So.

If you watch a lot of porn (and I do) you may notice that there’s a lot of supposed “squirting” and “gushing” going on out there.

And, like me, you may assume that it’s pee.

Because… well…

It’s pee.

I am not saying that every woman out there that says she’s mastered the fine art of “squirting” is peeing.  I am saying that those woman in porn?  The ones that can aim and hit a camera? Are peeing.

I’m not a fan.

First, who has the sort of time for doing that much laundry?

Second:  it’s a lie.

Now, a lot of porn-related notions are lies.  It’s nothing new. It’s only when the our goofy myths start to hurt people that I start to sneer.

Actually, if you want to have a good eye-roll, check out this Wiki entry on “Female Sexual Arousal Syndrome.”  (Which I like to think of as, “Maybe She’s Just Not That Into You Disease.”)

The only mention of female sexual arousal disorder in a peer-reviewed medical journal indicated that 43% of women suffer from FSD, however the survey turned out to not be a rigorous study. Of the handful of questions, if any respondent answered yes at any time, they were classified as having FSD. Here are the questions asked that respondents could only choose a response of Yes or No:

• Lacked interest in having sex
• Were unable to come to climax
• Came to climax too quickly
• Experienced physical pain during intercourse
• Did not find sex pleasurable even if sex was not painful
• Felt anxious just before having sex
• Had trouble lubricating

Furthermore, the author Edward O. Laumann turned out to have financial ties to Pfizer, creator of Viagra.

Classy.

If she’s not horny, she’s got a “syndrome.”

Familiar.

Calling Captain Phallus

Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar, and Sometimes an Orgasm is a Way to Theorize Directly from Your Viennese Ass.

 In 1905, Freud stated that clitoral orgasms are purely an adolescent phenomenon and that upon reaching puberty, the proper response of mature women is a change-over to vaginal orgasms, meaning orgasms without any clitoral stimulation. While Freud provided no evidence for this basic assumption, the consequences of this theory were considerable. Many women felt inadequate when they could not achieve orgasm via vaginal intercourse alone, involving little or no clitoral stimulation, as Freud’s theory made penile-vaginal intercourse the central component to women’s sexual satisfaction.

If she’s not vaginally climaxing, she’s immature and neurotic.

We had several decades where 70 to 80% of women were incapable of achieving the right kind of orgasm.

After Kinsey suggested that clitoral orgasm was the norm people did math and science and Quaaludes and eventually, Masters and Johnson suggested that even vaginal orgasm was still actually clitoral orgasm.  The theory was that the talent for “vaginal” orgasm was largely related to how far away the clit was from the vaginal opening.

You’d think that the human body would be pretty darned well mapped, but as late as 2008, scientists were using MRIs to try to locate and identify lady parts. Really.  French researchers Odile Buisson and Pierre Foldès confirmed that the “erectile tissue of the clitoris engorges and surrounds the vagina.”  At this point, most scientists agree that the ‘g-spot’ is actually just another part of the clitoris. Not all.  But most.

Was anyone really attracted to Billy Crystal? I mean… really?

No, Really. I’ve had a Point All Along.

So, here we are, in a world where women are peeing at cameras, and other women are claiming to be pioneers in tantra and “female ejaculation.” Hippie couples are running undoubtedly expensive seminars and retreats to “coach” you in the “ancient secrets” of “tantric g-spot orgasm.”  There are badly reviewed, self-published books for men that want to turn YOU into a “squirter.”

Imagine if you could give your partner the most powerful orgasm of her life and it was as easy as following a basic, straightforward set of instructions that are guaranteed to work. GOOD NEWS: IT IS THAT EASY!

It’s never that easy.

The “G-spot” isn’t an individual organ–it’s just more clit.  There are a couple of different organs in that area. One of them is the “Skene’s gland,” a vestigial organ (like male nipples), also called the “female prostate,” and it doesn’t even exist in all women.

According to a study at the University of Italy, Skene’s glands have “a highly variable anatomy, and in some extreme cases they appear to be missing entirely. If Skene’s glands are the cause of female ejaculation and G-spot-orgasms, this may explain the observed absence of these phenomena in many women.”

The prostate in men is functional because of testosterone–it produces a fifth to a third of the volume of any given ejaculation. So. A fully functioning, walnut sized prostate produces about a third to a fifth of a teaspoon of fluid, give or take.  And, the female prostate is many times smaller, occasionally not even there at all, and it does produce “some” fluid, in theory, which exits the urethra.

Deborah Sundahl suggests the female urethra can release, “cups full of erotic juices.”  Men don’t even produce cups of erotic juices with fully functioning, non vestigial prostates.

Unless the definition of “erotic juices” includes urine.

