by Lore Sjöberg

Hey, guys! How'd you like to have multiple orgasms? Sounds fun, doesn't it, being able to rattle those suckers off like a row of firecrackers? Howabout if you could learn to have multiple orgasms without ejaculating? Not bad, save a bit on the laundry bill? Howabout if you could come without even getting an erection? How does that sound, a bunch of dry flaccid orgasms? Getting less appealing? Howabout if you were able to have a series of dry flaccid orgasms with your partner just by standing and looking at each other? Does that sound like fun, or something Asimov would use to get past the censors? Okay, here's the kicker: what if you were able, at your will, to have these orgasms just by watching the moonrise, or the starlight, or an old episode of Too Close For Comfort?

Getting kind of Twilight Zone-y, aren't we? Kind of like the Midas touch without the financial benefits.

Jack Johnston has these sorts of orgasms, and he holds seminars to teach us poor spooging slobs how to have them, too. He kindly refrained from actually having any while lecturing to us, but you got the feeling that he could have at any moment. The lecture took place at the Berkeley Good Vibrations, which is kind of ironic considering that if you learn to get orgasms from amateur astronomy you probably won't be investing a lot of money in butt-plugs and vibrating eggs.

I'm going to get the cheap shots out of the way here. Well, some of them. Johnston was taught to have his special orgasms by an inner self named "Yod." "Yod" was a court concubine in some ancient civilization or another, and as far as I could tell was a pretty fun guy to be around. So Johnston got in touch with his inner Yod and now he can come without doing anything a twelve-year-old couldn't legally watch. Make of that what you will.

The secret basically comes down to a magic word. There's also some breathing, and you have to show some restraint while masturbating at first, but it's really the magic word that brings it all home. And just to save you twenty bucks, I'm going to print the magic word here:

"huuuUUUHHHH"

That's it. He spelled it and everything. This word, pronounced with proper emotion and conviction, sets up bio-energetic resonances in your body that slosh on back up and eventually make you have something orgasmesque. It's something like when you were a kid and you'd play the tidal wave game in the tub, and the waves would get higher and higher until your mom came in and yelled at you.

He had us do the whole breathing thing, and one guy said he was on the very brink of orgasm, and another said he felt needles in his clavicle, but I was pretty tired and I probably just would have "huuuUUUHHHHed" myself to sleep if it had lasted long. By the way, nobody so much as unbuttoned their Bugle Boys during this seminar. It was all strictly PG.

So, those of you familiar with my subtle brand of cynicism may be noticing that I didn't precisely swallow this thing hook, line, and chakra. The first question I asked myself when I heard about the whole diet erection-free orgasm thing was "Are these REAL orgasms, or is this going to be some sort of special tingly feeling of cosmic love that we're going to CALL an orgasm to sell audio tapes?" I mean, this guy says he comes. People send him e-mail saying they're coming, too. And vast swaths of my sexual approach revolve around believing people when they tell me they're coming. "I'm coming," they say. "All righty," I say.

What I'm trying to get across here is that I'm not comfortable telling people they're not having orgasms. I'm sure they are. I can identify my own orgasms more easily than I can identify, say, the vice-president, and I'm sure these guys can, too. If the human mind is capable of stopping the heart momentarily, allowing one to walk across hot coals, or convincing a producer that a movie with Woody Harrelson and an Amish bowler is a good idea, instant no-contact orgasms are a quick stroll around the park in comparison.

However, there were some things about this guy and his ideas that made me feel like I was being indoctrinated into some sort of strange orgasm cult. Even aside from the Yod thing. First off there was his belief that what we were learning would make us just like multiply-orgasmic gals. Uh-huh. And if my grandmother had three speeds she'd be a vibrator. Look, I've seen all sorts of wacky-ass female orgasms of both the single-play and the auto-repeat variety. Some were difficult to bring off and some barely required my presence, but none of them involved pointing out the Pleiades. And if anyone had made that huuUUUHHHHH sound I'd remember it.

Also, Johnston has that whole heal-the-sick-raise-the-dead-save-the-world thing going you find in all your better cults. He seems to be pretty sure that domestic violence and international wars would basically dry up and go away if we all just learned his way of off-getting. Sort of a "What if we had a war and everybody came instead" sort of a situation. I can see why everyone would be too damn busy to wage war, but that wasn't his point. His point was that apparently the reason so many guys are such violent poozers is that they're so jealous of the female ability to come over and over again while wearing high heels and too much makeup that they go out and build automatic rifles and multiple warheads and channel-scanning remote controls. He didn't explain why singly-orgasmic women aren't out there on the front lines with them, but I wasn't about to ask.

We do, however, have to come back to the question of the orgasms themselves. Like I said, I figure on some level they have to be real, even if toward the end he finally revealed that they don't actually feel just like plain old regular sloppy friction orgasms, and that it's an "energizing" feeling rather than a release. But even if they are real, I have to ask myself if this is something that I really think would improve my life. I LIKE fucking. I LIKE erections. And to me, turning every emotional experience from looking at the night sky to making a casserole with your partner into a potentially orgasmic one is missing the point.

Personally, I'd rather have sex without orgasms than orgasms without sex. If I want the experience to go on and on I can damn well wait to come. Or I can come and then use my hands and mouth the way my particular gods intended. Or we can take a break, have a bit of a chat, replenish the fluids, and go at it again. And frankly, any and all of these sound more appealing to me than what Johnston's offering.