Multiple Orgasms for Men

[Note:  this is the first of five posts on male multiple orgasms]   

For most men, alas, having multiple orgasms isn’t quite as simple as “just keep going.” It’s true that most men who practice tantric sex will experience multiple orgasms sooner or later, quite naturally, and some men can pretty much count on having one or more additional orgasms after ejaculation during lingam massage. But few men can be consistently and intentionally multi-orgasmic unless they have deliberately learned how to have an orgasm without an ejaculation.

So the question for each man is whether you should try to learn how to do this, and why. Do you want more orgasms for greater pleasure? Great, but it’s only fair to warn you that some men spend months or years learning the most common way to have non-ejaculatory orgasms (NEOs), and are then a little bit disappointed to discover that for them the extra orgasms are somewhat less intense. (This seems to happen more with men in their 20s and 30s.  Most older men say they notice very little difference between an NEO and a normal orgasm.)

Of the men I interviewed who are multi-orgasmic, almost half – 11 out of 24 – usually prefer to have a single, intense, multi-chakra orgasm during lingam massage (with or without natural pre-shocks and after-shocks) instead of having several separate non-ejaculatory orgasms and a final ejaculatory orgasm. They use their hard-earned skills mainly to extend their endurance during yab-yum and conventional sex and to stop a premature ending, if necessary, during lingam massage.

Multiple Orgasms and Increased Endurance

And that, of course, is the real reason most men want to be multi-orgasmic: endurance. The extra orgasms are nice, but for most guys it’s more about lasting longer.

You may want more endurance for many reasons. So you can experience the “Tantric high.” So your wife or girlfriend will have time to have at least one orgasm during vaginal sex, and maybe more. So you can have confidence in your lovemaking prowess. So you can feel like a stud! And most of all, so you never have to hear those horrible words “premature ejaculation” ever again!

And if you listen to many women, or read any of thousands of sex columns and books by various "experts," the biggest problem in the bedroom is simply that most men come too fast. Masters and Johnson discovered in their lab studies in the 1960s that most men last for less than three minutes of conventional vaginal thrusting and most women take much more than twice that long to reach orgasm, assuming that they can even have an orgasm from purely vaginal sex. (Perhaps half of all women simply can't, no matter how long it lasts, without some other stimulation.) Most research since then has confirmed these numbers or worse.

Rethinking the Problem

Under these circumstances, putting all the responsibility for the mismatch on one partner or one gender does not especially help to solve the problem. I’m going to make a slightly heretical suggestion. The problem is not so much the mismatch in timing as the emphasis on vaginal thrusting. Any man who can learn to be multi-orgasmic can also learn, with much less effort, to last at least ten minutes during intercourse, and almost all women can learn how to reach orgasm in less time than that, provided we include lots of creative variants on “normal” intercourse.

The women I interviewed said unanimously that learning Tantra caused them to be able to reach orgasm faster than they ever had before. During yoni massage, most shifted very quickly from “Will I have an orgasm?” to “How can we delay my first orgasm so it will be more intense?” For the majority, this carried over even to maithuna, the – supposedly – vaginal sex at the end of Tantra, as long as we recognize that almost all of these couples also practice some sort of clitoral or other stimulation before and/or during “vaginal” sex.

I’m not going to suggest that having the ability to have an orgasm without losing your erection isn’t convenient or helpful. It is. Furthermore, it is universally appreciated by women whose men have learned to do it.

But even in those cases where men have this ability, none of the couples are practicing conventional sex as it is usually described in the studies of what actually goes on in the bedroom: three minutes of foreplay, followed by non-stop vaginal thrusting until the man comes. After learning Tantra, after learning to really, deeply understand each other’s bodies and needs, after learning to communicate completely and openly with each other, why would a couple reduce sex to such a caricature?

And the fact is that the Tantric women whose partners have not learned to block ejaculation are not complaining. Those couples may spend a bit more time on both foreplay and “moreplay.” They are a bit more likely to prefer positions that give the woman more stimulation and control. They are likely to incorporate somewhat more clitoral stimulation from fingers, tongue, a toy, or a vibrator into “conventional” sex. They may indulge in nipple play or anal play a bit more. But, in truth, all of the couples I talked to do at least some of those things. The idea that sex should consist of nothing but a penis moving back and forth in a vagina is simply un-Tantric!

Multiple Orgasms and Tantra

So if you’re a man and your only reason for wanting to be multi-orgasmic is to be able to help your partner reach orgasm every time you have sex, my answer is that being multi-orgasmic, while undeniably useful, is not the only – and definitely not the easiest – way to do that.

For men, being multi-orgasmic is not in any way essential to Tantric sex, great sex, wonderful sex, or satisfying sex. It’s important to understand this because some men who try to learn the techniques described below simply don’t succeed.

