Pg. 59 - "Toward the end of the 19th century, science found another bogus female illness to add to time-honored hysteria. The previously unacknowledged problem - some women's failure to orgasm during sex - started to be considered a pathological condition: that of being frigid. Until writing this book, I had always assumed that frigid mean "cold" or " unenthusiastic about sex" ; but by the early 1900s the word very specifically referred to a woman being unable to orgasm with coitus. It was an infliction that carried shame and judgment. Additionally, some men believed that women who failed to orgasm during intercourse were willfully withholding their orgasms in an act of defiance that was deemed unhealthy, as it signaled either lesbian tendencies or a subversive disrespect for men. Being frigid was an entirely female matter, like hysteria. As if men don't suffer from it. But wait a minute! The week of May 8, 1998, one month after Viagra was launched, 300,000 Viagra prescriptions were written in the United States. What's that about, if not a man's version of being frigid?"
Pg. 66 - "The notion that women were not sexual beings was erroneously conceived from the fact that most women do not orgasm through intercourse. Most women are orgasmic. Current research suggests that these days many women have masturbated at some point, mostly to orgasm, and that under their own steam these women reach orgasm within time frames similar to that of men, I.e. within three to four minutes. But given the range of "cures" offered to women who masturbated or were not taking satisfaction from the marriage bed, one can see why women might either pretend they were having a vaginal orgasm or buy into the idea that they weren't sexual creatures anyway"
Pg. 68 - "For many centuries, science misunderstood women's anatomy and remained wedded to both androcentric and patriarchal visions of female sexuality; this gives us our first answer. The most problematic issues with the vagina-as-penis version of woman are that either it denied any sexual function of the clitoris, which became nothing more than a crisis-management solution for hysteria, or it brought about the judgment that a clitoral orgasm was an inappropriate sexual response. Marginalization of the clitoris also ultimately led to the belief that women were naturally less sexual than men, the flip side of this being that men were deemed to be naturally sexual, which gave them moral leeway and sexual license. The big lie has been the prowess endowed upon the penis to provide complete sexual satisfaction. This was so deeply assimilated into European and American culture that any other model of sexuality became inconceivable"
Pg. 79 - "The implications of having full anatomical knowledge of the clitoris go much further than settling any Freudian debate about the nature of women's orgasms and whether they are experienced vaginally or through the clitoris: orgasms involving genital stimulation are clitoral. The question is, are they triggered through stimulation of the glans or the whole and this depends on individual anatomy. Knowing this, people can understand their own sexual experiences. It also allows us to reset expectations around orgasm and how it is experienced, giving many people permission to stop searching for the holy grail of the vaginal orgasm and allowing them to enjoy the stimulation that works for them. It frees up men from feeling that the onus for a woman's orgasm is on the penis. It makes conversations about what works sexually for one's partner(s) central to mutually orgasmic sex"
Pg. 89: the snake represented passion [sexual pleasure] according to Philo of Alexandria in his book "Questions and Answers in Genesis"
1541- the book "The Schoolhouse of Women started the stories and lies about women being deceitful and lustful, criticizing women for their insatiable desire for sex
Survey in 1989 by Hatfield showed women in history painted as more sexually willing than men
Pamphlets with the opposing view portray women as chaste and motherly. Jean-Jacques Rousseau talked about the ideal woman as natural and passive
16th-17th century - the nature of women as lustful and deceitful towards men
6th-12th centuries in the Church portrayed some sexual sins [oral] and masturbation as worse than other sexual sings
Even Martin Luther said that heterosexual sex was only okay within marriage
Hesoid wrote about Pandora [similar to Eve]
Pandora doesn't carry sexual guilt but Eve did
À la Queen Victoria, child rearing was a serious business in sustaining an empire and still is today
6th century, Solon set up first brothel
60s-70s - the book "Love and Orgasm" was published by Lowden, he recommended no clitoral stimulation and said it's a burden for men!
In the Paleolithic art era, the art did represent clitoris' and vulvas!
