Would men stop defining women’s sexual unhappiness 4 0
T h e G r e a t S e x S e c r e t
as an illness? And would women speak up more force-fully for equal satisfaction in the bedroom?
No, no, no, and no. The evidence is that few people integrated the new insights into their sex lives and few women were willing and able to be more assertive about their sexual needs. Continued problems with open and honest communication about sex—and the stubborn-ness of the old paradigms in people’s heads—prevented this from happening. How long did this state of affairs continue? Here are three pieces of evidence that give us some indication:
• In 1935, a feisty Viennese woman wrote to Sigmund Freud complaining about men’s unsatisfactory lovemaking techniques. Freud’s response was very telling; he blamed the asymmetrical designs of human sexual anatomy and threw up his hands about what men (or women) might do to rectify the situation:
Dear Madam,
I think that you are right that most men are egotistical and ignorant in their sexual life and don’t care enough for the sexual satisfaction of the female. The main fault, however, is yet not on the side of man. Much more of it seems there is a neglect on the side of nature, which is interested only that the purpose of the sexual act is
W h a m , B a m , T h a n k Yo u , M a ’ a m
4 1
being attained while it shows indifference as to whether the woman gets full satisfaction or not. The reasons for this strange neglect, about which the female rightfully complains, are not yet recognized with certainty.
Yours very truly,
Freud
• In 1992, Richard Rhodes wrote in his extraordi-narily candid sexual autobiography,
Making Love,
An Erotic Odyssey
:
It’s appalling that men, willing to invest thought and energy in learning a sport…won’t invest thought and energy in learning how to play generously at sex. On the evidence, far too many men are sexually selfish and self-centered, reverting in the intimacy of the bedroom to mommy’s darlings, taking rather than giving, not required, as girls are required from earliest childhood, to pay attention to needs other than their own. Women complain, but bedroom chauvinism is so all-pervasive they hardly know where to turn.
• In 2002, Kim Cattrall, the actress who played the sexually liberated Samantha Jones in the TV series
Sex and the City,
wrote a sex advice book in which she confessed that she was sexually unsatisfied for most of her adult life:
4 2
T h e G r e a t S e x S e c r e t
Many men don’t know how to enable a woman to reach orgasm, and many women are not informed or confident enough to tell men what they need to do. I’ve discovered that the whole subject is essentially taboo. No one wants to admit it that millions of women have unsatisfying sex lives and that most men do not know what to do about it.
Could it be that,
despite all the gains of the
Women who find them-
last century, one-sided sex
selves in relationships
is still the norm in many
where they are subservient
bedrooms? Yes, because
to men often feel they have
four perennial factors are
no choice but to accept
still very much in play:
unsatisfying lovemaking.
• The asymmetries be-
tween men’s and
women’s bodies
• Men’s ignorance about giving women sexual satisfaction
• The chronic disempowerment of women, leading them to refrain from speaking up
• The lack of honest communication in bed These factors seem to be keeping a good portion of each new generation of lovers in the same one-sided pattern of making love. We might almost call Wham-Bam—that formula for female frustration—the default setting for sexual intercourse.
W h a m , B a m , T h a n k Yo u , M a ’ a m
4 3
But can’t this deeply ingrained pattern be changed?
Isn’t it possible for women to speak up for their own sexual needs? Can’t men listen to their partners and
get
it
? There certainly have been attempts to improve upon Wham-Bam sex. The next chapter looks at some of them.
Chapter Three
No Female Orgasm—
But He Tried
Over the millennia, several cultures have made earnest efforts to give women their fair share of sexual satisfaction.
• In the Jewish
Halakhah
, a body of tradition and law that goes back thousands of years, husbands are told that it is their
responsibility
to sexually satisfy their wives. It is considered a
mitzvah
(a commandment and a good deed) for a man to share sexual pleasure with his wife, especially on the Sabbath. This ancient teaching is definitely on the right track!
The problem is that the admonition was not accompanied by
details
, without which most couples are still in the dark. There’s no evidence that Jewish women have done any better than women in other cultures at getting real sexual satisfaction during intercourse.
• The ancient Chinese Tao sex manuals said that a man must, without fail, bring his partner to orgasm. The clitoris (dubbed the Jewel Terrace) 4 6
T h e G r e a t S e x S e c r e t
was correctly identified as the center of female sexual pleasure, and a woman’s orgasm was said to be as important to the man as it was to the woman.
But neither the
Chinese documents—
In some cultures men have
nor the sex manuals
made serious efforts to give
of ancient India—
equal sexual satisfaction to
contained details on
women—but have lacked the
exactly how the woman
all-important details on how
was to be brought to
to make it happen.
orgasm. The
Kama
Sutra
and the Tao and
Tantric books do not
have a single picture of a clitoris being touched by either partner during intercourse, and they don’t contain instructions on how to work around the asymmetries of males’ and females’ bodies.
So despite the rhetoric about mutual pleasure, the how-to of female orgasm was left to the imagination. The sexologists of ancient Asia did no better than those of other cultures at figuring out the geography of making love. The bottom line in these books is one of men pursuing their appetite for a variety of sexual positions and having lots of high-quality orgasms—their own.
• In Tudor and Stuart England and early Colonial America, the function of the clitoris was also
N o Fe m a l e O r g a s m — B u t H e Tr i e d
4 7
widely understood. And in the nineteenth century, some religious leaders had a remarkably enlight-ened view of the role of female pleasure. In 1848, the Bishop of Philadelphia, Francis Patrick Kenrick, recommended orgasms for women and strongly advised men to give their wives sexual pleasure.
