The Functions of the Orgasms
Steven Poole The Guardian,
Saturday 14 March 2009
You have more varied opportunities for "transcendence", it appears, if you're a woman: Odent, a celebrated French obstetrician who introduced birthing pools, has pluralised Wilhelm Reich's famous title to argue that orgasmic states are also possible in childbirth and during breastfeeding. The problem is that they are not often achieved because most societies, jealous of ungoverned pleasure, have institutionalised a "cultural orgasmophobia", and contemporary obstetric practices basically have it all wrong. (The right thing to do, in short, is to avoid stimulating the mother's neocortex.) Odent's is a stylish polemic that mixes endocrinology, comparative anthropology, philology, anecdotes from the author's own medical practice and reverential references to a capacity to "escape from space and time-bound reality".
The Functions of the Orgasms : The Highways to Transcendence by Michel Odent Pinter & Martin, £7.99
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