Following up on my previous post about the latest g-spot debunking researcher.
I mentioned earlier that in the early 20th Century Freudians accused women who responded to external clitoral stimulation of being immature, repressed, and otherwise sexually incomplete. Then in the 1970s, after Masters & Johnson, David Rubin, etc., women who responded to vaginal stimulation rather than “correct” external-clitoral stimulation were thought to be... immature, repressed, sexually incomplete, and/or in thrall to patriarchal notions about intercourse. (In her big report Shere Hite sounded particularly exasperated about women who claimed to enjoy penetration.)
Of course the whole debate — Freudian, sex “revolutionary,” and feminist alike— was still patriarchal to the core. In fact migrating genital stimulation to the external clitoris completed the dominant notion that women’s internal genitals were an utterly passive emptiness of interest only to penises going into and babies coming out of, end of story.
This latest research about the non-existence of the g-spot seems to be part of that same tradition by the way. Via Debbie Notkin at Body Impolitic and Dr. Petra Boynton it turns out that back in 2005 the same researchers who are now debunking the g-spot published another twins-based study on women’s orgasms. As an article in The Guardian put it
Tim Spector of St Thomas’s hospital in London, who led the research, said: “The theory is that the orgasm is an evolutionary way of seeing if men can prove themselves to be likely good providers or dependable, patient and caring enough to look after the kids.”
It gets better though
The findings suggest the failure of some women to orgasm regularly is not a dysfunction, but a sophisticated mate-selection strategy that evolved during prehistoric times.
...
Women who orgasm very easily may be more likely to be satisfied with poor quality men.
“Perhaps women who had orgasms too easily weren’t very good selectors,” Professor Spector said.
Never mind that these same researchers consciously discarded women who's "common use of digital stimulation ... may bias the results." Never mind that they excluded women who had never had intercourse. Never mind that they asked somewhat... leading questions like "Do you believe you have a so called G spot, a small areas the size of a 20p coin on the front wall of your vagina that is sensitive to deep pressure?" They used twins! They're evolutionary psychologists! It must be true!
Keeping women’s genitals passive responders to men’s prowess instead of, say, active, sophisticated, and highly-organized systems of organs in active, sophisticated, and highly-organized autonomous human beings is in keeping with the same researcher’s g-spot conclusions as well.
No-sex class much?
I’ve been thinking of putting
Submitted by k (not verified) on Tue, 2010-01-05 15:25.I’ve been thinking of putting the Hite Report on my Kindle… it’s available for Kindles, isn’t that interesting?
But I’m just like…
I forget where I saw one of her more recent works. Somewhere, on this big ol’ internet, I ran into one of her more recent posts, and I… I can’t even remember why I didn’t like it, but, I know I didn’t like it. I distinctly remember tasting something foul in my mouth when I read one of her more recent works and I remember thinking to myself, “Why am I supposed to like this person?”
And now I can’t remember why that is….! Lesson learned: Keep better records of things I see online.
But anyway, I’ve been thinking of putting the Hite Report on my Kindle, and I’m already biased against it. Which is bad. Because it means I’m probably not going to do a good job analyzing it. Or else I’ll analyze it wrong. D’you know if there’s a Cliff Notes version or something I could read alongside to help me out here…
More relevant to your post though – It seems I do in fact have a G-spot. It matches the approximate location & texture I’ve been told to look for. It feels funny.
But not as pleasant of a funny as other kinds of stimulation.
I’m okay with that. I’m a little bit perplexed about G-spot toys though. They look uncomfortable to me, but then, so do a lot of toys.
[I can’t comment on how g-spots feel but what you describe sounds like what a lot of other people do. It’s supposed to be sort of an acquired taste — a lot of people sa that, especially if you’re not already pretty aroused, it can feel kind of funny like that. And it can make you feel like you need to pee, although unless your bladder’s actually full you probably won’t need to. Oh, and if it does start to feel nice then for some people it can start to feel really nice. As for the Hite Report, it’s funny but I can’t find my copy. I’ve got the men’s version but not the one for women. My feeling is before you buy it on the kindle you should thumb through it in a used bookstore (table of contents plus index) to see if you really want to get it. It’s maybe 30 years old now (pre G-spot, for instance, and nearly pre-sex-toys) so it might be dated. On the other hand I remember she was pretty dour about penetration in general so she might be interesting on FSDs. Good luck, k. —fl]
Then there’s the other
Submitted by ChrisJ (not verified) on Tue, 2010-01-05 20:29.Then there’s the other foolish correlation Professor Spector makes between male prowess and male quality (whatever that means to a researcher using quantitative methods). How many women have found out the hard way (pun intended) that prowess doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with quality in a partner?
