“Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.” – James Joyce
1982: Beverly Whipple, John D. Perry, Alice Khan Ladas publish The G Spot: And Other Discoveries about Human Sexuality
1950: Ernst Graffenberg, an ophthalmologist turned gynecologist publishes The Role of Urethra in Female Orgasm.
1905: Sigmund Freud theorizes that “mature” women have “vaginal” orgasms that are distinct from “less mature” clitoral ones.
The 1500’s: Ambrose Paré advises other physicians in the treatment of “female hysteria”
Let the mydwife annoint her fingers with oleum nardinum or moschetalinum, or of cloves, or else of spike mixed with musk, ambergreese, civit and other sweet powders, and with these let her rub or tickle the top of the neck of the wombe wish toucheth the inner orifice.
For the record, Dr. Paré described the symptoms of “hysteria,” which at the time was more commonly, if not exactly charmingly, referred to as “suffocation of the uterus” (due to the panting and shortness of breath associated with the “curative” paroxysms produced by the above listed treatment) as
Those who are free’d of the fit of the suffocation of the womb either by nature or by art, in a short time their color commeth in to their faces by little and little, and the whole beginneth to wax strong, and th eteeth, that were set, and closed fast together, begin (the jaws being loosened) to open and unclose again, and lastly som moisture floweth from the secret parts with a certain tickling pleasure; but in some women, as in those especially in whom the neck of the womb is tickled with the Midwive’s finger, in stead of that moisture com’s thick and gross seed [note: medevalists believed that both men and women produced semen or “seed” for procreation —fl], which moisture or seed when it is fallen, the womb being before as it were rageing, is restored unto its own proper nature and place, and by little and little all symptoms vanish away.
It’s kind of embarrassing to see how over and over men (and it was obvously mostly men till, say, Beverly Whipple and Alice Ladas) managed to lose so much information about their (heterosexual) partners when, really, they don’t seem to have had all that much to begin with. And all in the maintenance of what, exactly?
[Note: For the record, Whipple, Ladas, and Perry, followers of Freud disciple Wilhelm Reich, undertook their investigation of the g-spot because they wondered how Freud could have been so wrong about vaginal orgasms in the face of Master’s and Johnson’s equally unilateral “discovery” of the clitoris. —fl]
Submitted by 1723 (not verified) on Sat, 2007-11-03 10:40.
"...men ... managed to lose so much information about their (heterosexual) partners"
And it's more or less still going on. In 1998 there was an article in the New Scientist, more or less repeated by the BBC in 2006, and put forward as an amazing revelation each time. In fact Helen O'Connell, whose work they are reporting, has been publishing different aspects and implications of the structure of the clitoris each time, but the reporters rarely seem to get past the fact that it is much larger and more extensive than people think. And yet it's greeted as new each time.
In yet another article (2005 this time) the author mentions that "Dr. O’Connell’s observations corresponded to the standard work Human Sex Anatomy, by R.L.Dickinson 1949" and wonders why there is such a lack of interest in the subject.
[Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about O'Connell's work in this context. And it's especially important because it reconciles the whole unfortunate vaginal/clitoral business since the "g-spot" (and several of the other alphabet spots) are just different sides of a much larger-than-realized clitoris. So according to O'Connell's anatomy, all orgasms are clitoral but some parts of the clitoris can be stimulated vaginally. (It's worth pointing out that work by Beverly Whipple, the original G-Spot authors, suggests multiple orgasmic pathways that are activated at different points.) Thanks so much for bringing this up, A. --fl]
Submitted by 1723 (not verified) on Wed, 2007-10-31 10:30.
I'd like to believe that all these things were always known to individuals and couples in the real world, and it's only the scientific literature that's been all doofy about it. I mean, I discovered the clitoris and the female orgasm at twelve years old. I'm probably not the first girl in history to do so.
Obviously shame and moralism can suppress such discoveries, but... only out of the public sector. Not out of bedrooms. (Perfect case in point: male homosexuality, which has often been much more explicitly and harshly condemned than pleasure, but even in periods where it was supressed by laws and hellfire and mob violence, men still had sex with men.)
[I agree it's hard to fathom, and obviously people kept rediscovering it but, with no possibility of public discourse it always *did* have to be rediscovery. Which is kind of a bummer when you think about it, and about how long it went on, and about the madonna/whore business that kept prostitutes overworked and wives isolated and largely in the dark. And, consequently, the men on top, yes, but still greviously sexually impoverished. Thanks, Holly. --fl]