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than take his thing out of me. Of me. Not until he has let go of all he has, and give it to me. To me. To me. When he does, I feel a power. I be strong, I be pretty, I be young. And then I wait. He shivers and tosses his head. Now I be strong enough, pretty enough, and young enough to let him make me come. I take my fingers out of his and put my hands on his behind. My legs drop back onto the bed. I don’t make no noise, because the chil’ren might hear. I beginto feel those little bits of colour floating up into me – deep in me. That streak of green from the june-bug light, the purple from the berries trickling along my thighs, Mama’s lemonade yellow runs sweet in me. Then I feel like I’m laughing between my legs, and the laughing gets all mixed up with the colours, and I’m afraid I’ll come and afraid I won’t. But I know I will. And I do. And it be rainbow all inside. And it lasts and lasts and lasts.
    What is most interesting to the student of the orgasm about Benedict’s collection of examples of what she regards as good sexual literature is that in the rare cases where a male author has gone the distance in attempting to provide a proper description of orgasm, it is not to explain what his own climax feels like, but what his female partner’s orgasm feels like to him. John Casey, in his novel
Spartina
, provides a good example of this:
    He turned his head so his cheek was flat against her. He could feel her muscles moving softly – her coming was more in her mind still; when she got closer she would become a single band of muscle, like a fish – all of her would move at once, flickering and curving, unified from jaw to tail …
    The most common description of the physical sensation of orgasm, male and female, in both literature and everyday conversation is, paradoxically, that it is ‘difficult to describe’, or ‘indescribable’. W.C. Fields expressed this paradox when he observed: ‘There may be some things that are better than sex, and there may be some things that are worse. But there is nothing exactly like it.’ We frequently follow our dumb-foundedness when it comes to describing sex by comparing it to things we have almost certainly never experienced – volcanoes erupting, cannons firing, ‘paradise’, an explosion, the earth indeed (with due respect to Ernest Hemingway) moving. Germaine Greer once likened orgasm to childbirth; she ischildless. It was Greer, however, who was on hand to rap another writer, Sean Thomas, over the knuckles when he described male lust in
Cosmopolitan
magazine. ‘Male lust is like a great river crashing down to the sea – put an obstacle in its path and it will merely find another route,’ said Thomas.
    Greer commented acidly: ‘It is one of the commonplaces of pornography grossly to exaggerate the volume of ejaculation. Male sexuality is more like a sluggish trickle meandering across a delta, dissipating its force in trillions of channels; twentieth-century men are like De Sade’s jaded aristocrats, so sated with sexual imagery that they must behold ever more bizarre and extravagant displays before they can achieve potency.’
    As for more experiential descriptions of orgasm: an expulsion of tension, a total release, a big shiver, a glorious sneeze, a spasm, a fluttering, a pulsating, a flash, a surge and a rush are among the less prosaic. Kenneth Mah at the psychology department of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, collected descriptions of orgasm for his PhD dissertation. He offered participants a rich variety of adjectives to choose from in describing their orgasms, among them, ‘pulsating’, ‘erupting’, ‘quivering’ and ‘rapturous’. But among his respondents, the distinctly dowdy ‘powerful’ ‘intense’ and ‘pleasurable’ were by far the most popular.
    In a 1998 article in the Indian magazine
The