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reproductive (or pseudo-reproductive) heterosexual variety.
    If it is not all, then, an agglomeration of curious design flaws, the best that can be said of the human orgasm is that it is a work in progress. But ‘progress’ implies a history, and how can we know anything of the human orgasm’s history? Does it even have a history?
    To answer the second question first, we can be reasonably confident from the study of surviving isolated primitive societies, many of which have language and customs relating to both male and female orgasm, that it has existed for the 100,000 years or so that humans have been ‘civilized’. And if we take an overview spanning from those days to now, we can tell that, far from being some fleeting neurological phenomenon like blinking, orgasm has consistently been of disproportionate importance to the way people have evolved both as organisms and in societies.
    But has the orgasm
changed;
has it improved or deteriorated, in any progressive or regressive way, down the millennia? History is above all a narrative and without evidence of a traceable journey what follows might as well be an account of constipation through the ages – even though this might, on reflection, not be such a fatuous idea; many great people, from Martin Luther to Mao Ze Dong, suffered from the affliction and may well have owed their temperament and actions in part to its miseries.
    But the human sexual climax is more important than constipation. The orgasm’s has been a long intellectual journey, during which whole civilisations for long periods in their history have advanced, then backtracked, then advanced again. If orgasm were merely humankind’s profoundest pleasure, it would be a matter of some importance – especially given the tortured relationship various cultures at different times have had with the curiously controversial idea of enjoyment.
    But the orgasm’s existence, as we shall see in this and subsequent chapters, has been influential in more than just the history of human physical gratification. Orgasm has been central, principally, in defining how both men and women and same-sex partners form and maintain couples. This in turn has been crucial to directing the way the human family has developed, to determining important facets of how we live together in broader communities under religious and legal constraints, and even to shaping, via the institutions ofmarriage and subsequent property inheritance by children of a sexual union, how we distribute land and material goods.
    The pursuit of orgasm has, indeed, been one of the most powerful impulses we have. Its iconic importance has been manifest in every culture and country in the world – never more so than today. And a large proportion of the world’s literature and art has been preoccupied with the endless, appetitive, unquenchable craving for orgasm; the sexual compulsion, of which orgasm is the goal, has routinely made and destroyed marriages, and occasionally dynasties.
    There is a good argument that testosterone, the chemical catalyst for desire in both sexes, has been the most influential compound in human history. Bill Clinton’s predilection for oral sex in the Oval Office was only the latest chapter in a long dirty book. Today, additionally, in an era when it is no longer widely taboo, the quest for orgasm has become even more of a business proposition than it was when the oldest profession was the only profession. Orgasm has become the universal yearning that underpins industries ranging from fashion to film to pornography to pharmaceuticals. Britney Spears even released a song in 2003, Touch of my Hand, expressly about masturbating. It is not merely for sensationalist impact that the zoologist Desmond Morris called
Homo sapiens
‘the sexiest primate alive’ – and he did so thirty years before that key date in the history of orgasm, March 1998, when the US Food and Drug Administration