Great Sex Secret (4 page)

Perhaps it’s naive to think it would be otherwise. In most societies, men have regarded women as chattel—

useful for preparing meals, doing domestic chores, providing them with sexual pleasure, and bearing and raising children. Marriages with mutual sexual satisfaction seem to have been a rarity, and a woman’s “right”

to an orgasm was unheard of until very recently. No doubt there were always

couples who found their

Historians tell us that for

way to mutual satisfac-

thousands of years, the

tion in bed, but they

default setting for sexual

seem to have been few

intercourse has been male

and far between—and

satisfaction and female

they seem to have kept

frustration.

very quiet about the

techniques they used.

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Cluelessness and insensitivity about female sexual satisfaction were especially prevalent among Victorian-era Brits and Americans—with the addition of a stultifying layer of prudery and refusal to see women (or at least

“good” women) as sexual beings. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the British surgeon William Acton proclaimed, “I should say that the majority of women (happily for society) are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind. Love of home, of children, and of domestic duties are the only passions they feel.”

In their scholarly book
Intimate Matters: A History of
Sexuality in America
, John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman describe the ignorance of nineteenth-century Americans about female sexuality and the social mores that forbade “proper” women from showing sexual pleasure, even (or perhaps especially) within marriage.

The book says that few women in this era had orgasms during intercourse, and many regarded sex as a family duty with little appeal. One woman wrote to a friend:

“It does nothing for me except disgust me…He calls it pleasure, but I’d rather be with friends or on a picnic or something.”

Tannahill has this poignant observation on the plight of women—and men—in this era: It was not altogether surprising that the gentle and submissive Victorian wife should have been thought of 3 2

T h e G r e a t S e x S e c r e t
as undersexed. Her repressed upbringing, the refine-ment and “spirituality” that were forced upon her, and her ignorance of physiology all helped to make her so, and even a woman who was not physically revolted by intercourse needed very delicate handling if she were to enjoy the experience. It was a task for which few Victorian husbands were equipped. They had their own problems, their own inhibitions, and making love to “the angel of the house” in the awareness that she was con-cealing a gently-bred disgust was scarcely conducive to a satisfactory performance.

Did any of the Victorians find a way out of the problem? One reflective gentleman quoted in
Intimate Matters
wrote to a friend: “I have a sense of guilt when I have relations with her and she does not enjoy them as much as I do. The fact that she’s not getting an orgasm takes the pleasure of intercourse away from me.” But this well-intentioned lover didn’t seem to know what to do, and most men either accepted the male-female pleasure gap as a fact of life or concluded that their mates were undersexed, frigid, or dysfunctional. Need-less to say, prostitution and extramarital affairs with more sexually expressive women thrived in an environ-ment in which spousal sex so often lacked mutual passion.

There was one curious exception to the nineteenth-century mindset. The leaders of a small utopian com-

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munity in Oneida, New York, required that men practice
coitus reservatus
as a form of communal birth control.

Couples were taught to engage in extensive foreplay, and men were instructed on how to give their partners climaxes during intercourse (using a carefully specified position with the man entering the vagina from behind) while holding back their own orgasms.

But this was a fleeting aberration. Until well into the twentieth century, it appears that the vast majority of women were sexually frustrated after intercourse. Most spent their lives in an orgasm deficit, but they lacked the vocabulary and the conceptual framework to put their finger on the problem.

The obvious sexual outlet—masturbation—was taboo. In fact, beginning around 1700, a private act that had been regarded with benign indifference for millennia was virtually criminalized in the Western world. Boys and girls were told that masturbation was morally wrong and physically harmful—and the Catholic Church ranked masturbation as a mortal sin, right up there with rape and murder. The title of a pam-phlet published in 1710 captures the spirit:
Onania, or
the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, and All Its Frightful
Consequences, in both Sexes, Consider’d with Spiritual
and Physical Advice to those, who have already injur’d
themselves by this abominable practice
. The French clini-cian Simon Tissot claimed that masturbation depleted 3 4

T h e G r e a t S e x S e c r e t
vital bodily fluids and led to feebleness and vice. In the mid-nineteenth century, masturbation was even thought to cause tuberculosis.

In his book,
Making Sex: Body and Gender from the
Greeks to Freud
, Thomas Laqueur describes the Victorian propaganda about “the suicidal masturbator whose faculties are greatly impaired, whose thinking is imprac-tical, memory weak, and body reduced to skin and bones… [who] will never find comfort in married love and thus contributes to the social monstrosity of sterility.”

In the United States, John Harvey Kellogg went on a campaign against masturbation and wrote
Plain Facts
for Old and Young,
listing thirty-nine warning signs (including moodiness, sleeplessness, lassitude, nail-biting, pimples, use of tobacco, bad appetite, and general grumpiness). Kellogg believed that a bland diet could control the ravages of sexual passion, and he developed and successfully marketed Corn Flakes to help solve the problem. But he didn’t think that eating his cereal was sufficient to stop masturbation; he also recommended childhood circumcision (without anesthesia), silver sutures across the foreskin, and carbolic acid applied to the clitoris.

Attitudes on masturbation gradually mellowed in the twentieth century, but it wasn’t until 1972 that the American Medical Association finally declared that masturbation was a normal sexual act.

