might happen in the future. Even if it’s a little more difficult to test the future theories, we can at least deduce, or induce, that certain phenomena that we see today are evidence of times past, such as radiation from billions of years ago. We can’t really test what will happen billions or trillions of years from now quite as directly, but this line of inquiry is legitimate, in terms of understanding the past and the derivation of the universe. As we heard today, the question of the origin of the universe is certainly not resolved. There are competing theories, and at several times we’ve had theories that have broken down, once we acquired more precise evidence.

At the same time, however, we don’t hear discussion about the role of intelligence in the future. According to common wisdom, intelligence is irrelevant to cosmological thinking. It is just a bit of froth dancing in and out of the crevices of the universe, and has no effect on our ultimate cosmological destiny. That’s not my view. The universe has been set up exquisitely enough to have intelligence. There are intelligent entities like ourselves that can contemplate the universe and develop models about it, which is interesting. Intelligence is, in fact, a powerful force and we can see that its power is going to grow not linearly but exponentially, and will ultimately be powerful enough to change the destiny of the universe.

I want to propose a case that intelligence—specifically human intelligence, but not necessarily biological human intelligence—will trump cosmology, or at least trump the dumb forces of cosmology. The forces that we heard discussed earlier don’t have the qualities that we posit in intelligent decision-making. In the grand celestial machinery, forces deplete themselves at a certain point and other forces take over. Essentially you have a universe that’s dominated by what I call dumb matter, because it’s controlled by fairly simple mechanical processes.

Human civilization possesses a different type of force with a certain scope and a certain power. It’s changing the shape and destiny of our planet. Consider, for example, asteroids and meteors. Small ones hit us on a fairly regular basis, but the big ones hit us every some tens of millions of years and have apparently had a big impact on the course of biological evolution. That’s not going to happen again. If it happened next year we’re not quite ready to deal with it, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen next year. When it does happen again our technology will be quite sufficient. We’ll see it coming, and we will deal with it. We’ll use our engineering to send up a probe and blast it out of the sky. You can score one for intelligence in terms of trumping the natural unintelligent forces of the universe.

Commanding our local area of the sky is, of course, very small on a cosmological scale, but intelligence can overrule these physical forces, not by literally repealing the natural laws, but by manipulating them in such a supremely sublime and subtle way that it effectively overrules these laws. This is particularly the case when you get machinery that can operate at nano and ultimately femto and pico scales. Whereas the laws of physics still apply, they’re being manipulated now to create any outcome the intelligence of this civilization decides on.

How intelligence developed

Let me back up and talk about how intelligence came about. Wolfram’s book has prompted a lot of talk recently on the computational substrate of the universe and on the universe as a computational entity. Earlier today, Seth Lloyd talked about the universe as a computer and its capacity for computation and memory. What Wolfram leaves out in talking about cellular automata is how you get intelligent entities. As you run these cellular automata, they create interesting pictures, but the interesting thing about cellular automata, which was shown long before Wolfram pointed it out, is that you can get apparently random behavior from deterministic processes.

It’s more than apparent that you literally can’t predict an outcome unless you can simulate the process. If the process under consideration is the whole universe, then presumably you can’t simulate it unless you step outside the universe. But when Wolfram says that this explains the complexity we see in nature, it’s leaving out one important step. As you run the cellular automata, you don’t see the growth in complexity—at least, certainly he’s never run them long enough to see any growth in what I would call complexity. You need evolution.

Marvin talked about some of the early stages of evolution. It starts out very slow, but then something with some power to sustain itself and to overcome other forces is created and has the power to self-replicate and preserve that structure. Evolution works by indirection. It creates a capability and then uses that capability to create the next. It took billions of years until this chaotic swirl of mass and energy created the information-processing, structural backbone of DNA, and then used that DNA to create the next stage.

With DNA, evolution had an information-processing machine to record its experiments and conduct experiments in a more orderly way. So the next stage, such as the Cambrian explosion, went a lot faster, taking only a few tens of millions of years. The Cambrian explosion then established body plans that became a mature technology, meaning that we didn’t need to evolve body plans any more.

These designs worked well enough, so evolution could then concentrate on higher cortical function, establishing another level of mechanism in the organisms that could do information processing. At this point, animals developed brains and nervous systems that could process information, and then that evolved and continued to accelerate. Homo sapiens evolved in only hundreds of thousands of years, and then the cutting edge of evolution again worked by indirection to use this product of evolution, the first technology creating species to survive, to create the next stage: technology, a continuation of biological evolution by other means.

The Law of Accelerating Returns

The first stages of technologies, like stone tools, fire, and the wheel took tens of thousands of years, but then we had more powerful tools to create the next stage. A thousand years ago, a paradigm shift like the printing press took only a century or so to be adopted, and this evolution has accelerated ever since. Fifty years ago, the first computers were designed with pencil on paper, with screwdrivers and wire. Today we have computers to design computers. Computer designers will design some high-level parameters, and twelve levels of intermediate design are computed automatically. The process of designing a computer now goes much more quickly.

Evolutionary processes accelerate, and the returns from an evolutionary process grow in power. I’ve called this theory "The Law of Accelerating Returns." The returns, including economic returns, accelerate. Stemming from my interest in being an inventor, I’ve been developing mathematical models of this because I quickly realized that an invention has to make sense when the technology is finished, not when it was started, since the world is generally a different place three or four years later.

One exponential pattern that people are familiar with is Moore’s Law, which is really just one specific paradigm of shrinking transistors on integrated circuits. It’s remarkable how long it’s lasted, but it wasn’t the first, but the fifth paradigm to provide exponential growth to computing. Earlier, we had electro-mechanical calculators, using relays and vacuum tubes. Engineers were shrinking the vacuum tubes, making them smaller and smaller, until finally that paradigm ran out of steam because they couldn’t keep the vacuum any more. Transistors were already in use in radios and other small, niche applications, but when the mainstream technology of computing finally ran out of steam, it switched to this other technology that was already waiting in the wings to provide ongoing exponential growth. It was a paradigm shift. Later, there was a shift to integrated circuits, and at some point, integrated circuits will run out of steam.

Ten or 15 years from now we’ll go to the third dimension. Of course, research on three-dimensional computing is well under way, because as the end of one paradigm becomes clear, this perception increases the pressure for the research to create the next. We’ve seen tremendous acceleration of molecular computing in the last several years.

When my book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, came out about four years ago, the idea that three-dimensional molecular computing could be feasible was quite controversial, and a lot of computer scientists didn’t believe it was. Today, there is a universal belief that it’s feasible, and that it will arrive in plenty of time before Moore’s Law runs out. We live in a three-dimensional world, so we might as well use the third dimension. That will be the sixth paradigm.

Moore’s Law is one paradigm among many that have provided exponential growth in computation, but computation is not the only technology that has grown exponentially. We see something similar in any technology, particularly in ones that have any relationship to information.

The genome project, for example, was not a mainstream project when it was announced. People thought it was ludicrous that you could scan the genome in 15 years, because at the rate at which you could scan it when the project began, it could take thousands of years. But the scanning has doubled in speed every year, and actually most of the work was done in the last year of the project.

Magnetic data storage is not covered under Moore’s Law, since it involves packing information on a magnetic substrate, which is a completely different set of applied physics, but magnetic data storage has very regularly doubled every year. In fact there’s a second level of acceleration. It took us three years to double the price-performance of computing at the beginning of the century, and two years in the middle of the century, but we’re now doubling it in less than one year.

This is another feedback loop that has to do with past technologies, because as we improve the price performance, we put more resources into that technology. If you plot computers, as I’ve done, on a logarithmic scale, where a straight line would mean exponential growth, you see another exponential. There’s actually a double rate of exponential growth.

Another very important phenomenon is the rate of paradigm shift. This is harder to measure, but even though people can argue about some of the details and assumptions in these charts you still get these same very powerful trends. The paradigm shift rate itself is accelerating, and roughly doubling every decade. When people claim that we won’t see a particular development for a hundred years, or that something is going to take centuries to do accomplish, they’re ignoring the inherent acceleration of technical progress.

Bill Joy and I were at Harvard some months ago and one Nobel Prize-winning biologist said that we won’t see self-replicating nanotechnology entities for a hundred years. That’s actually a good intuition, because that’s my estimation—at today’s rate of progress—of how long it will take to achieve that technical milestone. However, since we’re doubling the rate of progress every decade, it’ll only take 25 calendar years to get there—this, by the way, is a mainstream opinion in the nanotechnology field.

The last century is not a good guide to the next, in the sense that it made only about 20 years of progress at today’s rate of progress, because we were speeding up to this point. At today’s rate of progress, we’ll make the same amount of progress as what occurred in the 20th century in 14 years, and then again in 7 years. The 21st century will see, because of the explosive power of exponential growth, something like 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate of progress—a thousand times greater than the 20th century, which was no slouch for radical change.

I’ve been developing these models for a few decades, and made a lot of predictions about intelligent machines in the 1980s that people can check out. They weren’t perfect, but were a pretty good road map. I’ve been refining these models. I don’t pretend that anybody can see the future perfectly, but the power of the exponential aspect of the evolution of these technologies, or of evolution itself, is undeniable. And that creates a very different perspective about the future.

Let’s take computation. Communication is important and shrinkage is important. Right now, we’re shrinking technology, apparently both mechanical and electronic, at a rate of 5.6 per linear dimension per decade. That number is also moving slowly, in a double exponential sense, but we’ll get to nanotechnology at that rate in the 2020s. There are some early-adopter examples of nanotechnology today, but the real mainstream, where the cutting edge of the operating principles are in the multi-nanometer range, will be in the 2020s. If you put these together you get some interesting observations.

Right now we have 10²⁶ calculations per second in human civilization in our biological brains. We could argue about this figure, but it’s basically, for all practical purposes, fixed. I don’t know how much intelligence it adds if you include animals, but maybe you then get a little bit higher than 10²⁶. Non-biological computation is growing at a double exponential rate, and right now is millions of times less than the biological computation in human beings. Biological intelligence is fixed, because it’s an old, mature paradigm, but the new paradigm of non-biological computation and intelligence is growing exponentially. The crossover will be in the 2020s and after that, at least from a hardware perspective, non-biological computation will dominate at least quantitatively.

This brings up the question of software. Lots of people say that even though things are growing exponentially in terms of hardware, we’ve made no progress in software. But we are making progress in software, even if the doubling factor is much slower.

Reverse-engineering the brain

The real scenario that I want to address is the reverse-engineering of the human brain. Our knowledge of the human brain and the tools we have to observe and understand it are themselves growing exponentially. Brain scanning and mathematical models of neurons and neural structures are growing exponentially, and there’s very interesting work going on.