Now, if golden showers are your thing, then just own it. Love the pee. Embrace your inner pee fairy.

But keep your pee off me.

There’s always someone out there willing to tell women their orgasms are wrong.

They’re Satanic. They’re derived from the wrong organ. They’re too wet, too dry, too loud, too quiet. Fake. They take too long. They happen too readily.  I actually caught some radical feminists claiming that “real” orgasms are full body experiences of profound non-violent love and Real Lesbianic “gynergy” exchange, totally devoid of genital “colonization.”

No, I’m not kidding.  I’ll provide a link, if you want.

There’s always someone out there willing to tell women their orgasms are wrong.

Don’t let someone pee on you, and tell you it’s orgasm rain.

You don’t need training to have the “right” kind of orgasm. Fetuses masturbate in the womb.  We were born to rub one out.

You don’t need:

1. weird positions
2. specially trained muscles
3. the mysterious ability to “really let go emotionally”
4. because you’re probably just not trusting your partner enough
5. or you’re uptight and repressed
6. and you need some new age culturally-appropriated tantra
7. or dick-centric seduction community ministrations
8. where you fork over money for “secrets”

to have real, true, correct, and most-especially? Demonstrative orgasms.

Your orgasms are fine.

It’s 2012, and your orgasms are fine.

Let’s try to keep it that way, while we can.

 
The Female Orgasm: A Brief History, Part 1
The Female Orgasm: A Brief History, Part 2
The Female Orgasm: A Brief History, Part 3

“The best mothers, wives, and managers of households know little or nothing of sexual indulgences…. As a general rule, a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband, but only to please him.”

Dr. William Acton, 1875

Aren’t you glad you don’t live in the late 1800′s?

There’s a Victorian Wall between now and the vast majority of human history, at least it pertains to Western conceptions of female libido. So, how’d we get here?

Science and economics.

Sexy, right?

He’s got a hunger for knowledge.

Economics, or “The Money is in the Cure”

Somewhere around the time that men of education decide that ”all men are created equal,” ditching part of the feudal notion of the “great chain of being,” they “discover” that women aren’t actually deflated-balloon un-men.

They subsequently decide that women are pretty much a whole different species. Actually, they decide that anything that isn’t a European Dude is another species. That way they only have to apply that “being equal” business to a fairly small subset of the population.

Convenient, right?

So, at the beginning of the 1800′s, after all that Enlightenment materialist thinking, with people being equal and women in New Jersey voting, and a good chunk of France just going batshit insane, there’s a backlash.  Because, that’s how humans work.  And, it’s a backlash that occurs during an economic revolution–women running about willy-nilly, working in factories, going into indentured contracts and moving out into colonies.

When you’ve got an agricultural/artisan economy, most people live and work at home.  Your women may be lusty, but you’ve got them trapped, more or less–they’re at home and under your watch.

In an industrial economy dependent on Imperial connections, people move around more.  The more people moved around, the shriller the “scientific” voices became about the amazing shrinking female libido.

During the same period, male masturbation becomes a disease because someone wanted to sell the cure.

The first use of the word “onanism” to consistently and specifically refer to masturbation appears to be Onania, an anonymous pamphlet first distributed in London in 1716. It drew on familiar themes of sin and vice, this time in particular against the “heinous sin” of “self-pollution”. After dire warnings that those who so indulged would suffer impotence, gonorrhea, epilepsy and a wasting of the faculties (included were letters and testimonials supposedly from young men ill and dying from the effects of compulsive masturbation) the pamphlet then goes on to recommend as an effective remedy a “Strengthening Tincture” at 10 shillings a bottle and a “Prolific Powder” at 12 shillings a bag, available from a local shop.

By the 1770′s, it had morphed into medical fact, complete with a celebrity doctor. Pamphlets like memes.

Science!

Hysteria

If you repeat something often enough, people believe you.

Irony: the same 19th doctors that insisted that “normal” women didn’t like sex prescribed therapeutic ”paroxysms” to relieve the symptoms of “Hysteria.”  They also ordered clitorectomies to prevent female masturbation.  For creatures that can’t orgasm.

The logic appears to be that “orgasm” only happens during sex, exclusively meaning Penis In Vagina, and it requires ejaculation. Therefore medical “paroxysm” isn’t an actual orgasm. It’s… something else.

Mind you, it’s something that’s occasionally described in sexual literature–there’s Victorian erotica out there. For some mysterious reason, the non-existent female orgasm is still being faked by prostitutes in some places.

This is where people start waxing their Foucault pole.

Yes. A Foucault pole is a real thing. And it requires waxing. I said so.  So there.

It’s not like sex just went away for 100 years.

