What’s An Orgasm, Anyway?
[Image Description: A gouache painting where a mouth open wide in a scream sits in the center, written across the teeth, back of the throat and tongue is the question "What's orgasm anyway?" the surrounding rest of the page is split into six vignettes by purple lines that have the phrases "Embrace the Weird & Wondrous", "You were made to feel pleasure", and "Trust what feels good" written on them. One vignette shows a person's back getting hot wax dripped over it, another is a close up of someone's mouth biting a shoulder, the third shows someone tracing their nails over the back of someone's leg, the fourth shows a person sticking their tongue in someone's ear, the fifth shows a had clad in a spiked vampire glove running over someone's skin, and the sixth vignette shows someone sucking a person's big toe. The colors are all surreal and vibrant solids without shading. ]
What is an orgasm, exactly?
If I want to be pedantic, I can drop the dictionary definition here, tell you a bunch of stuff about how it's a full-body wave of muscle spasms brought on by continuous genital stimulation and that it releases a lot of good feeling brain juice. It's all very scientific about a feeling that frankly, is very not. Unless you're into that, then by all means, controlled measure and hypothesize to your heart's content.
The thing is, that narrow definition of orgasm leaves out a lot of body experiences I've had and a lot of experiences I've either helped bring about or heard tell of over cake on lazy afternoons with loved ones.
As a teenager, very little made me feel turned on inside my body with partners. Kissing? Nah. Hands on my ass? Well, okay. Feeling on my chest? I'll let you amuse yourself, sure.
Then one day, a partner ran their tongue along the shell of my ear and my entire body turned to liquid gold. Encouraged, they kept licking at my ears, essentially giving me a wet willy that removed the finger as the middleman. It was slick, and sloppy and admittedly a little bit gross feeling when spit got in my ear canal. It also made my brain melt as I squirmed uncontrollably against them and buried my face in the bean bag chair we were on to avoid getting caught. Turns out, sexual pleasure made me noisy.
Since then, I've gone absolutely to pieces on a dorm room bed from a partner running their nails from my neck down my back in long unending loops, I've been a shivering mess from a partner draping themselves over me and rubbing their stubble along my neck and shoulders like an affectionate cat, I've had my thoughts turn to water and my body become their vessel from a partner coiling rope around me, I’ve lost track of hours as I’ve been a partner’s canvas, and have howled and moaned as a partner diligently worked over my aching thighs with their calloused hands.
None of those experiences involved contact with my genitals, I think the time I became a canvas was the only encounter where I was naked. All of them stand out as blissful erotic moments that still give me a shiver when I replay them.
Sex is a relative definition. So is orgasm.
Examples that fall in that "I've helped bring about or heard tell of" category include:
Having someone growl in their ear while biting and sucking on their neck til they screamed
Getting to bite someone else until they couldn't stand it anymore
Having their toes sucked while the arch of their foot was stroked
Having their thumb stroked and sucked
Getting their back flogged
Having someone grind up against their back
All these examples too don't focus on playing with someone's junk or getting your junk played with as the avenue to pleasure. Here is the place where I could go on about erogenous zones, and how these have been identified as cornucopias of nerve endings, but that gets us back into science formula land and gets me away from my point.
My point being: we are built for pleasure. Attempting to reduce that down to a math equation of nerve endings plus stimulation misses the mark. Because the thing is, I've had many partners lick my ears, rub stubble against my neck, or draw their nails feather-light over my back. And that doesn't always result in the same spark emitting, full-body euphoria. Context matters, and I think different people in different moments make us come alive in places we don't expect.
In each of my moments, I was startled by an unexpected jolt of pleasure from a simple touch. That spark of pleasure ignited my lover's curiosity. They touched me again and again, in the same place, in varying ways, to see how I would respond, shifting their actions based on my reaction. All because they liked how I sounded, how I felt. All because they noticed it gave me pleasure and wanted to give me more.
In turn, this is one of my favorite ways to make a lover fall apart, in that glimmer of the unexpected. In the space where I discover how the smallest touch, the slightest sound, applied in the right place, in the right moment can bring transformation. An eager giddiness floods my thoughts when this happens. I forget myself, diving into my lover's face, their voice, the sprawling plains of them as they shiver and shake under me. It's delight, pure and unfiltered.
These bits of magic only happen when I'm really paying attention to how I'm affecting my lovers or when they notice how they're affecting me. That attention is what makes partnered sex fun for me. Shifting away from the "bop it, twist it, shake it" approach to fucking and into a place of play and curiosity brings me into the moment and into connection with my lovers.
There are a million manuals out there on how to do any sex thing you can imagine, and likely some you can't, though you may have to dig a little for those. How to give mind-blowing head, how to hang someone by their knees from the ceiling, how to whip someone, how to have an earth-shattering stroke game. Bop it, twist it, shake it. These are the moves to move your lover.
I am not knocking these instructionals. I spent most of my teen years devouring guides like these, practicing on my own and quietly collecting field research in my head every time I tried something out with a partner. Once again, we're back to science, to cutting complex muddy things into neat boxes. These guides help, especially in a world where most sex acts are treated as something we'll instinctually know how to do when we aren't even given basic landscapes of our own anatomy. But when we get too caught up in pulling the right moves, our thoughts are on ourselves, not our lovers. We can miss cues for when an off the manual move sparks something delicious, or worse, be too afraid to explore that little flicker because we don't trust ourselves to do what feels good, we don't trust our senses when we notice pleasure, and panic about making things weird.
Sex is weird, y'all. Even if you're following the instruction manuals, a lot of it involves "rub this part of you up against that part of them. Put things in your holes. Put things in their holes. Make nonsense noises. Do this to make them make nonsense noises." So what, if you rub up against these listed parts that's okay, but oh no, can’t rub this thing up against that thing, even if it gets a really good response, because that's not on the list and therefore it's weird now?
Fuck that.
The how-to's and the lists of sexy touching places are not set in stone, they're base frames. Sex guides provide out-of-the-box kits designed to give us something to work off of, but we can't let them make us afraid to venture into the unknown. We can't be afraid to believe our senses when we catch that little shiver of pleasure across our lover's skin, and can't scare ourselves out of the good time that might happen if we follow that tremor if we ask our lovers what secret want is hiding shyly behind their teeth, if we dare let slip the strange delicious things that light fires in us.
Watch for the weird. Follow it. It may go somewhere wonderful.
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