Any Man Can
<< About the Authors >>

Most Orgasms
World Sex Records
1990

For 22 years, Doctors William Hartman and Marilyn Fithian of the Center for Marital and Sexual Studies in Long Beach, California, have been faithfully recording the orgasmic response in their laboratory. After hooking up subjects to blood-pressure and heart-rate monitors and various sensors in the vagina or anus, the doctors would sit by the beside and take copious notes as the subjects busied themselves. In an attempt to head off accusations of prurience, they say such research is stupifyingly dull, saying they had to "struggle to stay awake." However, they overcame the tedium to spend 10,000 hours in the laboratory. After several false starts (originally they had the subjects push a button whenever they had a orgasm, but during the heat of the moment they usually became too preoccupied to be concerned with the cause of research), the study continued apace, eventually encompassing 751 individuals. The most orgasms they recorded in an hour for a woman is a staggering 134, while the best men could do was 16. How we lesser mortals can hope to achieve anything in that vicinity was not discussed.


Center for Marital and Sexual Studies
William E. Hartman, Marilyn A. Fithian
1994

The Center for Marital and Sexual Studies in Long Beach, California, was one of the early centers for the treatment of sexual problems. It was founded by William E. Hartman and Marilyn A. Fithian. Hartman was born February 17, 1919, in Meadville, Pennsylvania, the first of four children of Hartley J. and Janet Ellis Hartman. Both his father and maternal grandfather were Methodist ministers. He was educated at New York University and Centenary College and served in the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II for four and a half years. In 1944, he married Iva Decker, and they had seven children and more than two dozen grandchildren. They were divorced in 1980.
After the war, Hartman went on to study at the University of Southern California, from which he received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. He then joined the faculty of California State University at Long Beach, where he taught sociology for some 30 years before retiring in 1980. He is a past president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex.

Marilyn A. Fithian, the cofounder of the Center, was born in 1921 in Wasco, Oregon. She is the mother of four and grandmother of eight. After her children were born she went back to school and received a B.A. degree from California State University at Long Beach; she did graduate work at California State University at Los Angeles. She has an honorary doctorate from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Human Sexuality. She worked for a time in the Counseling Center at California State-Long Beach and eventually became a licensed marriage, family, and child counselor.

In the early 1960s, Hartman was a professor of sociology and chairman of the Department of Sociology and Social Welfare at California State University at Long Beach. He admired and respected the research in human sexuality done by Dr. William H. Masters in St. Louis. He felt that a similar research and therapy facility should be established in California and asked Fithian to join him as a member of a dual-sex research-therapy team.

In 1966, a group of professional people were asked to be an advisory board for the new center, the main purposes of which were to be research and treatment of sexual problems. The board comprised physicians, lawyers, therapists, educators, ministers, and one politician. It was designed to obtain feedback and support not only from professionals but also from the Long Beach community about the need and desire to have a treatment and research center in human sexuality.

Following consultation and advice, the Center opened in 1968 as a California nonprofit organization. and from the first it included a clinic for those with limited income. In 1972, Hartman and Fithian published a book, Treatment of Sexual Dysfunction, dealing with their 34-step treatment process. With publication came numerous requests for training, and eventually 54 dual-sex teams were trained. During the years immediately following, several teams at a time were going through training. Since each team often worked not only with Hartman or Fithian but also with other team members, a number of people were working at the Center at any one time. Training involved an intensive six-week, 360-400 hour, seven-day-a-week program. The time differential was due to required hours as opposed to the extra time most of the trainees spent in nonrequired activities, such as the ongoing physiological research being conducted at the Center.

There was also a demand for shorter training from therapists who wanted more than one- or two-day seminars but not the six>week program. The result was a week-long training program held several times a year for many years, with attendance ranging from 10 to 20 therapists. There were almost always a number of student interns working as well.

Initially, the Center developed audiovisual materials its own use, but as other professionals saw them they wanted copies. The result was the production of some 35 films, which were made available to others.

In 1970, some rudimentary physiological research began. In 1972, the late Berry Campbell, a research physiologist from the University of California Medical School at Irvine, joined the Center quarter-time as part of his teaching load. Campbell initially used borrowed equipment, but the Center itself eventually purchased a Beckman R411 Dynograph eight-channel recorder.