There is Lloyd Watts, for example, who with his colleagues has collected models of specific types of neurons and wiring information about how the internal connections are wired in different regions of the brain. He has put together a detailed model of about 15 regions that deal with auditory processing, and has applied psychoacoustic tests of the model, comparing it to human auditory perception.

The model is at least reasonably accurate, and this technology is now being used as a front end for speech recognition software. Still, we’re at the very early stages of understanding the human cognitive system. It’s comparable to the genome project in its early stages in that we also knew very little about the genome in its early stages. We now have most of the data, but we still don’t have the reverse engineering to understand how it works.

It would be a mistake to say that the brain only has a few simple ideas and that once we can understand them we can build a very simple machine. But although there is a lot of complexity to the brain, it’s also not vast complexity. It is described by a genome that doesn’t have that much information in it. There are about 800 million bytes in the uncompressed genome. We need to consider redundancies in the DNA, as some sequences are repeated hundreds of thousands of times. By applying routine data compression, you can compress this information at a ratio of about 30 to 1, giving you about 23 million bytes—which is smaller than Microsoft Word—to describe the initial conditions of the brain.

But the brain has a lot more information than that. You can argue about the exact number, but I come up with thousands of trillions of bytes of information to characterize what’s in a brain, which is millions of times greater than what is in the genome. How can that be?

Marvin talked about how the methods from computer science are important for understanding how the brain works. We know from computer science that we can very easily create programs of considerable complexity from a small starting condition. You can, with a very small program, create a genetic algorithm that simulates some simple evolutionary process and create something of far greater complexity than itself. You can use a random function within the program, which ultimately creates not just randomness, but is creating some meaningful information after the initial random conditions are evolved using a self organizing method, resulting in information that’s far greater than the initial conditions.

That is in large measure how the genome creates the brain. We know that it specifies certain constraints for how a particular region is wired, but within those constraints and methods, there’s a great deal of stochastic or random wiring, followed by some kind of process whereby the brain learns and self-organizes to make sense of its environment. At this point, what began as random becomes meaningful, and the program has multiplied the size of its information.

The point of all of this is that, since it’s a level of complexity we can manage, we will be able to reverse-engineer the human brain. We’ve shown that we can model neurons, clusters of neurons, and even whole brain regions. We are well down that path. It’s rather conservative to say that within 25 years we’ll have all of the necessary scanning information and neuron models and will be able to put together a model of the principles of operation of how the human brain works. Then, of course, we’ll have an entity that has some human like qualities. We’ll have to educate and train it, but of course we can speed up that process, since we’ll have access to everything that’s out in the Web, which will contain all accessible human knowledge.

One of the nice things about computer technology is that once you master a process it can operate much faster. So we will learn the secrets of human intelligence, partly from reverse-engineering of the human brain. This will be one source of knowledge for creating the software of intelligence.

We can then combine some advantages of human intelligence with advantages that we see clearly in non-biological intelligence. We spent years training our speech recognition system, which gives us a combination of rules. It mixes expert-system approaches with some self-organizing techniques like neural nets, Markov models and other self-organizing algorithms. We automate the training process by recording thousands of hours of speech and annotating it, and it automatically readjusts all its Markov-model levels and other parameters when it makes mistakes. Finally, after years of this process, it does a pretty good job of recognizing speech. Now, if you want your computer to do the same thing, you don’t have to go through those years of training like we do with every child, you can actually load the evolved pattern of this one research computer, which is called loading the software.

Machines can share their knowledge. Machines can do things quickly. Machines have a type of memory that’s more accurate than our frail human memories. Nobody at this table can remember billions of things perfectly accurately and look them up quickly. The combination of the software of biological human intelligence with the benefits of non-biological intelligence will be very formidable. Ultimately, this growing non-biological intelligence will have the benefits of human levels of intelligence in terms of its software and our exponentially growing knowledge base.

Superintelligence saturates the universe

In the future, maybe only one part of intelligence in a trillion will be biological, but it will be infused with human levels of intelligence, which will be able to amplify itself because of the powers of non-biological intelligence to share its knowledge. How does it grow? Does it grow in or does it grow out? Growing in means using finer and finer granularities of matter and energy to do computation, while growing out means using more of the stuff in the universe.

Presently, we see some of both. We see mostly the "in," since Moore’s Law inherently means that we’re shrinking the size of transistors and integrated circuits, making them finer and finer. To some extent we’re also expanding out in that even though the chips are more and more powerful, we make more chips every year, and deploy more economic and material resources towards this non biological intelligence.

Ultimately, we’ll get to nanotechnology-based computation, which is at the molecular level, infused with the software of human intelligence and the expanding knowledge base of human civilization. It’ll continue to expand both inwards and outwards. It goes in waves as the expansion inwards reaches certain points of resistance. The paradigm shifts will be pretty smooth as we go from the second to the third dimension via molecular computing. At that point it’ll be feasible to take the next step into femto engineering—on the scale of trillionths of a meter—and pico engineering—on the scale of thousands of trillionths of a meter—going into the finer structures of matter and manipulating some of the really fine forces, such as strings and quarks.

That’s going to be a barrier, however, so the ongoing expansion of our intelligence is going to be propelled outward. Nonetheless, it will go both in and out. Ultimately, if you do the math, we will completely saturate our corner of the universe, the earth and solar system, sometime in the 22nd century. We’ll then want ever-greater horizons, as is the nature of intelligence and evolution, and will then expand to the rest of the universe.

How quickly will it expand? One premise is that it will expand at the speed of light, because that’s the fastest speed at which information can travel. There are also tantalizing experiments on quantum disentanglement that show some effect at rates faster than the speed of light, even much faster, perhaps theoretically instantaneously. Interestingly enough, though, this is not the transmission of information, but the transmission of profound quantum randomness, which doesn’t accomplish our purpose of communicating intelligence. You need to transmit information, not randomness. So far nobody has actually shown true transmission of information at faster than the speed of light, at least not in a way that has convinced mainstream scientific opinion.

If, in fact, that is a fundamental barrier, and if things that are far away really are far away, which is to say there are no shortcuts through wormholes through the universe, then the spread of our intelligence will be slow, governed by the speed of light. This process will be initiated within 200 years. If you do the math, we will be at near saturation of the available matter and energy in and around our solar system, based on current understandings of the limitations of computation, within that time period.

However, it’s my conjecture that by going through these other dimensions that Alan and Paul talked about, there may be shortcuts. It may be very hard to do, but we’re talking about supremely intelligent technologies and beings. If there are ways to get to parts of the universe through shortcuts such as wormholes, they’ll find, deploy, and master them, and get to other parts of the universe faster. Then perhaps we can reach the whole universe, say 10⁸⁰ protons, photons, and other particles that Seth Lloyd estimates represents on the order of 10⁹⁰ bits, without being limited by the apparent speed of light.

If the speed of light is not a limit, and I do have to emphasize that this particular point is a conjecture at this time, then within 300 years, we would saturate the whole universe with our intelligence, and the whole universe would become supremely intelligent and be able to manipulate everything according to its will. We’re currently multiplying computational capacity by a factor of at least 10³ every decade. This is conservative, as this rate of exponential growth is itself growing exponentially. Thus it is conservative to project that within 30 decades (300 years), we would multiply current computational capacities by a factor of 10⁹⁰, and thus exceed Seth Lloyd’s estimate of 10⁹⁰ bits in the Universe.

We can speculate about identity—will this be multiple people or beings, or one being, or will we all be merged?—but nonetheless, we’ll be very intelligent and we’ll be able to decide whether we want to continue expanding. Information is very sacred, which is why death is a tragedy. Whenever a person dies, you lose all that information in a person. The tragedy of losing historical artifacts is that we’re losing information. We could realize that losing information is bad, and decide not to do that any more. Intelligence will have a profound effect on the cosmological destiny of the universe at that point.

Why SETI will fail

I’ll end with a comment about the SETI project. Regardless of this ultimate resolution of this issue of the speed of light—and it is my speculation (and that of others as well) that there are ways to circumvent it—if there are ways, they’ll be found, because intelligence is intelligent enough to master any mechanism that is discovered. Regardless of that, I think the SETI project will fail—it’s actually a very important failure, because sometimes a negative finding is just as profound as a positive finding—for the following reason: we’ve looked at a lot of the sky with at least some level of power, and we don’t see anybody out there.

The SETI assumption is that even though it’s very unlikely that there is another intelligent civilization like we have here on Earth, there are billions of trillions of planets. So even if the probability is one in a million, or one in a billion, there are still going to be millions, or billions, of life-bearing and ultimately intelligence-bearing planets out there.

If that’s true, they’re going to be distributed fairly evenly across cosmological time, so some will be ahead of us, and some will be behind us. Those that are ahead of us are not going to be ahead of us by only a few years. They’re going to be ahead of us by billions of years. But because of the exponential nature of evolution, once we get a civilization that gets to our point, or even to the point of Babbage, who was messing around with mechanical linkages in a crude 19th century technology, it’s only a matter of a few centuries before they get to a full realization of nanotechnology, if not femto and pico-engineering, and totally infuse their area of the cosmos with their intelligence. It only takes a few hundred years!

So if there are millions of civilizations that are millions or billions of years ahead of us, there would have to be millions that have passed this threshold and are doing what I’ve just said, and have really infused their area of the cosmos. Yet we don’t see them, nor do we have the slightest indication of their existence, a challenge known as the Fermi paradox. Someone could say that this "silence of the cosmos" is because the speed of light is a limit, therefore we don’t see them, because even though they’re fantastically intelligent, they’re outside of our light sphere. Of course, if that’s true, SETI won’t find them, because they’re outside of our light sphere.

But let’s say they’re inside our light sphere, or that light isn’t a limitation, for the reasons I’ve mentioned. Then perhaps they decided, in their great wisdom, to remain invisible to us. You can imagine that there’s one civilization out there that made that decision, but are we to believe that this is the case for every one of the millions, or billions, of civilizations that SETI says should be out there?

That’s unlikely, but even if it’s true, SETI still won’t find them, because if a civilization like that has made that decision, it is so intelligent they’ll be able to carry that out, and remain hidden from us. Maybe they’re waiting for us to evolve to that point and then they’ll reveal themselves to us. Still, if you analyze this more carefully, it’s very unlikely in fact that they’re out there.

You might ask, isn’t it incredibly unlikely that this planet, which is in a very random place in the universe and one of trillions of planets and solar systems, is ahead of the rest of the universe in the evolution of intelligence? Of course the whole existence of our universe, with the laws of physics so sublimely precise to allow this type of evolution to occur is also very unlikely, but by the anthropic principle, we’re here, and by an analogous anthropic principle we are here in the lead. After all, if this were not the case, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. So by a similar anthropic principle we’re able to appreciate this argument.

I’ll end on that note.

Copyright © 2002 by Edge Foundation, Inc. Published on KurzweilAI.net with permission.

