Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon has a very cool and fairly generous analysis of the, um, controversy over the existence, or lack thereof, of the “g-spot.” (Controversial not least because of some… interesting theories coming out of the same research shop. Via Debbie at Body Impolitic their theory was that women are supposed to have an evolutionary hard time having orgasms in order to test men’s prowess. Seriously. But I digress….)

Anyway, as part of her discussion Amanda correctly, I think, says

It’s interesting to consider if the G spot only occurs in some women, which would explain the huge gap between experiences without further shaming of women who don’t have G spot orgasms.

This is just a snippet, almost an aside. Read the rest of her post here.

For the record that’s what the original authors thought as well.

I’ve mentioned this before but I remember from Beverly Whipple, Ladas, Perry, and company’s original The G Spot: And Other Discoveries about Human Sexuality that the introduction goes specifically into that exact issue that not all women can expect to have them, and that if not they specifically shouldn’t worry about it.

In fact the book as a whole said more about handling expectation and shame than about any kind of tissue stimulation at all.

The introduction mentions specifically that women who read Freud in the 1940s and 1950s were expected to feel guilty for having orgasms from clitoral stimulation, and then later, after reading Masters & Johnson they were expected to feel guilty for having orgasms from vaginal stimulation. The authors thought that was… unfortunate.

Later there’s a whole chapter devoted to the principle that “the best is the enemy of the good,” by which they meant specifically that if people tried to obsess over having or (worse, I think) giving g-spot orgasms they were likely to wind up disappointed with their ordinary old eye-rolling, breathtaking, toe-curling ones. And, sure enough… But be darned if anyone should blame the original authors for that.

Oh, and another thing, the same book also introduced the idea of prostate stimulation in men. Gee, wonder why that idea wasn’t greeted with such widespread enthusiasm? And gee, wonder why men who can’t have them aren’t judged as losers the way women who don’t do the g-spot thing are. And finally, gee, wonder why no researchers are doing twins studies to try and debunk prostate sensitivity. But again I digress.

G-spots and prostates notwithstanding, another big contribution the book made was to introduce the importance of the pubococcygeus (a.k.a “PC muscle”) for both men and women’s genital health and sexual enjoyment. The authors were pretty adamant that Kegels and other pc muscle exercises were pretty important both for increasing the strength of orgasms (of any kind but especially g-spot ones) but also for reducing incontinence and prolapsed uteruses. Their proposed exercises for women are well known but less well-known are the ones for men which involve draping rolled-up towels and making them, um, bob.

Hmm. The book’s not actually that much about the actual g-spot. It was actually pretty radical (and thus most everything but the squirting parts have largely been ignored.) I highly recommend it. It used to be a huge best seller and I’m guessing you can still find copies in used-paperback bookstores. I imagine, could those researchers in the U.K. had they been interested. Just saying.

Bottom line, though, is that if you or your partner has one then great, cool. As long as you’re enjoying yourself and not stressing about it don’t worry about what researcher say. And of you or your partner doesn’t have one then, well, that’s great too. As long as you’re enjoying yourself and not stressing about it don’t worry what researchers say.

Susan Frelich Appleton of Washington University School of Law has an interesting paper in the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law and Justice called Toward a ‘Culturally Cliterate’ Family Law?. Amazingly (for an academic paper) you can download and read the whole thing. Here’s the abstract.

Toward a ‘Culturally Cliterate’ Family Law?

Susan Frelich Appleton
Washington University School of Law

Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice, Vol. 23, 2008
Washington U. School of Law Working Paper No. 09-05-02

Abstract:
Sexual desire and sexual activity long have played central roles in family law, rationalizing its rules, informing its policies, and animating any number of calls for reform. Since the 1970s, gender equality has also become a salient value in family law – purporting to correct legally imposed double standards of the past. Yet, despite the conceptual centrality of sexual desire and sexual activity, family law says nothing explicit about sexual pleasure. And despite the salience of gender equality in contemporary family law, the field remains preoccupied with performances that produce heterosexual men’s orgasms while ignoring or rejecting women’s interest in orgasmic pleasure. As a result, family law today is marked by fundamental omissions and inconsistencies.

