Bonk (8 page)

It seems Kegel didn’t read Kinsey’s book all that closely. Kinsey may have dethroned the vagina, but he didn’t kick it out of the castle. Item 5 on his list of “six or more sources of the satisfactions obtainable from deep vaginal penetrations” is stimulation of the pelvic-floor nerves. Though it is true that Kinsey gives more weight to item 3—“stimulation by the male genitalia or body pressing against…the clitoris” and the rest of the vulva.

The backlash to Kinsey and the general tide of conservatism turned the passive, vaginal orgasm into the holy grail of female sexuality, “the hallmark,” wrote Carolyn Herbst Lewis in the
Journal of Women’s History,
“of a well-adjusted and normal femininity.” The attitude was evident in the new crop of marriage manuals, now circumcised of their clitoral references, and even in the medical journals of the day. Lewis writes that some doctors used the newly sanctioned premarital medical examination—a venereal-disease-prevention measure enacted in a majority of U.S. states during the fifties and sixties—to prepare women for a life of completely fulfilling intercourse. A woman was “assured that her responses could be as full and satisfactory as her husband’s” yet given no advice about clitoral foreplay. The chief obstacle to the vaginal orgasm, in the physicians’ minds, seemed to be penetration anxiety. Journal articles counseled doctors to administer, in cases of thick and ornery hymens, some pre-wedding-night snipping or stretching during the premarital exam. The latter could be done with their fingers or, as one 1954
JAMA
author counseled, a “well-lubricated Pyrex centrifuge tube.” Again with the Pyrex tubes.

Marriage manuals and premarital exams had long disappeared by the time the front wall of the vagina and its “G-spot” gained widespread status as an erogenous zone. Otherwise, you might have found a curiously unconservative tidbit of advice for women bent on having intercourse orgasms: Try it doggie style. Zwi Hoch, of the Center for Sexual Therapy at the Rambam
*
Medical Center in Haifa, Israel, published a paper in which he trained 64 percent of a group of 56 noncoitally orgasmic women to have orgasms by stimulating the front wall of their vagina. While most were using their finger, some had managed it with “anteriorly directed intercourse.” Ernst Grafenberg
†
—the gynecologist who, in 1950, first wrote of “an erotic zone” on the front wall of the vagina “along the course of the urethra”—also advocated sex “
a la vache
” (like the cow) as a better way to hit the spot. “The stimulating effect of this kind of intercourse,” he wrote, “must not be explained away…by the melodious movements of the testicles like a knocker on the clitoris.”

The premarital doctor’s visit was not an entirely bad idea. There are some couples for whom a quick inspection and some frank chat was clearly in order. For example, Robert Latou Dickinson writes that he encountered, over his many decades of clinical practice, eighteen women whose virginity had remained intact despite having (what they mistook to be) intercourse for years. “The husbands and wives, though otherwise intelligent, thought the cleft of the vulva was as deep as his organ was expected to go.” Then there was the woman written up in a 1965 issue of
JAMA
whose husband was mistaking her urethra for her vagina. By the time a doctor discovered what was going on—she was, understandably, having some continence issues—her urethra had been stretched so far that it “readily admitted two fingers.” The author of the paper found thirteen such cases reported in various medical journals, all attributable to rigid, unyielding hymens.

You could not blame a tough hymen in the case of the gay man who—he told Kinsey collaborator Wardell Pomeroy—had intentionally stretched his urethra to accommodate his lover’s penis.

e
ven Marie Bonaparte succumbed to vaginal propaganda. In Bonaparte’s case, the change of viewpoint coincided with a midlife career move. In 1925, a year after publishing the
Bruxelles-Médical
paper, she met Sigmund Freud and decided to become a psychoanalyst. Freud was no friend of the clitoris. Freudian theory holds that grown women who derive their sexual satisfaction from their clitoris are stuck in a childlike state. This “phallic” phase is supposed to end at puberty, when a woman embraces her proper role as a passive, feminine being. “With the change to femininity,” he wrote in
New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis
, “the clitoris should wholly or in part hand over its sensitivity, and at the same time its importance, to the vagina.”

