Vagina (11 page)

Sappho wrote of jealousy “underneath my breast, all the heart is shaken . . . underneath my skin the tenuous flame suffuses . . . fever shakes my body.”
²⁷
The author of the Song of Songs (whom many scholars presume to have been a woman) wrote, “Strengthen me with raisins, / refresh me with apples, / for I am faint with love. . . . All night long on my bed / I looked for the one my heart loves; / I looked for him but did not find him. / I will get up now and go about the city. / Through its streets and squares; / I will search for the one my heart loves. / . . . I . . . would not let him go . . . / Blow on my garden, / that its fragrance may spread abroad.”
²⁸

The grieving Dido, abandoned by her lover Aeneas; Charlotte Brontë’s small, impoverished governess, who nearly died in a blazing bedroom trying to rescue her love in
Jane Eyre;
George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver, in
The Mill on the Floss,
who witnessed her reputation, her role in society, and her obligations to convention, all wash away from her as she allowed herself to be swept down a soon-to-be-fatal river with a man to whom she was powerfully sexually attracted; and you, my dear reader, who have probably—likely much to your own mortification—obsessively checked for a response to an unanswered e-mail or sat by an unringing phone, as have I; are we masochists, are we pathetic, or trivial-minded? No, to the contrary. Rather, we are subject to a force that is extremely powerful—one that perhaps no man can truly understand. I think that what drives us is rather noble.

An essential paradox of the female condition is that for women to really be free, we have to understand the ways in which nature designed us to be attached to and dependent upon love, connection, intimacy, and the right kind of Eros in the hands of the right kind of man or woman.

I believe we should respect the potential for “enslavement” to sexual love in women; to our place with Eros and love. Because only by making room for it, rather than suppressing or mocking it, can we strive to understand it. When a woman is engaged in this struggle with love and need, she is not “subject” to the person in question; she is actually engaged in a struggle with herself, to find a way to reclaim her autonomy while somehow not cutting herself off from the part of herself that was awakened by the beloved in the longing for connection.

A woman struggling with attachment and loss of self is engaged in a struggle for the self as demanding and rigorous as that of any man on any quest narrative. Of course, the biological responses I am talking about here have long been identified in psychoanalysis and in literature; only recently has science added new dimensions to and explanations of these mind-states elucidated by poets, novelists, and students of the psyche.

One of my favorite slang terms for the vagina in the United States is “the force.” This is what we should be talking about. Women indeed take love, sex, and intimacy seriously, not because women, intimacy, and Eros are trivial but because nature in its clever and transcendental wiring of women’s genitals and their brains has forced women to face the fact, which is simply more obscured to men (though actually ultimately no less true for them), that the need for connection, love, intimacy, and Eros is indeed bigger and stronger than anything else in the world.

A culture that does not respect women tends to deride and mock women’s preoccupation with love and Eros. But often we are preoccupied with the beloved not because we have no selves of our own, but because the beloved has physiologically awakened aspects of our own selves.

Should we not, rather, be proud of who we are?

We should be proud.

5

What We “Know” About Female Sexuality Is Out of Date

They had laughed and made love and laughed again . . .

—Nancy Mitford,
The Pursuit of Love

T
his journey showed me, to my surprise, that even though we talk about sex all the time, the information we have about female sexuality is generally out of date. If women had easy—or at least easier—access to and could draw on the new scientific discoveries about female sexuality, which have not been widely reported, they would have a much deeper understanding of their own sexual and emotional responses—and could feel far more sexually alive and connected. Many of these new discoveries illuminate our conflicted feelings vis-à-vis our drive to be loved, and speak directly to the need for men and women to engage with what I will call “the Goddess Array,” the set of behaviors that activate the autonomic nervous system in women.

Sex educator Liz Topp, author of
Vaginas: An Owner’s Manual,
in an eye-opening interview with me (in which she reported that senior girls in high school, even in our enlightened age, and even in excellent schools, have no idea where on the chart of the vulva the clitoris is—and neither do senior boys), referred to some of these behaviors, only half jokingly, as “the things that women need that men don’t need.”
¹
The latest science confirms that these “little” gestures and flourishes, which are so often relegated to the category of “things that people do in courtship and stop doing in a long-term relationship”—those sexual or romantic “extras” that are sort of nice to dole out to women but are not deemed essential—are in fact physically and emotionally fundamental to women’s vibrancy. These practices radically boost a woman’s orgasmic potential. But at least as importantly, they help support her relationships, and are even essential to her mental health and peace of mind. They all add up to gestures and attentions that compose “the Goddess Array.”

Why, one might ask, don’t more people know about this information? There are several reasons for this reticence. One reason is that it is still often taboo to write and talk substantively in public forums about the actual vagina and its actual needs and experiences, as opposed to talking about female sexuality from a more conventional women’s magazine “sex advice” angle.

Another reason this new information has not “crossed over” into mainstream conversation is that much of it can risk, at first, sounding terribly politically incorrect. It is not easy to address the biology of women’s sexuality without sounding reductive or running afoul of gender politics. If we try to address women’s basic animal nature, we run the risk of sounding as if we are casting women as
only
animal-like, or as more animal-like than men.

The tricky part is, if you look at the new science, that women
are
indeed, in sex, in some ways more like animals than men are; the new science also reveals that, in sex, women can be more like mystics than men are. These are controversial statements, but as a feminist I believe that a frank exploration of the potential animal and mystical aspects of female sexuality does not in any way undermine women’s rational, intellectual, and professional capabilities.

