Woman: An Intimate Geography (15 page)

Read Woman: An Intimate Geography Online

Authors: Natalie Angier

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will give a standing ovation. In the multiple orgasm, we see the finest evidence that our lady Klitoris helps those who help themselves. It may take many minutes to reach the first summit, but once there the lusty mountaineer finds wings awaiting her. She does not need to scramble back to the ground before scaling the next peak, but can glide like a raptor on currents of joy.
The intimate connection between a woman's psychic humor and her clitoral power means that the clitoris must be wired up to the brain the big brain before it can sing. The brain must learn to ride its little rod the way it must learn to balance its body on a bicycle. And once learned, the skill will not be forgotten. Some women learn how to climax in childhood, while others do not make the connection until adulthood. It is not an engineering problem, though. You can't figure it out with the neocortex alone, the new brain, that thickly ruffled top layer of fish-gray tissue that cogitates, hesitates, and second-guesses every impulse. Instead you must tap into a more ancient neural locus, the hypothalamus, which sits on the floor of your brain a few inches behind your eyeballs and reigns over appetite: for food, salt, power, sex. Sometimes wiring the clitoris to the hypothalamus demands a rerouting, a circumvention of the neocortex. The neocortex is clever and imperious, and it can be too controlling to grant its owner honest control. The control I'm speaking of is a whole-brain operation, a delicate negotiation between neo and primal, intellect and desire. And so if a woman's neocortex is stentorian, it must be muffled just long enough for the hypothalamus and the clitoris to seal their partnership. Alcohol might accomplish the task, if it weren't such a global depressant of the nervous system. More effective are drugs that distract the intellect without dampening the body's network of impulse relays. Most of these drugs are illegal. Quaaludes were said to be extraordinary aphrodisiacs, but Quaaludes no longer exist. They were too good, which meant too dangerous, and so had to be eliminated. But marijuana is still with us, and marijuana can be a sexual mentor and a sublime electrician, bringing the lights of Broadway to women who have spent years in frigid darkness. All the women in my immediate family learned how to climax by smoking grass my mother when she was over thirty and already the mother of four. Yet I have never seen anorgasmia on the list of indications for the medical use of marijuana. Instead we are told that

 

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some women don't need to have orgasms to have a satisfying sex life, an argument as convincing as the insistence that some homeless people like living outdoors.
We should not be surprised that the clitoris loves power, or that its nature is complex. For women, sex has always been risky. We can become pregnant, we can contract disease, we can forfeit our lucky lactose. At the same time, we are primates. We use sex for many reasons beyond reproduction. We may not be bonobos, but neither are we seasonally breeding sheep. In the face of vulnerability, we need effective defenses. The clitoris is our magic cape. It tells us that joy is a serious business and that we must not take our light, our sexual brilliance, lightly. The clitoris integrates information from diverse sources, conscious and unconscious, from the cerebral cortex, the hypothalamus, the peripheral nervous system, and it responds accordingly. If you are frightened, it becomes numb. If you are uninterested or disgusted, it remains mute. If you are thrilled and strong, it is a taut little baton, leading the way, cajoling here, quickening there, andante, allegro, crescendo, refrain.
Some experts have argued that natural selection has given women a lower sex drive than men, and that such inhibition makes sense: we shouldn't be out there screwing around and taking the chance of being impregnated by a genetic second-rater. The theory is rank nonsense. Sex is too important on too many social and emotional counts for us to be indifferent about it. Women display abundant evidence of a robust sex drive. They respond physiologically to sexual stimuli as rapidly as men do. Show a woman a pornographic film, and her vagina swells with blood as rapidly as the penis of a male observer does. Yet there is no doubt that a woman's sex drive is an involved instrument. It is tied to mentation, mood, past experience, the Furies. At the eye of the storm is the clitoris. It knows more than the vagina does, and is a more reliable counselor than the vagina remember that a woman may lubricate during rape, but she will almost never climax. Surely it is more logical for a female to have a sophisticated sex drive than to have either a simple-minded or a stifled drive. If a woman retains control over her sexuality, if she feels powerful in her sexual decisions and has sex with whom she wants when she wants to, her odds of a reasonable outcome are good. She is likely to have sex with men she finds attractive, men