This paper attempts to begin to fill the gap and to explore the incongruities. It builds on Susan E. Stiritz’s Cultural Cliteracy: Exposing the Contexts of Women’s Not Coming (published as a companion piece) and examines the relevance of Stiritz’s analysis for family law. According to Stiritz, “’[c]ultural cliteracy’ denotes what an adequately educated person should know about the clitoris, which is that it is a culturally despised body part because it is an obdurate reminder of women’s independence and power and supports women’s liberation.” Stiritz tracks the role of the clitoris and women’s sexual pleasure through history, compares past and contemporary anatomical understandings of the clitoris, and then demonstrates through empirical studies, based on courses she has taught, how cultural cliteracy can empower women and bring new insights to the reading of women’s texts. She calls for the integration of “adequate understandings of the clitoris” into a variety of different discourses, including law.

In response, this paper focuses on family law as a promising site for integrating cultural cliteracy into legal discourse. Part I introduces the project and its challenges. Part II explores the central role of sex in family law, with emphasis on how family law seeks to channel sexual desire into monogamous marriage and how this effort to manage sexual activity plays out, given the pervasive silence about women’s sexual pleasure. This analysis, in turn, exposes significant inconsistencies, challenging the coherence of family law’s own stated policies, including its simultaneous preference for monogamous marriage, acceptance of no-fault divorce, and commitment to gender equality. Part III turns to contrasting ways to make family law more culturally cliterate, specifically, allowing individuals to learn what they can from popular culture versus undertaking affirmative government efforts to promote such knowledge, through educational programs. Part III next looks beyond educational programs to suggest how respect for women’s sexual pleasure might prompt rethinking several specific aspects of family law, including divorce grounds; civil actions for sexual harm; and the legal treatment of various supports, interventions, and protections that facilitate sexual pleasure, from sex toys to reproductive autonomy. Part IV concludes with a deeper look at the prospect of a culturally cliterate family law, including the fundamental paradoxes that it might pose.

Keywords: clitoris, sexual pleasure, women, orgasm, marriage, channeling, monogamy, family law, gender equality, feminist theory, sex education, divorce, torts, sex toys, reproductive autonomy, contraception, abortion

Source: Social Science Research Network. Follow the link to download the full document here.

Yes it’s hard-core academic feminism. No I haven’t had time to read it all (I’ve got to finish cooking supper.) Yes it gets off to a very nice start

[T]his project, which began as a modest and largely conservative attempt to accept family law largely on its own terms while making the case for attention to women’s sexual pleasure, ultimately exposes profound paradoxes that merit analysis.

...if family law were to rescue women’s sexual pleasure from popular culture, our understanding of such pleasure would no doubt change. Would such “legitimating” efforts impose confining regulation, in turn defeating the individuality, diversity, and spontaneity necessary for the sexual pleasure that animates the enterprise? Can cultural cliteracy survive family law?

Finally, and again paradoxically, if we take modern family law on its own terms (in the sense of conceding, purely for purposes of analysis, its central objectives and ideals), then we must come to the conclusion that this field— which has sex as its conceptual core, which seeks to channel sexual desire into monogamous marriages, and which proclaims commitment to gender equality— would be far more coherent if it could achieve what Cultural Cliteracy establishes that women should be entitled to expect: sexual self-efficacy and sexual pleasure. Yet, this effort to make modern family law more coherent and more successful might well prove to be family law’s own undoing, subverting the stated objectives that provided the starting poCan family law survive cultural cliteracy?

I’ll be interested to see if she gets into some of the assumptions about gender and desire that Bob & Susan-Yager-Berkowitz confront He’s Just Not Up for It Anymore: Why Men Stop Having Sex, and What You Can Do About It. Because as Appleton points out, quite a bit of family law is based on the premise that not only do men want sex in heterosexual relationships, only men want it. To a point, she also reminds us, that on occasion we both figuratively and, occasionally, literally remove women’s clitorises in order to curtail their enjoyment of sex. One way or another, though, it seems clear family law is designed — covertly and overtly — to buttress gender stereotypes rather than address the underlying reality: when you factor out acculturation then on average, over time, we all turn out to be very much alike.