Propelling deep space flight with a new fuel source, Momentus prepares for liftoff

Jonathan Shieber@jshieber / 54 minutes ago

Original link:  https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/21/propelling-deep-space-flight-with-a-new-fuel-source-momentus-prepares-for-liftoff/?sr_share=googleplus&utm_campaign=sfgplus

 

Mikhail Kokorich, the founder of Momentus, a new Y Combinator-backed propulsion technology developer for space flight, hadn’t always dreamed of going to the moon.

A physicist who graduated from Russia’s top-ranked Novosibirsk University, Kokorich was a serial entrepreneur in who grew up in Siberia and made his name and his first fortunes in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The heart of Momentus’ technology is a new propulsion system that uses water as a propellant instead of chemicals.

Image courtesy Momentus

Using water has several benefits, Kokorich says. One, it’s a fuel source that’s abundant in outer space, and it’s ultimately better and more efficient fuel for flight beyond low earth orbit. “If you move something with a chemical booster stage to the moon. Chemical propulsion is good when you need to have a very high thrust,” according to Kokorich. Once a ship gets beyond gravity’s pull, water simply works better, he says.

Some companies are trying to guide micro-satellites with technologies like Phase 4 which use ionized gases like Xenon, but according to Kokorich those are more expensive and slower. “When ionized propulsion is used for geostationary satellites to orbit, it takes months,” says Kokorich, using water can half the time.

“We can carry ten tons to geostationary orbit and it’s much faster,” says Kokorich.

The company has already signed an agreement with ECM Space, a European launch services provider, which will provide the initial trip for the company’s first test of its propulsion system on a micro-satellite — slated for early 2019.

That first product, “Zeal,” has specific impulses of 150 to 180 seconds and power up to 30 watts.



Kokorich started his first business, Dauria, in the mid-90s amid the collapse of the Soviet Union, selling explosives and engineering services to mining companies in Siberia. Kokorich sold that business and went into retail, eventually building a network of stores that sold home goods and housewares across Russia.

That raked in more millions for Kokorich, who then said he diversified into electronics by buying Russia’s BestBuy chain out bankruptcy. But space was never far from his mind, and, eventually he returned to it.

“In 2011 I hit my middle-aged crisis,” Korkorich says. “So I founded the first private Russian aerospace company.”

That company, Dauria Aerospace, was initially feted by the government, garnering the entrepreneur a place in Skolkovo, and its inaugural cohort of space companies. In an announcement of the successes the space program had achieved in 2014 Kokorich co-authored a piece with the Russian cosmonaut Sergey Zhukov, who remains the executive director of the networking and aerospace programs at the multi-billion-dollar boondoggle startup incubator.

Utilis detects water leaks underground using satellite imagery.

A few months later Kokorich would be in the U.S. working to back the first of what’s now a triumvirate of startups focused on space.

“With all the problems with Russia in the Western world, I moved to the U.S.,” says Kokorich. Dauria had quickly raised $30 million for its work, but as this Moscow Times article notes, stiff competition from U.S. firms and the sanctions leveled against Russia in the wake of its invasion and annexation of Crimea were taking their toll on the entrepreneur’s business. “It was a purely political immigration,” Korkorich says. “I don’t have purely business opportunities, because you have to work with the government [and] because the government would not like me.”

For all of his protestations, Kokorich has maintained several economic ties with partners in Russia. It’s through an investment firm called Oden Holdings Ltd. that Kokorich took an investment stake in the Canadian company Helios Wire, which was one of his first forays into space entrepreneurship outside of Russia. That company makes cryptographically secured applications for the transmission and reception of data from internet-enabled devices.

The second space company that the co-founder has built since moving to the U.S. is the satellite company Astra Digital, which processes data from satellites to make that information more accessible.

Now, with Momentus, Kokorich is turning to the problem of propulsion. “When transportation costs decrease, many business models emerge” Kokorich says. And Kokorich sees Momentus’ propulsion technology driving down the costs of traveling further into space — opening up opportunities for new businesses like asteroid mining and lunar transit.

The Momentus team is already thinking well beyond the initial launch. The company’s eyes are on a prize well beyond geostationary orbit.

Indeed, with water as a power source, the company says it will lay the groundwork for future cislunar and interplanetary rides. The company envisions a future where it will power water prospecting and delivery throughout the solar system, solar power stations, in-space manufacturing and space tourism.

Kama Sutra

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Kama Sutra (/ˈkɑːmə ˈsuːtrə/; Sanskrit: कामसूत्र,  pronunciation (help·info), Kāmasūtra) is an ancient Indian Hindu text written by Vātsyāyana. It is widely considered to be the standard work on human sexual behaviour in Sanskrit literature.

A portion of the work consists of practical advice on sexual intercourse.^[4] It is largely in prose, with many inserted anustubh poetry verses. "Kāma" which is one of the four goals of Hindu life, means desire including sexual desire, the latter being the subject of the textbook, and "sūtra" literally means a thread or line that holds things together, and more metaphorically refers to an aphorism (or line, rule, formula), or a collection of such aphorisms in the form of a manual.

Contrary to western popular perception, the Kama Sutra is not exclusively a sex manual; it presents itself as a guide to a virtuous and gracious living that discusses the nature of love, family life, and other aspects pertaining to pleasure-oriented faculties of human life.^[5][6] The Kama Sutra, in parts of the world, is presumed or depicted as a synonym for creative sexual positions; in reality, only 20% of the Kama Sutra is about sexual positions. The majority of the book, notes Jacob Levy,^[7][who?] is about the philosophy and theory of love, what triggers desire, what sustains it, and how and when it is good or bad.^[8]

The Kama Sutra is the oldest and most notable of a group of texts known generically as Kama Shastra (Sanskrit: Kāma Śāstra).^[9]

Historians believe the Kama Sutra to have been composed between 400 BCE and 200 CE.^[10] John Keay says that the Kama Sutra is a compendium that was collected into its present form in the 2nd century CE.^[11]

Content

Artistic depiction of a sex position. Although Kama Sutra did not originally have illustrative images, part 2 of the work describes different sex positions.

In the preface of the Kama Sutra, Vatsyayana cites the work of previous authors based on which he compiled his own Kama Sutra. He states that the seven parts of his work were an abridgment of longer works by Dattaka (first part), Suvarnanabha (second part), Ghotakamukha (third part), Gonardiya (fourth part), Gonikaputra (fifth part), Charayana (sixth part), and Kuchumara (seventh part). Vatsyayana's Kama Sutra has 1250 verses, distributed over 36 chapters, which are further organised into seven parts.^[12] According to both the Burton and Doniger^[13] translations, the contents of the book are structured into the following seven parts:

1. General remarks

Five chapters on contents of the book, three aims and priorities of life, the acquisition of knowledge, conduct of the well-bred townsman, reflections on intermediaries who assist the lover in his enterprises.

2. Amorous advances/sexual union

Ten chapters on stimulation of desire, types of embraces, caressing and kisses, marking with nails, biting and marking with teeth, on copulation (positions), slapping by hand and corresponding moaning, virile behaviour in women, superior coition and oral sex, preludes and conclusions to the game of love. It describes 64 types of sexual acts.

3. Acquiring a wife

Five chapters on forms of marriage, relaxing the girl, obtaining the girl, managing alone, union by marriage.

4. Duties and privileges of the wife

Two chapters on conduct of the only wife and conduct of the chief wife and other wives.

5. Other men's wives

Six chapters on behaviour of woman and man, how to get acquainted, examination of sentiments, the task of go-between, the king's pleasures, behaviour in the women's quarters.

6. About courtesans

Six chapters on advice of the assistants on the choice of lovers, looking for a steady lover, ways of making money, renewing friendship with a former lover, occasional profits, profits and losses.

7. Occult practices

Two chapters on improving physical attractions, arousing a weakened sexual power.

Pleasure and spirituality

A sexual pose from Mukteswar Temple in Bhubaneswar, Odisha

 

A Sexual Encounter

 

Poolside Lovemaking

Some Indian philosophies follow the "four main goals of life",^[14][15] known as the purusharthas, in order of importance:

1. Kama: Desire
2. Artha: (Material) prosperity
3. Dharma: Virtuous living
4. Moksha: Liberation.

Dharma, Artha and Kama are aims of everyday life, while Moksha is release from the cycle of death and rebirth. The Kama Sutra (Burton translation) says:

Dharma is better than Artha, and Artha is better than Kama. But Artha should always be first practised by the king for the livelihood of men is to be obtained from it only. Again, Kama being the occupation of public women, they should prefer it to the other two, and these are exceptions to the general rule.

—Kama Sutra 1.2.14^[17]

Of the first three, virtue is the highest goal, a secure life the second, and pleasure the least important. When motives conflict, the higher ideal is to be followed. Thus, in making money, virtue must not be compromised, but earning a living should take precedence over pleasure; however, there are exceptions.

In childhood, Vātsyāyana says, a person should learn how to make a living; youth is the time for pleasure, and as years pass, one should concentrate on living virtuously and hope to escape the cycle of rebirth.^[18] The Kama Sutra acknowledges that the senses can be dangerous: 'Just as a horse in full gallop, blinded by the energy of his own speed, pays no attention to any post or hole or ditch on the path, so two lovers, blinded by passion, in the friction of sexual battle, are caught up in their fierce energy and pay no attention to danger' (2.7.33).

Also, the Buddha preached a Kama Sutra, which is located in the Atthakavagga (sutra number 1). This Kama Sutra, however, is of a very different nature, as it warns against the dangers that come with the search for pleasures of the senses.

Many in the Western world wrongly consider the Kama Sutra to be a manual for tantric sex.^{[citation needed]} While sexual practices do exist within the very wide tradition of Hindu Tantra, the Kama Sutra is not a Tantric text, and does not touch upon any of the sexual rites associated with some forms of Tantric practice.

Translations

The most widely known English translation of the Kama Sutra was privately printed in 1883. It is usually attributed to renowned orientalist and author Sir Richard Francis Burton, but the chief work was done by the Indian archaeologist Bhagwan Lal Indraji, under the guidance of Burton's friend, the Indian civil servant Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot, and with the assistance of a student, Shivaram Parshuram Bhide.^[19] Burton acted as publisher, while also furnishing the edition with footnotes whose tone ranges from the jocular to the scholarly. Burton says the following in its introduction:

It may be interesting to some persons to learn how it came about that Vatsyayana was first brought to light and translated into the English language. It happened thus. While translating with the pundits the 'Anunga Runga, or the stage of love', reference was frequently found to be made to one Vatsya. The sage Vatsya was of this opinion, or of that opinion. The sage Vatsya said this, and so on. Naturally questions were asked who the sage was, and the pundits replied that Vatsya was the author of the standard work on love in Sanscrit[sic] literature, that no Sanscrit library was complete without his work, and that it was most difficult now to obtain in its entire state. The copy of the manuscript obtained in Bombay was defective, and so the pundits wrote to Benares, Calcutta and Jaipur for copies of the manuscript from Sanscrit libraries in those places. Copies having been obtained, they were then compared with each other, and with the aid of a Commentary called 'Jayamanglia' a revised copy of the entire manuscript was prepared, and from this copy the English translation was made. The following is the certificate of the chief pundit:

"The accompanying manuscript is corrected by me after comparing four different copies of the work. I had the assistance of a Commentary called 'Jayamangla' for correcting the portion in the first five parts, but found great difficulty in correcting the remaining portion, because, with the exception of one copy thereof which was tolerably correct, all the other copies I had were far too incorrect. However, I took that portion as correct in which the majority of the copies agreed with each other."