[Yup. I think yet another problem with evolutionary psychology is they assume we evolved all this stuff back when our ancestors had brains the size of walnuts, and that selective pressure leading to the development of really large brains would have had no effect on those earlier behaviors. Plus, yeah, I get the impression prowess is sometimes manifest only during sex. Thanks, Chris. —fl]
For a somewhat irreverent
Submitted by janeway (not verified) on Wed, 2010-01-06 06:57.For a somewhat irreverent view of this issue:
http://xkcd.com/685/
janeway
“Perhaps women who had
Submitted by Holly Pervocracy (not verified) on Wed, 2010-01-06 09:29.“Perhaps women who had orgasms too easily weren’t very good selectors,” Professor Spector said.
Yeah, well, perhaps men who were named Professor Spector were doodyhead stinkypants, because that’s about the level I can take that remark at.
Anyway, mate selection doesn’t start at mating (durrr). I look for good “quality” men and then I have awesome easy orgasms with them.
[Yup. By the time you’re getting around to assessing orgasm quality it’s probably a little late to be talking about selecting a mate. Especially if you’re someone like Spector who focuses exclusively on orgasms from hands-free PIV-intercourse. Call that yet another little issue with the entire premise. Not to mention complete and utter incompatibility with the love-em-and-leave-em “seed spreading males” meme. Thanks as always, Holly, for cutting to the chase. —fl]
>> Massive, massive
Submitted by Red (not verified) on Wed, 2010-01-06 10:30.<<<>>>>>
Massive, massive straw man. For one thing. What the actual data shows is that most females don’t often orgasm from vaginal stimulation alone. That much qualifies as a fact. Enjoying penetration might be something of a different question. One can enjoy something without being likely to have an orgasm from it. If you look at the history of patriarchy, I’d say there’s a definite pattern of patriarchal sexual ideologies being more than a little against clitorises. There are multiple theories about why ranging from not wanting to see anything resembling a penis on a woman, to dislike of non-procreative sex to simple ignorance and fear around women because of their reproductive powers. But the pattern is undeniable and marked. At the worst extreme you get things like FGM, but less brutal forms include things like incomplete anatomical charts and medical theories that don’t acknowledge any external genitals in a female (as of 1900 the Websters Dictionary and some medical had no words for any female genitals other than “vagina”), the whole Freudian “shtick” on the matter, or even a schema where little girls are only given the term “vagina” and nothing else (which was often considered more “progressive” than terms like “down there” and such). The trend in the 60’s and 70’s towards calling any vaginal pleasure the result of patriarchal false consciousness while not entirely true, is historically a flash in the pan. While many people who are alive today remember it with some frustration and a sense of being accused of a patriarchal false consciousness or inflated male ego. Mostly we are talking about those from the vocal baby boom generation or near it, who started having sex in that time period. But it was basically an overreaction to literally millennia of obfuscation.[“The trend in the 60’s and 70’s towards calling any vaginal pleasure the result of patriarchal false consciousness while not entirely true, is historically a flash in the pan.” Absolutely true, Red. For better or worse Freud’s most significant contribution was to drag sex and, especially, sexual pleasure out of complete denial and disgust. (Disgust and denial, maybe, and judgmental as can be no doubt, but no longer complete.) So yeah, that little window in the late 60s and 70s, after Masters and Johnson but before Whipple, Ladas, and Perry would have been the only time anyone could have started calling intravaginal stimulation patriarchal or indoctrinated. So we’re in agreement there. But I’m sticking with my contention that patriarchy demands that the vagina be as passive and amorphous and as vaguely ill-named and “down there” as possible. And moving all sensation to the (yikes, easily excised!) outer clitoris, especially with it’s (as you say) penis-ish resemblance, helps complete patriarchy’s reservation of the actual vagina for itself.
