How more orgasms can turn you into a creative genius

By Catherine Small

Good sex – and I mean exceptionally good sex, the sort that happens with an uncommonly attentive and passionate partner, with waves of whole-body-and-brain earth-shattering orgasms, can leave me high for days. Over time it gives me surges of creative energy.

On the flipside, having sampled this natural narcotic, the absence of mind-blowing soul-fucking can leave me in a colourless depression and artistic stasis for months on end.

For a while I thought I was unbalanced. I know my ex-partner was concerned by the level to which our sex life – or lack thereof – shaped my physical and mental health.

Then I read Naomi Wolf’s book Vagina, and everything started to make sense.

It’s not so uncommon for a woman to – on occasion – experience sex as transcendental. To enter a state of altered consciousness during extended orgasm and, if denied sex once aroused, to come crashing down into the blackest of moods, like a drug addict in withdrawal.

In 2006, scientist Janniko Georgiardis used an MRI to study the brain during orgasm. He found that for women, the areas of the brain associated with self-awareness, inhibition and self-regulation are silenced during orgasm, indicating a state of altered consciousness –  loss of boundaries, loss of a sense of self, and loss of control.

Think a woman looks crazy when she’s coming? She’s literally lost her mind.

As clinical as it sounds, chemicals in the brain are the vehicles for profound human experiences. Love is a chemical reaction. Trances, mysticism, visions, bliss and rapture – whether through drugs, epilepsy, or just a really good fuck – are all prompted by chemical fireworks in the brain.

Nerves send orders to the pituitary and hypothalamus glands to produce and release chemicals like dopamine that alter our physical and emotional states.

Wolf calls dopamine the “ultimate feminist chemical” because it increases focus, motivation, confidence, creativity and assertiveness.

Think of somebody who has just snorted a line of coke: this is what a hit of dopamine is like. Dopamine rises during arousal to prepare the way for orgasm. After orgasm, it drops a little bit for a woman and drastically for a man; she has energy while he wants to sleep. If a woman has multiple orgasms, she gets hit after hit of dopamine.

She gets higher and higher.

Climax and orgasm also flood the brain with opioids. There’s a reason heroin turns people into junkies: opioids feel fucking amazing. They’re blissful and euphoric, associated with mysticism and trances. Again, for the multi-orgasmic woman, opioid levels are likely to be higher.

Sex, stroking and cuddling send oxytocin into the brain, more for women than men. Oxytocin makes us feel calm, intuitive, gentle, and in love – which is why it’s called the ‘cuddle hormone’.

Studies have also shown that oxytocin increases the ability to see the connections between things, an important aspect of creativity.

So while fucking feels amazing for both genders, really good sex can leave a multi-orgasmic woman especially assertive, positive, energised and intuitive: a creative force of nature.

Georgia O’Keefe, the artist whose soft, sensual, vulva-esque paintings of flowers were shocking at the time, had her most productive period of work during her erotic relationship with Alfred Stieglitz. Love affairs have often resulted in astounding artworks by male and female artists – such as Francis Bacon’s relationship with his gay lover George Dyer that inspired some of his best work.

Art galleries are cathedrals of sex.

The world of literature is just as raunchy: Gertrude Stein’s novels took an experimental and sensual turn when she began living with her lesbian lover, Alice B. Toklas. Even the very G-rated prose of Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre tells of a mild-mannered woman turned wild by sexual love.

It is a common perception that women must become passionless or masculine to crack the glass ceiling and succeed. But for brilliantly creative and revolutionary women, their passionately sexual feminine nature inspires and drives them.

Creativity and sex is a positive feedback loop. They fuel each other.

It might sound nuts, but Tantric-style whole-body orgasms can even occur in an entirely non-sexual context. Artists sometimes experience orgasms while painting, writing, or performing on stage. Being in “the zone” of creative flow can be arousing and satisfying in a physical, erotic way.

Historically, men have dominated the arts – along with just about everything else other than childbirth, lactation and vagina ownership. Wolff argues this is because of the tendency of women to spend the majority of their adult lives as mothers – ever in demand, ever distracted, never independent.

In order to create, ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own’.

But perhaps there’s more to it than that. Perhaps the difference in creative output might be partly because throughout history humanity has feared, condemned, misunderstood, disrespected and denied women’s sexuality. And this has had a crippling effect on what might have otherwise been a multitude of female creative geniuses.

While being a more sensitive person might make sex a fuller experience, and being with a long-term partner might make things more comfortable and pleasurable, the men I’ve spoken to don’t relate to the experience of amazing sex as a state of altered consciousness or transcendence, worlds apart from mere physical pleasure. Could it be that men are already operating at something closer to their sexual potential, getting that awesome chemical cocktail with ease, while some of their creative genius come from elsewhere?

Maybe to reach equality in the arts, female sexuality needs to be understood properly and allowed to flourish.

This is quite a different thing to the male-oriented, linear, pornographic view of sex that is the generally accepted model in what is supposed to be a liberated and educated society.

So how do you turn your stick figures into Mona Lisas?

It’s a complex and subtle journey of exploration, but a few tidbits of biology and psychology are worth a mention, if only because it would be cruel to leave everyone panting after some magical orgasm with nothing to do.

The automatic nervous system (ANS) regulates bodily functions like breath, heartbeat and arousal. It needs to be activated properly to bring a woman to the point where she relaxes, breathes deeply, fills with blood in all the right places and gets that all-important surge of dopamine.

Regular affection throughout the day are a good place to start. Unhurried cuddling, kissing, eye contact, and stroking before and during sex get the ANS to its optimal state. Unlike what the word ‘foreplay’ implies, these are not optional extras doled out to women like gifts; they’re an absolutely essential part of great sex.

Without fully activating the ANS, a woman can still have sex and climax – even multiple times – but it won’t be memorable.

Also: slow the fuck down. Take triple the time to warm up and quadruple the time to pleasure her, dial back the speed and pressure to an easy, leisurely pace, and her orgasms will bring down the house.

But maybe the best thing anyone can do to get on the vagina-brain train is talk. Communicate. You know, that noisy thing that we do with our mouths when our thumbs aren’t busy and our eyes aren’t glued to screens.

Talk comfortably, openly and honestly about sex, what we like and what we don’t, without stigma or shame or criticism. Then we can learn a lot more about ourselves and each other.

Sex will get better for everyone. And hopefully more women will be walking around on clouds with vagina-addled brains.