Tara Tainton

The following is an excerpt from "I'll Have What She's Having" written by Samantha Selinger-Morris and recently published by the Sydney Morning Herald. Thanks go to one of my Aussie mates in Sydney for passing the news along for us!

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...When Marrena Lindberg stumbled upon a sure-fire way to reach orgasm four years ago, she had no idea she was part of a new wave of women revolutionising the face of sexual health research.

Rather, her fortuitous discovery - that the high doses of fish oil she took in preparation for pregnancy and the kegel exercises she practised afterwards to restore lost vaginal muscle strength led her to easily achieve vaginal orgasm - was simply an unexpected boon.

"I noticed that something was different," Lindberg says over the phone from her Boston home.

That's an understatement. When the computer programmer had fine-tuned her recipe (see breakout), she claimed a whopping personal best of 52 vaginal orgasms in one session.

"It gives a certain confidence to a woman," she says. "Now when I walk around, I get noticed."

And how. She has wrangled a publishing deal with a branch of Random House to release her book in the United States next year and been profiled by American Elle and London's Telegraph Magazine. Meanwhile, she has joined the growing ranks of women spearheading a new era of orgasm research that is characterised by astonishingly diverse approaches.

Gone are the days of Alfred Kinsey and Desmond Morris and their focus on the sociological and biological impacts of female orgasm. In their place are researchers who look at the psychological, physiological, anatomical and, yes, dietary factors behind what causes orgasm.

Last year, Helen O'Connell, a urological surgeon at Melbourne Private Hospital, became the first person to accurately map the clitoris.

University of New England physiologist Dr Gemma O'Brien - hailed by Wired magazine as "perhaps the only orgasm theorist in the world" - is working on a hypothesis that understimulation of a girl's reproductive tract during puberty could account for her difficulty, or inability, to achieve orgasm later.

Overseas, Dr Elisabeth Lloyd, a biology professor at Indiana University, rocked the talk-show circuit with her 2005 book The Case of the Female Orgasm, which rejects the theory that a woman's orgasm exists to facilitate reproduction. (Nonsense, she says, it's all about fun.)

Vivienne Cass, a Perth clinical psychologist and author of The Elusive Orgasm, says it's no surprise that women are generating headlines with their findings, rather than men.

"A few years ago, I was at a conference and these male researchers are standing up and talking about how they have been investigating sexual arousal in women," Cass says.

"They had been putting various sorts of probes into women's vaginas, measuring blood flow and lubrication, but they got confused. Because when they spoke to the women, who said, 'Oh, I'm not actually turned on', these researchers were saying, 'Well, yes you are'.

"The women sexologists in the audience were going, 'They just don't get it, do they?' What researchers now understand is that you can have a physical arousal and you can have psychological arousal and, in women, they are two quite different processes."

This is why the so-called Pink Viagra, marketed by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer after the male version was so successful, was pulled a few years ago after it was discovered that simply increasing blood flow to the clitoral region gave little or no relief to the majority of women with female sexual dysfunction.

There are new drugs in the pipeline, of course - a recent Reuters Business Insight report estimated that the market to treat so-called female sexual dysfunction could approach $1 billion by 2008.

Proctor and Gamble is developing a testosterone patch in the hopes that increasing women's libido will do the trick. Palatin Technologies in New Jersey is working on a new class of drugs, called melanocortin agonists, to target a woman's central nervous system and spark both genital arousal and sexual desire.

O'Brien and Cass, among other experts, think these approaches are misguided.

"Drug companies put a lot of money into trying to develop [the drugs but they] would be better off finding out how orgasm works and then develop drugs," says O'Brien, who believes there's no reason that women shouldn't be as sexually satisfied as men.

Cass is wary of the increasing medicalisation of women's sexuality - supported by a controversial and often-quoted 1999 study by The Journal of the American Medical Association that estimated 43 per cent of women suffered from sexual dysfunction. She says the renewed focus reflects a positive shift towards taking female sexual pleasure seriously, but fails to acknowledge that "the psychological aspect of a woman's life can very quickly override sexuality".

Her book details 25 causes of orgasm difficulty, with only a few linked to medical conditions (such as diabetes, multiple sclerosis and depression). The rest, she says, can be chalked up to a woman's mental state - from resentment or loss of physical attraction towards a partner to sexual abuse, boredom and even dysfunctional fantasies.

Contrary to the popularly held belief that it's women's lack of interest in sex that leads them to be, well, undersexed, Cass has found that there are certain fantasies that can inhibit orgasm.

"I had a woman who used to fantasise about almost being raped, and she could actually orgasm through masturbation quite happily with that fantasy," she says.

"But then when she met a nice man in real life that she actually wanted to be with, all of a sudden, the sex thing didn't happen for her. She had psychologically conditioned herself to only get aroused to one kind of sex."

(Cass trained her patient to swap this fantasy for another.)

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Anonymous | 2009-12-19 17:34 Linda Smith 07/16/2006 02:12 PM I don't think that the ability to orgasm can be found in a pill. It's the energy body from which all orgasms come. Gee, I should write my own article, and post it above. "My Orgasm and Sexual Desire Secrets." Tara, your Eager WebMistress 07/16/2006 09:33 PM That would be a great article! Let me know when you have it written. ;) michael g.b. 07/16/2006 10:20 PM . . . me'thinks it t'were in a Rolling Stones song what i first heard the line, "she goes running to the shelter of her mother's little helper and it helps her through the day . . . " -- everyone WANTS an answer in a "pill" . . . (and probably for some people and some problems a pill WILL be the "little helper" but not for all.) life is a mix of so many things . . . ask "the bartender" . . . the magix is getting everything in just the right amounts and proportions and blend . . . (and "shaken not stirred" ha!) . . . my guess is the answer will be a combination of all the aspects mentioned in the article above . . . and probably a few more no one has yet thought of . . .

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3.23 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."