But the clitoris is the center of the action. The consensus among sex researchers is that in almost all cases, the clitoris is the source of female orgasms. The best proof of this is to ask what part of the body virtually all girls and women stimulate when they masturbate. It’s the clitoris.
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So Freud was wrong about there being distinct clitoral and vaginal orgasms, wrong about vaginal penetration producing orgasms, wrong about clitoral orgasms being immature and inferior, and wrong in saying that women who don’t climax through vaginal intercourse are disordered. How could he have been so far off so many bases?
Maybe we should cut the man some slack. After all, he was working with research methods that were prim-itive by our standards, and many of his Victorian contemporaries must have found it difficult to talk openly with him about sex. But Freud was a smart, well-informed scientist who could and should have done better. His theory of the vaginal orgasm had no basis in observation or empirical research and flew in the face of centuries of insight on the role of the clitoris in female satisfaction. Many Victorian medical books, numerous screeds warning against masturbation, and countless works of pornography made it clear that the clitoris was the source of the female orgasm. Freud was certainly aware of at least some of this material, yet he went right ahead and willed the vaginal orgasm into existence.
What was he thinking? Here is sex scholar Thomas Laqueur’s attempt to get inside Freud’s head: Freud knew that the natural locus of a woman’s erotic pleasure was the clitoris and that it competed with the 8 4
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culturally necessary locus of her pleasure, the vagina…Whatever polymorphous perverse practices might have obtained in the distant past, or today among children and animals, the continuity of the species and the development of civilization depend on the adoption by women of their correct sexuality. For a woman to make the switch from clitoris to vagina is to accept the feminine role that only she can fill…to assure that bodies whose anatomies do not guarantee the dominance of heterosexual procreative sex neverthe-less dedicate themselves to their assigned roles.
So here was yet another missed opportunity in the history of human sexual happiness. Freud understood the sexual asymmetry of men’s and women’s bodies and knew that sexual intercourse wasn’t deeply satisfying for most women. He recognized the importance of the clitoris and the deep biological need for orgasms in both men and women (“hysteria” being the result when women were deprived of sexual satisfaction). And he had the intellect to solve the puzzle and the medical prestige to get helpful advice into the hands of generations of lovers.
Instead, he veered off in another direction. His deeply held patriarchal beliefs, as well as his irrational fear that humans would somehow stop copulating and civilization would come to an end without vaginal
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orgasms, led him to an astonishingly wrong-headed conclusion. Having confronted the awkward fact that vaginal intercourse wasn’t
working sexually for
most women, he con-
Sex research in the 1960s and
cluded that it
must
work!
1970s made clear that the
He unilaterally declared
clitoris was the source of
that clitoral pleasure
virtually all female orgasms.
should be abandoned or
repressed at puberty so
that male desire would be heightened, heterosexual union would be cemented, and the future of family and civilization would be assured. In so doing, Freud ran roughshod over well-established medical knowledge, reinforced the penetration-produces-female-orgasm myth, led generations of couples away from lovemaking techniques that might have provided real satisfaction for women—and made it all the woman’s fault if things didn’t work out as he said they should.
This was a profound disservice to the world’s lovers.
Female Orgasms during Intercourse
When Kinsey and Masters and Johnson set the record straight on the true source of female orgasms, the time was right for people to rethink the mythology of vaginal orgasms and take a fresh look at how simultaneous orgasms really occurred (if they occurred at all).
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But it was not to be. The persistence of the penetration-produces-female-orgasm paradigm—and a research quirk—prevented most people from taking the next logical step.
A little known fact about the Masters and Johnson study was that they deliberately recruited women who
said
they were able to climax during intercourse. This decision confused the issue and muddied their findings because it left ambiguous the question whether their orgasms were assisted by direct clitoral stimulation. If the clitoris was really the source of all orgasms, how were the women in the Masters and Johnson study able to have an orgasm during intercourse? Were they built differently? Did they use some special technique? Did their partners? The same question goes for all other women who report that they have orgasms with their partners during penis-in-vagina sex.
With these questions in mind, let’s take a look at seven reasons that women might answer yes when asked if they have an orgasm during intercourse: 1.
Clitoral-hood stimulation.
When a woman
Clitoral-hood stimulation
is in the final stage of
during intercourse has
arousal (after plenty of
been described as a
foreplay), her labia are
Rube Goldberg approach.
fully engorged and the
penis thrusting in the
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vagina can pull the labia back and forth over the clitoral hood, stimulating the clitoris and theoretically producing an orgasm. Could this penis-to-labia-to-hood-to-clitoris stimulation be the way some women have orgasms during intercourse? Researchers have not been able to observe a climax taking place this way (it’s quite difficult to film!), and there are real doubts about how it can work unless the woman has already begun her orgasm from direct clitoral stimulation prior to penetration. For this method to produce a no-hands orgasm for the woman, the man must continue thrusting vigorously all the way through his partner’s orgasm—and this is
really
difficult because he’s engaged in the activity most likely to give him a rapid orgasm—while she is likely to take even longer than usual because the clitoral stimulation is indirect. If the man comes before his partner, the clitoral-hood tugging is going to cease forthwith because most men don’t like to continue thrusting after orgasm. Given these seemingly insur-mountable pacing and timing challenges, it’s no wonder that Shere Hite called this method “more like a Rube Goldberg scheme than a reliable way to orgasm.” Clitoral-hood stimulation probably accounts for a very small percentage of during-intercourse orgasms, if any at all.
