by Naomi Wolf
A Komisaruk team experiment asking women to rank orgasms subjectively confirmed heightened emotional subjectivity as well, in relation to some sexual areas more than others.
These experiments should, I believe, help to radically change our notion of what the “self” consists of. Since the eighteenth century, the self has been defined in the West as autonomous. But the vagina and cervix of even the most empowered woman cannot choose autonomy so simply. The vagina and the mouth of the cervix seem to be evolutionarily rigged to need “others” and to place the female brain in an unchosen but demanding connection to others.
The vagina and cervix, with their built-in craving for “the other,” seem to be evolution’s guarantee that heterosexual women will always interdepend with men and be willing to have intercourse with them, even with its many dangers, emotional as well as physical. This arrangement seems to guarantee that women will be driven by strong desires from within to attend to building complex bonds with others, even at the risk of their personal autonomy. And it comes as no surprise, then, to discover that many women find that vibrators alone or masturbation alone do not do exactly what lovemaking does for them emotionally. Dr. Pfaus believes that maybe we are “hardwired to associate that kind of stimulation with another individual that we have to work on in a relationship; and having the stimulation disembodied—though pleasurable—is not the same degree of pleasure that we experience with another individual living entity.”25
What if there is nothing wrong with this? Dr. Helen Fisher argues that male and female biologies and drives arose, for evolutionary purposes, to be interdependent with one another: to maximize each person’s success if the two genders work as a team. What if sexuality and satisfaction actually require both perspectives—the more autonomous male and the more interdependent female? What if the vagina’s longing is nature’s way of correcting the potential imbalance of a worldview based on male biology alone?
“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle,” the Second Wave feminist slogan assured us, but maybe the fact is, well, no. I now think that denial of this need for men for sexual pleasure in straight women’s lives was not actually feminist and did not actually help heterosexual women. Obviously, straight women do not need just any man. It is an insult to these women to dismiss their longing for the one they feel is the man, or to deride their mourning if he is gone. Nor does this denial of the paradox of our feminine autonomy, coexisting unsettledly with our feminine need for interdependence, help lesbians or bisexual women understand why, so often, the need for the lover is so intense. This ideology does nothing to help women of any sexuality understand why, often, the vibrator and a pint of Häagen-Dazs are pleasurable but that other longings for connections can remain strong.
To respect the central paradox of the female condition—the sexual/emotional need of the vagina and cervix—might mean that we need to face the fact that women are, in a sense, more easily addicted to love and to good sex with the person who triggers that heady chemical bath, than men are. The work of Dr. Daniel G. Amen, in The Brain in Love, along with that of many other neurobiologists whose work has not yet been “translated” into mainstream culture, suggests that some of women’s behaviors currently seen as needy or masochistic are in fact better understood as natural and probably evolutionary responses to the brain changes caused by female orgasm. Good sex is, in other words, actually addictive for women biochemically in certain ways that are different from the experience of men—meaning that one experiences discomfort when this stimulus is removed and a craving to secure it again. Bad sex—inattentive sex with a selfish or distracted partner—is actually chemically dispiriting and damaging psychologically to women in a way that is different from men’s experience. We will see why.
Neuroscientist Simon LeVay, in The Sexual Brain, points out that orgasm triggers, for both genders, the same mechanism as addiction, and he notes that all addictive mechanisms share a basis in dopamine. “Porn, accumulating money, gaining power over others, gambling, compulsive shopping, video games . . . if something really boosts your dopamine, then it’s potentially addictive for you.” Addiction highs can “hijack” our wiring, leaving us with little choice about seeking that high again and again, even if we suffer for the need in other ways. Of thousands of different chemicals, just a few—alcohol, cocaine, and other opiates and narcotics—boost dopamine. Highly stimulating versions of ordinary behaviors also boost dopamine, which is why exercise and pornography can be addictive.26
But we are living in a postfeminist world that tells women to just “fuck like men”—that doing so is a sign of liberation—and encourages young women to engage in “friends with benefits” relationships as an act of self-confidence, to roll out of bed with the same casual carelessness that men have traditionally demonstrated.
That male-model ideal of not-caring, take-it-or-leave-it sexuality is, I argue, setting up yet another impossible ideal into which women are supposed to shoehorn their actual needs, at some violence to themselves. Because sexually addictive behavior—or I should say, addictedness to a lover who is “right” for the autonomic nervous system—in women is hardwired. This is possibly the not so well-kept secret of women and love: we talk about great personalities or impressive résumés, similar backgrounds or common interests in prospective mates or new lovers. But though this dimension of our courtship experience is critical, certainly at first, the truth is that if he or she didn’t make you feel that great in your body—if he or she didn’t smell that good to you, taste that satisfying, touch you in ways that suited your unique needs to be touched, or make you come satisfyingly—you wouldn’t care that much if he or she never called again. If he or she is the one who turns the ANS on high alert, who delivers the dopamine high from anticipation, who leaves you with the world aglow from opioid release—that is the same man or woman who makes you ache with anxiety for the follow-up call. If this is the person with the right touch to activate your unique neural network, you will go into withdrawal if he or she is not around to do this again, and fairly soon. Actual, painful, real withdrawal.
So when women have good, satisfying sex—what I call “high” orgasm: caring, attentive sex that activates the entire pelvic neural network and also intensely engages the ANS—they experience a major brain high.
This bath, of what are essentially drugs, primes women’s neural systems to overcome huge obstacles to getting to the loved one; to engage in extreme behavior in pursuit of love and sexual pleasure; and to be physiologically unable to compartmentalize, to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, or just to “get a grip” or “get over” him or her. If they manage to “snap out of it,” it is with superhuman effort and at a cost. This major brain high can also involve the hormones that elicit obsessive thinking about a loved one, and that elicit nurturing and even self-sacrificing behaviors. This major brain high is a factor for both genders. Both genders, of course, experience passionate attachment and suffer from unrequited love. And yes, the issue of the way intercourse differs emotionally and physically from masturbation for men, the role of male attachment, and the relationship of male sexuality to consciousness, deserves its own book.
