The Lifestyle (24 page)

Before discussing what mainstream theory presently acknowledges (and ignores), we should have a look at Mary Jane Sherfey’s theory of the sexually insatiable female. Much of what Sherfey proposed has by now been accepted in the mainstream. But few authors are willing to cite her or her embarrassing proposition: that it is natural—if culturally abnormal—for a woman to want to attend “‘orgastic parties’, having relations with one man after another, for precisely the purpose of gratifying [her] capacity for numerous successive orgasms with coition.”

In the late 1930s, after a precocious girlhood spent wondering why no one could explain to her the precise reason women menstruated (after all, cows and dogs didn’t), Sherfey took an undergraduate course at Indiana University taught by Alfred Kinsey. At the time she was struck that the school treated his course as academically insignificant—one credit, no roll call, no grades. After she qualified as a physician and Freudian psychiatrist she attempted to find a hospital where she could research the origin of menses and the problem of premenstrual tension, but the male-dominated medical community showed not the slightest interest in the subject; this, even as Kinsey published the two statistical books that can be said to have been the opening shots in the sexual revolution:
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
and
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
. In the prefeminist fifties, Sherfey opened a private practice in New York and began researching premenstrual syndrome on her own from an evolutionary perspective. This led her to study primate females (the only mammal that menstruates); which led her to study their extraordinary sexuality; which led her to study the roots of human sexual behavior. Then, in 1961, her studies led her to stumble on an obscure finding so overwhelming it changed her life: in the womb “the mammalian male [was] derived from the female and not the other way around;” and the female’s clitoris was an internal
system
as large and refined as the male’s penis. Just as overwhelming was
the fact that no one seemed to be paying any attention to this finding that stood so utterly opposed to the standard theory of female sexual development. In a statement that encapsulates what might be called an evolutionary theory of the theories of evolution, Sherfey wrote: “I could only assume that this finding, which to me was a breath-taking, history-making discovery of the first magnitude with implications for everyone, had been ignored unconsciously because both the men who had made the discovery and those who had read the duly recorded data did not
want
this fact to be true.”

It is hard for us to comprehend now, but from the time Freud published his theory of sexuality in 1905 to the mid-1960s, the clitoris had been largely assessed as a rudimentary erogenous zone (a “stunted penis,” to use Freud’s own phrase), a perfect preoccupation for an infant girl but a distraction from proper sexual fulfillment in an adult woman. Only neurotics and nymphomaniacs refused to give up playing with this fiery nubbin that sidetracked women from the “goal” of female adult pleasure—which was to achieve one “mature,” vaginal orgasm to complement the man’s single ejaculation. In Darwinian terms, evolution had “selected for” the single vaginal orgasm in humans. In Freudian terms, the normal development of a woman entailed the natural “transfer” of erogenous zones from the vestigial clitoris to the functional vagina.

According to the Freudian analyst Sherfey, however, this left women “in a strange dilemma of having a developmental theory that explains so much and conforms to so many life histories and felt experiences, yet one that has shown surprisingly little therapeutic effectiveness and has only a questionable basis in biology.” As she came to an understanding of human embryonic development Sherfey also began to recognize that Freudian sexual theory had evolved to reflect culture, quite independent of fact. Not coincidentally, she realized, the vaginal orgasm matched the accepted view of females as naturally
monogamous and satiated by one vaginal orgasm to one penile ejaculation—which matched the
perception
of women’s behavior. Although men knew the mechanism of their own orgasms,
no one
knew the mechanism of the vaginal orgasm—and there was no proof it existed. That the physiology that produced the male orgasm developed from the clitoris was radical stuff for a Freudian to contemplate in 1961: it implied that a female’s clitoris was important.

In Missouri, Masters and Johnson were studying human sexual response, and, in 1963, when Sherfey discovered their paper on the clitoral orgasm, she had a second epiphany. “It was truly a Eureka-experience for me. This was it! Freud was wrong. Men were wrong. Women were wrong. Common sense was wrong. There was no such thing as the vaginal orgasm as heretofore conceived.”

Sherfey’s writing now sounds hyperbolic to us. After all, does it really matter
where
a woman has her orgasm so long as the physiology is straightened out in sex-education classes and she is taught how to achieve one when she wants it? Considering how painful life can be in so many of its nonsexual aspects, the pleasure of orgasm might indeed seem like a gift worth cultivating but not shouting intellectual eurekas over. In fact, to a psychiatrist as well to an evolutionary theorist, it matters very much: the location and functioning of the orgasm bears heavily on female sexual capacity, which in turn affects the view of normal female behavior, the interpretation of history—including why millions of women have been murdered by jealous men unforgiving of their supposed harlotry—and, ultimately, the foundations of a culture that has operated mostly on the belief that female promiscuity is unnatural. Yet all the biological information coming Sherfey’s way from Masters and Johnson and from her clinical practice proved that women weren’t equipped to have just one or two orgasms, as most men were. Women could go on having orgasms for hours. Sherfey’s
patients were having “up to fifty orgasms in a single session.” “To have the comfort of a label,” she wrote, “I had considered them to be cases of nymphomania without promiscuity. From the standpoint of our cultural norm, this may be an accurate enough phrase. From the standpoint of normal physiological functioning, these women exhibit a healthy, uninhibited sexuality—and
the number of orgasms attained, a measure of the human female’s orgasmic potentiality”

