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Weekly Playboy (2/4)

Come now, come now. Sounds like a call to be reasonable. But actually, it's an adequate description for the symptoms of iku iku byo (Cum Cum Disease), a potentially deadly affliction suffered by women who orgasm constantly, with Weekly Playboy (2/4) guessing that as many as 120,000 Japanese could have already come down with it.

Though the men's weekly admits its estimate of those afflicted is backed by nothing better than a questionnaire on sex industry recruitment site Love Bonita, it notes that those with Persistent Sexual Arousal Syndrome (PSAS), as the disease is called in English, commonly say almost continuously climaxing is cruel.

"Symptoms of iku iku byo are not pleasurable, they're torture," Weekly Playboy quotes a 2005 post on Love Bonita from a woman called Mei, a 27-year-old woman who has offered the public domain's most detailed description of a Japanese woman with PSAS.

"My body reacts to every movement the train makes and I come any number of times with each ride. I'm exhausted by the time I get to work. I orgasmed when a co-worker tapped me on the shoulder and when the mobile phone in my pocket rang, so I thought I had to do something about it and went to see a doctor. I come every time there's an earthquake and even the vibrations from the music at karaoke or a nightclub will set me off. I'm terrified just to go outside."

Yokohama psychiatrist Keigo Senda, a specialist in dealing with sex issues, notes that Japan's response to the threat of PSAS is sadly lacking.

"I still haven't had anybody with the symptoms come to me for a consultation. I think the condition exists, but because there's so little data it's hard to devise treatment standards for it," Senda tells Weekly Playboy.

"Even though Japan is said to be more open-minded than it used to be, there is still a strong belief that sexual matters are shameful and need to be hidden away and that's an obstacle to dealing with this."

Ruriha Iwasaki, a science beat writer well-versed in women's sexuality matters, guesses that iku iku byo is probably nerve related.

"I'd say that Persistent Sexual Arousal Syndrome is probably caused by nerves in the brain or spinal cord causing imbalance in the brain's hormones, which leaves the orgasmic switch on all the time and won't allow the switch to turn off," Iwasaki says.

Dr. Sandra Leiblum, the woman attributed with first diagnosing and naming PSAS, writes that learning more about the affliction could prove valuable when it comes to knowing about female sexual response.

But Japanese sex experts do not see much progress being made in this country.

"There aren't many medical institutions in Japan dealing with sex afflictions like Persistent Sexual Arousal Syndrome," a physician member of the Japan Society of Sexual Science tells Weekly Playboy. "Research is progressing on things like male erection dysfunction or women's difficulties in attaining orgasm, but for ailments where there are few reported cases or the causes are not clearly known, there just aren't the people out there putting the research in. We're not helped by the fact that there are no patients out there complaining of suffering from the symptoms, which is one reason why the disease is not being treated seriously at the moment." (By Ryann Connell)