History of Single Life
The politics of the female O.
by Ken Mondschein
While Freud might have brought back the idea of the sex drive as an integral part of human psychology, on the other hand, he also decided that there was a difference between the "immature" clitoral and the "mature" vaginal orgasm. Well-adjusted women, he believed, should be chasing the latter. Freud thus set himself up to be the sexual straw man of the century: Much of what has been written about the subject since his publication of Three Essays on Human Sexuality in 1905 has been a reaction against his denigrating of the clit--and, politically speaking, synonymous with rebellion against repressive ideas of sexuality. We can see this as early as 1953 in the Kinsey Institute's provocatively titled Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, which scandalously noted that "[psychoanalytic] literature usually implies that the vagina itself should be the center of sensory stimulation, and this as we have seen is a physical and psychologic impossibility for nearly all females." Similarly, in 1966, Masters and Johnson in that 1966 Human Sexual Response that "the clitoris is a unique organ in the total of human anatomy. Its express purpose is to serve both as a receptor and transformer of sensual stimuli. . . . [research has] established the organ as a homologue of the male penis."
The clitoral orgasm became politicized in the '60s and '70s by feminists who picked up on Masters and Johnson's idea of the clit as the female equivalent of the penis and, by extension (by obviating the need for a man) the key to women's sexual, economic, and political autonomy. "The clitoris is the female sex organ," as Betty Dodson has said time and again, and these days, arguing anything else is unthinkable, regressive, and, worse, anti-feminist. Check out, for instance, this video of Betty Dodson discovering new parts of the clitoris. This is semantics at its finest: The clitoris is the female sex organ; ergo, anything a woman gets orgasmic pleasure from must, perforce, be part of the clitoris.
What's the lesson in all this? For starters, texts can be read and re-interpreted just the same as bodies. When historians such as Laqueur make statements such as "before 1905, no one thought there was any other sort of female orgasm other than the clitoral sort" and start looking for clitorises in medieval medical texts, they're putting a historic imprimatur on the ideas that are currently fashionable. Freud's insistence on the vagina as the seat of women's pleasure, in other words, was a momentary aberration before we re-enlightened ourselves and rediscovered how girl-parts actually work -- no matter that there were an awful lot of people before 1905 who seem to have had the same ideas.
Nor is the re-appropriation of history limited to the clit: Medieval ideas of female "seed" have been used to intellectually validate female ejaculation. The real modern equivalent of Galen's ideas, however, is Robin Baker and Mark Bellis of Manchester University's "upsuck" theory. According to Baker and Bellis, the female orgasm causes the cervix to actually "swallow" and retain sperm as am aid to conception. (Meanwhile, Freudianism has been revisited and reversed as the male "prostate orgasm" has become the newest and most fashionable to get off.)
If, as Isidore of Seville said back in the sixth century, history is a form of rhetoric, so, too, is biology. Much of what we think of as intimate and personal truths have, in fact, been fed to us as articles of faith. Don't get me wrong: I'm not trying to turn the clock back to some sort of Freudian phallocentric patriarchy, but rather to decry any sort of orthodoxy at all. (If anything, I agree with Masters and Johnson when they say that the "clitorial and vaginal orgasms are not separate biologic entities.") Some people get pleasure in some ways, others get it in other ways, and people's own experience of their bodies shouldn't be guided by what other people think is correct. Just because the personal is also political doesn't mean that our personal lives always have to be political.
Update on under-18 condom buying: Little did I know that I'd find Comstockery in my own backyard. Ricky's, a New York City drug store/beauty products/cheap sex toys chain, keeps the condoms in the over-18 section, and according to the manager in the place, has a policy of not selling them to teenagers. Obviously, this doesn't present much of a problem to resourceful NYC kids -- there's a Duane Reade staffed by oblivious minimum-wage workers on every corner, building, and subway car -- but it does raise some upsetting ethical issues. Nerve readers, I call upon you to boycott Ricky's until they put them behind the register just like everywhere else, so that you have to ask for them in front of everyone in the store!
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©2007 Ken Mondschein and Nerve.com.