Most of you people watching this will have experienced the topic of today’s show.
If you haven’t yet, then statistically it’s very likely you will.
In fact, many males of a certain age will get down with this biological buzz on a daily
basis, while females may not be quite as prolific in producing this heavenly stimulant that
nature has bestowed on us.
We might be indebted to this fleshy machine that we call our body for giving us a natural
high that for the most part doesn’t cost us a penny.
It offers some respite from the grind of work and the endless obstacles in what can sometimes
be a difficult life.
For that reason, we salute the orgasm, this wonderful gift mother nature has bequeathed
to us.
Let’s now discuss the nitty-gritty of our gift, in this episode of the Infographics
Show, Female orgasm vs male.
Before we start comparing orgasms let’s look at why we have them in the first place.
Of course we know that we have orgasms as part of the impetus to copulate with another
person.
This gift makes that experience pleasurable, and in turn we sometimes churn out other human
beings and keep the species ticking over.
Do all animals have orgasms though?
That’s something scientists are not absolutely sure about because we can’t exactly ask
a dog, a fish or a proboscis monkey what it was like for them after they got it on.
Scientists know by observing some animals’ vocal chords and muscle contractions that
they do seem to have this biological carnal pay-off, just as humans do.
All female mammals have clitorises, and scientists have even stimulated nonhuman female primates
in labs and given them orgasms.
Perhaps that’s the best job a monkey can get when sent to the lab for testing.
They didn’t say how they did the testing, however.
So, simply put, science thinks most animals have sex because of the feeling they receive
from it.
Being the beneficiary of an orgasm is of course not the only reason animals do it – there
may be power plays if there’s a hierarchy for instance – but it certainly acts as
the main incentive.
We don’t know what it feels like for the animal of course, but as one scientist talking
to Popular Science says, it looks like a very pleasurable experience for some animals.
Talking about our male feathered friends, he said, “The bird shudders its wings and
clenches its feet as it ejaculates-- who knows whether it feels like a human orgasm, but
the external behavior looks like it.”
We are told animals don’t have the brain capacity to plan for babies; rats don’t
think when they’re getting it on that they can’t wait to see a little rascal ratty
taking his first breaths in the world.
They do it for pleasure.
Humans are different because we are cognizant of the consequences of love making if conditions
haven’t been met to prevent pregnancy.
But some animals also masturbate as humans do.
They may not fantasize as we do, or spend time and energy watching others do it for
their own gratification and enhanced stimulation, but some do enjoy pleasuring themselves.
These animals include other primates (the animal champs of sexual self-gratification),
elephants, walruses, bats and turtles, among many others.
Some animals, such as the brown bear and wolf, even practice autofellatio.
Humans generally don’t have the flexibility for that.
We orgasm fans know that when it happens it is pleasurable.
Our muscles contract, we feel euphoria, and then we experience a period of relaxation.
We also know that orgasms are not all made equal, with some feeling like a minor bump
of pleasure chemicals in our brain, while others feel more like being mainlined into
the ecstasies of chemical heaven.
We experience what is called neuromuscular euphoria when our brain’s pleasure centers
are activated.
This happens because of stimulation, but that stimulation can come many ways.
We’ll cut this short, because all the ways one can orgasm would take a while to explain.
As you probably know, even stimulation of a nipple or another erogenous zone can create
this sublime feeling.
Some people even orgasm in their dreams, when thought alone is the main driver.
There’s even something called Foot Orgasm Syndrome, which you can work out for yourself.
It’s unusual, to say the least, and apparently not pleasant.
But for men, they mostly orgasm when their penis or scrotum is stimulated and something
called the pudendal nerve sends signals to the brain.
It’s the same for women when their clitoris is stimulated.
Both sexes can orgasm from stimulation of their rectum when the pelvic nerve is stimulated.
The hypogastric nerve sends signals from a man’s prostate, while it does the same in
a woman’s uterus and the cervix.
For women, the vagus nerve comes into play when the cervix, uterus, and vagina is stimulated.
These we might call the main bases.
When orgasm is achieved your brain is flooded with neurochemicals, and these activate what
we call the brain’s reward systems.
It’s these reward systems that motivate us to do certain things, not just have sex,
but perhaps complete a marathon or get a job done.