To support the research, Hartman and Fithian offered short-term seminars on sexual therapy in most of the major cities in the United States. The first seminar was held for about 20 people, but the numbers built up to as many as 600 in such major centers as New York City. Short-term seminars continued to be held until 1982. and in some years more than two dozen such seminars were held. The money earned from them not only allowed the continuation of the research but also the upgrading and purchase of more and newer research equipment, some made specifically for the Center.

Hartman and Fithian not only used the laboratory for their own research, but they allowed a number of other professionals access to it as well. Though the cofounders were usually present, the researchers published the results under their own name. All the research subjects at the Center were volunteers, and none were paid. Those who volunteered to be in films, however, were given a modest amount to enable the Center to have a contract with them.

For the physiological research sample, Hartman and Fithian gathered records on 751 individuals (282 males and 469 females). To date, this is the largest number of subjects ever studied in human sexual response research. Some were monitored as many as 20 times. It is estimated that approximately 10,000 research hours were spent on monitoring and evaluating this body of work, with many more uncalculated hours spent on ongoing study. The first multiply-orgasmic men were monitored in the laboratory in 1972; multiply-orgasmic women were also studied, as was penile sensitivity and many other topics.

The major purpose of the center was therapy, however. The basic therapy program was a 34-step two-week intensive residential treatment program, although there were slight variations to suit the needs of the client. The main therapy focus was on sexual problems, although traditional talk therapy was also provided where indicated.

Almost all the work was with couples, although some singles were also treated, some with the help of surrogates. Hartman and Fithian were the first to treat female singles with surrogates. During the height of the Center's activities in the 1980s, more single females were treated than males. A large proportion of both male and female singles were virgins or had extremely limited sexual experience. To be treated by surrogates clients must have had tests for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and sexually transmitted disease and have used safe sex; the treatment was aimed at heterosexual, not homosexual, men or women.

Hartman and Fithian were primarily interested in relationships. and this was just as true for singles as for married couples. Fear of intimacy is a major problem, and helping individuals learn to be warm, caring people has always been an important part of their therapy. Since 1985, Hartman and Fithian have seen fewer clients and have been most interested in analyzing their research data and writing. Some of the more innovative aspects of their work include sexological examination and body imagery.

In the 1970s and 1980s, when their practice was at its height, they conducted sex therapy in groups on a three- and five-day basis, with excellent follow-up results. This is probably the most economical way to do sex therapy for clients, but many people are not comfortable working in a group. Still, some long-standing sexual problems, such as impotency, were often resolved in this format.

At the conclusion of therapy, each client was asked to rate statistically the extent to which his or her goal in entering therapy had been accomplished. The overall ratings in such cases averaged 92 percent satisfaction. Since 1985, Hartman and Fithian have focused on research and writing. Any Man Can, a book on male multiply-orgasmic research subjects, was published in 1984. Further books are in process.


Influenced Sex Research
The New York Times
October 13, 1997

William E. Hartman, whose teachings and research on sex influenced a generation of sex therapists, died on Sept. 26 in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 78 and lived in Long Beach.

The cause was myasthenia gravis, a degenerative muscle disease, said Marilyn A. Fithian, his longtime colleague and companion.

The team of Hartman and Fithian earned notice for studies on orgasms and sexual dysfunction, as well as their teaching. Sexologists often include Mr. Hartman and Ms. Fithian alongside figures like Alfred Kinsey, and William Masters and Virginia Johnson.

In 1968, Mr. Hartman and Ms. Fithian founded the Center for Marital and Sexual Studies in Long Beach to conduct sex therapy and observe, film and monitor the physiology of subjects in sexual activity. A resulting book, ''Treatment of Sexual Dysfunction,'' is still used as a text. The book was among the first to discuss the importance of having a good self-image to achieve sexual fulfillment.

Mr. Hartman and Ms. Fithian also advocated using trained sexual surrogates to help people with sexual difficulties. In 1984, Mr. Hartman and Ms. Fithian wrote ''Any Man Can,'' about multiple male orgasms.