Great concept—but again, no details.
Did these Jewish, Chinese, and English advocates of female pleasure hold back secrets that they didn’t pass along to the masses? Is it possible that they whispered their valuable insights to a highly satisfied elite and never wrote them down? This seems improbable, given the graphic nature of the illustrations and text in surviving manuals and the highly explicit stone carvings in parts of Asia. It’s more likely that through the ages, sexual-advice givers had simply not figured out a straightforward, practical route to mutual sexual satisfaction during intercourse.
Another question: is it possible that women in this era knew what it would take to have equal satisfaction in bed, but were too disempowered to share their insights?
Laqueur wonders whether “those who knew—women—
did not write and those who wrote—men—did not know.” Perhaps. But when women did write about sex during the Renaissance, Laqueur found that they followed the male party line. It appears that among many men and women, the role of the clitoris and the glories of female pleasure were well understood, but ways to 4 8
T h e G r e a t S e x S e c r e t
reliably bring a woman to orgasm during intercourse were not.
The bottom line: over the years, eager readers of even the most sophisticated sex manuals were getting
exhortations
,
not explanations
.
And why were men (at least in some cultures) being exhorted so insistently to give their partners an orgasm?
Perhaps it was out of genuine concern for female pleasure, but there may also have been another, more exis-tential motive. For more than a thousand years, it was believed that a woman would not get pregnant if she did not have an orgasm. This misconception seems to have originated with Hippocrates around 600 BC and was perpetuated (or recreated) by a succession of
“experts” through the years, including the Greek physician Galen in the second century AD and the Arabic writer Rhazes in the tenth century. The idea stemmed from the belief that women’s sexual functions mirrored those of men. If a man’s orgasm accompanies the ejaculation of semen, then a woman’s orgasm must be similarly tied to procreation. No orgasm, no baby.
Based on this theory, it was widely believed that prostitutes did not get pregnant because they did not have orgasms with their clients. And if a woman became pregnant after being raped, it was assumed she must have had an orgasm and was therefore guilty of licen-tiousness and adultery and needed to be put to death.
N o Fe m a l e O r g a s m — B u t H e Tr i e d
4 9
Taking this logic a
step further, some early
Through the years, there’s
scientists asserted that
been a persistent myth that
for conception to take
male penetration produces a
place, a man and woman
female orgasm—but the
needed to have
simulta-
evidence is that this almost
neous
orgasms. The the-
never happens.
ory was that if a woman
had an orgasm
before
her
partner, her cervix would clamp shut and no sperm would be able to get into the uterus. If she had her orgasm
after
the man, her egg would still be in the ovary and when the sperm entered the uterus, they would all die before conception could take place. Perfect synchroniza-tion of orgasms was therefore essential to procreation.
Wouldn’t men, believing that they could never sire a child if their wives didn’t have orgasms during intercourse, be highly motivated to figure out the mechanics of mutual satisfaction? It stands to reason—and yet men seem to have gone only part of the way down this road. Many understood how important it was to stimulate the clitoris, but then caressed it only enough to get the woman aroused and lubricated—as part of the warm-up act—and rarely sustained the stimulation long enough to bring the woman all the way to orgasm.
Why didn’t men finish what they started? Perhaps they found the mechanics of clitoral stimulation during 5 0
T h e G r e a t S e x S e c r e t
intercourse inappropriate or awkward. Perhaps lovers didn’t know what a female orgasm felt and sounded like, and assumed they had done their job if the woman lubricated and expressed
some
pleasure. Perhaps their partners had never experienced an orgasm and couldn’t identify its absence during lovemaking. Perhaps, in the heat of passion, men reverted to sexual selfishness, cast-ing aside their attempts to bring their partners to orgasm in the headlong rush toward their own enjoyment. Or perhaps women knew all along that having an orgasm had nothing to do with getting pregnant and faked pleasure to keep their men in the game and conceive the children they longed to hold.
It’s amazing. Even with the future of the species supposedly hanging in the balance, most women
still
didn’t get real sexual satisfaction when they had intercourse.
Over time, the belief that conception couldn’t happen without a female orgasm was undermined by repeated cases of women getting pregnant without sexual enjoyment (including by rape)—and women failing to get pregnant despite rapturous lovemaking. As the belief that the survival of humanity did
not
depend on female orgasms eroded (this occurred around 1700, according to Laqueur), it was logical for men to conclude that they were off the hook when it came to fully satisfying their partners.
So did men stop trying? Not all of them. Presumably
N o Fe m a l e O r g a s m — B u t H e Tr i e d
5 1
many good-hearted, well-intentioned men continued to try to satisfy their partners in bed. What motivated them? It could have been a woman getting up the courage to tell him, directly or indirectly, that she was not happy with their lovemaking. It could have been a man’s genuine concern for his partner’s pleasure and happiness. It’s possible that the man discovered that having an orgasm with a partner who is just
lying there
was not as exciting as it was when she was reveling in genuine sexual pleasure. Maybe it dawned on men that one-sided sex, while satisfying in the short run, lacked an important dimension of mutuality and joy. And perhaps men realized that an unsatisfied partner wasn’t conducive to a happy relationship—in other words, that Wham-Bam sex was not in their long-term best interests.
Some or all of these motivations have always prod-ded men in the direction of being less selfish in bed. But four changes in the twentieth century did even more to improve the chances of mutually satisfying intercourse:
• Attitudes about sex became more liberated.
• Expressions of sexual pleasure, even among “good”
women, were increasingly accepted.
• Many women gained a measure of power and independence.