Free Vagina by Naomi Wolf Page B

don’t more people know about this information? There are several reasons for this reticence. One reason is that it is still often taboo to write and talk substantively in public forums about the actual vagina and its actual needs and experiences, as opposed to talking about female sexuality from a more conventional women’s magazine “sex advice” angle.
    Another reason this new information has not “crossed over” into mainstream conversation is that much of it can risk, at first, sounding terribly politically incorrect. It is not easy to address the biology of women’s sexuality without sounding reductive or running afoul of gender politics. If we try to address women’s basic animal nature, we run the risk of sounding as if we are casting women as only animal-like, or as more animal-like than men.
    The tricky part is, if you look at the new science, that women are indeed, in sex, in some ways more like animals than men are; the new science also reveals that, in sex, women can be more like mystics than men are. These are controversial statements, but as a feminist I believe that a frank exploration of the potential animal and mystical aspects of female sexuality does not in any way undermine women’s rational, intellectual, and professional capabilities.
    Finally, these important new discoveries are not widely discussed in mass media yet because the “solution” to many of the sexual problems that women report is not a lucrative new drug, but rather a change in human interaction. Specifically, the solution is often that least easy goal to reach—a sweeping change in how most straight men behave in bed with most straight women. Major pharmaceutical companies—which are the major funders of ads for newspapers, magazines, and websites that address female sexuality—will not realize any profit from millions of men simply learning how to touch their women better, gaze at them longer, hold them more skillfully, or bring them to more transformative orgasms.
    But it is important to get this new information out into the world nonetheless, because our conventional wisdom about female sexuality is badly out of date. The last broadly reported investigation that still informs our notion of female sexuality was the survey of ten thousand cycles of orgasms surveyed in the William H. Masters and Virginia Johnson classics, Human Sexual Response (1966) and Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970), and the survey of 3,500 women by Shere Hite, The Hite Report on Female Sexuality (1976). As mentioned earlier, Masters and Johnson concluded that women and men were essentially similar in their sexual responses. They also concluded that there was no physiological difference between a “vaginal orgasm” and a “clitoral orgasm.”
    Masters and Johnson also annoyed feminists by maintaining that penile thrusting alone should give women enough stimulation to have orgasms. Shere Hite contested this conclusion in her own survey. She cited data that about two-thirds of women could not have orgasms during coitus but often could while masturbating, but that only about a third had orgasms through intercourse alone. 2 Masters and Johnson’s conclusions that the sexes’ responses are essentially the same, along with Hite’s interest in highlighting the importance of the clitoris and diminishing the importance of the vagina—joined as she was by a wave of feminist commentary also supporting the importance of the clitoris and downgrading the vagina, in such essays as Anne Koedt’s “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” (1970)—all served to leave us where we are today: with a general impression that female sexuality is a lot like male sexuality, except that some women can have multiple orgasms; the general belief that the vagina is not as important as the clitoris (women’s advice columns still, wrongly, echoing Anne Koedt’s vastly influential essay, misinform woman that the vagina “has very few nerve endings”); and a consensus that it is good