 

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with whom she feels comfortable for any number of reasons, and thus to further her personal, political, and genetic designs.
The clitoris is flexible. It can adapt to different habitats, different cultural norms. Among our ancestors, who adhered to the comparatively promiscuous schedule that is the primate norm, the clitoris might well have fostered restless experimentation, as Hrdy said. Yet unlike Hrdy, I believe that the clitoris can accommodate the contemporary strictures of monogamy as well that it will nourish the bonds of love and marriage when such bonds are useful to a woman's interests. In this country, which exalts marriage to extravagant heights, married women are quite orgasmic. According to the University of Chicago's 1994
Sex in America
survey, three quarters of wedded women say they always or usually reach climax during sex, compared to fewer than two thirds of single women. Of all the subgroups queried, married, conservative Christian women were the likeliest to say that they came every single time they copulated. And why not? For our God-fearing sisters, marriage is a sacrament, which means that every bounce on the matrimonial mattress is a holy and ennobling event. Right makes might, and with power comes the glory, and so it is that foes of the sexual revolution can emerge as orgasmic empresses.
There is another body of evidence suggesting that the clitoris trades in the currency of power. Recent work from the British researchers Robin Baker and Mark A. Bellis suggests that orgasm offers women a recondite way to control male sperm, either by imbibing it or by repelling it. They propose that the timing of a woman's orgasm relative to a man's ejaculation influences whether or not his semen has a shot at fertilizing her eggs. If a woman climaxes shortly after her partner ejaculates, her cervix, the gateway to the uterus, will do a spectacular thing. As it pulses rhythmically, the cervix reaches down like a fish's mouth and sucks in the semen deposited at its doorstep. This has been shown on video. A microcamera was attached to a man's penis and the deep events of intercourse were recorded: the milky ejaculate streaming forth like woozy pennants, followed by the cervix dipping into the proferred gene pool and with viscous, fluttering motions appearing to paddle the semen up into the uterus. Now whether the cervical palpitations truly enhance the chance that the semen will reach an egg is not known. Baker and Bellis have preliminary evidence suggesting that when a

 

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woman climaxes anywhere from several seconds to forty minutes after her partner, her chances of being impregnated are slightly higher than if she doesn't climax or if the orgasm occurs before or after this rather widely gaping window of opportunity.
The scientists' data are open to quarrel, but their general argument is compelling that female orgasm is the ultimate expression of female choice. If a woman's sexual responsiveness is tied to her sense of power, of having freely chosen this partner at this moment, then her cervix might very well go the next step, taking up what the woman demonstrates through her rapture is the chosen seed. Baker and Bellis promote the concept of sperm competition: that just as males compete with one another by locking horns or swords, so their sperm compete in the vaginal tract for access to the egg. Female orgasm is thus a woman's way of controlling the terms of the underground debate. Small wonder, they say, that men often are obsessed with their sexual prowess, their ability to turn women on and that even when a man cares very little for his partner's emotional well-being, he nonetheless wants to satisfy her sexually. The fate of his sperm, it seems, may depend on his erotic skills. Hypothetically, natural selection has favored those males who abide by the axiom ''We aim to please."
By the flip token, small wonder that many women say they have faked an orgasm at one time or another. How better to persuade a disappointing partner to get it over with and
go away
than to pretend to give him what he's been waiting for proof that your cervix is at his service?
The Baker and Bellis scenario makes the assumption that our ancestors in whom various traits and drives took root were highly polygamous, and that the semen of any given male was likely to brush up against the output of other pretenders to paternity. But even now, they claim, the sperm wars continue beneath our mantle of monogamy. Married women have affairs (no!), and when they do, Baker and Bellis say, their chances of conceiving an "illegitimate" child turn out to be higher than might be expected from a simple accounting of ratio of sex acts with spouse to sex acts with lover. The scientists attribute the excessive extramarital fecundity to the comparatively greater orgasmic pleasure that a woman has with her lover (why else would she bother with adultery, if she weren't having a good time of it?). Again, some of the data with which the scientists buttress their arguments including

 