In the introduction to her own translation, Wendy Doniger, professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, writes that Burton "managed to get a rough approximation of the text published in English in 1883, nasty bits and all". The philologist and Sanskritist Professor Chlodwig Werba, of the Institute of Indology at the University of Vienna, regards the 1883 translation as being second only in accuracy to the academic German-Latin text published by Richard Schmidt in 1897.^[20]

A noteworthy translation by Indra Sinha was published in 1980. In the early 1990s, its chapter on sexual positions began circulating on the internet as an independent text and today is often assumed to be the whole of the Kama Sutra.^[21]

Alain Daniélou contributed a noteworthy translation called The Complete Kama Sutra in 1994.^[22] This translation, originally into French, and thence into English, featured the original text attributed to Vatsyayana, along with a medieval and a modern commentary. Unlike the 1883 version, Daniélou's new translation preserves the numbered verse divisions of the original, and does not incorporate notes in the text. He includes English translations of two important commentaries:

• The Jayamangala commentary, written in Sanskrit by Yashodhara during the Middle Ages, as page footnotes.
• A modern commentary in Hindi by Devadatta Shastri, as endnotes.

Daniélou^[23] translated all Sanskrit words into English (but uses the word "brahmin"). He leaves references to the sexual organs as in the original: persistent usage of the words "lingam" and "yoni" to refer to them in older translations of the Kama Sutra is not the usage in the original Sanskrit; he argues that "to a modern Hindu, 'lingam' and 'yoni' mean specifically the sexual organs of the god Shiva and his wife, and using those words to refer to humans' sexual organs would seem irreligious." The view that lingam means only "sexual organs" is disputed by academics such as S. N. Balagangadhara.^[24]

An English translation by Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar, an Indian psychoanalyst and senior fellow at the Center for Study of World Religions at Harvard University, was published by Oxford University Press in 2002. Doniger contributed the Sanskrit expertise while Kakar provided a psychoanalytic interpretation of the text.^[25]

In popular culture

• Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love
• Tales of the Kama Sutra: The Perfumed Garden
• Tales of the Kama Sutra 2: Monsoon
• Kamasutra 3D

Orgasm

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Frenzy of Exultations (1894), by Władysław Podkowiński

Orgasm (from Greek ὀργασμός orgasmos "excitement, swelling"; also sexual climax) is the sudden discharge of accumulated sexual excitement during the sexual response cycle, resulting in rhythmic muscular contractions in the pelvic region characterized by sexual pleasure. Experienced by males and females, orgasms are controlled by the involuntary or autonomic nervous system. They are often associated with other involuntary actions, including muscular spasms in multiple areas of the body, a general euphoric sensation and, frequently, body movements and vocalizations. The period after orgasm (known as the refractory period) is often a relaxing experience, attributed to the release of the neurohormones oxytocin and prolactin as well as endorphins (or "endogenous morphine").

Human orgasms usually result from physical sexual stimulation of the penis in males (typically accompanying ejaculation), and the clitoris in females.^[2][5][6] Sexual stimulation can be by self-practice (masturbation) or with a sex partner (penetrative sex, non-penetrative sex, or other sexual activity).

The health effects surrounding the human orgasm are diverse. There are many physiological responses during sexual activity, including a relaxed state created by prolactin, as well as changes in the central nervous system such as a temporary decrease in the metabolic activity of large parts of the cerebral cortex while there is no change or increased metabolic activity in the limbic (i.e., "bordering") areas of the brain.^[7] There is also a wide range of sexual dysfunctions, such as anorgasmia. These effects impact cultural views of orgasm, such as the beliefs that orgasm and the frequency/consistency of it are important or irrelevant for satisfaction in a sexual relationship,^[8] and theories about the biological and evolutionary functions of orgasm.^[9][10]

Orgasm in non-human animals has been studied significantly less than orgasm in humans, but research on the subject is ongoing.

Definitions

In a clinical context, orgasm is usually defined strictly by the muscular contractions involved during sexual activity, along with the characteristic patterns of change in heart rate, blood pressure, and often respiration rate and depth.^[1] This is categorized as the sudden discharge of accumulated sexual tension during the sexual response cycle, resulting in rhythmic muscular contractions in the pelvic region.^[1][2][3] However, definitions of orgasm vary and there is sentiment that consensus on how to consistently classify it is absent.^[11] At least twenty-six definitions of orgasm were listed in the journal Clinical Psychology Review.^[12]

There is some debate whether certain types of sexual sensations should be accurately classified as orgasms, including female orgasms caused by G-spot stimulation alone, and the demonstration of extended or continuous orgasms lasting several minutes or even an hour.^[13] The question centers around the clinical definition of orgasm, but this way of viewing orgasm is merely physiological, while there are also psychological, endocrinological, and neurological definitions of orgasm. In these and similar cases, the sensations experienced are subjective and do not necessarily involve the involuntary contractions characteristic of orgasm. However, the sensations in both sexes are extremely pleasurable and are often felt throughout the body, causing a mental state that is often described as transcendental, and with vasocongestion and associated pleasure comparable to that of a full-contractionary orgasm. For example, modern findings support distinction between ejaculation and male orgasm.^[2][12] For this reason, there are views on both sides as to whether these can be accurately defined as orgasms.^[14]

Achieving orgasm

Orgasms can be achieved by a variety of activities, including vaginal, anal or oral sex, non-penetrative sex or masturbation. Orgasm may also be achieved by the use of a sex toy, such as a sensual vibrator or an erotic electrostimulation. It can additionally be achieved by stimulation of the nipples or other erogenous zones, though this is rarer.^[15][16] In addition to physical stimulation, orgasm can be achieved from psychological arousal alone, such as during dreaming (nocturnal emission for males or females)^[12][14][17] or by orgasm control. Orgasm by psychological stimulation alone was first reported among people who had spinal cord injury.^[17] Although sexual function and sexuality after spinal cord injury is very often impacted, this injury does not deprive one of sexual feelings such as sexual arousal and erotic desires.^[17]

A person may experience multiple orgasms, or an involuntary orgasm, such as in the case of rape or other sexual assault. An involuntary orgasm from forced sexual contact often results in feelings of shame caused by internalization of victim-blaming attitudes.^[20][21] The incidence of those who experience unsolicited sexual contact and experience orgasm is very low, though possibly under-reported due to shame or embarrassment; such orgasms additionally happen regardless of gender.^[21]

Scientific literature focuses on the psychology of female orgasm significantly more than it does on the psychology of male orgasm, which "appears to reflect the assumption that female orgasm is psychologically more complex than male orgasm," but "the limited empirical evidence available suggests that male and female orgasm may bear more similarities than differences. In one controlled study by Vance and Wagner (1976), independent raters could not differentiate written descriptions of male versus female orgasm experiences".^[14]

Males

Variabilities

In men, the most common way of achieving orgasm is by physical sexual stimulation of the penis.^[2] This is usually accompanied by ejaculation, but it is possible, though also rare, for men to orgasm without ejaculation (known as a "dry orgasm") or to ejaculate without reaching orgasm (which may be a case of delayed ejaculation, a nocturnal emission or a case of anorgasmic ejaculation). Men may also achieve orgasm by stimulation of the prostate (see below).^[2][18]

Two-stage model

The traditional view of male orgasm is that there are two stages: emission following orgasm, almost instantly followed by a refractory period.^[19] In 1966, Masters and Johnson published pivotal research about the phases of sexual stimulation.^[1][22] Their work included women and men, and, unlike Alfred Kinsey in 1948 and 1953,^[23] tried to determine the physiological stages before and after orgasm.

Masters and Johnson argued that, in the first stage, "accessory organs contract and the male can feel the ejaculation coming; two to three seconds later the ejaculation occurs, which the man cannot constrain, delay, or in any way control" and that, in the second stage, "the male feels pleasurable contractions during ejaculation, reporting greater pleasure tied to a greater volume of ejaculate".^[19] They reported that, unlike females, "for the man the resolution phase includes a superimposed refractory period" and added that "many males below the age of 30, but relatively few thereafter, have the ability to ejaculate frequently and are subject to only very short refractory periods during the resolution phase". Masters and Johnson equated male orgasm and ejaculation and maintained the necessity for a refractory period between orgasms.^[19]

Subsequent and multiple orgasms

There has been little scientific study of multiple orgasm in men. In contrast to the two-stage model of male orgasm, Kahn (1939) equalized orgasm and ejaculation and stated that several orgasms can occur and that "indeed, some men are capable of following [an orgasm] up with a third and a fourth" orgasm.^[19] Though it is rare for men to achieve multiple orgasms,^[2] Kahn's assertion that some men are capable of achieving them is supported by men who have reported having multiple, consecutive orgasms, particularly without ejaculation.^[19] Males who experience dry orgasms can often produce multiple orgasms, as the refractory period is reduced.^[19]

An increased infusion of the hormone oxytocin during ejaculation is believed to be chiefly responsible for the refractory period, and the amount by which oxytocin is increased may affect the length of each refractory period.^[24] Another chemical which is considered to be responsible for the male refractory period is prolactin,^[2][25] which represses dopamine, which is responsible for sexual arousal.^[25] Because of this, there is currently an experimental interest in drugs which inhibit prolactin, such as cabergoline (also known as Cabeser or Dostinex). Anecdotal reports on cabergoline suggest it may be able to eliminate the refractory period altogether, allowing men to experience multiple ejaculatory orgasms in rapid succession. At least one scientific study supports these claims,^[26] although cabergoline is a hormone-altering drug and has many potential side effects. It has not been approved for treating sexual dysfunction.^[26]

Another possible reason for the lack or absence of a refractory period in men may be an increased infusion of the hormone oxytocin. It is believed that the amount by which oxytocin is increased may affect the length of each refractory period. A scientific study to successfully document natural, fully ejaculatory, multiple orgasms in an adult man was conducted at Rutgers University in 1995. During the study, six fully ejaculatory orgasms were experienced in 36 minutes, with no apparent refractory period.^[2][27] Later, P. Haake et al. observed a single male individual producing multiple orgasms without elevated prolactin response.^[28]

Females

Study for Pasadena Lifesavers, prismacolor, 1968. Judy Chicago created the Pasadena Lifesavers, a series of abstract paintings that blended colors to create an illusion that the shapes "turn, dissolve, open, close, vibrate, gesture, wiggle," to represent her own discovery that she was multi-orgasmic.

