The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (14 page)

FEMALE ORGASM IN THE POST-FREUDIAN WORLD

Laqueur says of Freud that “in 1905, for the first time a doctor claimed that there were two kinds of [female] orgasm and that the vaginal sort was the expected norm among adult women.”
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Freud was certainly the great popularizer of this androcentric theory, but he was not the first to raise the question of where the female orgasm originated. The subject was clearly a matter for debate when Auguste Tripier asserted in 1883 that clitoral and uterine sensations had to occur simultaneously for the production of the “venereal orgasm in women.”
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It was twentieth-century post-Freudian medicine, however, that elevated the vaginal orgasm to a veritable Holy Grail of sexual function for women. When Alfred Kinsey dared to question both its existence and the necessity for adjusting women’s sexuality to fit an inappropriate “norm,” some of his colleagues reacted with horror and outrage. Edmund Bergler and William S. Kroger, who defined frigidity as “the incapacity of woman to have
a vaginal orgasm during intercourse”
(italics in the original), responded to Kinsey’s book on female sexuality with eloquent indignation:

The frigid women (not a mere 10 per cent as Kinsey assumes from the application of his mistaken yardstick [i.e., whether women could reach orgasm by any means], but probably 80 to 90 per cent) received the assurance that vaginal frigidity is a meaningless concept, and that the “normal” expectation is some form of clitoridean orgasm. This can be proved by an admission made by Kinsey on page 584 of Volume II. In his heated polemic against the existence of vaginal orgasm, he claims that
“some hundreds
of the women in our own study have consequently been much disturbed by their failure to accomplish this biological impossibility.” Obviously, Kinsey reassured these neurotics.
⁶⁸

Bergler and Kroger insist that there is no scientific difficulty with arguing that 80 to 90 percent of all women are “abnormal” and go on to defend the Freudian notion that real women are satisfied only by penetration. To give these authors their due, they are at least evenhanded about their normative illusions: they assert that “mature, normal men do not desire sex except with women they love tenderly.”
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Having reaffirmed the norm as coitus, twentieth-century physicians tended to blur the distinction between orgasm and satisfaction much as their nineteenth-century predecessors had done. A propensity to equate enjoyment of coitus with orgasmic satisfaction remains embedded in both medical and popular discussions despite nearly a century of study of female sexuality. Women themselves do not always know how to answer questions that distinguish between pleasure and orgasm, just as men typically, in Paul Gebhard’s words, “do not understand inquiries about differences between orgasm and satisfaction.”
⁷⁰
For most men, apparently, orgasm
is
satisfaction. Women, however, traditionally have been expected to find enjoyment in an activity—coitus—that results in orgasm for women in only a minority of instances. Thus women’s pleasure in sex, which may consist of arousal, enjoyment of physical intimacy, or the expression of affection it represents for both partners, is routinely interpreted both by scientists and even by some historians as orgasmic experience, whether or not it actually is. Both Katherine Bement Davis’s 1,183 college-educated respondents and James Cooper’s later working-class and lower-middle-class sample, surveys reported in 1925 by Robert Dickinson and Henry Pierson,
⁷¹
were frequently uncertain what was meant by the term “orgasm.” As we have seen, their doctors were not always certain either. Among women reporting sexual pleasure, including “orgasm” however defined, it has been observed that “peaks of feeling” short of clinically defined climax are frequently reported as orgasm.

Jeanne Warner, who wrote about this in 1984, used Joseph Bohlen’s 1981 definition: “Only the unique waveforms of anal and vaginal pressure associated with the reflexive contractions of the pelvic muscles provide distinct physiological evidence of orgasm.” In the absence of these signs, the emotional and physical enjoyment that women experience in coitus is frequently elevated to the stature of orgasm, both in the women’s own reports and in their medical interpretation. Women are under pressure to appear normal and feminine in their sexual responses—defined, of course, in terms of the androcentric model—and physicians have traditionally sought evidence that validated this model. Warner thinks it likely that female orgasm in coitus is substantially overreported owing to women’s tendency to say what their husbands and doctors want to hear, and she adds:

Another factor in the denial of lack of female orgasm has to do with a male bias for phallic stimulation. Although hard data on the relationship between mode of stimulation and female response are lacking at present, the literature conveys a strong impression that the penis is not the most effective means of producing a maximal level of arousal and response for a woman. Those male authorities who advocate the superiority of emotional orgasm in women [“peaks of feeling”] suggest that whatever provides the greatest satisfaction for the male should also provide the greatest pleasure for the female. It is not easy for any woman, professional or otherwise, to suggest that the culturally ingrained symbol of “manhood” is not the ultimate sensual magic wand.
⁷²

In Dianne Grosskopf’s sample of 1,207 women, commissioned by
Playgirl
and published in 1983, “masturbation was shown to be the most reliably orgasmic sexual practice.” Grosskopf, like Warner, thought her respondents overreported orgasm with penetration, and she observed that “women appeared to be defensive and sometimes less than honest in their answers to the questions about orgasms.” Significantly, she also reports that “all but a small number (20 percent) of respondents said they did not feel cheated if they did not experience orgasm during sex,” and that “three-quarters of the women felt it more important for their partner to be pleased than for themselves to be pleased.”
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Gebhard, too, said that 57 percent of his sample reported themselves as “satisfied” without orgasm.
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Clearly these women saw no reason to expect orgasmic satisfaction in coitus, felt uncomfortable with questions that would reveal their lack of conformity to the androcentric norm in this regard, and were motivated to stress the satisfaction of delivering acceptable sexual services to their male partners. In 1985 Ann Landers’s newspaper column shocked the masculine world by reporting the results of her inquiries to readers about how they felt about “the act”: of more than 100,000 women who responded, 72 percent wrote to say they’d much rather be doing something else.
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It has been argued that these and other data, notably Hite’s, contain a self-selection bias. This is certainly true, but it is difficult to imagine how we might gather data on human sexuality without introducing self-selection bias, observer effects, or other distortions.