Via Bridget Crawford of Feminist Law Professors

Anna N. of Jezebel says

If you’re still using Alex Comfort’s 1972 The Joy of Sex as your guide to such topics as “frigidity,” having sex on horseback, and “tactful ways to take a woman’s virginity,” it’s time to update.

British sexologist Susan Quilliam has revised the famous book, putting more focus where you need it most: the clit. In words oddly reminiscent of Obama’s “McCain doesn’t get it” speech, Quilliam says Comfort gave short shrift to the all-important bit of female anatomy “not because he was anti-clitoris, but because he just didn’t know.” Also included now are sections on Internet porn, vulvar care, and a technique called the “Venus butterfly.” [NY Times]

Read the quote in context here.

What’s really scary to contemplate is Comfort was actually fairly state-of-the-art on the clit for 1972! He only started writing the thing a year or two after Masters and Johnson announced their research that it’s all about the clit. And only maybe ten years after “helpful” American gynecologists finally stopped cauterizing** or cutting them out of women who couldn’t stop playing with them(!!!!)

During a trial to shut down a theater for showing the Linda Lovelace movie “Deep Throat” a New York City prosecutor said, with his bare face hanging out, “The movie says it’s perfectly normal to have a clitoral orgasm and THAT IS WRONG.”

Y’ever wonder why old 2nd-wave feminists seem really cranky compared to 3rd-wavers? 3rd-wavers are all too young to remember just how jarringly bad it used to be! It was bad!

The original book is impossibly old-fashioned now in large part because… people back then read it, tried some of the then utterly-unheard-of stuff in it, and took it from there. Some of it’s laugh-out-loud now but compared to everything else available to the general public back then it was light-years ahead.

[** Yes, that J.H. Kellogg. —fl]

Years ago someone finally showed me a very reliable way to find someone else’s clitoris if you’re too shy to ask her to show you.

a) don’t worry about it at first. Just lick, kiss, and caress her lovingly. All over. Till her breath is hot on your neck and her hands are stroking you back. Wait for her little erection to begin to grow and for that to happen you want her to be excited everywhere, not just there.

b) touch her lightly at the base of her mons, just above the top of her clitoral hood. Don’t move too fast, don’t make a beeline, but don’t squirrel around either since she might get ticklish if she’s not sure where you’re going. Also don’t drop everything else — keep kissing her and, of course, letting her kiss you back.

c) rock your fingertip left to right till you feel something sort of like a long thick tendon under her flesh. There aren’t any tendons there so that’s going to be it. (If you don’t feel it at first keep rocking or gently swirling, not to mention kissing and licking, and it’ll usually pop up.)

d) once you’ve found her, follow it down into her folds with your tongue or fingers

The idea is that the shaft of almost everyone’s clit is bigger (or at least easier to find) higher up and most people don’t know it goes that high. It’s definitely easier to find than starting with the little glans under her hood and working your way up.

Oh yeah, one more thing, as she gets closer to coming the surrounding flesh will get more and more engorged and flushed and that can make it harder to find again. It’s still easier to find if you go from the top. (Masters & Johnson and others said the erection goes away just before orgasm but it’s always seemed to me that everything else swells — wonderfully — around it.)

Another idea that helps is to lay the length of your finger alongside her clitoral hood and do the same rocking back and forth across it. Once you find it you can circle it or rub up and down on one side or the other. (If you’re talking at that point ask her which side she likes. One side is often more sensitive than the other.)

Finally, for a lot of women it feels better overall to stay on the outside of the hood than to dig a fingertip or tongue under the hood and drill directly into the little tip. For most people the tip, the glans, is very sensitive. It’s totally tempting to do it, especially since slurping or sliding up between her labia will lead you right to it. Yes, really tempting and unless she’s really into it you, like I, may have to fight yourself every time. That’s not to say you should never do it because some people do like it, but it’s a good idea to check first.

Yes, I’m sure there are other, and maybe even better ways to find it or play with it but ever I learned that way to do it I’ve had very, very good fortune and almost no complaints.