Orgasmic factors and variabilities

In women, the most common way to achieve orgasm is by direct sexual stimulation of the clitoris (meaning consistent manual, oral or other concentrated friction against the external parts of the clitoris). General statistics indicate that 70–80 percent of women require direct clitoral stimulation to achieve orgasm, although indirect clitoral stimulation (for example, via vaginal penetration) may also be sufficient.^[6][31] The Mayo Clinic stated, "Orgasms vary in intensity, and women vary in the frequency of their orgasms and the amount of stimulation necessary to trigger an orgasm."^[32] Clitoral orgasms are easier to achieve because the glans of the clitoris, or clitoris as a whole, has more than 8,000 sensory nerve endings, which is as many (or more in some cases) nerve endings present in the human penis or glans penis.^[33][34] As the clitoris is homologous to the penis, it is the equivalent in its capacity to receive sexual stimulation.^[35][36]

One misconception, particularly in older research publications, is that the vagina is completely insensitive.^[37] However, there are areas in the anterior vaginal wall and between the top junction of the labia minora and the urethra that are especially sensitive.^[38] With regard to specific density of nerve endings, while the area commonly described as the G-spot may produce an orgasm,^[2][39] and the urethral sponge, an area in which the G-spot may be found, runs along the "roof" of the vagina and can create pleasurable sensations when stimulated, intense sexual pleasure (including orgasm) from vaginal stimulation is occasional or otherwise absent because the vagina has significantly fewer nerve endings than the clitoris.^[5][40][41] The greatest concentration of vaginal nerve endings are at the lower third (near the entrance) of the vagina.^{[2][5][42][43]}

Sex educator Rebecca Chalker states that only one part of the clitoris, the urethral sponge, is in contact with the penis, fingers, or a dildo in the vagina.^[44] Hite and Chalker state that the tip of the clitoris and the inner lips, which are also very sensitive, are not receiving direct stimulation during penetrative intercourse.^[44][45] Because of this, some couples may engage in the woman on top position or the coital alignment technique to maximize clitoral stimulation.^[46][47] For some women, the clitoris is very sensitive after climax, making additional stimulation initially painful.^[48]

Masters and Johnson argued that all women are potentially multiply orgasmic, but that multiply orgasmic men are rare, and stated that "the female is capable of rapid return to orgasm immediately following an orgasmic experience, if restimulated before tensions have dropped below plateau phase response levels".^[19] Though generally reported that women do not experience a refractory period and thus can experience an additional orgasm, or multiple orgasms, soon after the first one,^[2][49] some sources state that both men and women experience a refractory period because women may also experience a period after orgasm in which further sexual stimulation does not produce excitement.^[50][51] After the initial orgasm, subsequent orgasms for women may be stronger or more pleasurable as the stimulation accumulates.^[48]

Clitoral and vaginal categories

Discussions of female orgasm are complicated by orgasms in women typically being divided into two categories: clitoral orgasm and vaginal (or G-spot) orgasm.^[14][43] In 1973, Irving Singer theorized that there are three types of female orgasms; he categorized these as vulval, uterine, and blended, but because he was a philosopher, "these categories were generated from descriptions of orgasm in literature rather than laboratory studies".^[2] In 1982, Ladas, Whipple and Perry also proposed three categories: the tenting type (derived from clitoral stimulation), the A-frame type (derived from G-spot stimulation), and the blended type (derived from clitoral and G-spot stimulation).^[52] In 1999, Whipple and Komisaruk proposed cervix stimulation as being able to cause a fourth type of female orgasm.^[52]

Female orgasms by means other than clitoral or vaginal/G-spot stimulation are less prevalent in scientific literature^[14] and most scientists contend that no distinction should be made between "types" of female orgasm.^[43] This distinction began with Sigmund Freud, who postulated the concept of "vaginal orgasm" as separate from clitoral orgasm. In 1905, Freud stated that clitoral orgasms are purely an adolescent phenomenon and that upon reaching puberty, the proper response of mature women is a change-over to vaginal orgasms, meaning orgasms without any clitoral stimulation. While Freud provided no evidence for this basic assumption, the consequences of this theory were considerable. Many women felt inadequate when they could not achieve orgasm via vaginal intercourse alone, involving little or no clitoral stimulation, as Freud's theory made penile-vaginal intercourse the central component to women's sexual satisfaction.^{[53][54][55][56]}

The first major national surveys of sexual behavior were the Kinsey Reports.^[23] Alfred Kinsey was the first researcher to harshly criticize Freud's ideas about female sexuality and orgasm when, through his interviews with thousands of women,^[23] Kinsey found that most of the women he surveyed could not have vaginal orgasms.^[54] He "criticized Freud and other theorists for projecting male constructs of sexuality onto women" and "viewed the clitoris as the main center of sexual response" and the vagina as "relatively unimportant" for sexual satisfaction, relaying that "few women inserted fingers or objects into their vaginas when they masturbated". He "concluded that satisfaction from penile penetration [is] mainly psychological or perhaps the result of referred sensation".^[54]

Masters and Johnson's research into the female sexual response cycle, as well as Shere Hite's, generally supported Kinsey's findings about female orgasm. Masters and Johnson's research on the topic came at the time of the second-wave feminist movement, and inspired feminists such as Anne Koedt, author of The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm, to speak about the "false distinction" made between clitoral and vaginal orgasms and women's biology not being properly analyzed.^[59]

Clitoral and vaginal relationships

Accounts that the vagina is capable of producing orgasms continue to be subject to debate because, in addition to the vagina's low concentration of nerve endings, reports of the G-spot's location are inconsistent—it appears to be nonexistent in some women and may be an extension of another structure, such as the Skene's gland or the clitoris, which is a part of the Skene's gland. In a January 2012 The Journal of Sexual Medicine review examining years of research into the existence of the G-spot, scholars stated that "[r]eports in the public media would lead one to believe the G-spot is a well-characterized entity capable of providing extreme sexual stimulation, yet this is far from the truth".^[41]

Possible explanations for the G-spot were examined by Masters and Johnson, who were the first researchers to determine that the clitoral structures surround and extend along and within the labia. In addition to observing that the majority of their female subjects could only have clitoral orgasms, they found that both clitoral and vaginal orgasms had the same stages of physical response. On this basis, they argued that clitoral stimulation is the source of both kinds of orgasms,^[57][58] reasoning that the clitoris is stimulated during penetration by friction against its hood; their notion that this provides the clitoris with sufficient sexual stimulation has been criticized by researchers such as Elisabeth Lloyd.^[31]

Australian urologist Helen O'Connell's 2005 research additionally indicates a connection between orgasms experienced vaginally and the clitoris, suggesting that clitoral tissue extends into the anterior wall of the vagina and that therefore clitoral and vaginal orgasms are of the same origin.^[6] Some studies, using ultrasound, have found physiological evidence of the G-spot in women who report having orgasms during vaginal intercourse,^[39][61] but O'Connell suggests that the clitoris's interconnected relationship with the vagina is the physiological explanation for the conjectured G-spot. Having used MRI technology which enabled her to note a direct relationship between the legs or roots of the clitoris and the erectile tissue of the "clitoral bulbs" and corpora, and the distal urethra and vagina, she stated that the vaginal wall is the clitoris; that lifting the skin off the vagina on the side walls reveals the bulbs of the clitoris—triangular, crescental masses of erectile tissue.^[6] O'Connell et al., who performed dissections on the female genitals of cadavers and used photography to map the structure of nerves in the clitoris, were already aware that the clitoris is more than just its glans and asserted in 1998 that there is more erectile tissue associated with the clitoris than is generally described in anatomical textbooks.^[40][57] They concluded that some females have more extensive clitoral tissues and nerves than others, especially having observed this in young cadavers as compared to elderly ones,^[40][57] and therefore whereas the majority of females can only achieve orgasm by direct stimulation of the external parts of the clitoris, the stimulation of the more generalized tissues of the clitoris via intercourse may be sufficient for others.^[6]

French researchers Odile Buisson and Pierre Foldès reported similar findings to that of O'Connell's. In 2008, they published the first complete 3D sonography of the stimulated clitoris, and republished it in 2009 with new research, demonstrating the ways in which erectile tissue of the clitoris engorges and surrounds the vagina, arguing that women may be able to achieve vaginal orgasm via stimulation of the G-spot because the highly innervated clitoris is pulled closely to the anterior wall of the vagina when the woman is sexually aroused and during vaginal penetration. They assert that since the front wall of the vagina is inextricably linked with the internal parts of the clitoris, stimulating the vagina without activating the clitoris may be next to impossible.^{[37][39][62][63]} In their 2009 published study, the "coronal planes during perineal contraction and finger penetration demonstrated a close relationship between the root of the clitoris and the anterior vaginal wall". Buisson and Foldès suggested "that the special sensitivity of the lower anterior vaginal wall could be explained by pressure and movement of clitoris's root during a vaginal penetration and subsequent perineal contraction".^[39][63]

Supporting a distinct G-spot is a study by Rutgers University, published 2011, which was the first to map the female genitals onto the sensory portion of the brain;^[64] brain scans showed that the brain registered distinct feelings between stimulating the clitoris, the cervix and the vaginal wall – where the G-spot is reported to be – when several women stimulated themselves in a functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) machine.^[64][37] "I think that the bulk of the evidence shows that the G-spot is not a particular thing," stated Barry Komisaruk, head of the research findings. "It's not like saying, 'What is the thyroid gland?' The G-spot is more of a thing like New York City is a thing. It's a region, it's a convergence of many different structures."^[41] Commenting on Komisaruk's research and other findings, Emmanuele Jannini, a professor of endocrinology at the University of Aquila in Italy, acknowledged a series of essays published in March 2012 in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, which document evidence that vaginal and clitoral orgasms are separate phenomena that activate different areas of the brain and possibly suggest key psychological differences between women.^[37]

Other factors and research

Regular difficulty reaching orgasm after ample sexual stimulation, known as anorgasmia, is significantly more common in women than in men (see below).^[32] In addition to sexual dysfunction being a cause for women's inability to reach orgasm, or the amount of time for sexual arousal needed to reach orgasm being variable and longer in women than in men, other factors include a lack of communication between sexual partners about what is needed for the woman to reach orgasm, feelings of sexual inadequacy in either partner, a focus on only penetration (vaginal or otherwise), and men generalizing women's trigger for orgasm based on their own sexual experiences with other women.^[5][10][29]