To comprehend that potentiality, one has to think of the penis in terms of the entire clitoral system, instead of the tiny clitoris in terms of the entire penis. Unlike the penis, the clitoris is an organ whose sole purpose is pleasure. When aroused its hidden system is
thirty times
larger than the clitoris itself, and in its engorged state the amount of blood in the organ exceeds the amount of blood in an erect penis. Two broad roots and a pair of bulbous “caverns” create internal tumescence early on in the sexually excited female; while later, during orgasm, complicated muscle structures generate vaginal spasms that in turn push the slightly bulging cervix down like an elephant’s trunk into the seminal pool deposited by the male—an active function performed by the female in her own fertilization. Sherfey explained how the many differences between female and male favor the clitoral system, with its five networks of veins fanning out on either side of the vagina all the way into the pelvis. However,
the
most significant difference for her lay in the postorgasmic activity of both systems. Whereas in males the engorged blood drains back from whence it came, resulting in a comparatively long recovery time, in a woman each orgasm is followed by an almost immediate refilling of the erectile chambers. This subsequent engorgement is in no way diminished from the first and produces even more arousal in the tissues. “Consequently, the more orgasms a woman has,” Sherfey wrote, “the stronger they become; the more orgasms she has, the more she
can
have. To all intents and purposes,
the
human female is sexually insatiable in the presence of the highest degrees of sexual satiation.”

Sherfey termed this experience
satiation-in-insatiation
, which she differentiated from the mere “satisfaction” society told women to settle for with a single man. Again, based on biological data, the work of Masters and Johnson, and her own practice, she argued for “the existence of the universal and physically normal condition of women’s inability ever to reach complete sexual satiation in the presence of the most intense orgasmic experiences, no matter how produced. Theoretically, a woman could go on having orgasms indefinitely if physical exhaustion did not intervene.” Thus, acculturated women who enjoyed one or even five orgasms might be “satisfied,” she claimed, but they were not satiated, particularly during the two weeks around ovulation when her hormones made her most desirous of sex. “I must stress that this condition does not mean a woman is always consciously unsatisfied,” Sherfey wrote. “There is a great difference between satisfaction and satiation. A woman may be emotionally satisfied to the full in the absence of
any
orgasmic expression—The woman
usually wills
herself to be satisfied because she is simply unaware of the extent of her orgasmic capacity.”

Sherfey granted that these marathon orgasmic sessions were usually masturbatory, but this was not because of any inability of women to transfer to a single, satisfying, “mature” orgasm. The problem, she posited, lay with the inadequacy of the male in a monogamous relationship: “Few males can maintain an erection long enough for more than three or four orgasms in the woman.” And sex, she maintained, became more frustrating for the monogamous woman as she aged and had children; her “vasocongestion” capacity actually increased, as did her body’s relative amount of testosterone, the hormone governing libido, which climbed ever-higher as she approached menopause. Overall, while men’s capacity for orgasm and
performance decreased, women became more inclined to experience, and more
capable
of experiencing, the fullness of their sexuality. As Sherfey noted: “These findings give ample proof of the conclusion that neither men nor women, but especially not women, are biologically built for the single spouse, monogamous marital structure.”

Just what were women built for then? It is now well documented that a woman is equipped by evolution to promote the competition of several inseminates inside her, but in Sherfey’s day no one dared speculate that the persistence of “insatiable” female capacity might have mating implications. For Sherfey, the implications were clear: women were built for a consider- able number of men during
each ovulation phase
. The modern human female’s complex and highly evolved structures, which produced insatiable capacity, must have been “selected for” to help her survive—otherwise, over time she would have dis- carded them as physiological traits. Sherfey assessed the sexual responsivity and hormonal changes of human females during ovulation and deduced that they were “too close to that of certain higher primates to be ignored. I would suggest (and will take to be true) that the use of the Masters and Johnson techniques on these primates, with sexual anatomy so similar to the human female’s, will reveal the same condition of
satiation-in-insatiation
. Having no cultural restrictions, these primate females will perform coitus from twenty to fifty times a day during the peak week of estrus, usually with several series of copulations in rapid succession.” Sherfey was roundly criticized for this observation on the grounds that she had discounted the “choosiness” of even the most promiscuous female primates, not to mention the spousal loyalty shown by the supposed monogamous gibbon. “If necessary,” she went on, “they will flirt, solicit, present, and stimulate the male in order to obtain successive coitions, then take up with another…. I suggest that something akin to this behaviour
could be paralleled by the human female if her civilization allowed it.”

Sherfey rejected the notion that women were “naturally” more inclined than men to desire intimacy and privacy during the act of sex, pointing out that of 694 men and women observed in masturbation and coitus during the clinical trials of Masters and Johnson “women desensitize with appreciably greater ease than men: 85 per cent of performance difficulties from this cause occurred in men…. The most inconsequential psychosensory distractions easily impair the erection in all subjects regardless of how well acclimatized they are to the surroundings…. Analogous distractibility is not present in women.”

Sherfey supposed that the rise of patriarchal civilization coincided with the “ruthless subjugation of female sexuality (which necessarily subjected her entire emotional life).” Based on an examination of Near Eastern myths and artifacts, she speculated that well into the Bronze Age societies existed that were ruled by women, and these early women would have been free to display “the fluctuating extremes of an impelling, aggressive eroticism…. For about half the time, women’s erotic needs would be insatiably pursued”: hence, Sherfey syndrome—the more controlled manifestation of which Edward Brecher would later observe described the behavior of some swinging women “when sexual inhibitions are cast off.”