Such research came at a personal cost to Mr. Hartman, who was reared a Mormon. He was ultimately excommunicated; near his death, he was trying to win readmission.

Mr. Hartman's first major research was a study of nudism. He once told of being apprehensive about asking for a grant to conduct the study because of its controversial nature in the early 1960's. In the end, he received the money, but with the caveat that he could not drive to nudist clubs in a campus-owned car.

In that research, Mr. Hartman first enlisted the help of Ms. Fithian to administer questionnaires. Their findings, that nudists were normal people who were comfortable with their bodies, were published in 1970 in ''Nudist Society.''

Mr. Hartman was born on Feb. 17, 1919, in Meadville, Pa. He received his bachelor's, master's and doctorate in sociology at the University of Southern California. He joined the faculty at the California State University at Long Beach in 1951 and retired in 1980. Mr. Hartman and Ms. Fithian closed the Center for Sexual and Marital Studies in 1984 but continued to give seminars.

Surviving are five sons, Larry, of Yucca Valley, Calif., Paul, of Encinitas, Calif., Steve, of Claremont, Calif., Taylor, of Sandy, Utah, and William Jr., of Platt City, Mo., and two daughters, Carol Whipple of Bountiful, Utah, and Beverly Rasmussen of Fruit Heights, Utah.


Senior student talks about sex
Sharon Nagy
October 5, 1998

It was the two virgins, an elderly couple, that was the most difficult case for world-renowned sex therapist Marilyn Fithian. "Neither one could figure out what to do when we sent them to the hotel," Fithian said.

Young singles were much easier to work with and offered more rewards, considering they had a whole lifetime ahead of them, she said.

Fithian, who holds a doctorate in human sexuality, has been intertwined in Cal State Long Beach since graduating from high school. She earned her bachelor's degree in sociology from CSULB in 1961 and taught classes part time from 1961 to 1979 in the psychology, comparative literature, English and sociology departments. Now semi-retired, she takes classes through the Senior University program.

Two years ago, Fithian was involved in a car accident that damaged soft tissue in her legs. It made walking difficult for her. Now, Fithian takes the student bus to school and attributes walking from the bus stop to her classes as an important part of her rehabilitation.

At 77, she still finds time to write papers for conferences, conduct interviews, give presentations and take classes at CSULB. Fithian is still sought after for her expertise and advice on sex.

"I get calls from reporters from magazines like Redbook and Cosmopolitan and they say the interview will only take 15 minutes, but we end up talking for hours," she said.

For more than 25 years, Fithian ran a nonprofit organization, the Center for Marital and Sexual Studies, with her late partner, William Hartman, Ph.D.

Singles or couples would come to her center for two-week sessions. Fees would run from $5,000 to $10,000.

Fithian said two weeks is the most effective time frame for resolving problems.

"If it goes on for more than two weeks, people tend to stay in therapy forever," she said. "I had a woman who came in with a $60,000 psychiatric bill, yet we got her problem taken care of in two weeks."

One of the first exercises patients participated in was a test matching names of sexual organs to a drawn-out diagram of male and female genitalia.

"You would be surprised how many people don't know the names of their own body parts," she said. "How can they function sexually if they don't know the territory?

Cal State Los Angeles did an independent study on their center by client evaluations and found a 92 percent success rate.

Fithian's mother taught human sexuality and consequently she grew up feeling comfortable talking about sex. She became involved in the sex-related field after realizing so many acquaintances' problems stemmed from not communicating about sex.

"Nobody talks about sex in the United States. I think the Clinton situation is a good thing because it forces the issue out into the open," she said.

Fithian and Hartman also funded their own research, observing 751 different subjects having sex, which produced an enormous amount of data on topics.

Fithian had to close the center in 1996, when her partner fell ill and could not continue working. He died Sept. 28, 1997.

This past summer, Fithian presented a 45-page paper on pornography at a conference sponsored by the human sexuality department at Cal State Northridge. To research the paper, she watched 100 adult films spanning the early century to modern day, and read 50 journal articles and 10 books on pornography.


