Ooh! Controversy. I love it! One of our readers posted this link in a comment saying that the vaginal orgasm is a myth. Let’s have a look, shall we? I’ve excerpted some salient quotations for your debate.This 1970s article by feminist Anne Koedt explores the idea of the vaginal orgasm in term of the idea of women being “frigid,” aka “defined by men as the failure of women to have vaginal orgasms.”
Now, she goes on to say “Actually the vagina is not a highly sensitive area and is not constructed to achieve orgasm. It is the clitoris which is the center of sexual sensitivity and which is the female equivalent of the penis.”
However, I remember a particularly celibate summer where, with the lack of anything that vibrates (my sol-O of choice at the time), I kept my hands very busy, trying to achieve orgasm without direct clitoral stimulation. (I had ALOT of time in my hands and a job at a hot erotic publication and no, no, no man or woman was of any interest to me.) And one day, poof. An orgasm that felt entirely different, not a G-spot thing, that welled up from the inside. To this day, I believe in 2 kinds of orgasm: vaginal and clitoral. If biology says this is impossible, maybe the definition of “vaginal O” needs to be changed to accommodate orgasms that produce distinctly different sensations [vag, anal, clit, intellectual ;)]. I have yet to find my G-spot, so I can’t comment on that, but I hear emphatic evidence that it exists.
Of course achieving the vaginal orgasm, I laughed, “Ah, Freud. Am I now a woman in your eyes?” (Here’s what Koedt writes)
“Freud contended that the clitoral orgasm was adolescent, and that upon puberty, when women began having intercourse with men, women should transfer the center of orgasm to the vagina. “
I believe Freud is wrong and often condescending from his naive-but-not-his-fault, fin de siecle Viennese perspective. One should read Freud like fiction, but thank him for introducing therapy in such an organized manner so that it can be continued to be improved upon for years to come. Anna does a fine job of breaking him down.
In the rest of the essay, she explores why we perpetuate the myth of the vaginal orgasm from various perspectives. Fine. It’s a feminist article from the 1970s. I get the context. And the finest point Koedt makes is this:
“We must discard the “normal” concepts of sex and create new guidelines which take into account mutual sexual enjoyment. “
However, and dear reader thank you for this article, is it really worthwhile to hold up an outdated article on the female sexual experience in a patriarchal context today? In some respects, yes, as we have not far beyond the limited perspectives of sex that were being challenged then, but this is a new time. In our permissive society, we need a new language for the liberation and expression of our sexual selves. Also, I can’t do generalization. It just doesn’t make sense. The sexual revolution is up to each woman to assert her boundaries, know herself and never, never let a man tell her how she should be feeling. We need to move towards mutuality. We need to move towards a oneness. We need a SEXUALLY SANE society. From that spring will bubble all the neurosis-free, mutual enjoyment one can keep their hands busy with.
