One 63-year-old man had so many prostate orgasms that he couldn’t stop.
If you didn’t already know, it’s possible for someone with a prostate to orgasm by massaging it through their anus. I thought everyone already knew this, thanks to awkward conversations in health class and the movie Road Trip. But it’s an understudied phenomenon, and a British researcher who is interested in sex named Roy Levin has just published a review paper about it. At the paper’s center is a case study about our poor 63-year-old protagonist.
The unnamed man was healthy, with a normal prostate and high sex drive. He purchased an Aneros helix, a fancy butt plug, to massage his tender prostate after an infection. Combined with his daily tadalafil prescription (that’s Cialis, an erectile dysfunction and urinary tract infection drug), the sex toy made the infection go away. But naturally, he also began having extreme orgasms of the “Super-O” category, says the paper. He felt them everywhere — his penis, his anus, his pelvis, and his perineum (the place between the anus and the scrotum).
He became addicted.
The man needed to wear a condom in order to catch any of the semen that came out when he finished, reports the researcher. And soon, he was able to rewire his brain so that laying flat and putting on the condom was enough to get him off, no butt plug required. That’s when the problems started, as the scientific paper details:
This subject found that whilst the orgasms were extremely enjoyable at the time, he could easily spend too much time experiencing them. Further, he had an old neck injury which flared up in association with some neck spasm at orgasm whilst lying prone. It has proved difficult to stop experiencing these orgasms and ‘unwire’ himself back to normal.
Eventually, the man figured he should go back to masturbating and having regular sex. He still had up to 10 non-stimulatory orgasms before ejaculating during these encounters, but was able to stop having these random orgasms for a few months at a time.
There are few papers about prostate orgasms. These orgasms “appear to be more powerful and pleasurable” than penile orgasms, writes Levin. “There have been no published laboratory-conducted investigations of the orgasms induced by prostate stimulation alone.” There is a lot of talk about them on the internet. And it’s obvious that the prostate has important function when it comes to orgasms. “Sexual dysfunction is common in patients after radical prostatectomy (RP) for prostate cancer,” or people who’ve had their prostates removed, according to one recent paper.
As for the 63-year-old’s symptoms, while there’s anecdotal evidence that his experience may be shared by others, such “rewiring” hasn’t really been studied, Berit Brogaard, professor and director of the Brogaard Lab for Multisensory Research at the University of Miami, told Gizmodo. There are cases of spontaneous orgasms or other symptoms confused for orgasms, even epilepsy, she explained. She’d like to see more scientific research. Brogaard also pointed out that these days, researchers more frequently focus on the female orgasm, given how long it’s been neglected by science.
There’s not a lot of research into the prostate orgasm, either, she said. And Levin thinks its time for scientists to fill these gaps in our knowledge.
“Why, for an obvious example, have we still not had any brain imaging of prostate-stimulated orgasms so that we can compare them with penile orgasms?” Levin writes. “Who will lead the challenge?”