Orgasms, Multiple
From Encyclopedia of Sex and Sexuality
William H. Masters and Virginia Johnson, the pioneering American sex researchers (see Masters and Johnson) reported in Human Sexual Response (1966) that most women participating in their study felt that mechanical automanipulation to the mons area with the aid of a vibrator produced the kind of stimulation that resulted not only in the fastest and the most intense orgasms but also in multiple orgasms during a single sexual episode. Masters and Johnson reported to a colleague:
The average female with optimal arousal will usually be satisfied with three to five manually induced orgasms; whereas mechanical stimulation, as with the electric vibrator, is less tiring and induces her to go on to long stimulative sessions of an hour or more during which she may have twenty to fifty consecutive orgasms.
At about the same time Mary Sherfey, a psychoanalyst, reported in an article in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (and repeated later in her book, The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality) that:
In clinical practice, a number of married and single women using the electric vibrator to achieve up to fifty orgasms in a single session have come to my attention in the past few years. … From the standpoint of normal physiological functioning, these women exhibit a healthy, uninhibited sexuality—and the number of orgasms attained, [are] a measure of the human female’s orgasmic potentiality. .
Multiple orgasms during a single sexual episode, that is, before loss of sexual excitement sets in, appears almost exclusively in women. Although there have been some reports of multiple orgasms in males, there is some question as to whether or not they are complete orgasms or a resumption of an interrupted orgasm just before the moment of inevitability.
The main reason for the discrepancy between men and women is that while both go through a resolution phase, during which the body returns to the presexual excitement state, only males go through an automatic refractory period, when they experience the ejaculation that accompanies their orgasm. During this period, men quickly lose their sexual excitement and require renewed stimulation to rejuvenate their sexual desires before another orgasm and ejaculation can occur. For men this may take from a few minutes to a few hours to a few days, depending on age, physical condition, and strength of libido. Women, however, do not go through such a refractory period immediately after reaching orgasm. Instead, they remain at a high level of excitement that only slowly—for some women, very slowly—subsides. During this time, if the woman is properly stimulated, she may achieve orgasm again and again.
Some women report that their orgasms may increase in intensity during these multiple orgasm sessions to a level in which they appear to faint from pleasure. Even among males who claim to have had multiple orgasms, none approaches the number of orgasms reported by women.
Compared with the intensity of sexual excitation in women produced by cunnilingus, manual stimulation, and the use of vibrators, rarely are there reports of multiple orgasms occurring from coitus alone. While many women are desirous of multiple orgasms once they become aware that they are capable of them, others are content with one orgasm and still others find the attempt at continuing stimulation after orgasm either unpleasant or even painful. Multiple orgasms should not be a goal imposed upon a woman, and the inability to have multiple orgasms does not constitute sexual dysfunction.