For one, you’ve got plenty of acceptably dirty poetry, poets being the daring rock stars of the era.  You’ve got erotic, even kinky, stories and novels.

They invented the word pornography. It entered Webster’s dictionary in 1864.  Laws banning obscenity began in 1857 in the UK.  The discovery of all the smut at Pompeii was something of a scandal.  As soon as we could take pictures?  We took sexy pictures. As soon as we had film?  We filmed sexy ladies.

The fifth domestic appliance that received an American patent?  Hamilton Beach’s electric vibrator in 1902.

By 1905 at least one Esteemed Man of Education referred to a “clitoral orgasm.”

Guess who?

To be continued…

The Female Orgasm: A Brief History, Part 1
The Female Orgasm: A Brief History, Part 2

The Female Orgasm: A Brief History, Part 4

In which I roll my eyes at Great Thinkers.

We owe a lot to the Greeks.  Sometimes what we owe them is a kick in the junk.

Just saying.

First off, we’ve got Aristotle.

The female is, as it were, a mutilated male.
– from Generation of Animals

I don’t happen to believe that’s the case, but I’m a woman that reads a lot, so it might my wandering uterus talking.

Galen knew about the clitoris, and he took the Aristotelian notion of “vital heat” straight to the genitals.

Before the eighteenth century, ideas about sexual difference were based on the Galenic notion that males and females basically had the same genitals. Women were considered essentially as “men in whom a lack of vital heat—of perfection—had resulted in the retention, inside, of structures that in the male are visible without.”

Kind of makes men sound like magic hot air balloons.  It also equates the vagina with the penis, completely ignoring the clitoris. This scrotal inflationary theory lasted until, ohhhh, the 1700′s or so, during which time the clitoris was “discovered” on a repeated basis.  As late at the 1500′s, though, scholars argued over whether or not it even existed, including Andreas Vesalius, the “Father of Modern Anatomy.”

Aren’t you glad you’re not that guy’s wife?

Vesalius, the Snarkster: ”It is unreasonable to blame others for incompetence on the basis of some sport of nature you have observed in some women and you can hardly ascribe this new and useless part, as if it were an organ, to healthy women.”

So, for 2000 years or so, elite, educated men had all the anatomical sophistication of Anastasia Steele.

It was, at least academically, just “down there.”

Let’s just blame the whole, wide world.

There’s a running notion that Western sexual repression can be laid fully on Paul and Augustine.

Asceticism is a Greek word which originally applied to athletic training. It’s not a Jewish tradition. The kind of self-denial you see in the Judeo-Roman world around the time of Christ resembles Hindu and Buddhist practices.  Alexander was a bad ass; the Greeks made it to India, and trade routes spread knowledge as well as wealth. (This is how you end up with mouth breathers in Bible-based megachurches using words like agape in their men’s Bible study groups, as short-hand for the “no-homo” version of having a “relationship” with a Loving Christ.)

The ascetic impulse applies not just to sex, but all physical indulgence. Food. Clothing. Shelter. Speaking, in some cases.

Out into the desert with you, to wrestle with demons and inner narrative.  Give up your attachments to worldly pleasure. Live on Spirit. (Starving saints have traditionally been female. Interpret that however you want.)

The Judgement of Paris, Simonet, 1904. Helen. Cassandra. Aphrodite. Eve and the Magdalen didn’t exactly have the market cornered.

So, you’ve got this new(ish) Indo-Hellenic aversion to corporeal existence, mixed in with long-standing Greek ideas (read: homosocial) about the nature of “true” affection and magic-balloon-peen, and a Jewish male God that is dead-on obsessed with human reproduction. Add that to Roman constructs of “sex” as being primarily class constructed and entirely penetration-focused, with a number of taboos concerning who did what to whom.  Finish off with a heaping helping of apocalyptic fervor.  The world is always just about to end.

Paul was just a product of his times.

But, really, it’s less about Christianity being specifically anti-sex, than it is about Christian theology being opposed to the human body. Some denominations over the years pretty much advocated for voluntary human extinction.  But, in perspective? Lust is only the first level of hell in Inferno. 

Doctrine solidified. Rome fell.

There’s a dark age for Western orgasms. At least, orgasms on the record.

Mostly, it’s a dark age for record keeping.

By the early modern period, you still have those same insatiable vaginas, throwing a monkey wrench into male plans. Blodeuwedd. Guinevere, Morgan, Isolde.  The Wife of Bath. Witches, even. Women were still perceived as the lustier sex.  The ones that pick the apple and believe the serpent.  Since they, apparently, wanted to steal all that vital heat from male sperm, or at least that’s what doctors thought.

Then, the tide started to turn.

