emmanuel reynaud holy virility the social construction of masculinity

is frigid, and not in imagination: ejaculation without orgasm is
not unusual in his little secret garden.» [2]
Sexologists take great interest in woman's potential for orgasm,
but they do not even imagine that man may also experience
pleasure in sexuality. To them, everything is simple: just as
woman needs only to lie down in order to feel desire, man οnly
needs to ejaculate to experience pleasure.
Modem sexology assimilates ejaculation and sexual pleasure in
man to the extent that it considers ejaculation as a synonym for
the male orgasm. This claim, on which most contemporary
sexologists base their research, has already been questioned in
scientific circles. For example, at the beginning of the fifties, the
Kinsey Report noted: «Because ejaculation is almost invariably
and immediately associated with orgasm, it is often considered
as the orgasm of the male. This interpretation is not
acceptable.» Earlier, Wilhelm Reich, who certainly did not take
existing ideas for granted, did not accept the traditional
equation of ejaculation and orgasm:
«The more exactly I had my patients describe their
behavior and sensations in the sexual act, the firmer
became my clinical conviction that all of them, without
exception, suffered from a severe disturbance of
genitality. This was especially true of those men who
bragged the loudest about their sexual conquests and
about how many times a night they 'could do it'. There
was no doubt: they were erectively very potent, but
ejaculation was accompanied by little or no pleasure,
or even the opposite, by disgust and unpleasant
sensations ... To the so-called potent man, the act had
the significance of conquering, piercing or raping the
woman. They wanted to give proof of their potency, or
to be admired for their erective endurance. This
'potency' could easily be destroyed by laying bare its
motives. It served to cover up serious disturbances of
erection of ejaculation. In none of these cases was
there as much as a trace of involuntary behavior or
loss of alertness during the act.» [3]
[The myth of the phallic orgasm / 61]
In spite of these earlier attempts to understand men's sexuality,
science has still taken a giant step backwards in the last few
years: it has in fact re-established the old myth that ejaculation
equals orgasm, even though it does not carry much weight in
everyday experience.
Ejaculation in itself has little to do with sensual pleasure: it is
primarily an image which concretises man's power, and a
means of reproducing himself through his descendants. It is no
more than the means by which he participates in procreation,
but he still attributes a disproportionate importance to its role.