Straight (25 page)

COIN OF THE REALM

There is no official international unit for measuring sexuality, but if there were, it would be the orgasm. This is Alfred Kinsey's fault. Unlike his predecessors in the field of sexology, Kinsey chose to base his research, as much as possible, on measurable, distinct physical experiences and biological phenomena. The most prominent of these, used for counting and classifying sex acts, was orgasm. Part of the shock that
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
produced when it was published in 1948 was due to Kinsey's conclusive evidence that far more men were experiencing orgasms far more often, and as a result of far more kinds of sexual activity, than polite society willingly imagined, and each orgasm represented a fait accompli. And when, for example, it turned out that only about half the orgasms Kinsey's several thousand male respondents reported had occurred in the course of
vaginal intercourse with their respective wives, it was not a welcome revelation.

Orgasm-counting delivered another wallop to traditional expectations about sex when
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
was released, in 1953. While the ubiquity of masturbation and the 37 percent of men who had experienced sex with other men had been the shocking revelations of the male Kinsey report, the mindblowers of the female version were women's pre- and extramarital sexual activity and the diversity of their orgasmic experience. Nearly half of Kinsey's women subjects had engaged in intercourse before they married, a figure that American society pretended to find appalling despite the fact that it was obviously commonplace and took place, for the most part, as Kinsey demonstrated, with fiancés whom the women went on to marry. Worse still was the approximately one-quarter of married women (26 percent in Kinsey's figures) who had engaged in extramarital sex.[
21
] Furthermore, Kinsey's women, including the adulterous ones, tended to enjoy sex. His sample ran the full gamut of histories of sexual response, from the 10 percent of women who had been married at least fifteen years but had never experienced an orgasm and the 14 percent who were frequently multiply orgasmic, to the approximately 50 percent of the women who reported having orgasms almost every time they had sex.

Kinsey's orgasm-counting made him a sex-doxa whistleblower. The difference between what people believed the average sex life was like and what it seemed to genuinely be was staggering. But the way Kinsey measured the difference was just as influential as his research. By using orgasms as the beads on his sexological abacus, Kinsey effectively declared that reproduction no longer counted as the baseline of sex between men and women, pleasure did. This had been increasingly true for at least half a century in practice. After Kinsey, it was also true in sexological and biomedical theory.

Kinsey's orgasm-counting also turned the focus of sex theorizing and research firmly away from moralizing. Statistics and demographics, both nineteenth-century inventions, had been making their influence felt in sexological circles for some time. In fact survey-based sex research had been going on longer than anyone really suspected, as was later proven in 1974, when historian Carl Degler uncovered the
surveys Dr. Clelia Mosher had conducted of her women patients' sex lives beginning in the 1890s.[
22
] But by relying on physical events for his metrics, Kinsey added a bench-science attitude to the mix, the attitude that one could observe human sexual behavior and response with the same value-neutral detachment that would be used in documenting the vital statistics of, say, gall wasps. Wasps, indeed, represented Kinsey's major contribution to science prior to his sexological work. Of the 18 million insects in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History, around 5 million are the mindboggling and painstaking collection of gall wasps and galls assembled by Alfred Kinsey.

This bioscientific approach permitted, even encouraged, a new focus on mechanical processes and physiological events, centering around the most dramatic and easily observed: orgasm. Chapter 15 of Kinsey's
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,
“Physiology of Sexual Response and Orgasm,” became an instant touchstone, for no one had previously approached the subject in such a methodical and comprehensive fashion. Shortly thereafter, when William Masters began his research on sex in 1954, he immediately concentrated on the mechanics, techniques, and phenomena of sexual arousal and climax. By the time Masters, by then working in partnership with Virginia Johnson (whom he would later marry), published
Human Sexual Response
in 1966, the research team had observed 382 women and 312 men in what they estimated had been approximately ten thousand “complete cycles of sexual response” that included both penis-in-vagina intercourse and, radically, masturbation. Technology was a major factor in their work, including miniaturized cameras mounted inside plastic phalluses that let them document, for instance, what took place inside the vagina during orgasm. Masters and Johnson's research led to a complete overhaul of the biomedical understanding of what happened physiologically during sex, and to a ground-up reevaluation of female orgasm in particular.