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Sexually frustrated

women who believed

Until well into the twentieth

all this nonsense and

century, it appears that the

refrained from mastur-

vast majority of women were

bation (abstainers were

sexually frustrated after

probably more numer-

intercourse.

ous among girls and

women than among

boys and men) had no sexual outlet, and their libidinous urges built up like steam in a pressure cooker. Something had to give, and a number of women exhibited a variety of physical and psychological ailments that Freud and others called “hysteria.” The original meaning of this word is “womb disease,” and it was first diagnosed in Egypt four thousand years ago.

Here is a composite of the symptoms of hysteria as described by doctors over the years: fainting, edema, nervousness, insomnia, sensations of heaviness in the abdomen, muscle spasms, shortness of breath, loss of appetite for food or for sex with the approved male partner, and sometimes a tendency to cause trouble for others, particularly members of the patient’s immediate family. Doctors came to believe that hysteria was caused by insufficient sexual intercourse, not enough sexual gratification, or both. Not a bad diagnosis! But rather than addressing the
source
of this sexual frustration, doctors persisted in treating women with these symptoms as 3 6

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if they were suffering from an illness.

The descriptions of hysteria listed above come from a remarkable book by Rachel Maines,
The Technology of
Orgasm
. The book goes on to document that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many middle-class American women went to their doctors to be treated for these ailments. What did the doctors do?

They applied vulvular massage—in plain English, they stimulated their patients’ clitorises with their fingers and brought them to orgasm. This was a highly lucrative business for a number of years: patients didn’t die of the “illness,” but they didn’t recover either; the treatment was inexpensive to administer, and patients kept coming back for more. It was a cash cow.

Maines also describes

how a good number of

Not long after the invention

n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y
of electricity, the electro-British and American

mechanical vibrator was

women with symptoms

introduced in the 1880s,

of hysteria went to med-

and doctors were quick to

ically supervised spas for

see its potential to ease

“hydrotherapy.” A variety

hysteria in women.

of ingenious machines

directed jets of water at

women’s vulvas, bringing

on the orgasms they were not getting during sexual intercourse. Women who visited these spas felt a whole lot
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better and became regular customers—and the doctors and proprietors reaped huge profits.

All this is hard to believe. But Maines’s book has scholarly evidence that it really did happen, not just in the 1800s and early 1900s, but, in the case of genital massage by physicians, all the way back to the first century AD. We can only shake our heads in wonder. Doctors were doing a job that nobody else would do—not husbands, not lovers, not the frustrated women themselves.

Surely, these doctors knew that what they were doing was sexual. Not so, says Maines. In the Victorian era, there was a strong belief in some quarters that the vagina was the only truly sexual part of girls’ and of women’s bodies and that female orgasms were caused only by penetration. (Because of this belief, a huge fuss was made when the speculum and the tampon were first introduced; wild stories circulated about females reacting with sexual delight when either object was inserted into the vagina.) A willful ignorance about the clitoris in some parts of the medical profession (it wasn’t even mentioned in many medical diagrams or textbooks of this era) seems to have allowed doctors to believe that stimulating a woman’s external genitalia was a
medical
and not a sexual act. The fact that doctors did not identify their patients’ reactions to massage as orgasmic says a lot about their own sex lives: if they did not recognize a female orgasm when it happened in their examining 3 8

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room, they must never have experienced one in their bedrooms.

Maines contends that doctors, far from getting prurient delight from these “treatments,” found them tedious and exhausting. Because clitoral stimulation requires some skill and the level of dexterity among doctors varied widely, some sessions took as long as an hour. Long-suffering medics delegated the job to mid-wives or assistants whenever possible.

Then American technological ingenuity came to the rescue. Not long after the invention of electricity, the electromechanical vibrator was introduced in the 1880s, and doctors were quick to see its potential.

Using a vibrator, a doctor could bring a woman to orgasm in only five to ten minutes, eliminating the fatigue factor and making it possible to see more patients every day. For a period of about thirty years, vibrators were a staple in many doctors’ offices, and countless women received regular treatments.

But just after the turn of the twentieth century, two developments put a stop to this lucrative business. First, several American companies started producing low-cost vibrators for home use and advertised them in mainstream women’s magazines. (It was in these magazines that Rachel Maines first stumbled upon this phenomenon, leading her to uncover the rest of the story.) Spotting these ads, lots of women must have said to
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themselves, “Why pay for visits to my doctor when I can administer the same treatment in the privacy of my own home?”

Second, around 1920, a number of stag movies were released that featured the vibrator in raunchy sex scenes.

The stag movies stripped away the social camouflage and revealed that what all those doctors were doing to their patients (and what some women were doing at home) was
sexual
. Doctors stopped using vibrators to treat women for hysteria and didn’t go back to the more laborious procedure they had used before, because obviously that was sexual, too. Women who were using vibrators realized that they had purchased a sex toy and were (gasp!)
masturbating
. Women brought up to believe that masturbation was harmful and wrong threw away their machines with considerable embarrassment, and advertisements for vibrators disappeared from women’s magazines.

At this point in the early 1920s, when the medical

“treatment” of orgasm-deprived women was brought to a halt, Americans had arrived at a sexual crossroads.

Would the sorry state of Wham, Bam, Thank You, Ma’am lovemaking change? Would people find ways to improve lovemaking techniques now that they knew more about the role of the clitoris and the importance of regular orgasms to women’s health and happiness?