Coming, Coming, Gone
Jonathan Margolis
(Excerpt from: O: The Intimate History of the Orgasm, 2005)

Although human males have a trickier task maintaining erection than most mammals in that they depend entirely on hydraulics — most animals, including all primates except man, have a bone called the baculum to shore themselves up — men still do not inevitably lose their erection after orgasm or ejaculation. A controversial (and lately fashionable) body of opinion exists that orgasm and ejaculation in men are quite separate functions; that physiologically, ejaculation is simply a reflex that occurs at the base of the spine, an involuntary muscle spasm resulting in the ejection of semen and felt only in the penis, whereas orgasm is somehow much more than that, an unspecified ‘whole body experience’ produced by clenching muscles throughout body to avoid the penis being sensitised.

Multiple orgasm, in which ejaculation is not necessarily involved, is according to some modern research and ancient texts on sex something of which men are physiologically capable only by the application of learned techniques. Researchers William Hartman and Marilyn Fithian of the Center for Marital and Sexual Studies in Long Beach, California were the first sexologists to present scientific data on the existence of multi-orgasmic men. They monitored the orgasms of 282, of whom 33 proved multi-orgasmic. Their most prolifically orgasmic subject was an athletic young man who consistently managed sixteen orgasms or thereabouts in less than an hour. Sex researchers Beverly Whipple and colleagues, writing in the Journal of Sex Education and Therapy, have for their part reported on a man who had six orgasms in thirty-six minutes with no erection loss.

The secret to men achieving multiple orgasms, according to Hartman and Fithian, is nothing more spiritual or arcane than learning to control ejaculation via the PC muscle, also known as the voluntary urinary sphincter muscle, that starts and stops the flow of urine. Once strengthened, it can provide the same sort of control over ejaculation. ‘Just prior to the moment of ejaculatory inevitability, you clench the PC tight and hold it until the urge to ejaculate passes — roughly fifteen seconds,’ Hartman reports.

Another modern researcher, Barbara Keesling, who has worked as a surrogate sexual partner, has moreover identified three distinct patterns of male multiple orgasm; one, she calls non-ejaculatory orgasm (NEO) in which a man has an orgasm but inhibits ejaculation using the PC muscle, and only allows himself to ejaculate (‘release the hounds’) after several orgasms. Keesling's second model is multi-ejaculation, in which a man has several partial ejaculations in succession. Her third pattern is for the man to have one intense orgasm and ejaculation, followed by less intense ‘aftershocks’. All of these patterns, says Keesling, can occur without loss of erection. Other researchers speak of a phenomenon called ‘injaculation’, whereby semen is retracted by force of will into the bladder instead of out through the penis. (‘Injaculation’ is one of the Holy Grails of practitioners of ‘Tantric sex’, an offshoot of Buddhism which explores sexuality as a way of transcending the limitations of ordinary life. But it is worth noting that backwards-flowing semen is elsewhere regarded as a male sexual dysfunction.)

Men who can achieve multiple orgasm, Keesling reports, say — say being the important word, since one always suspects a measure of one-upmanship in this field, as in ejaculatory volume and trajectory measurements — that they feel energised rather than depleted after orgasm, and that their climaxes are stronger and more intense. She writes: ‘I describe orgasms on a continuum from a localised genital sensation that is mildly pleasurable to a full-body orgasm with intense psychological sensations and all the fireworks — the kind of orgasm one of my clients calls “the psychedelic jackpot that lights up the universe”.’

The most significant feature of an apparently sophisticated sexual technique practised by men, however, is not that it may or may not be more imagined than real; nor that it may be destined to become a debunked myth to equal that of Freud’s distinction between clitoral and vaginal orgasm, which, as we shall discuss in a later chapter, is today a thoroughly discredited theory; nor that Tantric and Taoist methods of orgasm delay are predicated on the arguably vain, macho misconception that hours of thrusting is what women actually want from sex; nor that such techniques are a retrospective attempt to ‘feminise’ the male orgasm now that men have belatedly realised that women have the richer orgasmic experience of the two genders.