Finally, these important new discoveries are not widely discussed in mass media yet because the “solution” to many of the sexual problems that women report is not a lucrative new drug, but rather a change in human interaction. Specifically, the solution is often that least easy goal to reach—a sweeping change in how most straight men behave in bed with most straight women. Major pharmaceutical companies—which are the major funders of ads for newspapers, magazines, and websites that address female sexuality—will not realize any profit from millions of men simply learning how to touch their women better, gaze at them longer, hold them more skillfully, or bring them to more transformative orgasms.

But it is important to get this new information out into the world nonetheless, because our conventional wisdom about female sexuality is badly out of date. The last broadly reported investigation that still informs our notion of female sexuality was the survey of ten thousand cycles of orgasms surveyed in the William H. Masters and Virginia Johnson classics,
Human Sexual Response
(1966) and
Human Sexual Inadequacy
(1970), and the survey of 3,500 women by Shere Hite,
The
Hite Report on Female Sexuality
(1976). As mentioned earlier, Masters and Johnson concluded that women and men were essentially similar in their sexual responses. They also concluded that there was no physiological difference between a “vaginal orgasm” and a “clitoral orgasm.”

Masters and Johnson also annoyed feminists by maintaining that penile thrusting alone should give women enough stimulation to have orgasms. Shere Hite contested this conclusion in her own survey. She cited data that about two-thirds of women could not have orgasms during coitus but often could while masturbating, but that only about a third had orgasms through intercourse alone.
²
Masters and Johnson’s conclusions that the sexes’ responses are essentially the same, along with Hite’s interest in highlighting the importance of the clitoris and diminishing the importance of the vagina—joined as she was by a wave of feminist commentary also supporting the importance of the clitoris and downgrading the vagina, in such essays as Anne Koedt’s “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” (1970)—all served to leave us where we are today: with a general impression that female sexuality is a lot like male sexuality, except that some women can have multiple orgasms; the general belief that the vagina is not as important as the clitoris (women’s advice columns still, wrongly, echoing Anne Koedt’s vastly influential essay, misinform woman that the vagina “has very few nerve endings”); and a consensus that it is good etiquette for men to give women, chivalrously, a bit of advance help in the stimulation department (these gestures, cast as gildings on the lily of intercourse, are still infuriatingly called “foreplay”) but that the pacing of “sex” is essentially that of the male sex response cycle.

These assumptions are not accurate. It turns out that male sexuality and female sexuality are
very
different. It turns out that, for women, the clitoris is sexually important, the vagina is sexually important, the G-spot is sexually important, the mouth of the cervix is sexually important, the perineum is sexually important, and the anus is sexually important. Recent research has found that what Masters and Johnson argued—that all female orgasm goes through the clitoris—is incorrect. According to the newest data, the G-spot and the clitoris are both aspects of a single neural structure; and women have, as we saw and as Dr. Komisaruk’s MRI findings confirm, at least
three
sexual centers: clitoris, vagina, and the third at the mouth of the cervix. (He adds a fourth, the nipples.)

When I first learned that new science had confirmed the sexual responsiveness of the cervix, I was shocked that I had heard nothing about it from science reporting (though I had from literature: “At the back of the womb there lay flesh that demanded to be penetrated. It curved inwards, opening to suck. The flesh walls moved like sea anemones, seeking by suction to draw his sex in. . . . She opened her mouth as if to reveal the openness of the womb, its hunger, and only then did he plunge to the very bottom and felt her contractions . . . ,” writes Anaïs Nin, who was not waiting for scientific confirmation, in
Delta of Venus
³
). That elision of information was one of many weird omissions I would find on this journey as I stumbled upon hugely important scientific discovery after hugely important scientific discovery that had received virtually zero mainstream ink. If a sixth unknown sense were confirmed by science, if they had found that every man had, tucked away, somewhere about his person, an extra sexual organ
,
for God’s sake—
would that not make the evening news?

Another recent study has found that the whole “clitoris versus vagina”—Masters and Johnson versus Shere Hite—debate is itself wrongly framed: the G-spot, in the anterior wall of the vagina, is now being understood by many researchers to be
part
of the anterior root of the clitoris. The female sexual organ, which includes all these areas, is being proved by new science to be far more complex and far more magical than the utilitarian thrusting totted up by Masters and Johnson can account for, or the goal-oriented, male-identified model of female sexuality mistakenly popularized to this very day in sex advice columns in magazines from
Good Housekeeping
to
Cosmo.

It turns out that women are designed to have many different kinds of orgasms; that women have the potential to have orgasms without any end except physical exhaustion; that if you understand female sexuality, you pace all the action around her; that while this is a high bar to set, you still want to set it, because properly treated, some women can ejaculate, and because all women in orgasm can go into a unique trance state; that women’s orgasms last longer than men’s; that memory plays a role in female arousal in a way that is not the case with male arousal; and that women’s response to arousal and orgasm is biochemically very different from men’s. We’re like guys sexually in superficial ways, but in many ways we are, sexually, profoundly
not
like guys.

Maybe one reason this new information has been underreported has to do with anxieties about the male ego, even if the censorship involved is unconscious. Why wouldn’t every newspaper be reporting new data that suggest that women are potentially sexually insatiable? Or that many of them are unhappy with the current sexual status quo? Or that certain kinds of seductive behavior and attention from their partners doubles or even quadruples the “microvolts” in the climaxing cervix and vagina? What’s not to like about this information? Perhaps the lack of attention to this new information is the fear of implying a new “task”—that of sexual muse and sexual artist—to be put upon male shoulders, even as most men are already overtired and overworked.