Scholars state "many couples are locked into the idea that orgasms should be achieved only through intercourse [vaginal sex]" and that "[e]ven the word foreplay suggests that any other form of sexual stimulation is merely preparation for the 'main event.'... ...Because women reach orgasm through intercourse less consistently than men, they are more likely than men to have faked an orgasm".^[5] Sex counselor Ian Kerner stated, "It's a myth that using the penis is the main way to pleasure a woman." He cites research concluding that women reach orgasm about 25% of the time with intercourse, compared with 81% of the time during oral sex (cunnilingus).^[65]

In the first large-scale empirical study worldwide to link specific practices with orgasm, reported in the Journal of Sex Research in 2006, demographic and sexual history variables were comparatively weakly associated with orgasm. Data was analyzed from the Australian Study of Health and Relationships, a national telephone survey of sexual behavior and attitudes and sexual health knowledge carried out in 2001–2002, with a representative sample of 19,307 Australians aged 16 to 59. Practices included "vaginal intercourse alone (12%), vaginal + manual stimulation of the man's and/or woman's genitals (49%), and vaginal intercourse + manual + oral (32%)" and the "[e]ncounters may also have included other practices. Men had an orgasm in 95% of encounters and women in 69%. Generally, the more practices engaged in, the higher a woman's chance of having an orgasm. Women were more likely to reach orgasm in encounters including cunnilingus".^[66]

Other studies suggest that women exposed to lower levels of prenatal androgens are more likely to experience orgasm during vaginal intercourse than other women.^[10]

Exercise-induced

Kinsey, in his 1953 book Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, stated that exercise could bring about sexual pleasure, including orgasm.^[67] A review in 1990 on the sexual response itself as exercise, reviewed the literature and stated that the field was poorly researched; it also said that studies had found that aerobic or isotonic exercise that resembles sexual activity or sexual positions can induce sexual pleasure, including orgasm.^[67] A 2007 review of the relationship between pelvic floor dysfunction and sexual problems in men and women found that they are commonly linked and suggested that physical therapy strengthening the pelvic floor could help address the sexual problems but that it was not well studied enough to recommend.^[68] Starting in at least 2007, the term, "coregasm" was used in popular media to refer to exercise-induced orgasm^[69][70] and an extensive discussion of the "yogasm" occurred in a 2011 Daily Beast posting.^[69][71] A paper published in 2012 presented results of an online survey of women who had experienced an orgasm or other sexual pleasure during exercise.^[69][72] The paper was widely discussed in popular media when it was published.^{[73][74][75][76]} The authors of the paper said that research on the relationship between exercise and sexual response was still lacking.^[69]

Anal and prostate stimulation

In both sexes, pleasure can be derived from the nerve endings around the anus and the anus itself, such as during anal sex. It is possible for men to achieve orgasms through prostate stimulation alone.^[2][15] The prostate is the male homologue (variation) to the Skene's glands (which are believed to be connected to the female G-spot),^[77] and can be sexually stimulated through anal sex, perineum massage or via a vibrator.^[78] Prostate stimulation can produce a "deeper" orgasm, described by some men as more widespread and intense, longer-lasting, and allowing for greater feelings of ecstasy than orgasm elicited by penile stimulation only.^[2][15] The practice of pegging (consisting of a woman penetrating a man's anus with a strap-on dildo) stimulates the prostate. It is also typical for a man to not reach orgasm as a receptive partner solely from anal sex.^[79][80]

For women, penile-anal penetration may also indirectly stimulate the clitoris by the shared sensory nerves, especially the pudendal nerve, which gives off the inferior anal nerves and divides into the perineal nerve and the dorsal nerve of the clitoris.^[15] The G-spot area, considered to be interconnected with the clitoris,^[6][15][41] may also be accessible through anal penetration; besides the shared anatomy of the aforementioned sensory nerves, orgasm by indirect stimulation of the clitoris or G-spot area through anal penetration may be aided by the close proximity between the vaginal cavity and the rectal cavity.^[81][82] Achieving orgasm solely by anal stimulation, however, is rare among women.^[83][84] Direct stimulation of the clitoris, a G-spot area, or both, during anal sex can help some women enjoy the activity and reach orgasm from it.^[34][82]

The aforementioned orgasms are sometimes referred to as anal orgasms,^[84][85] but sexologists and sex educators generally believe that orgasms derived from anal penetration are the result of the relationship between the nerves of the anus, rectum, clitoris or G-spot area in women, and the anal and rectal nerves' relationship, and promixity, to the prostate in men, rather than orgasms originating from the anus itself.^[15][82][84]

Nipple stimulation

For women, stimulation of the breast area during sexual intercourse or foreplay, or solely having the breasts fondled, can create mild to intense orgasms, sometimes referred to as a breast orgasm or nipple orgasm.^[64] Few women report experiencing orgasm from nipple stimulation.^[16][86] Before Komisaruk et al.'s functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) research on nipple stimulation in 2011, reports of women achieving orgasm from nipple stimulation relied solely on anecdotal evidence.^[87] Komisaruk's study was the first to map the female genitals onto the sensory portion of the brain; it indicates that sensation from the nipples travels to the same part of the brain as sensations from the vagina, clitoris and cervix, and that these reported orgasms are genital orgasms caused by nipple stimulation, and may be directly linked to the genital sensory cortex ("the genital area of the brain").

An orgasm is believed to occur in part because of the hormone oxytocin, which is produced in the body during sexual excitement and arousal and labor. It has also been shown that oxytocin is produced when a man or woman's nipples are stimulated and become erect.^[64][89] Komisaruk also relayed, however, that preliminary data suggests that nipple nerves may directly link up with the relevant parts of the brain without uterine mediation, acknowledging the men in his study who showed the same pattern of nipple stimulation activating genital brain regions.^[64]

Medical aspects

Physiological responses

Masters and Johnson were some of the first researchers to study the sexual response cycle in the early 1960s, based on the observation of 382 women and 312 men. They described a cycle that begins with excitement as blood rushes into the genitals, then reaches a plateau during which they are fully aroused, which leads to orgasm, and finally resolution, in which the blood leaves the genitals.^[1]

In the 1970s, Helen Singer Kaplan added the category of desire to the cycle, which she argued precedes sexual excitation. She stated that emotions of anxiety, defensiveness and the failure of communication can interfere with desire and orgasm.^[90] In the late 1980s and after, Rosemary Basson proposed a more cyclical alternative to what had largely been viewed as linear progression.^[91] In her model, desire feeds arousal and orgasm, and is in turn fueled by the rest of the orgasmic cycle. Rather than orgasm being the peak of the sexual experience, she suggested that it is just one point in the circle and that people could feel sexually satisfied at any stage, reducing the focus on climax as an end-goal of all sexual activity.^[92]

Males

As a man nears orgasm during stimulation of the penis, he feels an intense and highly pleasurable pulsating sensation of neuromuscular euphoria. These pulses are a series of throbbing sensations of the bulbospongiosus muscles that begin in the anal sphincter and travel to the tip of the penis. They eventually increase in speed and intensity as the orgasm approaches, until a final "plateau" (the orgasmic) pleasure sustained for several seconds.^[19] The length of a man's orgasm has been estimated at 10–15 seconds on average, though it is possible for them to last up to 30 seconds.

During orgasm, a human male experiences rapid, rhythmic contractions of the anal sphincter, the prostate, and the muscles of the penis. The sperm are transmitted up the vas deferens from the testicles, into the prostate gland as well as through the seminal vesicles to produce what is known as semen.^[19] The prostate produces a secretion that forms one of the components of ejaculate. Except for in cases of a dry orgasm, contraction of the sphincter and prostate force stored semen to be expelled through the penis's urethral opening. The process takes from three to ten seconds, and produces a pleasurable feeling.^[14][19] Ejaculation may continue for a few seconds after the euphoric sensation gradually tapers off. It is believed that the exact feeling of "orgasm" varies from one man to another.^[14] Normally, as a man ages, the amount of semen he ejaculates diminishes, and so does the duration of orgasms. This does not normally affect the intensity of pleasure, but merely shortens the duration. After ejaculation, a refractory period usually occurs, during which a man cannot achieve another orgasm. This can last anywhere from less than a minute to several hours or days, depending on age and other individual factors.^[49][50][51]

Females

Sinnenrausch (ca. 1890), by Franciszek Żmurko

A woman's orgasm may last slightly longer or much longer than a man's. Women's orgasms have been estimated to last, on average, approximately 20 seconds, and to consist of a series of muscular contractions in the pelvic area that includes the vagina, the uterus, and the anus.^[93] For some women, on some occasions, these contractions begin soon after the woman reports that the orgasm has started and continue at intervals of about one second with initially increasing, and then reducing, intensity. In some instances, the series of regular contractions is followed by a few additional contractions or shudders at irregular intervals.^[93] In other cases, the woman reports having an orgasm, but no pelvic contractions are measured at all.^[95]

Women's orgasms are preceded by erection of the clitoris and moistening of the opening of the vagina. Some women exhibit a sex flush, a reddening of the skin over much of the body due to increased blood flow to the skin. As a woman nears orgasm, the clitoral glans retracts under the clitoral hood, and the labia minora (inner lips) become darker. As orgasm becomes imminent, the outer third of the vagina tightens and narrows, while overall the vagina lengthens and dilates and also becomes congested from engorged soft tissue.^[96]

Elsewhere in the body, myofibroblasts of the nipple-areolar complex contract, causing erection of the nipples and contraction of the areolar diameter, reaching their maximum at the start of orgasm.^[97] A woman experiences full orgasm when her uterus, vagina, anus, and pelvic muscles undergo a series of rhythmic contractions. Most women find these contractions very pleasurable.

Researchers from the University Medical Center of Groningen in the Netherlands correlated the sensation of orgasm with muscular contractions occurring at a frequency of 8–13 Hz centered in the pelvis and measured in the anus. They argue that the presence of this particular frequency of contractions can distinguish between voluntary contraction of these muscles and spontaneous involuntary contractions, and appears to more accurately correlate with orgasm as opposed to other metrics like heart rate that only measure excitation. They assert that they have identified "[t]he first objective and quantitative measure that has a strong correspondence with the subjective experience that orgasm ultimately is" and state that the measure of contractions that occur at a frequency of 8–13 Hz is specific to orgasm. They found that using this metric they could distinguish from rest, voluntary muscular contractions, and even unsuccessful orgasm attempts.^[98]

Since ancient times in Western Europe, women could be medically diagnosed with a disorder called female hysteria, the symptoms of which included faintness, nervousness, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in abdomen, muscle spasm, shortness of breath, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, and "a tendency to cause trouble".^[99] Women considered suffering from the condition would sometimes undergo "pelvic massage" — stimulation of the genitals by the doctor until the woman experienced "hysterical paroxysm" (i.e., orgasm). Paroxysm was regarded as a medical treatment, and not a sexual release.^[99] The disorder has ceased to be recognized as a medical condition since the 1920s.