Ok, so just to be clear I’m not going too far here I’m not, not, not saying what people call the g-spot is some kind of be-all, end-all magic-button holy grail of women’s sexuality. Nor am I saying women who can’t find theirs just aren’t trying hard enough. (Um, heh.) And I’m really not saying existence of a g-spot would somehow relocated women’s sexual pleasure to its “rightful” place. I’m just saying I think it’s important for men at least and perhaps for the kind of women who edit Cosmo to acknowledge that the vagina (the vagina vagina, not the euphemism-for-vulva vagina) does have affirmative form and structure independent of men’s arousal and pleasure and reproduction. —fl]
But I’m sticking with my
Submitted by chingona (not verified) on Wed, 2010-01-06 23:29.But I’m sticking with my contention that patriarchy demands that the vagina be as passive and amorphous and as vaguely ill-named and “down there” as possible.
This sounds right to me. I come very easily from penetrative sex (if I’m on top). I very rarely come from oral sex or manual stimulation from a partner, though both feel fantastic to me. I once had a partner tell me “you kind of take a guy out of his game.” He wanted to work really hard for it so that my orgasm reflected well on him and his skill. Otherwise, it wasn’t worth much to him. And I’ve had other partners who seemed to have their own sets of issues with me achieving orgasm easily, though none have just come out with it quite so clearly.
[“I once had a partner tell me “‘you kind of take a guy out of his game.’” Wah? Actually I kind of get it — the glacier of performance expectation on men to be “up for the challenge” is roughly the size of Antarctica. And almost as thick and slow-moving. That said, I think it would be kind of fun with one exception: if you’re a “premature ejaculator” type who comes once and then promptly loses interest. I’ve had partners like that (as, I’m guessing, have you) and it’s not a lot of fun. Heck, I’ve been a partner like that and it wasn’t fun for me either. Assuming coming early doesn’t take you “out of your game” that way I’d have a hard time worrying about it if we were partners (blush. I mean that in the general sense of course.) I’m guessing if he’d had a little more time to get used to it he might have learned to enjoy it. Thanks, Chingona. —fl]
That said, I think it would
Submitted by chingona (not verified) on Thu, 2010-01-07 08:18.That said, I think it would be kind of fun with one exception: if you’re a “premature ejaculator” type who comes once and then promptly loses interest.
It occurred to me after I posted that that could be one implication. So, no. I’m not that type. ;) There was plenty of fun stuff before that and I definitely was/am still game afterward and had given no indication that I wasn’t, other than pausing briefly to bask a little in the afterglow.
I definitely got the feeling that his problem was that he felt like I’d done it myself, that he didn’t get to do enough. If you take that idea that there’s no skill to helping a man get off, that it’s just a matter of “insert in moist hole, repeat,” and flip that around, that seemed to be how he took it. And it was just as ridiculous, because it’s not like the act of coitus for either men or women somehow exists in isolation from the entire experience and everything that leads up to it and everything that comes afterward.
But anyway, the larger point is that I think you’re right that regardless of where women’s orgasms are, uh, positioned, there’s this tendency for patriarchy, for lack of a better word, to try to stake its claim on it, this tendency to see women as being for acting upon and even our own pleasure really is just for men to feel good about themselves.
I think the saddest thing I ever read about this whole g-spot/no g-spot thing, was an article about g-spot enhancement procedures. The women in the waiting room had a whole series of money and relationship problems, and she often had a hard time reaching orgasm at all, and this really frustrated her boyfriend. So she was getting injections in her g-spot to make it bigger in the hopes that she would come more easily and this would pacify her boyfriend. I was between face-palming and wanting to cry.
[Yup. Because, for sure, the best reason to have an orgasm is so your boyfriend feels like he did a good job… without tiring him out too much. You mentioned coming easily while on top, by the way, Chingona. I think that’s a huge key for a lot of people — men and women who are on top and directing the motion, pace, and points of contact just have a sort of obvious advantage compared to the person who’s along for the ride. Great comment, C. Thanks. —fl]