Bonaparte had to do some backpedaling on her clitoral placement theory. For if, as Freud insisted, the well-behaved clitoris relinquishes its sensitivity to the vagina at puberty, then in theory a woman shouldn’t need a clitoris for sexual gratification, let alone care where it’s placed. In her 1953 book
Female Sexuality
, she discredits her
Bruxelles-Médical
article, saying she had since encountered both frigid
paraclitoridiennes
and
téléclitoridiennes
with no problems achieving
volupté.
(Robert Latou Dickinson, in his
Atlas of Human Sex Anatomy,
also mentions having encountered exceptions to Bonaparte’s “sweeping statements.”)

Obviously torn, Bonaparte tried to gain a better understanding of the matter by interviewing women whose clitorises were beyond distant—they were removed, or anyway, the protruding bits were. “Are African women more frequently, and better, ‘vaginalized’ than their European sisters?” she wondered in
Female Sexuality.
Freud got her interested in this. He had told her that cultures that remove clitorises do so in order to further feminize the woman.
*
(The more common belief is that it is done to quash sexual pleasure and desire and keep women from committing adultery.)

In 1941, during the German occupation of France, Bonaparte and her family were evacuated to Egypt, and she had her chance to talk to a couple of women who had had clitoridectomies. The women were not, in fact, fully “vaginalized.” Both women—though they did report having orgasms from intercourse—still masturbated clitorally, on their scars. Probably because (more on this to follow) the majority of the organ is hidden below the deck.

Purely as an aside, Bonaparte needn’t have gone to Africa to find women to talk to. American women were given clitoridectomies from the 1860s up until the turn of the century. The practice was started in London, in 1858, by a well-respected obstetrician-gynecologist named Isaac Baker Brown. Brown put out a book stating that masturbation—in women, that is—caused hysteria, epilepsy, and “idiocy.” Excising the clitoris, he stated, was the only sure cure. Often he wouldn’t tell patients exactly what he was planning to do to them. When Brown’s colleagues got wind of what he was up to, they voted to expel him from the Obstetrical Society of London, and his reputation swiftly disintegrated. Happily, most of his patients went right on masturbating the way they always had.

In the meantime, alas, the practice had spread to the States, where gynecologists had of late gone scalpel-happy, working out one new surgical procedure after another on indigent women—without telling them they were guinea pigs. (A long-standing tradition, says historian Ben Barker-Benfield. The much-revered obstetrician-gynecologist Marion Sims, Barker-Benfield writes, purchased slaves with vaginal fistulas
*
as surgical practice material for a fistula procedure he wanted to try. One poor woman was given thirty unwarranted gynecological operations.)

In the end, Marie Bonaparte concluded that some women were simply born with a clitoral orientation and some with a vaginal, and there wasn’t a thing to be done about it. Neither surgery nor psychoanalysis, it turned out, could fix what ailed Marie.

a
lfred Kinsey had the most sensible take on the intercourse orgasm conundrum. Sure, it may make a difference how your clitoris is situated. And, yes, some positions are more promising than others. But what matters more, Kinsey concluded, is one’s level of engagement in the proceedings. Kinsey believed the erotic responsiveness of a woman on top was not a mere matter of “anatomical relations.” He made the point that “the female who will assume such a position is already less inhibited in her sexual activity.” And it is the person on top who’s in control—making the movements and controlling their speed and depth and direction. “In the younger generations,” Kinsey wrote, “there is an increasing proportion of the females who have become aware of the fact that active participation in coitus may contribute not only to the satisfaction which the husbands receive, but to their own satisfaction in coital activity.” Maybe Marie Bonaparte just never got into it.

Kim Wallen, who recently began interviewing women about intercourse and orgasms for a new study, has been finding what Kinsey said to ring true. “Women who routinely have orgasm in intercourse without explicit clitoral stimulation all say that it makes little difference what the guy does, as long as he doesn’t come too soon,” Wallen said in an email. Meaning, it’s the women’s own movement that matters most. “In fact it is sometimes preferred that he just lie there and anchor the woman’s pelvis to his. The movie image of wild abandoned thrusting seems to have exactly the opposite of the intended effect in these women.” Well, yes and no, I replied. Sometimes they want that. Later, you know, toward the end. There were days, talking to Wallen, when I sensed he was nearing the end of his orgasm-in-intercourse (or O-in-I, as he’d shorthanded it) rope. “The only conclusion I feel sure of at this point,” he mused, “is that women are too complicated.”

