page_title: Orgasm
section_title: Literature
hierarchical_section_title: Orgasm / Literature
context_page_description: Orgasm is the sudden discharge of accumulated sexual excitement during the sexual response cycle, resulting in rhythmic muscular contractions in the pelvic region characterized by sexual pleasure. Experienced by males and females, orgasms are controlled by the involuntary or autonomic nervous system. They are usually associated with involuntary actions, including muscular spasms in multiple areas of the body, a general euphoric sensation and, frequently, body movements and vocalizations. The period after orgasm is typically a relaxing experience, attributed to the release of the neurohormones oxytocin and prolactin as well as endorphins.
  Human orgasms usually result from physical sexual stimulation of the penis in males and of the clitoris in females. Sexual stimulation can be by self-practice or with a sex partner.
  The health effects surrounding the human orgasm are diverse.
context_section_description: Orgasm has been widely described in literature over the centuries. In antiquity, Latin literature addressed the subject as much as Greek literature: Book III of Ovid's Metamorphoses retells a discussion between Jove and Juno, in which the former states: "The sense of pleasure in the male is far / More dull and dead, than what you females share." Juno rejects this thought; they agree to ask the opinion of Tiresias ("who had known Venus/Love in both ways," having lived seven years as a female). Tiresias offends Juno by agreeing with Jove, and she strikes him blind on the spot (Jove lessens the blow by giving Tiresias the gift of foresight, and a long life). Earlier, in the Ars Amatoria, Ovid states that he abhors sexual intercourse that fails to complete both partners.
  The theme of orgasm survived during Romanticism and is incorporated in many homoerotic works. In FRAGMENT: Supposed to be an Epithalamium of Francis Ravaillac and Charlotte Cordé, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), "a translator of extraordinary range and versatility", wrote the phrase "No life can equal such a death." That phrase has been seen as a metaphor for orgasm, and it was preceded by the rhythmic urgency of the previous lines "Suck on, suck on, I glow, I glow!", which has been seen as alluding to fellatio. For Shelley, orgasm was "the almost involuntary consequences of a state of abandonment in the society of a person of surpassing attractions". Edward Ellerker Williams, the last love of Shelley's life, was remembered by the poet in "The Boat on the Serchio", which has been considered as possibly "the grandest portrayal of orgasm in literature":
  Shelley, in this poem, associates orgasm with death when he writes "the death which lovers love". In French literature, the term la petite mort (the little death) is a famous euphemism for orgasm; it is the representation of man who forgets himself and the world during orgasm. Jorge Luis Borges, in the same vision, wrote in one of the several footnotes of "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" that one of the churches of Tlön claims Platonically that "All men, in the vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare." Shakespeare himself was knowledgeable of this idea: lines "I will live in thy heart, die in thy lap, and be buried in thy eyes" and "I will die bravely, like a smug bridegroom", said respectively by Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing and by King Lear in the play of that ilk, are interpreted as "to die in a woman's lap" = "to experience a sexual orgasm". Sigmund Freud with his psychoanalytic projects, in The Ego and the Id (1923), speculates that sexual satisfaction by orgasm make Eros ("life instinct") exhausted and leaves the field open to Thanatos ("death instinct"), in other words, with orgasm Eros fulfills its mission and gives way to Thanatos. Other modern authors have chosen to represent the orgasm without metaphors. In the novel Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), by D. H. Lawrence, we can find an explicit narrative of a sexual act between a couple: "As he began to move, in the sudden helpless orgasm there awoke in her strange thrills rippling inside her..."
caption: Jupiter and Juno, by Annibale Carracci.
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