Kinsey had asserted—although it was well buried nearly 600 pages into an 800-plus-page book—that the vagina was “of minimum importance in contributing to the erotic responses of the female,” and actually probably contributed more to men's sexual experience than to women's. Masters and Johnson's work confirmed that this was true, and further revealed that the so-called vaginal orgasm was actually
not vaginal. When it happened at all, it was the result of friction between clitoral hood and clitoris that some women experienced when the thrusts of the penis tugged at connected flesh. This, they explained, created the mistaken impression of an orgasm that was dependent on penetration. Masters and Johnson's work on masturbation further disproved the vaginal orgasm theory. Proper psychosexual adjustment, it appeared, had little to do with anything where orgasm was concerned. Proper sexual technique and adequate attention to the clitoris, on the other hand, did. What Kinsey had proposed, Masters and Johnson disposed.

These discoveries, arriving when and as they did, provided bountiful fuel for the social, political, and philosophical fires of the Sexual Revolution. Prioritizing pleasure over reproduction was a fine complement to critiques of capitalism and industrialism. Acknowledging that pleasure gave utility to non-intercourse sex acts was a powerful critique of conformity. Putting orgasm first, and making pleasure the aspect of sex that counted most, made it easier to bash “hang-ups” like monogamy, the idea that sex belonged only in marriage, and the idea that sex was only legitimate when accompanied by love. A body that was free to experience orgasm at will, it seemed to many, was a body that could be liberated from the shackles of a repressive society that wanted to control what people did with their loyalties, their energies, and their reproductive organs.

If orgasm was the thing that made sex legitimate, not the kind of activity that produced the orgasm, all kinds of possibilities for legitimate sex opened up. Oral sex in particular had been rare among male/female couples in the Kinsey reports, but became commonplace for the younger generation (those under thirty) during the 1970s. At the same time, the Pill transformed even traditional penetrative vaginal sex itself into something that could be considered from the standpoint of pleasure first, and only secondarily as a potentially reproductive act. As John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman write in
Intimate Matters,
their landmark history of sexual life in America, “Even the supposedly immutable ‘sex act' underwent redefinition in ways that weakened a male monopoly over the nature of sex.”[
23
]

Orgasm was particularly significant to the causes of gay liberation and feminism. The rise in recreational sex and contraceptive use
among straight-identified couples made it more difficult to pillory the “unproductive” sex of same-sex partners. Same-sex sexual activity also gained some legitimacy, as it became clear that different-sex couples were regularly participating in many of the same actual activities as same-sex partners. Oral sex, in particular, had become extremely popular among different-sex couples, many of whom, as studies like Kinsey's clearly showed, were also no strangers to at least occasional anal intercourse.

To women, the orgasm-centered revelations of Kinsey and of Masters and Johnson were even more important and symbolic. First and foremost, they let feminists gleefully kick the whole notion of “vaginal orgasm” to the curb. Women everywhere breathed a sigh of relief as they began to set down the Freudian baggage of “appropriate” psychosexual gender-role identification. Many were also thrilled at the prospect of legitimate female sexual pleasure that was not beholden to penetration or the penis. The pleasures of the clitoris became a rallying point for feminists and lesbian-feminists, who rapidly began to produce a number of stunning critiques of “vaginal orgasm,” penetrative sexual intercourse, and heterosexuality as a whole. Anne Koedt's essay “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” and Ti-Grace Atkinson's “The Institution of Sexual Intercourse” and “Vaginal Orgasm as a Mass Hysterical Survival Response” were all published in 1968, dramatically radicalizing a feminist discussion about sex that was already in a lively state of ferment.

