The Orgasmic Imperative

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with the privileging of orgasm as a natural, inevitable and necessary part of sexual interactions — not only something which one could experience, but something which one should experience. This ‘orgasmic imperative’ (Potts, 2002) transforms orgasm from pleasurable option, into a requirement which individuals have an obligation or responsibility to deliver. The young woman quoted above, describes feeling a ‘pressure’ to produce an orgasm. Constructing orgasm as a distinct ‘event’ located in the body (Laqueur, 1986, 2009), produces an understanding of hetero-orgasm as structured by the dichotomous opposition of presence/absence (Potts, 2000a). An orgasm is a bodily event which either happens or it does not; it is either present or absent. The pressure to orgasm which this young woman describes draws our attention to a number of ways that the presence of orgasm takes on symbolic significance. Firstly, she describes orgasm as a ‘kind of benchmark’ for sex. The presence of orgasm is used as a yardstick by which the ‘success’ of sex and/or the relationship is measured. Secondly, the obligation to orgasm is described as signalling something about the ‘kind of person’ we are. The presence of orgasm comes to signify the competence of sexual actors (how I am as a lover), to represent a successful gendered performance (how I am as a woman), and to signal a particular relationship with the body (how ‘in touch’ with your body you are).

Putting pressure on myself to orgasm feels strange. For something that’s supposed to happen spontaneously, supposedly, it feels like there’s a lot of thought put into this and a lot of anxiety around it, like this is some kind of benchmark of not only the sex, but who this person is as a lover, or how I am as a lover, or how I am as a woman. It just is supposed to be an index of how liberated you are, how in touch with your body or yourself you are.

Fahs, 2011: 54