Great Sex Secret

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Authors: Kim Marshall
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theories have been advanced about other parts of a woman’s body—the area around the urethra, the cervix, the G-Spot, and the A-Spot. Are these competitors for the clitoris’s top spot?
    Probably not. One explanation for the seeming prolifer-ation of erogenous zones in the genital area is that the visible clitoris is just the tip of the iceberg: once aroused, its roots are activated and can be stimulated through contact with nearby areas. Natalie Angier describes this phenomenon with her usual panache: The clitoris overspills its anatomical borders and tran-scends its anatomy. Other pathways feed into it and are fed by it. The fifteen thousand pudendal nerve fibers that service the entire pelvis interact with the nerve bundles of the clitoris. That’s why the anus is an erogenous zone. Nerves are like wolves and birds: if one starts crying, there goes the neighborhood.
    But the clitoris is the center of the action. The consensus among sex researchers is that in almost all cases, the clitoris is the source of female orgasms. The best proof of this is to ask what part of the body virtually all girls and women stimulate when they masturbate. It’s the clitoris.
    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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    So Freud was wrong about there being distinct clitoral and vaginal orgasms, wrong about vaginal penetration producing orgasms, wrong about clitoral orgasms being immature and inferior, and wrong in saying that women who don’t climax through vaginal intercourse are disordered. How could he have been so far off so many bases?
    Maybe we should cut the man some slack. After all, he was working with research methods that were prim-itive by our standards, and many of his Victorian contemporaries must have found it difficult to talk openly with him about sex. But Freud was a smart, well-informed scientist who could and should have done better. His theory of the vaginal orgasm had no basis in observation or empirical research and flew in the face of centuries of insight on the role of the clitoris in female satisfaction. Many Victorian medical books, numerous screeds warning against masturbation, and countless works of pornography made it clear that the clitoris was the source of the female orgasm. Freud was certainly aware of at least some of this material, yet he went right ahead and willed the vaginal orgasm into existence.
    What was he thinking? Here is sex scholar Thomas Laqueur’s attempt to get inside Freud’s head: Freud knew that the natural locus of a woman’s erotic pleasure was the clitoris and that it competed with the 8 4
    T h e G r e a t S e x S e c r e t culturally necessary locus of her pleasure, the vagina…Whatever polymorphous perverse practices might have obtained in the distant past, or today among children and animals, the continuity of the species and the development of civilization depend on the adoption by women of their correct sexuality. For a woman to make the switch from clitoris to vagina is to accept the feminine role that only she can fill…to assure that bodies whose anatomies do not guarantee the dominance of heterosexual procreative sex neverthe-less dedicate themselves to their assigned roles.
    So here was yet another missed opportunity in the history of human sexual happiness. Freud understood the sexual asymmetry of men’s and women’s bodies and knew that sexual intercourse wasn’t deeply satisfying for most women. He recognized the importance of the clitoris and the deep biological need for orgasms in both men and women (“hysteria” being the result when women were deprived of sexual satisfaction). And he had the intellect to solve the puzzle and the medical prestige to get helpful advice into the hands of generations of lovers.
    Instead, he veered off in another direction. His deeply held patriarchal beliefs, as well as his irrational fear that humans would somehow stop copulating and civilization would come to an end without vaginal S i m u l

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