Orgasm Addict

By Crispin Sartwell

A signal moment in the history of American popular song and of human intellectual history arrived in 1975, with Donna Summer's "Love to Love You, Baby." Many of us had, before that, never actually heard an orgasm on the radio. The disco era's decadence was off too a moaning start, while the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, confronted by Summer's performance, came, as it were, to a new understanding of science as a whole.

"Love to Love You," like the orgasm itself, has stood the test of time as a fundamental human experience. And yet the question has always nagged at me, as it has many men, including Heisenberg: was Donna only faking? Admittedly, the recording studio, over a period of days, with repeated takes, overdubs, etc. could be, for many women, a difficult context in which to achieve climax. And yet Summer's plummy tones, her aspirated consonants, the fluting of her great pipes, were strangely convincing.

Indeed the female orgasm - like Everest, the Grail, the Theory of Everything, accounting, soccer, human sacrifice, birdwatching, sleight of hand, alcoholism, Greek philosophy, coin collecting, mindless violence, and self-delusion - is a famous site of male solicitous attention, exertion, and anxiety.

Now a Canadian musician and his girlfriend hope, as it were, to lay the mysteries of the female orgasm to rest. Aaron Funk and Rachael Kozak, of Winnipeg, have been recording their romps, which Funk then processes through a variety of digital procedures, until grunts and moans swell, as it were, into choirs.

The album, "Nymphomatriarch," is supposed to be released next year, and includes songs such as "Pervs," "Blood on the Rope," and "Hymen Tramp Choir."

Kozak is only the latest in a long line of Canadian songbirds to wow the world, from Anne Murray to k.d. laing to Avril Lavigne. And yet Kozak's work may well be the richest in philosophical import. For soon the world will be asking itself: is that a choir of Kozaks achieving orgasm, or what?

We must, in this context, like Donna Summer, confront the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: that the conditions of observation alter the observed phenomena; that we can never know what something is outside of our own experience of it.

So, in this case, Kozak knows that she is being recorded. This will certainly have an effect on her orgasms; indeed, the result may have less to do with the way Kozak sounds during an unobserved spasm than with the way she wants us to think she sounds. This in turn is complicated by the way she thinks Funk wants her to sound, which in turn is nuanced by the way she thinks Funk wants us to think she sounds. Thus far, we face the Donna Summer problem that led Werner Heisenberg to his principle.

But then we have a series of even deeper conceptual issues. For Funk is not only listening and recording, he is actually digitally manipulating Kozak's orgasms. He is collaborating in the making of her orgasm, as though it was his intellectual property: one of the first times that as man has actually had the female orgasm. It's as though Heisenberg not only altered physics by his observation, but also created and sold it at a profit.

But Funk and Kozak's final theoretical contribution may be deeper even than that, if such a thing is possible. For "Nymphomatriarch" raises the problem of whether the *guy* is simulating orgasm. A simulated ejaculation is admittedly a difficult and complex achievement, but Funk's productions actually isolate the male orgasm as a sonic event from ejaculation as a physiological one, and hence raise the specter of a choir of men, all of them Funk, pretending to come.

This is a blow, so to speak, not only for metaphysics, but for sexual equality: it is at once an abstract conceptual and concrete political advance.

Nymphomatriarch awaits only its Heisenberg.