10 things you didn’t know about Orgasm

TED Talk by Mary Roach- A writer

Please expect the unexpected!

Major takeaway points:

1. You cannot control it. It is involuntary. Orgasm is a reflex of the autonomic nervous system. Now, this is the part of the nervous system that deals with the things that we don’t consciously control, like digestion, heart rate, and sexual arousal.
2. You don’t need genitals. The orgasm reflex can be triggered by a surprisingly broad range of input. The most curious one that she came across was a case report of a woman who had an orgasm every time she brushed her teeth.
3. You can have an orgasm after you die, by oxygenating the sacral nerve.
4. Orgasms can cause bad breath. Theodoor van De Velde was something of a “semen connoisseur.” He could smell the semen of a man on the breath of a woman. He even went so far as to differentiate between a young man’s semen, and an older man’s.
5. Orgasms can cure hiccups.
6. Doctors once prescribed orgasm for fertility. The contractions that a woman experiences during orgasm, can actually serve to suck up the semen from the cervix. It doesn’t have much of a success rate in humans but…
7. The up-suck method works very well in pigs. It is used to propagate pig farming.
8. Studying human orgasm in a lab can get very complicated. Masters and Johnson who set out to do this, had to perform various experiments in their labs that were highly uncomfortable. (They had to make a sex machine.)
9. 8 feet is the longest distance traveled by semen during ejaculation.
10. Men have an evolutionary excuse for frequent masturbation. Sperm that sit around in the body for a week or more start to develop abnormalities that make them less effective at head-banging their way into the egg. British sexologist Roy Levin has speculated that this is perhaps why men evolved to be such enthusiastic and frequent masturbators. He said, “If I keep tossing myself off I get fresh sperm being made.”

Orgasm is just science.