But: women are potentially multiorgasmic, which changes, to some extent, one aspect of the “major brain high” equation.
Sappho wrote of jealousy “underneath my breast, all the heart is shaken . . . underneath my skin the tenuous flame suffuses . . . fever shakes my body.”27 The author of the Song of Songs (whom many scholars presume to have been a woman) wrote, “Strengthen me with raisins, / refresh me with apples, / for I am faint with love. . . . All night long on my bed / I looked for the one my heart loves; / I looked for him but did not find him. / I will get up now and go about the city. / Through its streets and squares; / I will search for the one my heart loves. / . . . I . . . would not let him go . . . / Blow on my garden, / that its fragrance may spread abroad.”28
The grieving Dido, abandoned by her lover Aeneas; Charlotte Brontë’s small, im
poverished governess, who nearly died in a blazing bedroom trying to rescue her love in Jane Eyre; George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver, in The Mill on the Floss, who witnessed her reputation, her role in society, and her obligations to convention, all wash away from her as she allowed herself to be swept down a soon-to-be-fatal river with a man to whom she was powerfully sexually attracted; and you, my dear reader, who have probably—likely much to your own mortification—obsessively checked for a response to an unanswered e-mail or sat by an unringing phone, as have I; are we masochists, are we pathetic, or trivial-minded? No, to the contrary. Rather, we are subject to a force that is extremely powerful—one that perhaps no man can truly understand. I think that what drives us is rather noble.
An essential paradox of the female condition is that for women to really be free, we have to understand the ways in which nature designed us to be attached to and dependent upon love, connection, intimacy, and the right kind of Eros in the hands of the right kind of man or woman.
I believe we should respect the potential for “enslavement” to sexual love in women; to our place with Eros and love. Because only by making room for it, rather than suppressing or mocking it, can we strive to understand it. When a woman is engaged in this struggle with love and need, she is not “subject” to the person in question; she is actually engaged in a struggle with herself, to find a way to reclaim her autonomy while somehow not cutting herself off from the part of herself that was awakened by the beloved in the longing for connection.
A woman struggling with attachment and loss of self is engaged in a struggle for the self as demanding and rigorous as that of any man on any quest narrative. Of course, the biological responses I am talking about here have long been identified in psychoanalysis and in literature; only recently has science added new dimensions to and explanations of these mind-states elucidated by poets, novelists, and students of the psyche.
One of my favorite slang terms for the vagina in the United States is “the force.” This is what we should be talking about. Women indeed take love, sex, and intimacy seriously, not because women, intimacy, and Eros are trivial but because nature in its clever and transcendental wiring of women’s genitals and their brains has forced women to face the fact, which is simply more obscured to men (though actually ultimately no less true for them), that the need for connection, love, intimacy, and Eros is indeed bigger and stronger than anything else in the world.
A culture that does not respect women tends to deride and mock women’s preoccupation with love and Eros. But often we are preoccupied with the beloved not because we have no selves of our own, but because the beloved has physiologically awakened aspects of our own selves.
Should we not, rather, be proud of who we are?
We should be proud.
5
What We “Know” About Female Sexuality Is Out of Date
They had laughed and made love and laughed again . . .
—Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love
This journey showed me, to my surprise, that even though we talk about sex all the time, the information we have about female sexuality is generally out of date. If women had easy—or at least easier—access to and could draw on the new scientific discoveries about female sexuality, which have not been widely reported, they would have a much deeper understanding of their own sexual and emotional responses—and could feel far more sexually alive and connected. Many of these new discoveries illuminate our conflicted feelings vis-à-vis our drive to be loved, and speak directly to the need for men and women to engage with what I will call “the Goddess Array,” the set of behaviors that activate the autonomic nervous system in women.
Sex educator Liz Topp, author of Vaginas: An Owner’s Manual, in an eye-opening interview with me (in which she reported that senior girls in high school, even in our enlightened age, and even in excellent schools, have no idea where on the chart of the vulva the clitoris is—and neither do senior boys), referred to some of these behaviors, only half jokingly, as “the things that women need that men don’t need.”1 The latest science confirms that these “little” gestures and flourishes, which are so often relegated to the category of “things that people do in courtship and stop doing in a long-term relationship”—those sexual or romantic “extras” that are sort of nice to dole out to women but are not deemed essential—are in fact physically and emotionally fundamental to women’s vibrancy. These practices radically boost a woman’s orgasmic potential. But at least as importantly, they help support her relationships, and are even essential to her mental health and peace of mind. They all add up to gestures and attentions that compose “the Goddess Array.”
Why, one might ask, 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 etiquette for men to give women, chivalrously, a bit of advance help in the stimulation department (these gestures, cast as gildings on the lily of intercourse, are still infuriatingly called “foreplay”) but that the pacing of “sex” is essentially that of the male sex response cycle.
These assumptions are not accurate. It turns out that male sexuality and female sexuality are very different. It turns out that, for women, the clitoris is sexually important, the vagina is sexually important, the G-spot is sexually important, the mouth of the cervix is sexually important, the perineum is sexually important, and the anus is sexually important. Recent research has found that what Masters and Johnson argued—that all female orgasm goes through the clitoris—is incorrect. According to the newest data, the G-spot and the clitoris are both aspects of a single neural structure; and women have, as we saw and as Dr. Komisaruk’s MRI findings confirm, at least three sexual centers: clitoris, vagina, and the third at the mouth of the cervix. (He adds a fourth, the nipples.)