Do the Guys Have Too Many Orgasms in Chapter 13 of Loving the Legend?

Lightly edited from the video above. The video is the definitive version. This page exists for readers, searchers, and citers.

Loving the Legend by Kit Grey is a high-spice M/M basketball romance, and a frequent complaint about it in reviews is that the sex scenes in it are unrealistic. Specifically – and we're not going to be able to talk about this without using some clinical words for things, so let's all be adults about it – that the guys have too many orgasms too close to each other. Guys don't have sex and have four orgasms in a row, this is unrealistic, 1 star.

But is it unrealistic? And why do people have that complaint in the first place? Let's break it down. I'm going to go through the chapter where a character has four orgasms, and we're going to count them up, and we're going to go through the blocking of the scene and talk about some of the dynamics of refractory periods and different kinds of orgasms that people can have, and we'll see if it's actually unrealistic. Let's get our orgasm counter on. This is a really silly video, but this is what I wanted to do today.

So the chapter I think people are complaining about specifically is chapter 13, which is the first time that the two main characters, Sid and Ty, have sex with each other. So here's how the scene goes. Ty and Sid get to Ty's place after having been at a party, and they are ready to go. They start kissing and groping each other, and Ty gets his hands around Sid, and Sid pops off immediately. That's 1 for Sid right at the beginning of the activities, and it was basically accidental.

The action moves to Ty's shower, where Sid gets his hands around Ty, and then Ty pops off. So 1 for Ty. And then Sid whispers into Ty's ear the thesis of chapter 13:

I plan to make you come over and over, baby.

They then spend some time in the shower. They do like the thing that you normally do in the shower. They both mutually get cleaned up. They get out of the shower. They towel off, and they go to the bedroom, so time passes. This is Ty's first time having anal sex, and Sid wants to like take some time and be careful and like open him up and, you know, get him prepped for it. So like 6 or 7 pages go by while they're doing this, Sid getting Ty ready. He gives him very good advice, which is "push out when I enter you and breathe." Good advice.

We don't know exactly like how much time has passed at this point, but it's surely been 15, 20, maybe even 30 minutes. And at that point, Ty has a, what Sid says, his first prostate orgasm. Actually, he doesn't get the word orgasm out. He says:

Your first prostate orgas–fuck, you're clenching my dick so hard!

How did this become my hobby? Anyway, plus 1 for Ty.

But that was an anal orgasm, and Grey describes it thusly. Ty is told he had an anal orgasm, and the reason why we know is because he doesn't have an emission. This activity has really worked up Sid, and he tells Ty he won't last much longer, and his prediction comes true. He finishes inside of Ty in a condom. So plus 1 for Sid.

This is the part that I think in particular sets people off, which is after Sid finishes, he goes down on Ty, and Ty has a climax in Sid's mouth. Plus 1 for Ty. After that is all finished, he thinks:

If I never make a good decision again, I can revel in knowing that choosing Sid, the god of sex, to take my anal virginity is the best decision I ever made.

And I highlighted that passage, and I left a note on it, which is just LOL.

They then finish up, have a conversation, clean up, go to sleep, and then later in the night, they both mutually get each other off again. They have, this time, simultaneous orgasms. So plus 1 for Ty and Sid each. If we look at the scoreboard, that's 4 for Ty, 3 for Sid. There's that four times that people complain about.

So first off, and I won't belabor this point with a bunch of studies, this is the Wikipedia page for the term refractory period. That is the amount of time it takes a person to recover from having an orgasm to the point where they can have another one. And if you notice here:

According to some studies, 18-year-old males have a refractory period of about 15 minutes, while those in their 70s take about 20 hours. Although rarer, some males exhibit no refractory period or a refractory period lasting less than 10 seconds.

The two main characters in Loving the Legend are in their early or mid-20s. Ty is, I think he's meant to be 22, and Sid is like 25 or 26. They are also NBA all-stars in peak physical condition. My expectation is that they would have relatively short refractory periods, like in the 15-minute range. That basically explains all of the dynamics of this scene.

So first of all, the last two orgasms that the guys have occur potentially hours after the session. So I don't think that that even counts.

So Sid comes twice and Ty comes three times. There's also way more than 15 minutes between the first time they come in the scene and the subsequent times that they come in the scene. So when they immediately get to Ty's house, they both get off. And then there's a shower and a leisurely like rimming and fingering scene. If you take a look at it from Sid's perspective, he's horny. He gets to this guy's house. He gets off immediately. 30 or 45 minutes later while plowing him, he comes again. And then hours later in the night, he has a third time. That's totally normal.

Okay, so that just leaves the like back to back orgasms that Ty has, which is also explained. People with prostates can be stimulated internally to the point where they have an orgasm with no emission. And typically they're able to do this multiple times and they can still have a subsequent orgasm with an emission and then a refractory period. And that's what happened to Ty. He was getting dicked down real good and he had some like nice feelings from it. And then subsequently more nice feelings. I don't think any of that is actually unrealistic.

Actual unrealistic things about this scene, like how expressive the guys are to each other, the like very explicit, almost obligate and didactic sounding conversation about PrEP and testing and condom usage and how Ty had been practicing and training. Sometimes I feel bad for authors. It can feel like a no win scenario where I feel like you don't do those things, someone will complain that like, oh, you didn't do it. And then if you do do it, it's like, oh, it feels clunky. But this feels like a little on the clunkier side, but like that's unrealistic. And it's unrealistic on the first time having anal sex that you would have a prostate orgasm, that can be difficult to accomplish. But I think that if Ty had been practicing, like he said, maybe he, you know, kind of like knew a little bit more how to get there. Like typically you would have like a little bit more communication between guys. Those are the unrealistic things about the scene, not that they had so many orgasms.

Why do people complain about this? So I think that there are several explanations. Like one, I think that there is a small like niche cohort of M/M romance readers who maybe like consume content like mine, who feel like they should be like on guard for the realism of scenes, but they maybe don't know enough to know what's realistic. So hopefully this video can help you. It's like, no, that's like perfectly fine.

I think there's a larger group of people who just have expectations about how those scenes should go down in M/M romance books. And it's just this like cargo culting, this like shaping of expectations around scenes like this over time. My hypothesis would be that typically women writers of M/M romance want the scenes to feel different from an M/F romance. And in an M/F romance, a woman might have multiple climaxes in a scene. So making it feel more male might mean like, oh, well, like they come and then they're done. And in the real world, a lot of guys finish and then they're finished. So if authors are trying to differentiate their works by writing scenes like that, and readers are consuming a lot of scenes like that, seeing something that is different or maybe reminds them of M/F romance can feel weird.

I think that that's what's going on here. There is a lack of understanding about like all of the guy's parts down there and like the capabilities of them, and these expectations from the genre that are imposed on scenes like this. So I'm here to tell you, yeah, you can totally like come that many times. It's not actually unrealistic. Go hog wild with it. Just, you know, make sure that you've got like some passing time. Make sure that, you know, you have some variety of orgasms.

And I am giving the people what they want, a nine-minute video about jizzing. But not every time. One of the times there was none, which is possible, which you know now.