2.
Bumping the clitoris.
Because of the wide variety of human body shapes and dimensions, different men and 8 8
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women fit together in a variety of ways during intercourse. In certain positions (notably female on top), some women are able to perform a back-and-forth or circular grinding motion that rubs the clitoris against the man’s pubic bone or the base of his penis. This can produce an orgasm, and can even bring about simultaneous orgasms if the man is poised to climax when the woman reaches hers.
This technique works for some couples, but it was reported by a few women in
The Hite Report
to be distracting and unappealing to some men, who were put off by the woman’s self-stimulating movements (it felt like she was masturbating
on
him) and preferred a more comfortable position. There are no reliable statistics on how many couples successfully use the clitoris-bumping approach, but it’s unlikely to be a very large number—
and their partners may not be happy campers.
3.
The G-spot.
This much-debated feature of female sexual anatomy was first noticed by Kinsey in the 1940s, officially discovered by a German doctor named Ernest Grafenberg in 1950, and popularized (and named after Grafenberg) by John Perry and Beverly Whipple in the 1980s. The G-spot is a sexually sensitive urethral sponge-like tissue that can be stimulated through the front wall of the vagina by rubbing with a
“come hither” motion with one or two fingers. Firm and sustained G-spot stimulation can produce an
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intense orgasm in about 10 percent of women, and G-spot orgasms are sometimes accompanied by an ejaculation of fluid through the urethra (the fluid is not urine and appears to be produced by the Skene’s glands around the urethra).
A man’s penis can stimulate the G-spot if it enters the vagina from behind at a shallow angle. But trying to have a G-Spot orgasm during intercourse is not easy, and it comes with the same challenges of pacing, timing, and sustaining stimulation as the two methods described just above; it’s extremely difficult for the man to hit this spot just right and synchronize his own orgasm with his partner’s. So the G-spot is not a reliable method for no-hands, during-intercourse orgasms, and it’s not an option for the estimated 90 percent of women who do not respond with orgasm to stimulation in this area. In addition, women who use a diaphragm for birth control may not have access to their G-spot because the lower edge of the diaphragm covers it.
4.
Sheer-excitement orgasms.
In the hotly passionate early stages of a love affair, it’s possible for a woman to have an orgasm more from mental than physical stimulation. After all, the brain is the body’s most sensitive sexual organ; women, like men, can have orgasms in their sleep, so they can certainly have an orgasm if they are swept away with lust and novelty and vicarious excitement. But this kind of hands-free “vaginal”
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orgasm is impossible to sustain after the steamy initial stages of a relationship. No couple can keep up this level of novelty and passion, so sheer-excitement orgasms don’t stand the test of time.
5.
Orgasms with a small “o.”
When questioned closely by researchers about their during-intercourse orgasms, some women say that what they are having is a mild or
“emotional” orgasm without the intensity of a full, clitoris-driven climax. One of the women quoted in
The Hite
Report
described it as “the boom of a distant explosion, powerful but somewhat muffled, versus the high, sweet, rippling sensation, the peak of sensitivity, with direct clitoral stimulation.” Another Hite respondent wrote: I never have the same sort of violently physical orgasms with vaginal penetration with the penis as I do with direct clitoral stimulation. I’m not even sure if I come. I get a great sensation of pleasure, but it never peaks like it does the other way. I wish it did. I’d love to come right when he does without any extra attention.
Similarly, women who have never had an orgasm, either alone or with another person, can mistake a high level of arousal—reaching a pleasant plateau during intercourse—for a real orgasm. They might very well tell a sex researcher that they are having orgasms during lovemaking when in fact they aren’t.
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6.
Orgasms before or after penetration
. When a researcher inquires about orgasms during sexual intercourse, a woman may think she’s being asked if she has an orgasm
at some point in the lovemaking encounter
. If her partner brings her to orgasm
before
penetration or
after
withdrawal, she might say, “Yes, I have an orgasm when I make love,” giving researchers the impression that it happened while her partner’s penis was in her vagina. This misunderstanding seems to have happened frequently in sex interviews and probably accounts for Kinsey’s
anomalous finding that
Let’s face it: because of
three quarters of women
the location of the clitoris,
said they had orgasms
hands-free intercourse is
with their partners; Kin-
not an efficient or effective
sey’s subjects were appar-
way for a woman to have
ently including “assisted”
an orgasm.
orgasms that happened
before, during, and after
penetration. We’ll look at separate orgasms in the next chapter, but let’s be clear: these are not “vaginal” orgasms.
7.
Fibbing.
As we saw in the discussion of faked orgasms, women are under a lot of pressure to buy into the penetration-produces-female-orgasm paradigm.
Many feel that if they are not orgasmic during intercourse, something is wrong with them. If some women are capable of tricking their lovers into thinking they are 9 2
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having an orgasm during penis-in-vagina intercourse, isn’t it likely that they would continue the deception when interviewed by sex researchers? Why not?
Taken separately, each of these seven possibilities erodes the credibility of the perennial research finding that 15 to 35 percent of women have unassisted orgasms during penis-in-vagina intercourse. Taken together, they strongly suggest that the number is much lower. We won’t have a definitive answer until much more rigorous research is done, but the real figure is probably much closer to zero. Women who don’t have an orgasm during penis-in-vagina intercourse are the overwhelming majority. They are
normal
!