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Thursday, May 7, 2009 8:16 IST

One of my all-time favourite movies is When Harry Met Sally. It tells a great story (which the Bollywood copycat Hum Tum never quite did) and it has some sizzling lines. But above all, it has perhaps the best fake orgasm seen on film: Sally (Meg Ryan) pricks the bubble of a cocksure Harry (Billy Crystal) by faking an orgasm in a crowded restaurant - just to demonstrate how realistic it can get. You can watch that scene here (fair warning: it's Not Safe For Workplace).

But that's on film. In China, a short clip of a university student audibly 'demonstrating' multiple orgasms at what appears to be a sexuality awareness class/event is now the rage. You can watch/hear it here (again, it's NSFW), where it's currently available although China's killjoy censors have deleted it from another bulletin board service. In the clip, the female student audibly fakes a succession of orgasms: a 'contented orgasm', a 'mixed orgasm', a 'virginal orgasm', a 'from-here-to-eternity orgasm', a 'puritanical orgasm', a 'puppydog orgasm', a 'crybaby orgasm', an 'all-American orgasm', a 'Japanese porn' orgasm, and a 'blockbuster triple-whammy orgasm'.

It's all in good fun, but it isn't inconceivable that the female student's undoubted talents can be leveraged for economic gain. (Believe it or not, economists have studied the phenomenon of fake orgasms, particularly in women, in some detail: now you know why the world didn't see the global economic crisis coming!)

In a study in 2008 titled 'The Economics of Ecstasy', Hugo M. Mialon, who teaches economics at Emory University, modelled love-making as a "signalling game" and postulated that "in the act of love-making, a man and a women send each other possibly deceptive signals about their true state of ecstasy". Mialon's study established, among other things, that women are more likely to fake if they are in love than if they are not in love; that men and women who would hate to find out that their partners are faking orgasms are less likely to fake orgasms themselves; and, surprisingly, that more educated men and women are more likely to fake than less educated men and women.

In another recent study conducted in China by Dr Thomas Pollet and Dr Daniel Nettle of Newcastle University, women with rich sexual partners reported more frequent orgasms. "In a large representative sample of the Chinese population, we found evidence that women's self-reported orgasm frequently increases with the income of their partner," they report. More on their findings - and their likely explanations for why richer men make Chinese women more orgasmic - here.)