Paleolithic - Neolithic era - farming grew, more people living together, more personal wealth
The book "A Women's History of Sex" wrote that the poor were okay with pre and extra marital sex but the rich married off as young virgins
When wealth wants to be protected, women's sex is restricted
Philo of Alexandria - women were just baby hosts [this was the general thought until the 19th century]
Pre-Christian times didn't deny pleasure
Aristotle thought that women were immoral and weak-willed
Pg. 96 - "Historian Ciara Meehan reviewed letters received by the agony aunts (advice columnists) of Irish women's magazines in the 1960s. She found that they revealed a shocking lack of accurate knowledge about sex and conception, and also that many women struggled with a "guilt complex" when it came to sex, stemming from the Catholic Church's and the state's view of the female body, which sought to impose on women "standards of idealized conduct." Irish girls were taught from an early age that modesty and purity were valued traits; once they'd internalized these teachings, their letters to women's magazines revealed how hard it was for some wives to switch to obliging their husband's physical desires then reconcile their sexual selves with their moral selves. A Dr. Kennedy, writing for Women's Choice at the time, blamed Catholic teaching for women being conditioned to think that it was improper to openly enjoy sex"
Pg. 101 - "When the pill was first made available to women in 1961, it was stipulated that candidates should be married and have had children. There was concern that prescribing it to younger, married but childless women would encourage sex and not procreation. This was not driven by religious beliefs, but by an agenda among decision makers - in this case male politicians and doctors - that sex should be firmly situated within marriage because marriage was good for social stability, just as procreation was good for the economy. The world needed workers and carers, just as the armies of Sparta and Athens, millennia earlier, had needed soldiers, and - in the eras of expansionism - colonies needed colonizers. The pill, it was perceived, would cater to the "needs" of men who'd done their duty by having children; their wives had perhaps been advised by doctors not to have any more for health reasons"
Pg. 104 - "In Greek and Roman cultures, male promiscuity was considered normal and healthy, but female chastity was required for respectable women to ensure the integrity of family bloodlines. Both civilizations needed soldiers and leaders, so women were increasingly used as breeders. In Rome, Emperor Augustus (63 BCE-14CE) took marriage-bed duties very seriously, passing laws insisting that all men between 25 and 60 years of age and all women between 20 and 50 were to marry and have children, or pay extra tax. Men were urged to have intercourse with their wives three times a month, but they were free to visit prostitutes and to take other lovers, in whatever form they came...chaste daughters became valuable to their families in the matrimonial trading game. Poor or slave women found their sexual freedoms restricted in another way, by the creation of brothels. In sixth-century BCE an Athenian lawyer called Solon set up the first brothel. Sex became a male-owned commodity with a role in the political and economic system"
Pg. 107 - "When Christianity was assimilated into Roman culture, the New Testament played to this polarization nicely, offering up the Virgin Mary and a caste of loyal mothers versus Eve and the Whore of Babylon, "mother of harlots and abominations of the earth," who is portrayed as active in her role as harlot, rather than a passive victim of subjugation. With her "the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication." The Whore of Babylon's fornication (intercourse outside marriage, therefore against the laws of God) is like wine. The metaphor implies that she makes people drunk with her wine, so that they lose their judgment and control. The drinkers are passive, and this is their get-out-of-jail-free card. "She made me do it." She led me on," It's been a convenient ruse for men who evade guilt by indulging in this convenient blame-shifting. It's always easier to lay the blame for guilt and feelings of shame at someone's else's cunt"
Pg. 113: Rousseau said that the ideal woman was passionless and selfless
Pg. 124: Freud had a bigger impact than others
Masters & Johnson's research was in 1966 [before their study, it was thought that women who orgasmed clitorally were infantile and evidence of neurosis for much of the 20th century
Dr. Kinsey's study was in the 1950s
Masters and Johnson observed the anatomy and physiological responses [not the behaviors like Kinsey did]. They also discovered the 4 phases of the sex-response cycle
Pg. 126 - "Neither Kinsey's nor Masters and Johnson's research is without problems. One recurring issue is how to create a random sample, because in any truly random sample there will be subjects who have no desire to reveal the intimate details of their sexual experiences. Unless your sample is truly random, critics argue, the sex-crazed, deviant, and those prone to exhibitionism might be the only ones to respond. Also, you should randomize by race, region, age, and socioeconomic and educational factors otherwise your research is deeply biased. The second issue undermining sex research is the innate biases of experimenters themselves. Kinsey had a behaviorist bias - he saw behavior as a function of animal drives sometimes repressed by society, and was progressive in his attitudes to all things sexual; Masters and Johnson favored heterosexual sex as the ideal forum, betraying their deep cultural conservatism. They selected for their studies couples where the woman was orgasmic in intercourse, and while they concluded it was because of the clitoris and its stimulation during intercourse, they failed to recognize this was not the case for most women"
There was a bias because they didn't recognize that a lot of women did not orgasm in intercourse and they selected only the ones that did
Shere Hite - 1976
Pg. 128: "Obviously, these detractors argued, the multitudes of good women who passed over the opportunity to fill in the questionnaires did so because they were orgasmically sated through intercourse, couldn't see the purpose of the survey, and were properly modest about this most private aspect of their lives. The thousands of unfilled questionnaires, they argued, spoke for themselves: these women had nothing to say about sex...Having proved the quantitative failure of the project, critics damned the qualitative findings, and even suggested that Hite had invented some of the responses"
Playboy called it The Hate Report!
