A laughter love-in
OBVIOUSLY I watched Channel 4’s documentary The Super Orgasm in a spirit of serious scientific enquiry. No, not really. Like most of the audience (I imagine) I watched it for a laugh and because orgasms are of interest to pretty much everybody.
And where else would you hear the deliriously funny phrase “arousal booth”? This show though wasn’t about any old orgasms, your basic Harry Met Sally climax. Oh no. It was about women who are multi-orgasmic and just, you know, go on and on. Like trains.
They were all very jolly ladies as well they might be in the circumstances. Jeanette had a religious background (“Well you do say ‘Oh God!’ a lot” she reasoned). Francesca enjoyed singing in the church choir and Natalie always wore a woolly hat. Perhaps the headwear was the key to her 60-in-a-row claim. Though I gotta say, sister, that if you’re counting, you ain’t there.
There was a group of airy-fairy types who lay around smiling insanely and staring at each other’s vulvas and a motherly sort who’d only discovered that she was a super-orgasmic kind of gal when she followed instructions on the internet. I only hope the instructions were more useful than the ones I looked up for help with a knitting pattern. Possibly they were identical.
Jeanette was a trouper, bless her, relentlessly masturbating for a couple of wacky American scientists in an MRI scanner. Hardly what you’d call a tunnel of love but she was allowed to keep her socks on as she got her rocks off. Others who were also in laboratory conditions had to press an orgasm button every time they achieved lift-off.
IT was gratuitous nonsense but for all the trying-to-keep-a-straight-face science bit everyone who took part was cheerful which makes a nice change in a TV documentary. No doubt someone will fret that it makes women feel “under pressure” which is of course always a terrible worry to us all. But I’m sure it will do wonders for the sale of vibrators. And nobody mentioned Brexit or the Single Market once – which was a definite plus.
My absolutely favourite orgasm (that got your attention at the back of the class didn’t it?) is in one of my all-time favourite books. It’s Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, published in 1958 about the adventures of girl-about-town Sally Jay Gorce.
In Paris she runs into Larry, another young American and apologises for being in evening clothes. “It’s all I’ve got…my laundry hasn’t come back yet.” (How could you not love her?)
Anyway... she and Larry sit down in the Café Dupont opposite the Sorbonne and order glasses of Pernod. Then Larry (and we’re only a few pages in at this stage) touches her arm. “Some people can hack and hack away at you,” observes Sally Jay, “and nothing happen at all and then someone else just touches you lightly on the arm and it happens… yes, I mean I came.”
No arousal booth needed.