Brain

There have been very few studies correlating orgasm and brain activity in real time. One study examined 12 healthy women using a positron emission tomography (PET) scanner while they were being stimulated by their partners. Brain changes were observed and compared between states of rest, sexual stimulation, faked orgasm, and actual orgasm. Differences were reported in the brains of men and women during stimulation. However, changes in brain activity were observed in both sexes in which the brain regions associated with behavioral control, fear and anxiety shut down. Regarding these changes, Gert Holstege said in an interview with The Times, "What this means is that deactivation, letting go of all fear and anxiety, might be the most important thing, even necessary, to have an orgasm."^[100]

While stroking the clitoris, the parts of the female brain responsible for processing fear, anxiety and behavioral control start to diminish in activity. This reaches a peak at orgasm when the female brain's emotion centers are effectively closed down to produce an almost trance-like state. Holstege is quoted as saying, at the 2005 meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Development: "At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings."^[101]

Initial reports indicated that it was difficult to observe the effects of orgasm on men using PET scans, because the duration of the male orgasm was shorter. However, a subsequent report by Rudie Kortekaas, et al. stated, "Gender commonalities were most evident during orgasm... From these results, we conclude that during the sexual act, differential brain responses across genders are principally related to the stimulatory (plateau) phase and not to the orgasmic phase itself."^[7]

Research has shown that as in women, the emotional centers of a man's brain also become deactivated during orgasm but to a lesser extent than in women. Brain scans of both sexes have shown that the pleasure centers of a man's brain show more intense activity than in women during orgasm.^[102]

Human brain wave patterns show distinct changes during orgasm, which indicate the importance of the limbic system in the orgasmic response.^[3] Male and female brains demonstrate similar changes during orgasm, with brain activity scans showing a temporary decrease in the metabolic activity of large parts of the cerebral cortex with normal or increased metabolic activity in the limbic areas of the brain.^[7]

EEG tracings from volunteers during orgasm were first obtained by Mosovich and Tallaferro in 1954.^[103] These research workers recorded EEC changes resembling petit mal or the clonic phase of a grand mal seizure. Further studies in this direction were carried out by Sem-Jacobsen (1968), Heath (1972), Cohen et al. (1976),^[104] and others.^[105][106] Sarrel et al. reported a similar observation in 1977. These reports continue to be cited.^[107] Unlike them, Craber et al. (1985) failed to find any distinctive EEG changes in four men during masturbation and ejaculation; the authors concluded that the case for the existence of EEG changes specifically related to sexual arousal and orgasm remained unproven.^[108] So disagreement arises as to whether the experiment conducted by Mosovich & Tallaferro casts a new light on the nature of orgasm. In some recent studies, authors tend to adopt the opposite point of view that there are no remarkable EEG changes during ejaculation in humans.^[109]

Health

General

Orgasm, and sexual activity as a whole, are physical activities that can require exertion of many major bodily systems. A 1997 study in the BMJ based upon 918 men age 45–59 found that after a ten-year follow-up, men who had fewer orgasms were twice as likely to die of any cause as those having two or more orgasms a week.^[110] A follow-up in 2001 which focused more specifically on cardiovascular health found that having sex three or more times a week was associated with a 50% reduction in the risk of heart attack or stroke. (Note that as a rule, correlation does not imply causation.)

There is some research suggesting that greater resting heart rate variability is associated with orgasms through penile-vaginal intercourse without additional simultaneous clitoral stimulation.^[37]

A small percentage of men have a disease called postorgasmic illness syndrome (POIS), which causes severe muscle pain throughout the body and other symptoms immediately following ejaculation. The symptoms last for up to a week. Some doctors speculate that the frequency of POIS "in the population may be greater than has been reported in the academic literature",^[114] and that many POIS sufferers are undiagnosed.^[115]

Dysfunction and satisfaction

The inability to have orgasm, or regular difficulty reaching orgasm after ample sexual stimulation, is called anorgasmia or inorgasmia.^[116] If a male experiences erection and ejaculation but no orgasm, he is said to have sexual anhedonia (a condition in which an individual cannot feel pleasure from an orgasm) or ejaculatory anhedonia. Anorgasmia is significantly more common in women than in men, which has been attributed to the lack of sex education with regard to women's bodies, especially in sex-negative cultures, such as clitoral stimulation usually being key for women to orgasm.^[118]

Approximately 25% of women report difficulties with orgasm,^[119] 10% of women have never had an orgasm,^[120] and 40% or 40–50% have either complained about sexual dissatisfaction or experienced difficulty becoming sexually aroused at some point in their lives.^[121] A 1994 study by Laumann et al. found that 75% of men and 29% of women always have orgasms with their partner.^[122] Women are much more likely to be nearly always or always orgasmic when alone than with a partner.^[8] However, in a 1996 study by Davis et al., 62% of women in a partnered relationship said they were satisfied with the frequency/consistency of their orgasms.^[8] Additionally, some women express that their most satisfying sexual experiences entail being connected to someone, rather than solely basing satisfaction on orgasm.^[123][124]

Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Female showed that, over the previous five years of sexual activity, 78% of women had orgasms in 60% to 100% of sexual encounters with other women, compared with 55% for heterosexual sex.^[125] Kinsey attributed this difference to female partners knowing more about women's sexuality and how to optimize women's sexual satisfaction than male partners do.^[5] Like Kinsey, scholars such as Peplau, Fingerhut and Beals (2004) and Diamond (2006) found that lesbians have orgasms more often and more easily in sexual interactions than heterosexual women do,^[5] and that female partners are more likely to emphasize the emotional aspects of lovemaking.^[5] In contrast, research by Diane Holmberg and Karen L. Blair (2009), published in the Journal of Sex Research, found that women in same-sex relationships enjoyed identical sexual desire, sexual communication, sexual satisfaction, and satisfaction with orgasm as their heterosexual counterparts.^[126]

Specifically in relation to simultaneous orgasm and similar practices, many sexologists claim that the problem of premature ejaculation^[127] is closely related to the idea encouraged by a scientific approach in the early 20th century when mutual orgasm was overly emphasized as an objective and a sign of true sexual satisfaction in intimate relationships.

If orgasm is desired, anorgasmia may be attributed to an inability to relax. It may be associated with performance pressure and an unwillingness to pursue pleasure, as separate from the other person's satisfaction; often, women worry so much about the pleasure of their partner that they become anxious, which manifests as impatience with the delay of orgasm for them. This delay can lead to frustration of not reaching orgasmic sexual satisfaction.^[119] Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, in his 1927 book Die Funktion des Orgasmus (published in English in 1980 as Genitality in the Theory and Therapy of Neurosis) was the first to make orgasm central to the concept of mental health, and defined neurosis in terms of blocks to having orgastic potency. Although orgasm dysfunction can have psychological components, physiological factors often play a role. For instance, delayed orgasm or the inability to achieve orgasm is a common side effect of many medications.

Menopause may involve loss of hormones supporting sexuality and genital functionality. Vaginal and clitoral atrophy and dryness affects up to 50%–60% of postmenopausal women.^[128] Testosterone levels in men fall as they age. Sexual dysfunction overall becomes more likely with poor physical and emotional health. "Negative experiences in sexual relationships and overall well-being" are associated with sexual dysfunction.^[129][130]

Theoretical biological and evolutionary functions of female orgasm

Shifts in research

The function or functions of the human female orgasm have been debated among researchers.^[131] Because male orgasms that expel sperm from the body into the vagina during sexual intercourse may result in conception, researchers have several hypotheses about the role, if any, of the female orgasm in the reproductive and therefore evolutionary process. The literature started with the argument that female orgasm is a byproduct of shared early male ontogeny, where male orgasm is an adaptation. Research has shifted to investigate and also support the sire-choice hypothesis, which proposes that female orgasm has been shaped by natural selection to function in the selection of high quality sires (male parents) for offspring. Therefore, orgasm increases the chances of conceiving with males of a high genetic quality. Research by Randy Thornhill et al. indicates that female orgasm is more frequent during intercourse with a male partner with low fluctuating asymmetry.^[135]

Selective pressure and mating

Wallen K and Lloyd EA stated, "In men, orgasms are under strong selective pressure as orgasms are coupled with ejaculation and thus contribute to male reproductive success. By contrast, women's orgasms in intercourse are highly variable and are under little selective pressure as they are not a reproductive necessity."^[10]

Desmond Morris suggested in his 1967 popular-science book The Naked Ape that the female orgasm evolved to encourage physical intimacy with a male partner and help reinforce the pair bond. Morris suggested that the relative difficulty in achieving female orgasm, in comparison to the male's, might be favorable in Darwinian evolution by leading the female to select mates who bear qualities like patience, care, imagination, intelligence, as opposed to qualities like size and aggression, which pertain to mate selection in other primates. Such advantageous qualities thereby become accentuated within the species, driven by the differences between male and female orgasm. If males were motivated by, and taken to the point of, orgasm in the same way as females, those advantageous qualities would not be needed, since self-interest would be enough.

Fertility

There are theories that the female orgasm might increase fertility.^[9][31][56] For example, the 30% reduction in size of the vagina could help clench onto the penis (much like, or perhaps caused by, the pubococcygeus muscles), which would make it more stimulating for the male (thus ensuring faster or more voluminous ejaculation). The British biologists Baker and Bellis have suggested that the female orgasm may have a peristalsis or "upsuck" action (similar to the esophagus' ability to swallow when upside down), resulting in the retaining of favorable sperm and making conception more likely.^[136] They posited a role of female orgasm in sperm competition.

The observation that women tend to reach orgasm more easily when they are ovulating also suggests that it is tied to increasing fertility.^[137] Evolutionary biologist Robin Baker argues in Sperm Wars that occurrence and timing of orgasms are all a part of the female body's unconscious strategy to collect and retain sperm from more evolutionarily fit men.^{[citation needed]} An orgasm during intercourse functions as a bypass button to a woman's natural cervical filter against sperm and pathogens. An orgasm before functions to strengthen the filter.

