Why women evolved to have orgasms--when most of their primate relatives don't--is a persistent mystery among evolutionary biologists. In pursuing this mystery, Lloyd arrives at another: How could anything as inadequate as the evolutionary explanations of the female orgasm have passed muster as science?

'Fetus ejection reflex, 'milk ejection reflex, 'Sperm ejection reflex, 'Orgasmogenic cocktail'... These are examples of terms used by Michel Odent in his study of the ecstatic/orgasmic states associated with different episodes of human sexual life.

This book describes Reich's first medical and scientific work on the living organism from his first efforts at the Medical School of the University of Vienna in 1919 to the laboratory experiments in Oslo in 1939 which revealed the existence of a radiating biological energy, orgone energy. The subject of "sexuality" is basic to this work, and Reich shows clearly its importance for human life and its relevance in understanding the social problems of our time. "In the central phenomenon, the sexual orgasm, we meet with questions deriving from the field of psychology as well as from that of physiology, from the field of biology no less than from that of sociology. Natural science offers hardly another field of research that is so well equipped to exhibit the fundamental unity of everything that lives and to guard against narrow, fragmentizing specialization." --Wilhelm Reich.

The author explores hysteria in Western medicine throughout the ages and examines the characterization of female sexuality as a disease requiring treatment. Medical authorities, she writes, were able to defend and justify the clinical production of orgasm in women as necessary to maintain the dominant view of sexuality, which defined sex as penetration to male orgasm - a practice that consistently fails to produce orgasm in a majority of the female population. This male-centered definition of satisfying and healthy coitus shaped not only the development of concepts of female sexual pathology but also the instrumentation designed to cope with them.

Like men, women also can ejaculate, enhancing and intensifying their sexual pleasure. In an open, positive style, Deborah Sundahl presents information about female ejaculation including scientific findings, anatomical illustrations, historical accounts, a chapter on how men can help their female partners to ejaculate, and women's and men's experiences collected during the past two decades.

One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year A Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of 2011 Well before the 1960s, a sexual revolution was under way in America, led by expatriated European thinkers who saw a vast country ripe for liberation. In Adventures in the Orgasmatron, Christopher Turner tells the revolution's story—an illuminating, thrilling, often bizarre story of sex and science, ecstasy and repression. Central to the narrative is the orgone box—a tall, slender construction of wood, metal, and steel wool. A person who sat in the box, it was thought, could elevate his or her "orgastic potential." The box was the invention of Wilhelm Reich, an outrider psychoanalyst who faced a federal ban on the orgone box, an FBI investigation, a fraught encounter with Einstein, and bouts of paranoia. In Turner's vivid account, Reich's efforts anticipated those of Alfred Kinsey, Herbert Marcuse, and other prominent thinkers—efforts that brought about a transformation of Western views of sexuality in ways even the thinkers themselves could not have imagined.

This award-winning book “offers a thorough compilation of what modern science, from biomechanics to neurochemistry, knows about the secrets of orgasm” (Publishers Weekly). The coauthor of the international best-selling book The G Spot and Other Discoveries about Human Sexuality, Beverly Whipple joins neuroscientist Barry R. Komisaruk and endocrinologist Carlos Beyer-Flores to view orgasm through the lenses of behavioral neuroscience along with cognitive and physiological sciences. Covering every type of sexual peak experience in women and men from intense to phantom, this fascinating and comprehensive work illuminates the hows, whats, and wherefores of orgasm. The authors explain how and why orgasms happen, why they fail to happen, and what brain and body events are put into play at the moment of orgasm. They also describes the genital-brain connection, how the brain produces orgasms, how aging affects orgasm, and the effects of prescription medication, street drugs, hormones, disorders, and diseases. Winner of the 2007 Bonnie and Vern L. Bullough Book Award, given by the Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality