I keep meaning to do this post and have finally found a rainy day. A month back I saw an old friend, my age, 53,who looked great, young. I said, How do you do it? His family was there and he said, "Three orgasms a week." Laughter. Later I emailed him to ask what he meant–he's a serious guy, an econometrics prof–and he told me he was only half joking: "there was a
particularly dumb study on the determinants of longevity. They simply
correlated all sorts of behavioral variables (one at a time) with life
span. Flossing your teeth came out the highest with an additional 3
years, more than one orgasm per week was second with 2 years…"
I looked around on line and found that this "knowledge" is reflected at Oprah's website, where in a questionnaire on fighting aging, she suggests that men should have four orgasms a week, women two.
The differential between husbands and wives gets at an unspoken issue in modern life: masturbation. When I went on Stephen Colbert's show last spring for a piece I did for New York Magazine on male sexuality, I asked in the green room if I could mention masturbation and the producer said, Go ahead, we'll see if it gets bleeped. As it turned out, Colbert made the masturbation reference that night, a joke–"if you can't find it, grind it." But the point here is that masturbation is an important part of sexual behavior and would seem to be the way that many married people of my age deal with sexlessness in a marriage–a very real phenomenon of married sexuality–and for that matter with meeting Oprah's quota. Hey, you better masturbate if you want to extend your life.
From a man's standpoint, the alternative for the orgasm-discrepancy is prostitution, the hetaera class, Spitzer's solution, which I have no problem with but which is illegal and frowned upon even in haut bourgeois circles. Actually, all circles; it goes against American norms, by and large. I think it's a better answer than the masturbation solution, but I'm not making the norms here; and my point is that married men are expected/encouraged to have many orgasms, and expected to get them at home, regardless of the source. (And yes: studies show a behavioral difference in sexual frequency between men and women.)
One of the best quotes in my New York piece came from Mark Penn's book Microtrends, the jolly pollster of Hillary Clinton fame (my Harvard classmate, son of a Kosher poultry man, and supporter of rightwingers in Israel). Penn said,“[P]orn is the norm." In ways we don't fully comprehend: the marketplace for porn is gigantic, dwarfing the national
pastime of baseball. “And when women realize it, will it change the way they
view their colleagues, bosses, husbands, and boyfriends?” It’s not just men.
Erick Janssen of Kinsey Institute wrote, “Relatively large numbers of
married men and women indicate using the Internet for sexual purposes … but the
impact of this on marriages has, as yet, not received much research attention.”
Again I turn to the social consequences. Marriage is apotheosized in this culture, so nothing can go against marriage. But if your marriage isn't that sexual, you must be sexual, so you find sexual surrogates on the web. We have objections to prostitution on exploitive grounds, among others, but what about the exploitation of the porn industry, in which from the looks of it there is a lot of pressure on young attractive women to perform for older men? Porn means pictures of prostitutes; I think it's an accurate description.
I don't have a conclusion. I'm for the loosening of social norms on this issue because I'm a liberal, and there's a ton of repression, shame, and hypocrisy that seems to be weighing down the human condition here. I wonder how healthy the solution our society has arrived at really is, or whether it's just the way we've found to keep the central economic unit of the society, the family, intact, using an unspoken industry. Now let's talk about dental floss!