Sexual arousal affects many areas of the brain, such as the amygdala, cerebellum, pituitary
gland, nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area.
If all that terminology means little to you, the Journal of Neuroscience simply tells us
that sexual arousal in terms of brain patterns looks similar to what happens in the brain
when one takes heroin.
Thankfully, sexual stimulation isn’t as expensive and doesn’t produce severe withdrawal
symptoms after long-term use.
Wouldn’t that make a dent in our masturbating regimen…
For men, the result of this orgasm is usually the release of fluid through the penis, that
may contain semen (dry outcomes are possible, too).
All sorts of things come into play here, but usually with enough testosterone the male
can send his homemade gunge into a female orifice or simply into open space.
Prior to this, the man is aroused, and his penis becomes erect due to blood racing up
the appendage’s arteries at high speed.
The blood rush causes hardness and the rest of the body tenses.
Houston, get ready for lift off.
This may take a while, but orgasm can be achieved as quickly as 30 seconds from the first arousal.
At this time the heart might be beating around 150 and 175 beats per minute, while parts
of the body might be moving involuntarily.
Nature now plays an ace card by secreting a pre-ejaculatory fluid in the penis which
helps protect the arriving sperm by changing the pH balance in the urethra.
All you men know that when it’s time for lift off there is no going back, and this
is called “ejaculatory inevitability,” a fine term if ever we heard one.
Muscles around the penis and anus will contract rapidly, you may push out your pelvis, and
all those chemicals flood the brain and possibly cause one to grimace wildly like a madman
in the grips of an ecstatic seizure.
But it’s not over yet.
Men go through a pleasant recovery stage, a kind of easy comedown plateau after the
rush, and they will see their member slowly reduce to its original unimpressive state.
Younger guys can sometimes recover from this in as little as 15 minutes, while older men
may require hours to go through all that again.
There seems to be a lot of content out there on what it feels like to have female orgasm,
and not much on the feeling of the male orgasm.
As we said, orgasms are not all the same.
Perhaps a seasoned masturbator on his fifth adult video session of the day might have
a few substandard climaxes in that day’s organism medley, but when one has orgasmed
for the first time with the love of his life the feeling might be somewhat more intense.
One description we found online said this of his orgasms, “Like a tickle that creeps
up from every corner of your body until you're desperate for it to stop and also to continue
forever, as if squeegees are scraping through your limbs.
Like a gunshot, startling and discreet, leaving you with the vibrations, the trembling steel,
the blow-back.”
Hmm, that sounds good, and the reason many men during sex or masturbation will be thinking
about the next round before the current round has even finished, but they often change their
mind immediately after orgasm.
That’s just because they have achieved a satisfactory result and the brain is contented,
at least for a while.
Again, we have this feeling so we will want to do it again, and again.
Men are blessed with this – some may argue they were cursed – so that the merry-go-round
of life continues to spin.
It’s as simple as that.
With that in mind, now let’s turn to women.
Women could still procreate even if they didn’t have an orgasm.
Women don’t need to achieve orgasm to have babies, so why are they blessed with this
blissful treatment from nature?
There has been much research about this.
First, we should say that 10 percent of women don’t orgasm through sexual intercourse,
or not at all even with their own hands or certain purpose-made instruments.
Some sources say it may be as high as 15 percent.
You can read things like this on the web, “I don't understand.
I feel like less of a woman because I can't have an orgasm and I want to so bad.
I feel incomplete sometimes after sex.”
Vice magazine cited what it called the “Biggest-Ever Orgasm Study” which told us that “nearly
37 percent of American women required clitoral stimulation to experience orgasm” while
18 percent said that vaginal stimulation did the trick.
9 percent of women in that study said that nothing worked, not clitoris rubbing, cunnilingus,
pulsating plastic toys or penetrative sex.
66.6 percent of those women did say they enjoyed their clitoris being stimulated, usually with
an up-and-down rubbing motion with medium pressure of perhaps their own or their partner’s
digit.
As for why women orgasm at all, science is not all agreed on this.
Some experts tell us the reason is because orgasm will help women find a man of better
genetic quality.
