Taoist Orgasms and Older Adults

Sometimes we joke about how other civilization, or other ages, looked upon old age. Since we have “medical-ized” aging and death, we have shielded ourselves from experiencing other ways of understanding aging. For many of us, aging refers just to the physical and mental breakdown of the body. But before modern science, the only way to learn about aging was through philosophy and religion.

Chinese philosophers probably thought about longevity and aging before anyone else. Early Taoist thinking—some 2000 BC—contended that there is an energy substance contained in the human body known as Jing—and that once your Jing has been expended, you will die. This comprised a simple but compelling explanation. Jing could be lost from the body in a variety of ways—most notably through bodily fluids.

Taoists embraced extensive practices to stimulate/increase and conserve their bodily fluids. The fluid that contained the most Jing was male semen.  Taoist men attempted to decrease the frequency of, or totally avoided ejaculation—in some cases redirecting the ejaculation—in order to conserve their life essence.  Others reportedly recycled and composted their own fecal matter as fertilizer for their crops—human manure. The Jing was the most precious of all substances because it was life personified.

With women surviving longer than men, later Taoist teachings needed to completely ignore females in order to make assertions about longevity hold. In addition to this major omission, recent studies also debunk the myth of a Jing. Studies published in the last few years show that sex, ejaculation and orgasms have the opposite effect of Taoist predictions.

In 2011 Howard Friedman correlated the “orgasm adequacy of wives” with longevity. Using data gathered from a group of 1,500 California students in the 1920’s—and following them throughout their lives—Friedman was able to correlate their sexual activities with longevity. The results were exciting. Women who had more orgasms during intercourse tended to live longer than their less responsive peers. 

For men, a 2009 British study interviewed nearly 918 men aged 45 to 59 about their sexual frequency. Ten years later, when all death records were forwarded to the researchers, they measured the subjects’ life spans. The findings were conclusive. Men who had two or more orgasms a week had died at a rate half that of the men who had orgasms less than once a month. Ejaculating more than 100 times a year increases life expectancy by 5-8 years.

The causes of longevity might include more than sexual climax. Although the climax by itself has positive neural and chemical effcts on the body, it may be that the pre-existing conditions for sex are equally or more important.  Conditions which allow for sex—and its fulfillment—to take place might be more important than the climax itself. These factors may include being healthy, gregarious, active, a certain level of hygiene and cognitive functioning, physical capacity, as well as certain level of social adaptness. All, by themselves, may comprise strong correlates of longevity, without the climax. However, these studies do debunk myths that conserving the Jing will promote living longer.