Still to be continued…

The Female Orgasm: A Brief History, Part 1

The Female Orgasm: A Brief History, Part 3
The Female Orgasm: A Brief History, Part 4

A series.

This week shall be all about orgasms.

Or, at least, the history of orgasms.

You can blame this on the porn. I am going to.

As did the Ancient Caveladies of Ye Olden Tymes

There are a handful of evolutionary theories out there about female orgasm.

Now, some scientists think that women only have orgasms because they have “vestigial organs.”  The clitoris is embryonic penis debris, and female orgasm isn’t evolutionarily adaptive.

It’s an exploitable bug, more than a product feature.

Some scientists think that female orgasm has some “useful” functions–it increases female libido, it ups the odds of conception through cervical spasms, and it encourages heterosexual pair bonding. That sort of thing.

But my personal favorite is the Cave Lady Group Sex idea.

Because some scientists nick the whole “pair bonding” thing altogether.

Real Time Photo of Ancient Cave Lady

So, some scientists have suggested that women orgasm, not just the one time per session, but potentially many times because we used to be big old group sex-aholics.

Basically, if a cave-lady didn’t get satisfaction the first time, she could move onto another partner, and then maybe another. Like chimps do.  It’s possible that the orgasm ‘gender gap’ serves a purpose.

And, seeing as we all lived in bands and there were no privacy screens or Tin Lizzies or single-family detached homes, basically all sex was what we’d call exhibitionist.

It’s possible that our ancestors were horn-dog orgy experts who whittled huge-boobed ladies with giant vulvas. It has some potential adaptive advantages, most notably in a theoretical decrease in infanticide and a boost in group cohesion.

You have to admit. The theory has a certain charm, right?

Multiple orgasms: solace for the risk of being trampled to death by woolly mammoths.

Homo sapiens have been around less than half a million years, and anatomically modern humans are about 200,000 years old.  Our oldest cave paintings go back about 40 thousand years.  Permanent human settlements linked to agriculture appear to date back about 10 thousand years.  So, you know, that’s about 190 thousand years of potential cave orgies.

Alas, after we do things like “run out of megafauna” and “invent property rights” this notion that women are insatiable becomes a big problem.  When hunting and gathering stops sustaining, and you’re all on little bits of land, you’ve got three new problems: 1.) who do you assign property rights to, 2. ) who’s going to work the land, and 3.) who are you going to pass it on to?

So, humanity invents the Orgasm Police.  And, guess who’s orgasms need the most policing?

Woman as libidinous and insatiable has been the dominant human sexual narrative for much, much longer than the current notions about “frigidity” and “dysfunction.”  Ovid actually had Juno and Jove argue over who got the most pleasure out of sex.  Women won. In a lot of places, it’s still the assumed truth.  Granted, in a lot of places, the notion still does an enormous amount of harm.

Scientifically speaking, women are the more visual sex.  Women physically respond to a wider variety of erotic imagery than men, and they do it, in a lot of cases, completely unconsciously.  When we say things like “men are just visual creatures,” and “women crave emotional connection,” and we intend for those two statements to represent polar opposite approaches, we are repeating myths, and we’re doing it on faith.

You have to wonder why.

I wish I could remember the link, but about a month ago, I saw novelist compare the “climax” in pornography to the “climax” in erotic romance.

The climax in porn is, as we all know, a woman coated in semen–generally a woman apparently sated. The climax in romance, erotic or otherwise, is a declaration of eternal(ish) devotion from a man that’s recognized a woman’s unique awesomeness.

On the surface this looks like “dudes want orgasms” and “chicks want true love!”

Of course, it’s also possible that this looks like some sort of Age of Anxiety manifesto.  ”Dudes want assurance they’re adequate in satisfying a bottomless pit of female sexual want (also: assurance that semen isn’t actually icky)” and “chicks want proof that someone attractive has found them bewitching, over and over and over.”

Romance novels are like those potato chips or methamphetamine.  Once you’re hooked, you don’t stop at one.

Women don’t necessarily “want true love.”  They want “falling in love.”  Tension. Lust.  The gaze. With men. With two men. Men with men.  Men with space aliens.  Women with Vampires. Vampires with werewolves. Werewolves with humans.   Werewolves with vampires AND humans AND Australian Catholic Priests.  Over and over.

And, it doesn’t change the measurable fact that women are still easier to visually arouse than men are.  Which is to say that women get off on all of it.

Yet, somehow, here we are in 2012, with the supposed shock of “Mommy porn” and a whole new way to tell women their orgasms are inadequate.

I told you I was blaming porn.

To Be Continued…

The Female Orgasm: A Brief History, Part 2
The Female Orgasm: A Brief History, Part 3
The Female Orgasm: A Brief History, Part 4