Women may not orgasm with a man of lower genetic quality, and so we are told the fact they
can orgasm will weed out the weaker men.
Not everyone agrees with this theory, though.
Some scientists compare the female orgasm to the male nipple, in that it serves little
evolutionary function.
Another theory is that orgasms in women will make them want to have sex with as many men
as possible, and this increases the possibility of getting pregnant and promote what you could
call sperm competition.
Others suggest that her orgasm will help bond a pair and so ensure that the child has two
parents.
Orgasming in unison is quite a beautiful thing, perhaps sometimes even spiritual, and maybe
that bonds a couple.
This doesn’t say much about many animals though that are hardly monogamous.
It’s an ongoing debate.
Now let’s look at the female orgasm in terms of what happens physiologically.
Like men, women’s orgasms can be vastly different.
Sometimes, they may feel like they’ve been rocketed to the moon and back and sometimes
they are a mere fulfilling glitch in an otherwise unspectacular day.
Like the man, the woman will experience a rush of happy chemicals to the brain; she
may also contract and convulse and exhibit facial expressions that can border on being
frightening.
Again, we can’t talk for all women and all orgasms.
We can see what some women say about their orgasms, though.
One women told Cosmopolitan, “The pleasure builds up and I feel it coming.
Then an explosion of pleasure takes over everything from the waist down.
The feeling trickles down through my legs and everything is completely relaxed.”
As you can see, this doesn’t sound too different from what men say.
It can also sound like more hard work, though, as this woman explains: “It is like a warm,
tingling wave that starts at your center, and just radiates outward.
It can be frustratingly blissful as you start to build and then lose it and then build again
and each time you start to climb that mountain it becomes more intense and desperate.”
Perhaps we can say a man is a rocket with a certain trajectory, and a woman is a more
complex machine with a few more moves before it achieves lift-off.
The experts tell us that is correct, in that the female orgasm is more complex.
She may have multiple orgasms, or even what are called blended orgasms.
If you’ve ever been the sole contributor of such an orgasm, you’ll know it can last
longer than the male orgasm and come with many shakes, involuntary convulsions and perhaps
the man being gripped onto tightly as she experiences her bit of physical bliss.
Women can also have relaxation orgasms and tension orgasms, which should be self-explanatory.
As you know, this orgasm might be clitoral, vaginal, from G-Spot stimulation or even other
happy zones such as the lips or nipples.
They can be grand, they can be minor, they can move mountains or barely eclipse normality.
“Unlike men, women can have a remarkable variety of orgasmic experiences, which evolve
throughout the lifespan," said one academic.
“A woman's erotic body map is not etched in stone, but rather is an ongoing process
of experience, discovery and construction.”
Now men sound rather dull and predictable.
We are also told that women become more lost in the moment during orgasm and the build
up to it; that they block out everything else.
Does that mean like some men they could be thinking about an upcoming football game or
how they are performing during copulation?
Yes, that could happen, too, if she’s not into it.
But as one writer said, if she is, “We lose our usual self-awareness and consciousness
of other noises, feelings, and smells around us.”
Described like this, it sounds what we might call more “full-on”, as if the woman is
not the astronaut taking off but the rocket itself.
It sounds like it could be almost an outer body experience.
It lasts longer, too, about 20 seconds compared to that short blast the men get.
But in terms of what happens to our brains, we are not that different.
Women might have different kinds of orgasms and existentially things might seem different,
but that heroin hit we get is both present in men and women.
We may be different in how quickly we get aroused, usually easier for men, but as Psychology
Today tells us, “The orgasmic experience is almost identical in both sexes.”
This means heart rate, blood pressure, tensed muscles and the release of the love chemical
oxytocin.
Nature didn’t get too complicated in this respect, and made us both similar.
We feel the same love buzz of an orgasm, and for this we can be thankful as we can empathize
and know what joy we can give to each other.
We are different in some respects, though, in that men self-administer orgasms more often.
In spite of some remaining social taboos preventing some women from pleasuring themselves as often
as they might, the Kinsey Institute tells us men are just hardwired to beat-off.
Call it practice for the big day that an orgasm might result in the beating heart of another
wonderfully constructed human being.
All we want to know from you, is what do you make of all this?
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other show Your Body During Sex.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.