WHAT OUGHT TO BE, AND WHAT WE’D LIKE TO BELIEVE

Like that of physicians and other male professionals, the work of some male historians suggests they are anxious to interpret the highly ambiguous evidence on female sexuality in such a way as to reinforce the androcentric model. Peter Gay, in filling volumes with extrapolations from somewhat scanty data, has not hesitated to assume that all female assertions of pleasure in heterosexual activity indicate regular experience of orgasm. In a section of
The Education of the Senses
appropriately titled “The Dubious Certainty of Numbers,” he consistently assumes female orgasm during penetration and conflates pleasure with orgasmic satisfaction, despite the clearly emotional, rather than physiological, tone of most of his quotations from women. Although he says that doctors’ reports “testify to a brimming reservoir of unsatisfied female desire,” Gay never questions that a woman’s claim to enjoy sex means orgasm in coitus, even when his sources explicitly deny any sensual dimension to their pleasure.
⁷⁶

Carl Degler’s work on female sexuality exhibits the same androcentric bias as Gay’s. In his famous article “What Ought to Be and What Was,” he addresses questions raised by the Mosher survey at the turn of the century. On his own evidence, neither women nor their physicians could distinguish among arousal, the “psychic and subjective” enjoyment of sex, Warner’s “peaks of feeling,” and the physiological orgasm as defined above. Without inquiring what Mosher’s respondents might have meant by “venereal orgasm,” as we have seen, a more ambiguous term when applied to women than when applied to men, Degler concludes from his evidence that 95 percent of Mosher’s sample of forty-five women experienced orgasm in coitus. Degler’s point is that what physicians asserted about female sexuality and what women experienced were probably very different, a point certainly worth making. Unfortunately, his use of the Mosher data is tendentious and misleading; later in the same article he misinterprets Kinsey’s data in a manner that would have horrified Kinsey.
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Like traditional physicians and many others of his historical and contemporary brethren, Degler is reluctant to rock the boat of the androcentric model of female sexuality. Katherine Nelson, in a passage quoted in Marie Stopes’s
Married Love
, shows a different view of women’s experience of sex in the early decades of this century:

To mate with men who have no soul above
Earth grubbing; who, the bridal night, forsooth,
Killed sparks that rise from instinct fires of life,
And left us frozen things, alone to fashion
Our souls to dust, masked with the name of wife—
Long years of youth—love years—the years of passion
Yawning before us. So, shamming to the end,
All shrivelled by the side of him we wed,
Hoping that peace may riper years attend,
Mere odalisques are we—well housed, well fed.
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The overloaded and leaking vessel of androcentric sexuality, as we have seen, has required systematic bailing out of contradictory data. Some of this has been accomplished, I have suggested, by medicalizing the production of female orgasm, thus relieving husbands and lovers of the chore of stimulating the clitoris, a task rarely compatible with such reliable masculine favorites as coitus in the female-supine position. Physicians did not relish the job either, however lucrative it might be as an office visit cash cow, and from ancient times to the end of the nineteenth century they sought some means of literally getting the female orgasm off their hands. Their efforts to mechanize and expedite the task while retaining the profitable character of orgasmic treatment are the subject of the next chapter.

4
“INVITING THE JUICES DOWNWARD”

In a discussion of electromedical technologies new in his day, in 1903 Samuel Howard Monell effectively summarized the demand of physicians since Hippocrates for some simple means of getting results with their hysterical patients: “Pelvic massage (in gynecology) has its brilliant advocates and they report wonderful results, but when practitioners must supply the skilled technic with their own fingers the method has no value to the majority.” For physicians in this line of work, the vibrator was a godsend: “Special applicators (motor driven) give practical value and office convenience to what otherwise is impractical.”
¹

Not only the need for skill but the time required annoyed physicians. Samuel Spencer Wallian, extolling the virtues of “rhythmotherapy” with a vibrator in 1906, asserted that in manual massage the physician “consumes a painstaking hour to accomplish much less profound results than are easily effected by the other [the vibrator] in a short five or ten minutes.”
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For the profitability of a physician’s practice, at any period in history, the difference between ten minutes and an hour to complete treatment would have been significant.

As I mentioned earlier, at no time did physicians show any real enthusiasm for treating hysteria in their women patients. All the evidence points to their having generally considered it a tedious, difficult, and
time-consuming chore and having made efforts to delegate the task to subordinates or machines even in ancient and medieval times. Western physicians have in general found physical therapies annoyingly labor intensive, an attitude that eventually resulted in an occupational split between doctors and physical therapists in the twentieth century. There had been earlier efforts in this direction, as we have seen; massage was often a lower-status task relegated to semiprofessionals at ancient and medieval bathhouses and at spas in the modern period. Until the nineteenth century, pelvic massage of women, useful in childbirth as well as in the treatment of hysteria, was not uncommonly the responsibility of midwives, whether or not under the supervision of a physician. As a mode of therapy, massage rarely was harmful, often was beneficial, and achieved results, if any, only with patience, which meant that from the Galenic physician’s point of view it lacked the heroic character of surgery, venesection, and purging. In this context it is hardly surprising that physicians sought technologies that would allow them to reap the economic benefits of pelvic massage, as delegating it to another therapist did not, while avoiding a wearying and costly investment of the doctor’s time and skill.