We all know what an orgasm is, don’t we?
Arousal builds.
The tension mounts.
We reach a peak of intense pleasure — ooh la la!
…and then we come down the other side.
Lovely. I’m a big fan.
But what we’re actually describing there is a climax, a ‘peak’ orgasm, which is just one particular kind of orgasmic experience. And too often we mistake the peak for the whole landscape.
Imagine believing that the only point of going into nature was to climb to the top of a mountain, that that was the whole point. You’d miss rambling through rolling hills, meandering through wildflower-strewn meadows, floating in the ocean, luxuriating in a hot spring, cavorting in a mud bath, lying by the sea with the sun on your skin…
You’d miss standing in awe as the setting sun bathes you in its golden rays, or feeling moonlight scintillating over you. You wouldn’t notice the joys of breathing in the rich, fecund scents of a forest or stopping and allowing yourself to be carried away by birdsong…
You see, none of these nature experiences needs to go anywhere. They are complete within and of themselves. Our orgasmic potential is the same.
There are peaks, for sure, and scaling those peaks can be magnificent. But there is an entire landscape of sensation and pleasure available to us when we stop believing that reaching the summit is the sole point of the journey.
From orgasm to orgasmic
This is why I find the word orgasmic so useful. An orgasm, as we generally understand it, is an event. It’s something that happens, that we can identify and count. But orgasmic describes a quality of experience.
We can feel orgasmic without necessarily having anything that resembles the classic peak orgasm. Pleasure can ripple and spread, rise and fall, hover exquisitely, suffuse the whole body. We may not be able to say exactly when the orgasm happened — because perhaps there wasn’t one. Or maybe the whole experience was one…
All that matters is that the experience was orgasmic, regardless of the type, intensity or duration. There can be orgasmic waves, where pleasure rises and crests, subsides and rises again, without ever producing that sense of there, done. There can be blissful orgasmic states where we hover in exquisite sensation for what feels like ages. There can be experiences in which pleasure spreads beyond the genitals until the whole body seems to become orgasmic. And there can be all sorts of delicious experiences that don’t fit neatly into any category at all.
The orgasmic landscape really is much broader, more interesting and more pleasurable than we have been led to believe.
An entire body capable of pleasure
Orgasmic response doesn’t have to begin in the genitals. It can arise through the nipples, neck, mouth, thighs, or other parts of the body. It can arise in different ways, through kissing, through breath and movement, through emotional connection, through giving pleasure as well as receiving it. It can even arise without being touched at all.
Because orgasmic experience isn’t confined to a clitoris, penis or vagina, it involves the whole embodied nervous system. So the more we develop our erotic capacity — our ability to notice sensation, stay present with it, allow it to build and move through us without immediately trying to make something happen — the more responsive the whole body can become.
And in partnered sex, the more open and responsive we become, the more we can feel both our own pleasure and our partner’s, until the two begin to merge.
For women, this can include extraordinary internal pleasure.
Let me clarify. For a long time women were told that they should orgasm through intercourse, and if they couldn’t there was something wrong with them. Then came the very necessary correction that the clitoris is central to female pleasure, and we began recognising the importance of clitoral stimulation in female orgasm. That was a great step forward in sexual understanding!
But I wonder whether the pendulum has swung so far that we’ve inadvertently created another limitation: the idea that female orgasmic pleasure is essentially about stimulating the clitoris. That isn’t my experience, nor that of many women I’ve worked with and spoken to over the years.
As fabulous as clitoral stimulation can be, there can also be something quite extraordinary about deep vaginal pleasure — particularly when it is approached without fast thrusting, or trying to stimulate the right spot, or even trying to produce an orgasm at all.
I’m talking about allowing a penis deep into the vagina with slowness, presence and mutuality; actively opening and welcoming, being relaxed, receptive and engaged enough to really feel the internal sensations; and allowing them to spread rather than trying to concentrate them into a peak.
The experience can become almost impossible to locate. Where is the pleasure coming from now — the vagina, the pelvis, the belly, the heart, the whole body? Or even from the soul?
And really, that question is irrelevant, because the whole landscape has come alive and you are no longer trying to get anywhere. You are fully in it.
The same is true of direct clitoral pleasure. It doesn’t always have to be used to drive towards a climax. Stay on that delicious plateau without trying to make anything happen and clitoral sensation itself can become expansive, spreading, blissful and deeply orgasmic.
Men live in the landscape too
Men have access to this wider landscape too.
We tend to assume that men have orgasm sorted: arousal, erection, stimulation, ejaculation — done. And certainly, in partnered sex, men generally have easier access to that classic peak orgasm than women do.
But I think that sells men woefully short. Because the peak orgasm is not necessarily the pinnacle of male erotic potential either.
My provocative stance is this: rather than women trying to limit themselves to the conventional model of male sexuality, men need to expand themselves into the breadth of female sexuality.
While men tend to reach peak orgasms more readily through intercourse, women often seem to have greater access to more diffuse, wave-like, whole-body experiences of pleasure. When a woman is deeply aroused — relaxed, open, expansive and fully inhabiting her pleasure — she can remain orgasmic for a very long time.
And her partner can come along with her.
Beyond giving and receiving
But that requires him to stop approaching sex as though partnered orgasm were essentially a masturbatory orgasm achieved inside another person’s body.
