How To Experience An Orgasm Breakthrough

 “I don’t know if I’ve had one.”

 

 

 

In a message to my friend, who’d been quizzing me on my relationship with my showerhead at the age of 18, that was my response to the persistent question: so, have you had an orgasm yet?

 

“Um, you would know,” they said.

 

That’s what a lot of people would say. “If it happened you’d know”.

 

But I was always unsure. What’s it actually like? How do you know if that was it? What if it wasn’t the euphoric peak everyone had promised it would be? What if I *had* already had one and it sucked?

 

Yeah, things built up and did feel really good in that shower — I’d see red bloom behind my closed eyelids and goosebumps ripple across my skin, but then it would all feel like too much and I’d have to stop. Was that it? It seemed more uncomfortable and painful than anything else. Where were these fireworks I’d been promised?

 

It was a point of contention with my first boyfriend. He just couldn’t get what was 'wrong' with me, and I didn’t know either. And then eventually, somewhat embarrassingly, it was a TV show called Masters of Sex that helped things make a lot of sense.

 

The show introduced me to the work of sexologists Dr William Masters and Virginia Johnson, who helped usher in the sexual revolution with their findings about pleasure and sexual response. They came up with the human sexual response cycle which looks like this:

 

• Excitement phase (initial arousal)
• Plateau phase (at full arousal, but not yet at orgasm)
• Orgasm
• Resolution phase (after orgasm)

 

And while there have been criticisms of that theory, and it’s not the only model out there (see Kaplan’s Three-Stage Model) it did get me paying more attention to what my body was doing at different points. It kind of all clicked together and I could feel the stages as I was getting down. And yes, it helped me get there. Fireworks, baby.

 

Sex educator Georgia Grace tells The Hook Up that for some people, learning about what orgasm means and where they may be in certain stages of arousal can be helpful. But she also acknowledges that sex is about so much more than this process: "Learning about your body and learning about pleasure that’s not just penetration and is about more than just that expectation to climax -- there’s so much pleasure that can be accessed beyond these habits of sexual trajectory.”

 

I believe that knowledge is power. This knowledge gave me the power to climax. And maybe some of the following knowledge will empower you too.

 

So what is an orgasm exactly?

 

Well, this is why ‘when you have one, you’ll know’ is a problem. Because there isn’t one agreed upon definition.

 

“Physiologically, it’s defined as 8-12 contractions that occur in the vaginal and anal sphincter starting 0.8 seconds apart and increasing in latency to their termination,” neuroscientist Dr Nicole Prause says in her TEDx talk on the subject:

 

But other experts go for a more qualitative definition, like sex educator Emily Nagoski's “sudden, involuntary release of sexual tension”.

 

“A single overarching explanation of the orgasm doesn’t exist,” Georgia Grace says. “The journey to an orgasm is such an individual experience that there really is no singular or all-encompassing definition.”

 

What happens to your body when you orgasm?

 

Apart from the aforementioned contractions, lots of other things are going on, like: “Your pain threshold more than doubles ... your skin becomes flushed, it can make you sweat or tremble, your pupils dilate and some people even say their vision increases,” Georgia says.

 

“People breathe harder during climactic states or on their way to orgasm ... salivation increases, your blood pressure goes right up and climaxing gets you hot — your body temperature and metabolism rise slightly, even if it wasn’t a vigorous session. And of course, there’s blood flow to your genitals. They become engorged and once you reach orgasm the muscles involuntarily, rhythmically contract and then relax."

 

What about your brain?

 

“The prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for logical thought, shuts down, and the limbic system, which regulates your feelings, takes over. So that may explain why you feel more animalistic,” Georgia says. (Reow). “At the same time, the dopamine — your body’s reward hormone, which is associated with pretty much anything that feels good — surges through your body, giving you a sense of intense pleasure.”