The Upsuck Chronicles

Does Orgasm Boost Fertility, and What Do Pigs Know About It?

t
he inseminators wear white. Their coveralls are white and their boots are white, and they themselves are white too, it being the tail end of a long, dark winter in Denmark. Their names are Martin, Morten, and Thomas, and they have twenty sows to inseminate before noon. An informal competition exists among the inseminators of Øeslevgaard Farm, I am told—not to inseminate more sows than anyone else, but to inseminate them
better
. To produce the most piglets.

To win requires patience and finesse in an area few men know anything about: the titillation of the female pig. Research by the Department for Nutrition and Reproduction at Denmark’s National Committee for Pig Production showed that sexually stimulating a sow while you artificially inseminate her leads to a 6 percent improvement in fertility. This in turn led to a government-backed Five-Point Stimulation Plan for pig farmers, complete with instructional DVD and color posters to tack on barn walls. It also led to a certain amount of awkwardness on the part of Danish pig farmers, most of whom do inseminations themselves. (Gone are the days of the roving Boar Truck, a man and a pig who drove the length and breadth of Denmark, servicing sows—and unwittingly spreading pig disease from farm to farm.)

Martin, Morten, and Thomas are in the break room, eating bread with jam and drinking coffee from a slim steel thermos. They are uncomfortable speaking English, and I speak no Danish. We are dependent on Anne Marie Hedeboe, a visiting pig production researcher whose colleague Mads Thor Madsen drafted the Five-Point Stimulation Plan for sows. The mood in the room is a little starched. I called Morten Martin. I referred to the owner of the farm as “Boss Man,” which sounds like the Danish for “snot.” Unspoken questions hover in the air:
Do you find it arousing to stimulate a sow? How often are young male farmworkers caught getting fresh with the stock?
*
For their part, the inseminators must be wondering why on earth I’ve come here.

I could not adequately explain to them, but I will explain to you. Please don’t worry. This chapter is not about pig sex. It is about female orgasm and whether it serves a purpose outside the realm of pleasure. What is accepted dogma in the pig community—that the uterine contractions caused by stimulation and/or orgasm draw in the sperm and boost the odds of conception—was for hundreds of years the subject of lively debate in medical circles. You don’t hear much these days about uterine “upsuck”—or “insuck,” as it was also known—and I’m wondering: Do the pigs know something we don’t know?

t
he job of a production pig is to produce more pigs, as many pigs as is pigly possible. The sows of Øeslevgaard shuttle back and forth between the “service” (insemination) barn and the open-floored nursing and weaning barns, where they sprawl flank-to-flank, a mounded porcine land mass. Anne Marie and I are standing around in the insemination barn. Here the sows are briefly confined in narrow pens separated by metal railings. It’s like living inside a shopping cart. They seem to be in good spirits nonetheless. This may have to do with boar No. 433, a brown and white Duroc with testicles as big as a punching bag.

Thomas has hold of No. 433’s tail, steering him from behind into a large enclosure that flanks the pens of the twenty sows in heat. No. 443 is a “teaser boar.” His presence in the barn primes the sows for what’s to come. It is not a quiet presence. The grunts of a sexually aroused boar are a soundtrack from a horror film: the deep, guttural, satanic noises of human speech slowed way down on tape. When I replayed my cassette, weeks later, I tried speeding it up to see if it would sound like speech. Perhaps I would decipher the secret language of pigs. It just sounded like someone retching.

The boar moves along the row of sow snouts protruding through the bars, rubbing each one with his own. “This is what he does,” yells Anne Marie over the grunting and the banging of metal grates. “He slobbers on them.” Boar saliva has a pheromone—a chemical that primes a sow in heat for mating. Strictly speaking, you do not need a boar, because you can buy a Scippy
*
—a remote-controlled plastic boar doused with Boarmate synthetic boar odor spray. Anne Marie’s coworker Mads, who resembles a Danish Javier Bardem, if that is possible, told me about them. Mads has an endearing affection for absurdity, which must serve him well in this line of work. He dug up a picture of Scippy on his computer while I was there. “See? He’s nice and pink, and he goes on wheels. It’s very nice. He just has to smell and grunt. He has an MP3 player.” Then Mads sank a little lower in his chair. “We bought one and tried him, and he didn’t work, and the farmers didn’t want him.” Scippy lives in the closet now.