Free Bonk by Mary Roach

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