Women's orgasms rapidly became tokens of liberation, proof that one had succeeded in throwing off, and rooting out, the psychological fetters of repressive, conformist “Victorian” and “Puritan” views of sexuality. But no sooner did the pendulum begin to swing than some women began to feel that the pressure to have orgasms was oppressive in its own way. Feminist Dana Densmore wrote, in 1971, “Our ‘right' to enjoy our own bodies has not only been bestowed upon us, it is almost a duty . . . and people seem to believe that sexual freedom (even when it is only the freedom to actively offer one's self as a willing object) is freedom.”[
24
] Some lesbian feminists, in particular, retreated from the pursuit of orgasm-focused sex, finding it too much an instrument of patriarchal, performance-oriented control. They endorsed a feminist sexuality that was whole-bodied rather than genitally focused, centered
on emotions and intimacy rather than bodily sensation. Others continued to explore feminist models for overtly genital, orgasm-oriented sex predicated on physical pleasure.[
25
]

In the mainstream culture, too, women and men struggled to make sense of what it meant to have orgasm be a sexual raison d'être. As powerful and new as the orgasm standard was, it by no means made a clean sweep of sexual culture. Women, and men as well, had to figure out how or indeed whether the pursuit of sexual pleasure for its own sake fit in with their desires for love, romance, marriage, children, economic stability, and career goals. Books, magazine articles, and other media touted the giving and getting of sexual pleasure as a source of personal fulfillment, the ultimate in sophistication, and manifest proof of sexual desirability. But relatively few people gave up the search for love—at least in the long term—in favor of purely sexual liaisons. Clumsily, sometimes catastrophically, but also hopefully, men and women tried their best to incorporate the ethos that “good relationships are based in good sex” and the cultivation of equal-opportunity orgasm into the already demanding culture of different-sex relationships. To be heterosexual now meant to pursue relationships that encompassed, at minimum, egalitarian sexual pleasure, enthusiastic sexual desire and activity, romantic love, emotional intimacy, and companionship. In most cases, heterosexuality also encompassed economic collaboration, monogamy, kinship, shared domesticity, and parenting. It was, and still is, a lot to ask.

Making orgasm the goal of sex did not, in fact, usher in a magical era of liberation, equality, and general grooviness. Women continue to have to negotiate a sexual double standard that, even in Hollywood's fantasy factory, paints their sexual pleasure as less appropriate and less valid than men's. The film-ratings body known as the Motion Picture Association of America has been noted to apply its harshest, most commercially damaging, ratings to films featuring what it deems to be “overlong” scenes of female orgasm.[
26
] Women who are perceived to be overly sexual, or too sexual in the wrong ways—meaning, especially, ways that do not focus on conventional feminine receptivity to men—are still likely to be shamed, ostracized, and punished.[
27
]

Men, in their turn, have had to learn to contend with sexually assertive, even aggressive, women. While one might assume this would
be a dream come true for men, for many it has proven to be a source of anxiety and fear. Women with the sexual experience to form critical opinions about men's sexual performance may be seen as terrifying taskmistresses whose exacting standards, as historian Angus McLaren notes, men often perceive as emasculating. Women's use of vibrators, dildos, and other tools for self-pleasuring also generate fears that the penis—and presumably the man himself—will not be able to measure up and that men will find themselves obsolete.

Women's relative freedom to have orgasms on their own, with one another, and on demand is surely an improvement over having their sexual pleasure be always and forever yoked to the movement of a husband's penis. But an expanded ethos of heterosexual pleasure options does not sweep away older mandates; it just adds to the list. Penetrative penis-in-vagina sex continues to define “sex” in the eyes of many; there is evidence that many teenagers, schooled in antipregnancy and abstinence-only rhetoric, happily engage in many other sex acts on the blithe assumption that they are “not really” sex.[
28
] Ejaculation also continues to hold a certain pride of place. Even in the age of HIV/AIDS—perhaps, paradoxically, partly because of it—the external ejaculation “money shot” is the standard depiction of male pleasure in pornography. The recent popularity of
bukkake
porn, in which a woman is depicted as reveling in being ejaculated on by multiple men simultaneously, also seems to tap into some very old fantasies about the source of women's “real” and “proper” sexual pleasure.