From the Creative Library. This is an imagination exercise, not a protocol. Nothing here is a promise, and nothing here is medical advice.
There is a version of this subject that gets written a lot, where ancient civilisations knew a secret and modern men have forgotten it. I am not going to write that one, because the moment you ask which civilisation and which text, it tends to evaporate.
Here is the version with the receipts.
1973, a tomb at Changsha
Archaeologists opened Tomb 3 at Mawangdui, in Hunan, and found seven medical manuscripts written on silk. They had been sealed since 168 BCE. Among them were instructions for sexual practice, and the practice they describe is the one this whole series is about: that orgasm and ejaculation are separable, that the separation can be learned, and that the lever is the muscle floor of the pelvis plus the breath plus where you put your attention.
Somebody wrote that on silk two thousand two hundred years ago. Somebody else thought it was worth burying with the dead.
The Chinese tradition has a name for the genre. Fangzhongshu, 房中術, which translates as the arts of the bedchamber. It was not fringe material and it was not embarrassing. Physicians wrote it, emperors consulted it, and it sat inside medicine rather than alongside it. The Mawangdui manuscripts were first translated completely into any language in 1997, by the sinologist Donald Harper.
Some of what we know about the later Tang-dynasty manuals survives only by accident. A Japanese physician called Tamba no Yasuyori copied long passages into a work called the Ishinpō in 984 CE, and the Chinese originals were subsequently lost. So part of the record of Chinese sexual medicine exists because somebody in Japan was taking notes.
The name tells you the price
The practice reached English-language readers mostly through Mantak Chia and Douglas Abrams and their 1996 book The Multi-Orgasmic Man, where it travels under the name sexual kung fu.
And that name is the most useful thing in the whole tradition.
功夫, kung fu, does not mean a secret technique. It means skill earned through time and effort. Which means the oldest name for this already tells you what it costs. Not a trick you pick up on a Thursday. A practice. Before anyone had written a training program or built a device or counted a single repetition, the word for this was already the word for showing up over and over until you got good at something.
I came to this expecting mysticism and found a training principle instead.
1848, upstate New York
The Western version is more recent and much stranger.
John Humphrey Noyes founded a community at Oneida, New York, in 1848, and built its doctrine around what he called Male Continence. Orgasm without ejaculation, practised as a matter of religious principle, by around two hundred adults, for roughly twenty years. He wrote a pamphlet by that name. He located the required self-control, in his own words, "after the sexes have come together in social effusion, and before they have reached the propagative crisis," and framed the whole thing as "the subordination of the flesh to the spirit."
His stated reason was not pleasure. His wife had endured repeated difficult pregnancies with almost no surviving children, he opposed contraceptives, and this was his answer.
Whatever you make of the man or the community, two hundred people organising their marriages around this for two decades is a reasonably large natural experiment, and it is documented.
1890s, Chicago
Alice Bunker Stockham was a physician who gave the practice the name most people now use for the Western version. She took karezza from the Italian carezza, a caress, and taught protracted sex without male ejaculation as a route to what she called spiritual exaltation.
She travelled to India and attended a Theosophical convention in Madras. People often draw a line from that trip to the Eastern practices her method resembles. I cannot find anything that actually establishes the connection, so I am going to leave it as two facts sitting next to each other rather than a causal story. She had been to India. Her method resembles older Eastern ones. Whether one produced the other, I do not know.
The part they got wrong
Every one of these traditions shares a premise, and it is the premise modern evidence does not support.
The Chinese version holds that ejaculation drains a vital essence called jing, and that conserving it buys health and longevity. Noyes argued that ejaculation drained a man's vitality and led to disease. The contemporary retention community says a version of the same thing.
The largest cohort study on the question runs the other way. Rider and colleagues, published in European Urology in 2016, followed 31,925 men across roughly half a million person-years. Men reporting 21 or more ejaculations a month had somewhere around 19 to 22 percent lower risk of a prostate cancer diagnosis than men reporting four to seven, depending on the age band, and the association held when the analysis was restricted to men who had been screened.
It is observational. The authors said to read it cautiously. Mayo Clinic calls the evidence inconclusive and that is fair. But the direction is the opposite of depletion, and it is the best data anyone has.
So the conclusion is not that they were fools. It is that they were right about the mechanism and wrong about the reason. They observed something real, built a technique that works, and explained it with the physiology available to them, which was not much. We went through the modern version of that argument separately.
And the part nobody likes to mention
The tradition has a self-serving streak and a reader deserves to know about it.
R. H. van Gulik, whose 1961 survey opened this material to Western readers, coined the phrase "sexual vampirism" for a strand of the Chinese bedchamber literature in which the man absorbs his partner's energy for his own benefit. Later scholars have also challenged van Gulik's broader thesis that Chinese sexual life was uniformly healthy and well-adjusted.
That strand is really in there. A page that presents two thousand years of this as uniformly beautiful is selling you a tidied-up version, and anyone who has read around the subject will spot it immediately.
What to actually take from them
Borrow the observation, which was correct, and which modern physiology has since confirmed: orgasm and ejaculation are separate events running on separate systems.
Borrow the technique, which works, and which now has a name in the research literature.
Borrow the name, which is the most honest thing any of them said about it. Skill earned through time and effort.
Leave the metaphysics on the shelf. You do not need jing to explain why a trained muscle costs you less to use than an untrained one, and the explanation you do need is in the anatomy.
What strikes me most about all of it is how long people have been paying attention to this muscle. A thin hammock slung across the floor of the pelvis, holding up more than anyone wants to think about, and men were writing instructions for it on silk before anyone had a word for the nervous system. Hands down the most important muscle group most men have, and hands down the most neglected. We are not the first people to notice. We are just the first with a way to put a number on it.
Sources
- Harper, D. Early Chinese Medical Literature: The Mawangdui Medical Manuscripts. 1997.
- Tamba no Yasuyori, Ishinpō, 984 CE, section on the bedchamber.
- Noyes, J. H. Male Continence. Oneida, 1848 onward.
- Stockham, A. B. Karezza: Ethics of Marriage. 1896.
- van Gulik, R. H. Sexual Life in Ancient China. 1961; revised edition, Brill, 2003.
- Rider JR, et al. Ejaculation Frequency and Risk of Prostate Cancer. European Urology, 2016.
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