The point is that, useful or not, ejaculation withholding is an acquired skill, whereas the majority of men’s sexual pleasure is highly instinctive. Erection is an involuntary, hydraulic phenomenon, which cannot normally be willed. Ejaculation usually results from intercourse with a minimum of effort.


Influential sex therapist and researcher
by Elaine Woo
September 19, 2008

Marilyn Fithian, an influential sex therapist and researcher known for her studies on nudity and sexual dysfunction, died Sept. 11 at Long Beach Community Hospital. She was 87.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, according to her granddaughter, Michelle Todd.

With colleague and longtime companion William E. Hartman, Fithian founded the Center for Marital and Sexual Studies in Long Beach, where they conducted research and treated people with sexual problems. They wrote a well-regarded text for sex therapists, "Treatment of Sexual Dysfunction" (1972), that is often cited for its down-to-earth approach and detailed explanation of therapeutic techniques.

She and Hartman, who died in 1997, were sometimes described as the Masters and Johnson of the West Coast, whose contributions to their field were considered as important as those of Alfred Kinsey and the team of William Masters and Virginia Johnson.

"They helped legitimize and destigmatize sex research," said professor Eli Coleman, a past president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality and director of the human sexuality program at the University of Minnesota. He described their book on sexual dysfunction as one of the most important in the field during the 1970s, along with Masters and Johnson's landmark work "Human Sexual Response."

Fithian and Hartman were prodigious researchers, who gathered data on the sexual performance of 751 subjects—282 men and 469 women. "To date that is the largest number of subjects ever studied in human sexual response research," sex historian Vern Bullough wrote in his 1994 book "Human Sexuality: An Encyclopedia."

According to Bullough, they compiled 10,000 hours worth of observations over two decades and monitored some subjects as many as 20 times. The prowess of some of their male subjects inspired "Any Man Can," their 1984 book about multiple male orgasms.

Watching sexual acts hour after hour was not as exciting as others might presume. "Sex research," Fithian often said, "is boring."

Fithian, who was born Sept. 7, 1921, in Wasco, Ore., said she knew early in life that she wanted to be a sex researcher but did not pursue it until after the last of her four children entered school. In 1958, she enrolled at Cal State Long Beach, where one of her first projects was a cross-cultural study of prostitution, and earned a bachelor's degree in sociology in 1962.

Three years later she received a master's degree from Cal State L.A. and became a licensed marriage and family counselor.

Her master's thesis was based on research about nudism that she conducted with Hartman, who had been one of her professors at Long Beach. They interviewed 2,600 people at 150 nudist camps around the country over eight years and in 1970 published their survey, "Nudist Society," which found that those who chose clothing-free environments were generally well-educated and married.

As she told Robert A. Georges and Michael Owen Jones in their book "People Studying People," she reluctantly disrobed before interviewing nudists and was immediately identified as a "cottontail," or non-nudist, because of telltale tan lines.

In 1968, she and Hartman opened the Center for Marital and Sexual Studies. They trained scores of sex therapists, including more than 50 male-female therapy teams, and gave seminars around the country.

Their practice focused mainly on heterosexual couples and often incorporated group therapy. They also worked with disabled people and, according to Bullough, were the first sex therapists to use surrogates to treat single women who were unhappy in their sex lives.

"In all those situations, Marilyn was the lead therapist," said Ted McIlvenna, president of the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, where Fithian received her doctorate in 1992 and taught courses.

Describing Fithian as an unusually warm and caring person, he said she was "the grandmother of clinical sexology in the United States."

She is survived by four children, seven grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

Her practice was not conducted solely in the clinic. She and Hartman held desert retreats, which often began with a stop at the Hadley Fruit Orchards store in Cabazon. They used the emporium's vast display of dried produce—particularly the dates, nuts and figs that were "reminiscent of early sexual symbols"—to launch a free and open discussion of sex. This was Fithian's idea, inspired by her studies in mythology, which she taught at Cal State Long Beach along with courses in marriage and family counseling.

She and Hartman both divorced their spouses and lived together for 27 years. According to Todd, when they were in their 70s they decided to get married, but Hartman died before the ceremony could be held. Fithian wore her wedding dress to his funeral.

>>