Orgasm

Orgasm, by Brian Richard Boylan

July, 1973  Dell Books

Now here’s a book on a topic I think we all might find some interest in. Subtitled “The Ultimate Experience,” Orgasm is part of the glut of sex paperbacks turned out in the early ‘70s; author Brian Boylan gives no bio for himself, but in the book he does reveal that in 1972 he published another sex-themed Dell PBO, Infidelity, which was taken from his interviews with a few hundred married couples who had cheated in some capacity. 

In his intro to this book, Boylan states that he personally has noticed that the orgasm itself is rarely focused on in these sex books; it is the end goal people work toward, and writers and researchers leave it at that. Or, “The last taboo,” as Boylan puts it. But what does an orgasm feel like? And how would women or men describe it? This apparently is the germ idea for Orgasm, but Boylan loses the plot, and for the most part the book comes off like any other early ‘70s sex book. 

This is humorous, given that Boylan spends the intro chapter of Orgasm ranting about the glut of sex books in the marketplace and how they are all essentially retreads of one another. That said, this is a good idea of how the market was responding to the sex glut of the early ‘70s; even the researchers were getting burned out. That is, if Boylan was indeed a researcher. His occasional self-references give the impression that he was, but there was no biographical detail about him I could find in the book. He’s certainly done his homework on the sex research front, though, but humorously he never refers to himself, maintaining an objective view and just telling us what the people he spoke to said. 

So then, Orgasm is not like How To Be A Tiger In Bed, but more like The Groupsex Scene, in that the majority of it is comprised of ribald dialog from early ‘70s men and women on how they like to get down. Boylan notes in his intro that he did not take notes nor record anything when talking to his subjects – saying that this often kept them from being totally open with him – and he admits that the dialog is filtered through his own writing style, which explains why all the characters “sound” the same. In other words, Boylan didn’t invade the privacy of his subjects like Robin Moore did in The Making Of The Happy Hooker. 

Occasionally Boylan does move away from the dry, factual tone, especially when complaining about all the misleading sex books of the day, or imagining how the average guy would describe an orgasm. There’s also a lot of complaining about sleaze novels, which Boylan asserts is the level to which most “sex books” stoop to. And yet, Orgasm also stoops to those levels, if only due to the sometimes-crazy comments Boylan’s subjects tell him. Oh, and given the lack of the male imagination in describing a climax, the majority of the commentary in Orgasm is from women. 

As with most of these books, Orgasm provides a glimpse into the era in which it was written: an era in which women were coming out of the shackles of the early twentieth century and were on The Pill, freely gabbing about their extramarital affairs and their love of the male genitalia (see below). Speaking of which, I am currently working on my time machine. 

In closing, I think this is one of those books where a bunch of random excerpts will do a better job of describing the book than I ever could: