1,000 Words About a Fraction of a Second: Male Orgasm and Ejaculation

It didn't review well and has largely been forgotten, but the Bill Murray film "Osmosis Jones" was unique in how it portrayed the human body. In it, the body was a functional, living city occupied by microscopic organisms.

What does this have to do with male orgasm and ejaculation? We'll get to that.

In the movie, Murray's body is known as the City of Frank. A virus attacks it after he eats a boiled egg that spent some time in a monkey's mouth. So he takes a cold pill that, of course, anthropomorphizes. It teams up with Osmosis Jones, a white blood cell and renegade officer in the Frank Police Department.

It's a buddy cop flick complete with gang warfare, metaphors for the drug trade and corrupt politicians.

You don't have tiny, sentient organisms living inside you and controlling your bodily functions. "Osmosis Jones," though, manages to highlight the complexity of the automatic processes your body routinely performs. White blood cells do help fight infectious diseases; they just don't do it with tiny guns.

This example shows that just because something is small doesn't mean it's simple. The little processes in our bodies are intricate, interconnected and complex, like human societies.

It is possible to examine the different things your body does from a much closer point of view. You can explain them in ways that go beyond, "My nose itched, so I sneezed," or "My stomach was upset, so I vomited." From a microscopic point of view, much more is happening.

This is very much the case with another brief sensation: the male orgasm, and the usually corresponding ejaculation. What amounts to a few seconds of pleasure for men during sexual experiences is a fair chunk of a sperm cell's life. And even before it's out of the body, there's a lot going on behind the scenes.

Arousal, stimulation and ejaculation

Unless you experience premature ejaculation, the buildup to an orgasm occupies significantly more time than the orgasm itself. But how do these events connect? Why do arousing thoughts prompt your body to prepare for an orgasm, and what is that process like?

Arousal is an individual and multifaceted psychological and physiological sensation. Here's the gist of it, as evidenced by multiple studies: Certain stimuli cause the brain to release certain neurotransmitters and hormones that have cognitive and physical effects. Those stimuli could be a light touch on an erogenous zone or motions that stimulate blood flow to the genitals.

The result is the feeling of being "turned on."

In the "Osmosis Jones" city, this process would involve a worker in the brain telephoning the blood vessel employees and relaying that it's time to open the valves that send blood to the penis.

Of course, sex wouldn't be all that exciting if the process went directly from arousal to ejaculation. Stimulation is the key part of what makes sex, sex. It makes masturbation, masturbation. Stimulation is the act that eventually—hopefully—leads to orgasm and ejaculation.

People often incorrectly use the terms interchangeably. A distinction exists between orgasming and ejaculating, even if they are closely related.

What happens during ejaculation?

"[Generally speaking], a sperm gets made in the testicles, goes into the epididymis and then it goes into the vas deferens and shoots out when we ejaculate," said Nannan Thirumavalavan, M.D., the chief of male reproductive and sexual health at University Hospitals in Cleveland. "The vas deferens, the epididymis and what's called the vasal ampulla meet near the seminal vesicles and become the ejaculatory duct."

This is the main pathway through which the sperm travel, but sperm aren't actually semen, or ejaculate, as Thirumavalavan pointed out. Sperm become part of semen when they mix with the seminal fluid.

"The seminal vesicles are responsible for a lot of the fluid that's actually in semen," he said. "They come together at the ejaculatory duct, and that's inside your prostate. Then you get a bunch of other secretions from your prostate mixed in there. That's what actually comes out when you have an ejaculation."

In fact, this process is what causes one of the biggest misconceptions about vasectomies, he explained. Many men believe that if they get a vasectomy, nothing will come out when they ejaculate. But vasectomies only cut off the supply of sperm from the vas deferens. They don't inhibit the seminal fluid that makes up most of the ejaculate.

In other words, guys, you can still ejaculate after a vasectomy; the ejaculate just won't contain sperm. Perhaps more importantly, you can still have an orgasm.

What is a male orgasm?

If ejaculation is the release of seminal fluid from the penis, then what exactly is an orgasm?

In truth, an orgasm has nothing to do with ejaculation, though men usually experience both sensations simultaneously during sexual activities. An orgasm refers to muscle contractions and the release of endorphins, which are hormones associated with pleasure and pain relief. Men also tend to have what's known as a refractory period after an orgasm, which is a length of time they have to wait before they're able to feel sexually aroused again.

However, it's entirely possible for men to delay ejaculation and have multiple orgasms.

"Many men who report having multiple orgasms say they trained themselves to do it by separating the process of orgasm and ejaculation," said social psychologist Justin Lehmiller, Ph.D., a research fellow at the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana, and a scientific advisor with Arcwave, a sex toy company based in Germany. "What often happens in these cases is that individuals may experience several non-ejaculatory orgasms, culminating in a final ejaculatory orgasm."

To use "Osmosis Jones" as a point of reference, imagine sex is an amusement park for the anthropomorphic inhabitants inside you. The ejaculatory duct is one of those especially tall roller coasters where, on occasion, the car doesn't clear the top and has to return, backward, to the launch point to go again. The passengers are still enjoying their time. Just imagine those passengers are muscles and nerve endings.

You know that sentient, tiny people are not inside of you dictating the automatic processes of your body. It can, however, be helpful to think of these processes in that manner. If you can't quite wrap your head around "neurotransmitters," picture a roomful of telephone operators connecting two parties to each other.

Whatever metaphor you use, if it helps you to understand your body better, then you'll only benefit from it.