Magazines and the report both share the same findings of women's experiences and by surveys
The respondents had trouble translating masturbation to vaginal orgasm, some just gave up on vaginal orgasm anymore after they did clitoral stimulation in intercourse!!!
Naomi Wolf's article "Liberate Female Sexuality Research"
Pg. 133: the top 1,000 words from 1970 to 2017. Clitoris didn't even make it to the first 1,000 words!
"This is forcefully reflected by the findings of researchers Katherine Ellen Roley, Youyou Zhou, and Christoper Groskopf. They downloaded 4,545 articles from Journal of Sexual Research and Archives of Sexual Behavior, the two journals that have served as the home for sexology research since 1965 and 1971 respectively and remain the most cited sources on the topic. Foley, Zhou, and Groskopf tracked the 1,000 most-used words in these journals from 1970 to 2017, and also traded the frequency of use of these words over that time....they found that the words bisexual, orientation, condom, gender, and risk had increased in use over the five decades. Masturbation, orgasm, coitus, and contraception had all declined. Penis remained relatively constant in its use, declining by just 0.73"
Many of the slang phrases for a vulva are babyish
Many of the words are misogynistic, violent, pejorative
Smartphone was invented in 1992 and we are now comfortable using common language associated with it. Should be the same for the vulva and clitoris!!
The book Fanny Hill was problematic
Fifty Shades - older man, younger girl, controlling, clit isn't mentioned
MindGeek is one of the top 3 sites, along with Google and Netflix
2017 study of Pornhub - most viewed females were only portrayed orgasming 18.3% of the time either conveyed in the face or vocalization [not actually showing clitoral stimulation!!]
We don't feel embarrassed by statues depicting the penis, children know what a penis is and that men have it, should be the same with the vulva and clitoris
11th century European buildings had carvings of women with vulvas lodged into the walls of the buildings, the "Sheela-na-gig" girls
Women are depicted nude but pubic hair, vulvas, and clitoris is not shown
Kitty, cunt, sweet spot, sugar plum
Pg. 202: The porn star that the author, Sarah Chadwick, views again later in life is now receiving cunnilingus, but the foreplay is hurried when she asks if they can have intercourse without having even finished getting stimulated clitorally!! This makes me angry just like the author!! Foreplay quickly moves to intercourse because men think they deserve pleasure more
Peggy Orenstein quotes a study where 90% of the random scenes in porn contain aggression towards women and no reverence at all towards the vulva, female desire, or female pleasure!!
Clit is mentioned in passing in sex-education and anatomy books
Womanhood [2019] Laura Dodsworth
Society has told women that the clitoris is inappropriate to show in public
Pg. 212: "What is the full nature of female sexuality and desire? The truth is we don't know, because it has been repressed and inaccurately constructed by faulty and misguided science, religion, philosophers, psychologists, and policymakers. Do vulva owners like sex less than people with a penis? Is emotion and tenderness more important to them than sexual satisfaction? Is there a problem with the orgasmocentric construct of sexual satisfaction? Let vulva owners decide. Give them the knowledge and space to know for themselves"
Women have been socialized to be facilitators of men's needs [promotions, orgasms]
Pg. 214: "Historically the evolutionary narrative has been that women seek breeding and home-providing mates, while men seek multiple mates, and that for women, sex, and morality are symbiotic - but is this the whole sex story? How does contraception change the landscape for women who have most at stake with an unwanted pregnancy? Are vulva owners not able to discern between a passing fancy, a medium-term hook up, and a long-term mate? Might they function differently if the script was less proscriptive? If the sex was better? Safer?"
We are still at the start of understanding the role of the brain in orgasm
Finally, the correct anatomical rendering of the clit was mapped in 2005 by Professor Helen O'Connell with an MRI scanner
Pg. 74 - "The clitoris is responsible for many orgasms experienced through genital stimulation; it's just a matter of where the stimulation occurs. For some, vaginal stimulation of the clitoris brings them to orgasm - either through the rubbing of the glans during intercourse or through the proximity of the internal structure to the vaginal wall. For others, having the glans stimulated so that the internal bulbs and crura are fully aroused enables an orgasm to occur with coitus. For many people, however, no amount of stimulation through the vagina is sufficient to trigger an orgasm - it can only be experienced through stimulation of the glans. That's just the way some bodies are made. Not orgasming in intercourse is not a "disorder" or a "failure"; it can be a function of physiology"
The internal shape, size, location of a person's clit varies and is so interconnected so each orgasm is so diverse
Science is trying to answer the question of whether genital stimulation is triggered through the clitoral glans or the whole anatomical structure [scientists can only do this if they have full anatomical knowledge of the clit]