And I don’t say that because I think men are selfish lovers. Quite the opposite in fact. After talking with thousands of men in my Clinic I know how deeply most men care about their partner’s pleasure. Her pleasure turns him on, sure, but it also tells him that he’s doing a good job, that he’s pleasing her, that he’s being a good lover.
The trouble is that he thinks his job is to create her pleasure through what he does. So during intercourse he thrusts away, all the while watching and listening for signs that it’s working for her. He may be intensely focused on her pleasure, yet still feel separate from it, and her, because he’s trying to produce it rather than losing himself in the shared experience of it.
And that can be terribly lonely. I’ve had countless men describe some version of this to me.
So we solve the problem by taking turns. He gives her clitoral stimulation until she reaches her peak; then they have intercourse so he can reach his.
That’s definitely fairer. But even when we’re trying to be egalitarian — make sure she gets her orgasm too — we can still end up organising sex around summit-bagging. We’re still climbing those separate mountains and must reach the top…
So what’s a better approach? Well, he too can soften into pleasure rather than strive towards ejaculation. He too can become receptive, embodied and open. And rather than either of them trying to create pleasure for the other, they can both be fully engaged and fully receptive. They’re feeling their own pleasure and their partner’s pleasure, affecting each other and responding to each other.
One might be more physically active at any particular moment, but that doesn’t mean one is giving and the other receiving. They’re both engaged and they’re both receiving. They’re in it together.
In the language of Yin and Yang, he is bringing more Yin into his sexuality: more receptivity, openness and allowing alongside his active Yang qualities. He isn’t becoming less masculine, he is expanding his erotic range.
And when that happens, ejaculation itself can feel quite different.
Rather than tension building towards an explosive release followed by a sense of being finished, the orgasm can feel like it’s blossoming. It can open into something larger, with sensation spreading through the body and connection with his partner deepening rather than abruptly ending.
Years ago, my then partner described his ejaculation as “a door that opens into a deeper orgasm”. My current partner seconds that opinion, experiencing orgasm in a vastly different, and far more pleasurable, way than when we first met.
And one of the most beautiful differences in this approach is what happens next. Instead of come and roll over, it becomes come and stay together.
The orgasm hasn’t taken either of you out of the landscape. You’re still there, still connected, still orgasmic.
And still together.
In the landscape together
So what happens when we stop treating sex as two individual orgasm projects?
Rather than taking turns climbing our respective mountains, or trying to miraculously reach the summit at the same time, we can inhabit the whole landscape together. We can wander, rise and fall, linger somewhere delicious, become still, cavort, luxuriate, allow ourselves to be surprised…
One person’s pleasure might ripple into the other. A wave might rise between us and carry us both somewhere neither of us was trying to go.
Even simultaneous orgasm can look quite different from this perspective. Rather than two people trying to time their respective climbs so that they reach the summit together, it can emerge naturally from moving through the landscape together.
To share my personal experience, usually I’ll feel myself cresting one of many waves of pleasure and my partner will feel it too, allowing his orgasm to rise into that wave. We’re not trying to arrive anywhere at the same time, we’re simply so attuned to the same movement that we crest together, staying in that shared orgasmic space as the pleasure continues to move through us.
Then orgasmic pleasure becomes something much broader and richer than two individual climaxes. It becomes an experience we are inhabiting — and receiving — together.
The Provocation
I believe our obsession with orgasm has led us astray. Peak orgasms are countable, orgasmic experience isn’t.
We can ask: How many orgasms did you have? But how do you count luxuriating in a hot spring? How do you count being carried away by birdsong? How do you measure an hour spent wandering through an extraordinary landscape together?
You can’t. And that’s the point. The measure isn’t how many orgasms the body can produce, but how much orgasmic experience we have the capacity to receive, inhabit and share.
How much pleasure can we notice and how deeply can we feel it?
Can we remain present when sensation becomes intense rather than rushing to discharge it?
Can we notice the subtle pleasures as well as the obvious ones?
Can we allow arousal to rise and fall without interpreting the fall as failure?
Can we stay somewhere delicious without needing to make it become something else?
This is what I mean by expanding our erotic capacity.
And there is a paradox here. The more determinedly we pursue orgasm, the more elusive some of the richest orgasmic experiences can become. The wider landscape requires presence, embodiment, relaxation, receptivity, awareness, and connection.
You have to be in your body, you have to feel safe enough to let go. You have to be able to notice subtle sensation rather than constantly reaching for intensity. And you have to be willing to allow pleasure to unfold in whatever form it takes.
Which means orgasm becomes less something you do and more something you allow.
So the goal, then, isn’t to have more orgasms. It’s to become more orgasmic. To expand our erotic capacity so that more and more of the landscape becomes available to us.
There will still be mountains, wonderful ones. Go ahead and climb them, revel in the peaks. But don’t mistake the summit for the whole journey.
There are hills and valleys to wander, rivers to follow, warm oceans to float in, hot springs to luxuriate in, forests to breathe in, mud to cavort in and vast skies beneath which you might simply stand in awe.
And sometimes the most exquisite thing is simply to stand still and let the landscape move through you.
Together.
The Salon
Please join me in the Salon video below where I develop on these ideas some more.
An acolyte of the penultimate orgasmic state that I call pregasm, I'm so glad you wrote this piece so that others can surf the highest arousal plateaus and blur the boundaries between arousal, pleasure, orgasm, ejaculation, and well, the conclusion that wet orgasm brings.