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paternity statistics gathered in Liverpool, an international seaport that may or may not be representative of communities everywhere are open to dispute. Nevertheless, it is amusing that the new information at least partly supports an ancient belief, first promulgated by Galen in the second century
A.D.
and prevailing for the next twelve hundred years or so, that a woman must reach orgasm if she is to conceive. That absolute stricture is false, of course, but if female orgasm subtly enhances fecundity, there are practical implications to consider. For example, a couple struggling to conceive should not become so grimly task-oriented that the woman's climax is neglected as a discretionary frill. No, better to be sure that there's enough grim pleasure around for two.
Throughout this chapter, I've been using the terms
clitoris
and
female orgasm
and
female sexuality
almost interchangeably, and in my view they are all rightly joined at the hip. The clitoris is at the core of female sexuality, and we must reject any attempts, Freudian or otherwise, to downgrade it. Yet the clitoris overspills its anatomical borders and transcends its anatomy. Other pathways feed into it and are fed by it. The 15,000 pudendal nerve fibers that service the entire pelvis interact with the nerve bundles of the clitoris. That's why the anus is an erogenous zone. Nerves are like wolves or birds: if one starts crying, there goes the neighborhood. In some women, the skin around the urinary opening is exceptionally sensitive, and because this periurethral tissue is pushed and pulled quite vigorously during coitus, such hypersensitivity could result in a comparatively easy stroll to orgasm through the thrustings of intercourse alone. Other women say they can climax best with the application of pressure deep within the vagina, which led the gynecologist Ernst Grafenberg and his partisans to propose the existence of a Grafenberg, or G, spot, a sort of second, internalized clitoris. The G spot is said to be a two-inch cushion of highly erogenous tissue located on the front wall of the vagina, right where the vagina wraps around the urethra, the tube that carries urine from the bladder. Some have said that the G spot is embedded in the so-called Skene's glands, which generate mucus to help lubricate the urethral tract. Others have said that the gee-whiz spot is actually the sphincter muscle, which keeps the urethra clamped shut until you're read to void. Still others question the existence of a discrete G spot altogether. Let's not bother inventing novel erogenous loci, they say, when the existing infrastructure will do.

 

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The roots of the clitoris run deep, after all, and very likely can be tickled through posterior agitation. In other words, the G spot may be nothing more than the back end of the clitoris.
Anatomy is not epiphany. When scientists have tried to quantify the discrete components of orgasm, they've had very little luck. In one study, for example, researchers at the University of Sheffield recruited twenty-eight adult women to measure the duration, intensity, and vaginal blood flow associated with climax. A small heated oxygen electrode was inserted into each woman's vagina and held in place on the vaginal wall by suction. The woman was then asked to masturbate to orgasm, to indicate when the orgasm began and when it ended, and to grade its intensity on a scale from one (pitiful) to five (transcendent). Throughout the session, the electrode gauged vaginal blood flow, indicating how congested the vaginal tissues became. The average orgasm, as indicated by the woman's signing of "start" and "all done," turned out to be surprisingly prolonged, lasting an average of twenty seconds much longer than the twelve seconds, on average, the women guessed in retrospect. Yet there was no correlation between length and strength; the intensity rating a woman assigned to her orgasm had nothing to do with how long it lasted. Neither did relative blood flow correlate with perceived pleasure.
The clitoris is complex. It is never just a clitoris. Like blood flow, its proportions probably bear no relation to its potential. Yes, a female bonobo has an immense clitoris, but her endowment might have more to do with assuring a petitioner easy access than with signifying in any way that she is more orgasmic than her human counterparts. Nobody has studied whether women with large clitorises are hyperorgasmic. But another sort of "experiment" has been done that is relevant to the question of whether function follows form. Children with unusually large clitorises have had their protrusions surgically reduced whittled back, towed in, or amputated altogether. They have been clitoridectomized. This is not an operation that we normally associate with high-minded Western medicine, but clitoridectomies are fairly common. In this country, about two thousand babies a year undergo some form of "adjustment" to reconfigure a clitoris deemed abnormally prominent. There are no official guidelines for what constitutes "clitorimegaly," but anything projecting beyond the mollifying lips of the

 

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