It’s true that the men I interviewed had a surprisingly high rate of success: Around three quarters of those who tried succeeded. But this is almost certainly because of a selection effect: I was much more likely to be introduced to a couple if our mutual friends thought they were especially successful at learning Tantra.  And learning to have multiple orgasms is inevitably seen as a kind of advanced merit badge for male Tantrics – not at all essential, but an indication of “star student” status – so the people I met and interviewed were at least somewhat unrepresentative.

Judging from other people’s comments and observations, moreover, I would guess that less than half of the men who make a serious effort succeed, and that less than 5% of the men who buy the typical books succeed. Most don’t get past the first assignment, which is to do Kegels many times a day for at least a month.

The Decision

Have I discouraged you? That’s not really my goal, because even if you don’t succeed, trying to learn to be multi-orgasmic can help you have better sex in a number of ways. But I do want to encourage you to delay your decision to really commit extra time and effort to this until you are somewhat further along with your Tantric curriculum.

To begin with, the first step in the standard process for becoming multi-orgasmic is to greatly strengthen your Kegel muscles. This is fun and easy to do, increases your staying power, and increases the intensity of your orgasms, so you should be doing it anyway!

Learning Tantra also requires learning to meditate, which takes time and attention. And you need to learn how to give and how to receive a complete Tantric massage, including controlling your arousal and your attention as much as necessary to achieve a multi-chakra orgasm.

In other words, if you and your partner are learning Tantra together, you are going to be very busy with a lot to learn and do at the beginning. Only after you are well on the road to success in all of these areas should you seriously consider the extensive discipline necessary to learn to be multi-orgasmic.

The final consideration is the inevitable limit that your schedule, your age, your body, and your relationship put on the number of orgasms and ejaculations you can have in a day or week. As you will see when I describe the principal method for learning to block ejaculation with Kegel clenches, below, this takes many, many sessions, with or without a partner, and most of them will result in ejaculation without providing much or any benefit for your partner. Finding time to do this, and having a partner willing to put up with it, may be a problem.

In many ways, the quest to become multi-orgasmic makes more sense for single men, or for men who see their regular partner only at intervals. Of the 24 multi-orgasmic men I interviewed, six learned it while single, four learned it during extended separation periods (military deployments and jobs on different coasts), five learned it while in weekend-only dating situations (e.g., working in DC with a fiancée in NYC), and one learned it as part of his “two weeks at home/two weeks away” work situation.

Only eight actually learned to do this while in a full-time, live-in relationship, and it took most of them noticeably longer than the others. One learned it in “a little more than two years, by doing the exercises immediately after having sex with my wife, which she wasn’t thrilled about, so I didn’t do it very often.”

My Partner's Odyssey

At the far extreme, my partner took almost ten years to learn it, practicing mostly when I was sick or when one of us was traveling.  So he wasn't trying very hard and for years he was getting nowhere. Finally when he turned forty he decided to "get serious about it" and try the idea mentioned above of doing practice sessions immediately after having normal sex. So twice a week, for about 6 months, we added a session of lingam massage/masturbation to the end of our normal nighttime sex activities.  Sometimes I did it for him, or we alternated, but often I curled up next to him and went to sleep, leaving him to practice by himself, because I have to be up earlier than he does in the morning.  He made very slow progress for almost five months, but he stuck with it, and then something clicked and he quickly got better and better at it.

Was it worth it? He says it was, but for him it's in the "nice, but not essential" category. If it hadn't been for the personal challenge, and the fact that I was interviewing men who had learned to do it, he probably wouldn't have stuck with it. He says that the biggest benefit is that it makes him "feel studlier" when he's able to match me, orgasm for orgasm, at the end of normal sex.

But from my own selfish point of view, it's definitely worth it. To begin with, it's nice not to have to be so careful about lingam massage during Tantra sessions. If I push him a little bit too close to the edge before he's ready, he can have a dry orgasm and then we can continue on. But the biggest benefit for me is the one he cited – being able to share multiple orgasms during vaginal sex, whether it's our normal nighttime sex or during maithuna at the end of a Tantra session.

In the past, a perfect ending for me would be having 4 or 5 orgasms of increasing intensity with him joining me on the last one.  Unfortunately, this didn't happen very often.  On rare occasions, he would come on my third or fourth orgasm and then have one or even two natural aftershocks if I kept going.  But that happened even less often, and even when it did the initial orgasms felt less complete because I was experiencing them alone, and the later ones felt weaker because he was starting to get soft.

The difference now is two-fold:  I'm much more likely to get as many O's as I want, and I get them in stereo!  When I climax, I'm feeling him come too, and I'm experiencing his side of it as well as my own, and that always makes an orgasm much more powerful and enjoyable for me.  In the past, that only happened on the last one (or sometimes the last two or three, in the case of natural aftershocks).  Now, we usually share all of them. Occasionally, one of us will start ahead of the other and have the first one solo, but we almost always synch up after that and stay in synch to the end.  It's great!


Tomorrow, we'll take a look at how male multiple orgasms got to be a hot topic, and I will suggest some good resources for you to look at.