Desmond Morris proposed that orgasm might facilitate conception by exhausting the female and keeping her horizontal, thus preventing the sperm from leaking out. This possibility, sometimes called the "Poleaxe Hypothesis" or the "Knockout Hypothesis", is now considered highly doubtful. A 1994 Learning Channel documentary on sex had fiber optic cameras inside the vagina of a woman while she had sexual intercourse. During her orgasm, her pelvic muscles contracted and her cervix repeatedly dipped into a pool of semen in the vaginal fornix, as if to ensure that sperm would proceed by the external orifice of the uterus, making conception more likely.^[138]

Evolutionary psychologists Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, in their discussion of the female orgasm, address how long it takes for females to achieve orgasm compared to males, and females' ability to have multiple orgasms, hypothesizing how especially well suited to multiple partners and insemination this is. They quote primate sexuality specialist Alan Dixson in saying that the monogamy-maintenance explanation for female orgasm "seems far-fetched" because "females of other primate species, and particularly those with multimale-multifemale [promiscuous] mating systems such as macaques and chimpanzees, exhibit orgasmic responses in the absence of such bonding or the formation of stable family units." On the other hand, Dixson states that "Gibbons, which are primarily monogamous, do not exhibit obvious signs of female orgasm."^[139]

The female promiscuity explanation of female sexuality was echoed at least 12 years earlier by other evolutionary biologists, and there is increasing scientific awareness of the female proceptive phase.^[140] Though Dixson classifies humans as mildly polygynous in his survey of primate sexuality, he appears to have doubts, when he writes, "One might argue that ... the female's orgasm is rewarding, increases her willingness to copulate with a variety of males rather than one partner, and thus promotes sperm competition." Ryan and Jethá use this as evidence for their theory that partible paternity and promiscuity were common for early modern humans.^[139]

Adaptive or vestigial

The clitoris is homologous to the penis; that is, they both develop from the same embryonic structure.^[35][36] While researchers such as Geoffrey Miller, Helen Fisher, Meredith Small and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy "have viewed the clitoral orgasm as a legitimate adaptation in its own right, with major implications for female sexual behavior and sexual evolution,"^[9] others, such as Donald Symons and Stephen Jay Gould, have asserted that the clitoris is vestigial or nonadaptive, and that the female orgasm serves no particular evolutionary function.^[9][56] However, Gould acknowledged that "most female orgasms emanate from a clitoral, rather than vaginal (or some other), site" and stated that his nonadaptive belief "has been widely misunderstood as a denial of either the adaptive value of female orgasm in general, or even as a claim that female orgasms lack significance in some broader sense". He explained that although he accepts that "clitoral orgasm plays a pleasurable and central role in female sexuality and its joys," "[a]ll these favorable attributes, however, emerge just as clearly and just as easily, whether the clitoral site of orgasm arose as a spandrel or an adaptation". He said that the "male biologists who fretted over [the adaptionist questions] simply assumed that a deeply vaginal site, nearer the region of fertilization, would offer greater selective benefit" due to their Darwinian, summum bonum beliefs about enhanced reproductive success.^[56]

Proponents of the nonadaptive hypothesis, such as Elisabeth Lloyd, refer to the relative difficulty of achieving female orgasm through vaginal sex, the limited evidence for increased fertility after orgasm and the lack of statistical correlation between the capacity of a woman to orgasm and the likelihood that she will engage in intercourse.^[31][141] "Lloyd is by no means against evolutionary psychology. Quite the opposite; in her methods and in her writing, she advocates and demonstrates a commitment to the careful application of evolutionary theory to the study of human behavior," stated Meredith L. Chivers. She added that Lloyd "meticulously considers the theoretical and empirical bases for each account and ultimately concludes that there is little evidence to support an adaptionist account of female orgasm" and that Lloyd instead "views female orgasm as an ontogenetic leftover; women have orgasms because the urogenital neurophysiology for orgasm is so strongly selected for in males that this developmental blueprint gets expressed in females without affecting fitness, just as males have nipples that serve no fitness-related function".^[141]

A 2005 twin study found that one in three women reported never or seldom achieving orgasm during sexual intercourse, and only one in ten always orgasmed. This variation in ability to orgasm, generally thought to be psychosocial, was found to be 34% to 45% genetic. The study, examining 4000 women, was published in Biology Letters, a Royal Society journal.^[142][143] Elisabeth Lloyd has cited this as evidence for the notion that female orgasm is not adaptive.^[31][144]

Miller, Hrdy, Helen O'Connell and Natalie Angier have criticized the "female orgasm is vestigial" hypothesis as understating and devaluing the psychosocial value of the female orgasm.^[9] Hrdy stated that the hypothesis smacks of sexism.^[145] O'Connell said, "It boils down to rivalry between the sexes: the idea that one sex is sexual and the other reproductive. The truth is that both are sexual and both are reproductive."^[6] O'Connell used MRI technology to define the true size and shape of the clitoris, suggesting that it extends into the anterior wall of the vagina (see above).

O'Connell describes typical textbook descriptions of the clitoris as lacking detail and including inaccuracies, saying that the work of Georg Ludwig Kobelt in the early 19th century provides a most comprehensive and accurate description of clitoral anatomy. She argues that the bulbs appear to be part of the clitoris and that the distal urethra and vagina are intimately related structures, although they are not erectile in character, forming a tissue cluster with the clitoris that appears to be the center of female sexual function and orgasm.^[6] By contrast, Nancy Tuana, at the 2002 conference for Canadian Society of Women in Philosophy, argues that the clitoris is unnecessary in reproduction, but that this is why it has been "historically ignored", mainly because of "a fear of pleasure. It is pleasure separated from reproduction. That's the fear". She reasoned that this fear is the cause of the ignorance that veils female sexuality.^[146]

Other theories

Brody Costa et al. suggest that women's vaginal orgasm consistency is associated with being told in childhood or adolescence that the vagina is the important zone for inducing female orgasm. Other proposed factors include how well women focus mentally on vaginal sensations during penile-vaginal intercourse, the greater duration of intercourse, and preference for above-average penis length.^[147] Costa theorizes that vaginal orgasm is more prevalent among women with a prominent tubercle of the upper lip.^[148] His research indicates that "[a] prominent and sharply raised lip tubercle has been associated with greater odds (odds ratio = 12.3) of ever having a vaginal orgasm, and also with greater past month vaginal orgasm consistency (an effect driven by the women who never had a vaginal orgasm), than less prominent lip tubercle categories." However, lip tubercle was not associated with social desirability responding, or with orgasm triggered by masturbation during penile-vaginal sex, solitary or partner clitoral or vaginal masturbation, vibrator, or cunnilingus.^[148]

An empirical study carried out in 2008 provides evidence for Freud's implied link between inability to have a vaginal orgasm and psychosexual immaturity. In the study, women reported their past month frequency of different sexual behaviors and corresponding orgasm rates and completed the Defense Style Questionnaire (DSQ-40), which is associated with various psychopathologies. The study concluded that a "vaginal orgasm was associated with less somatization, dissociation, displacement, autistic fantasy, devaluation, and isolation of affect." Moreover, "vaginally anorgasmic women had immature defenses scores comparable to those of established (depression, social anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and obsessive–compulsive disorder) outpatient psychiatric groups." In the study, a vaginal orgasm (as opposed to a clitoral orgasm) was defined as being triggered solely by penile–vaginal intercourse.^[149] According to Wilhelm Reich, the lack of women's capacity to have a vaginal orgasm is due to a lack of orgastic potency, which he believed to be the result of culture's suppression of genital sexuality.^[150]

Tantric sex

Tantric sex, which is not the same as Buddhist tantra (Vajrayana), is the ancient Indian spiritual tradition of sexual practices. It attributes a different value to orgasm than traditional cultural approaches to sexuality. Some practitioners of tantric sex aim to eliminate orgasm from sexual intercourse by remaining for a long time in the pre-orgasmic and non-emission state. Advocates of this, such as Rajneesh, claim that it eventually causes orgasmic feelings to spread out to all of one's conscious experience.

Advocates of tantric and neotantric sex who claim that Western culture focuses too much on the goal of climactic orgasm, which reduces the ability to have intense pleasure during other moments of the sexual experience, suggest that eliminating this enables a richer, fuller and more intense connection.^[153]

Literature

Jupiter and Juno, by Annibale Carracci.

Orgasm has been widely described in literature over the centuries. In antiquity, Latin literature addressed the subject as much as Greek literature: Book III of Ovid's Metamorphoses retells a discussion between Jove and Juno, in which the former states: "The sense of pleasure in the male is far / More dull and dead, than what you females share."^[154] Juno rejects this thought; they agree to ask the opinion of Tiresias ("who had known Venus/Love in both ways," having lived seven years as a female).^[155] Tiresias offends Juno by agreeing with Jove, and she strikes him blind on the spot (Jove lessens the blow by giving Tiresias the gift of foresight, and a long life).^[156] Earlier, in the Ars Amatoria, Ovid states that he abhors sexual intercourse that fails to complete both partners.^[157]

The theme of orgasm survived during Romanticism and is incorporated in many homoerotic works. In FRAGMENT: Supposed to be an Epithalamium of Francis Ravaillac and Charlotte Cordé, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), "a translator of extraordinary range and versatility",^[158] wrote the phrase "No life can equal such a death." That phrase has been seen as a metaphor for orgasm,^[159] and it was preceded by the rhythmic urgency of the previous lines "Suck on, suck on, I glow, I glow!", which has been seen as alluding to fellatio.^[159] For Shelley, orgasm was "the almost involuntary consequences of a state of abandonment in the society of a person of surpassing attractions".^[160] Edward Ellerker Williams, the last love of Shelley's life, was remembered by the poet in "The Boat on the Serchio", which has been considered as possibly "the grandest portrayal of orgasm in literature":^[159]

Shelley, in this poem, associates orgasm with death when he writes "the death which lovers love".^[159] In French literature, the term la petite mort (the little death) is a famous euphemism for orgasm;^[161] it is the representation of man who forgets himself and the world during orgasm. Jorge Luis Borges, in the same vision, wrote in one of the several footnotes of "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" that one of the churches of Tlön claims Platonically that "All men, in the vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare." Shakespeare himself was knowledgeable of this idea: lines "I will live in thy heart, die in thy lap, and be buried in thy eyes" and "I will die bravely, like a smug bridegroom", said respectively by Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing and by King Lear in the play of that ilk,^[163] are interpreted as "to die in a woman's lap" = "to experience a sexual orgasm".^[164] Sigmund Freud with his psychoanalytic projects, in The Ego and the Id (1923), speculates that sexual satisfaction by orgasm make Eros ("life instinct") exhausted and leaves the field open to Thanatos ("death instinct"), in other words, with orgasm Eros fulfills its mission and gives way to Thanatos.^[165] Other modern authors have chosen to represent the orgasm without metaphors. In the novel Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), by D. H. Lawrence, we can find an explicit narrative of a sexual act between a couple: "As he began to move, in the sudden helpless orgasm there awoke in her strange thrills rippling inside her..."^[166]

Other animals

The mechanics of male orgasm are similar in most male mammals.^[167] Females of some mammal and some non-mammal species, such as alligators,^[168] have clitorises. There has been ongoing research about the sexuality and orgasms of dolphins, a species which apparently engages in sexual intercourse for reasons other than procreation.^[169] The duration of orgasm varies considerably among different mammal species.