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It was a funny ending to a funny night.

Little did I realize how important the note in my pocket would become.

The Quest

Exactly 24 hours later, serendipity entered stage left.

I was enjoying French food and a bottle of Bordeaux with a 25- year- old female yoga instructor new to San Francisco, fresh from the Midwest. Talk drifted to the singles scene and then to her culture shock in places like the Castro, where drag queens and transsexuals have dinner next to dot-com millionaires. Nothing is taboo, and she was just getting acclimated. SF is, after all, the world’s capital city of sexual exploration.

Several glasses further into the evening, she casually admitted that she’d never experienced an orgasm. How we got to that topic, I don’t remember, but I looked around to see if God was playing a trick on me. I’ve never won the Powerball lottery, but I felt like I had.

My daydream was interrupted when her follow-up comment slapped me back to reality:

“It’s fine, though. I’ve realized that sex just isn’t that important.”

Time-out.

“What?!” I blurted, a little too loudly. (Thank you, wine.)

This gorgeous woman in her prime, let’s call her Giselle, had compartmentalized sex as an unimportant and uninteresting activity. As the drinks flowed and we continued to talk, it became clear that this rationalization was a direct product of her inability to fully enjoy it.

And so it came to be that I made her a drunken promise: I would fix her inability to orgasm. Not that night, not necessarily through me,1 but somehow.

In retrospect, it was a foolish and overconfident promise. But with alcohol- induced optimism on my side, I viewed it as a watershed moment, an opportunity to harness my OCD for the greater good.

Most men assume they kinda-sorta understand female anatomy, but—the upper-left quadrant at one o’clock? That was a new one.

Tallulah had given me a glimpse of a different world altogether.

Later that evening, somewhere between Wikipedia and PornHub, I realized Giselle wasn’t alone. Sex researcher Shere Hite had long ago concluded that 70% of U.S. women couldn’t experience orgasm from intercourse, and Alfred Kinsey’s data suggested that up to 50% of U.S. women weren’t able to achieve orgasm at all.

My quest for the elusive female “O” had begun.

The outcome, four weeks later, was better than I ever could have imagined.

I was able to facilitate orgasms (the word facilitate will be explained later) in every woman who acted as a test subject.2

The results: those who’d never experienced manual-only orgasm were able to do so, and those who’d never experienced penetration-only orgasm were also able to do so. The success rate was 100%.

Here is what I learned.

The Process

The morning after wine with Giselle, I wrote down a number of questions that seemed like good starting points. Several of them related to extending male endurance, if that were to prove a limiting factor. I figured I might need to train men to become Energizer bunnies.

Some of the assumptions, reflected in the wording, turned out to be totally wrong, but here are my original questions:

1. How do you tweak the most common sexual positions to make it more likely that the woman will orgasm?

2. How can you reduce the refractory periods (the erection- impossible period after ejaculation) for men? This would allow more sessions per night.

3. Is it possible for men to have multiple orgasms without ejaculating?3

4. How do you keep it—the hoo-ha, that is—from stretching out over time? (A female friend insisted I throw this one in.)4

Once I had questions, I needed some answers. For that I would need two things: experts and lots of practice.

First things first: experts.

There is no shortage of how-to sexual information. From Chigong Penis (competes with the Iron Penis Kung-Fu school, not kidding) to orgasm training on elaborate vibrator-saddle machines like the Sybian, it’s a paradox-of-choice problem. Considering the options, I started to think that I might be reenacting The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen.

In 1973, Peter traveled with zoologist