Free Great Sex Secret by Kim Marshall Page A

satisfaction from intercourse. The next two chapters return to this challenge.
    Chapter Five
    Simultaneous Orgasms:
    Are They Possible?
    So far we have focused on sexual encounters where the woman does not have an orgasm while she is with her partner. What about women who do climax during intercourse? According to most surveys, as many as 35
    percent of women are in this category. How are they and their partners managing to include female satisfaction in their lovemaking? What triggers these women’s climaxes? And do they come simultaneously with their partners?
    Freud’s Wrong Turn
    These questions lead us straight to the doorstep of Sigmund Freud, who had strong views on the subject.
    Beginning around 1905, Freud asserted that the clitoral orgasm, usually the result of masturbation, was an
    “infantile” precursor to the deeper, more satisfying vaginal orgasm, which was produced by the man’s penis during intercourse. In his New Introductory Lectures on 8 0
    T h e G r e a t S e x S e c r e t Psychoanalysis , Freud wrote: In the phallic phase of the girl, the clitoris is the dominant erotogenic zone. But it is not destined to remain so; with the change to femininity, the clitoris must give up to the vagina its sensitivity, and, with it, its importance, either wholly or in part.
    Note that Freud said that the clitoris must give up its sensitivity. He wasn’t reporting on research, and he wasn’t describing something he’d learned from his patients; he was telling women what needed to happen. What about women for whom this transition did not take place?
    Freud believed that something was wrong with them. In 1935, he wrote, “In those women who are sexually anaes-thetic, as it is called, the clitoris has stubbornly retained this sensitivity.” Freud even referred one colleague to the practice of genital mutilation practiced by the Nandi tribe in Africa, suggesting that when this tribe cut off girls’ clitorises, they were not suppressing female pleasure but merely redirecting it to the vagina, its appropriate adult location.
    Freud’s theory, bolstered by his medical and psycho-analytic reputation, reinforced many people’s gut-level belief in the penetration-produces-female-orgasm paradigm. If the vagina was the source of “mature” female pleasure, then the natural order of the universe was for S i m u l t a n e o u s O r g a s m s : A r e T h e y Po s s i b l e ?
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    couples to have orgasms together during penis-in-vagina intercourse with no clitoral stimulation. Freud’s theory sent generations of scientists and laypeople off in exactly the wrong direction.
    It wasn’t until 1953
    that Alfred Kinsey’s book
    From the 1920s through the
    Sexual Behavior of the
    1950s, sexologists
    Human Female debunked
    aggressively pushed the idea
    Freud’s notion of the vagi-
    that having simultaneous
    nal orgasm. A decade later,
    orgasms during intercourse
    researchers William Mas-
    was a virtual duty—but gave
    ters and Virginia Johnson
    couples no help on how to
    solidified Kinsey’s findings
    make them happen.
    and restored the clitoris to
    its rightful place at the
    center of female sexual response. The painstaking Masters and Johnson research (which included putting a tiny cam-era inside a transparent plastic penis to get the inside story on intercourse) proved beyond a shadow of doubt that virtually all female orgasms are caused by clitoral stimulation (direct or indirect) and felt in muscular contractions in the vagina (and more generally). Masters and Johnson also found that orgasms from direct clitoral stimulation were the most intense, producing stronger contraction spasms and more rapid heartbeats. Many of the women they interviewed reported that their best orgasms came from masturbation.
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    T h e G r e a t S e x S e c r e t What about other female-orgasm-producing areas?
    Masters and Johnson found that a small number of women were capable of having orgasms from breast stimulation. In recent years,