Yesterday
Marie Stopes International, a sexual and reproductive health agency, sponsored Europe's first
Masturbate-a-thon. (There's been a similar event in America for a number of years.) Participants got people to pledge a certain amount of money for every minute spent masturbating and/or every orgasm achieved. As Marie Stopes admits, it's basically a
publicity stunt. But the part I find interesting are the rules which ban fake orgasms. They warn quite bluntly: "NO FAKING ORGASMS! Do not waste our time." They claim to have highly trained monitors who can spot the fakes. But how good could the monitors really be? I note in
Hippo Eats Dwarf that neuroanatomist
Gert Holstege of the University of Groningen has discovered that fake orgasms can be detected by a PET scanner. The scanners detect the increased activity in the periaqueductal gray matter of the brain when a woman orgasms. If there's no increased activity, it can be assumed the orgasm is fake. However, I doubt the Masturbate-a-thon is hooking participants up to PET scanners to weed out the fakes. It also surprises me that they're not worried about the use of local anaesthetics, which, it seems to me, would be a more obvious way to cheat and greatly lengthen times. (Unless I missed the section of their website where they warn against this.)
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