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enjoy the pleasure of orgasm? Tiger in
The Pursuit of Pleasure
suggests it could be that they were beaten as children by parents whose attention they craved, and thus associate love with pain; or, he speculates, they are people who view their lives as worthless and find in hurting others some relief to this sense of valuelessness. One gay US writer, Edmund White, argues that the sadists he knows are gentle pacific types outside the sexual arena. He concludes in his 1981 book
States of Desire
that: ‘S&M sex may merely be a more frank expression of the dynamics underlying
all
sex; perhaps gay liberation has merely given the leather boys permission to make manifest what is latent in everyone.’
    A still more extreme manifestation of the link men may feel between orgasm and aggression is provided by professional fighters. Boxers, in particular, seem prepared to keep fightingthrough any pain, any degradation, to have one more one chance at the championship belt. It was former
Sports Illustrated
boxing writer Mark Kram who suspected this masochistic behaviour may have sexual connotations for some fighters – that they outwardly abjure pain while secretly warming to it. ‘Old trainers used to tell me that they had known fighters who got hit so much that it became [so] pleasurable, they even ejaculated,’ he wrote.
    Despite pervasive cultural myths that only males set in train the procedure that leads to the more conventional, intercourse-related orgasm, the probability is that either the man or the woman will have initiated the above scenario. The modern assumption that men have a greater sex drive while women need to be coaxed and often coerced into sex may be faulty. One of the confusing factors in this is the wide difference in the ages at which men and women reach their peak of sexual desire and ability: nineteen in men, close to forty in women. The idea that women are intrinsically less interested in sexual pleasure may also be self-fulfilling – that they absorb societal notions of what their sexual desire
ought
to be.
    It is also arguable that anatomy (with a bit of help from evolution, as we shall see) has conspired to make sexual delight a little more elusive for women. The concealed position of the vagina and clitoris is in stark contrast to the more obvious and convenient placement of the penis. A clitoris can be aroused without its owner, if she is not attuned to its moods, knowing it; it is less easy to ignore an erection. Men are, as a result, the more likely to masturbate and become aware of the possibilities of sexual pleasure.
    And aware of those possibilities – obsessed with them, no less – men demonstrably are. It is hard to exaggerate the male sex’s single-mindedness when it comes to ejaculating as often as possible in as short a time as feasible. After the comedian Bob Hope’s death in 2003, a story emerged of his and his professional partner Bing Crosby’s insatiable appetite for sex.According to the London
Sunday Times
, Crosby, while recovering in hospital from an appendectomy, spoke of the unusually attentive post-operative care he was receiving in the form of one nurse who, he said, ‘gave me the greatest blow-job of my life.’ The next day, according to the story, Hope checked himself into the hospital, pleading ‘shattered nerves’. He got the same room, the same nurse – and the same unorthodox treatment.
    The whole prostitution industry, of course, is predicated on the ease with which men can reach orgasm – and the urgency with which they seek it, especially for enjoyment in emotionally undemanding conditions. A rare, stark and alarming quantification of the scale of demand for easy sex by men was made by an undercover police operation in northern England in the 1970s. A serial killer of prostitutes – the Yorkshire Ripper -was at large and officers were logging car registrations of regular ‘punters’. Over 21,000 men