by Terry Gould
In Missouri, Masters and Johnson were studying human sexual response, and, in 1963, when Sherfey discovered their paper on the clitoral orgasm, she had a second epiphany. “It was truly a Eureka-experience for me. This was it! Freud was wrong. Men were wrong. Women were wrong. Common sense was wrong. There was no such thing as the vaginal orgasm as heretofore conceived.”
Sherfey’s writing now sounds hyperbolic to us. After all, does it really matter where a woman has her orgasm so long as the physiology is straightened out in sex-education classes and she is taught how to achieve one when she wants it? Considering how painful life can be in so many of its nonsexual aspects, the pleasure of orgasm might indeed seem like a gift worth cultivating but not shouting intellectual eurekas over. In fact, to a psychiatrist as well to an evolutionary theorist, it matters very much: the location and functioning of the orgasm bears heavily on female sexual capacity, which in turn affects the view of normal female behavior, the interpretation of history—including why millions of women have been murdered by jealous men unforgiving of their supposed harlotry—and, ultimately, the foundations of a culture that has operated mostly on the belief that female promiscuity is unnatural. Yet all the biological information coming Sherfey’s way from Masters and Johnson and from her clinical practice proved that women weren’t equipped to have just one or two orgasms, as most men were. Women could go on having orgasms for hours. Sherfey’s patients were having “up to fifty orgasms in a single session.” “To have the comfort of a label,” she wrote, “I had considered them to be cases of nymphomania without promiscuity. From the standpoint of our cultural norm, this may be an accurate enough phrase. From the standpoint of normal physiological functioning, these women exhibit a healthy, uninhibited sexuality—and the number of orgasms attained, a measure of the human female’s orgasmic potentiality”
To comprehend that potentiality, one has to think of the penis in terms of the entire clitoral system, instead of the tiny clitoris in terms of the entire penis. Unlike the penis, the clitoris is an organ whose sole purpose is pleasure. When aroused its hidden system is thirty times larger than the clitoris itself, and in its engorged state the amount of blood in the organ exceeds the amount of blood in an erect penis. Two broad roots and a pair of bulbous “caverns” create internal tumescence early on in the sexually excited female; while later, during orgasm, complicated muscle structures generate vaginal spasms that in turn push the slightly bulging cervix down like an elephant’s trunk into the seminal pool deposited by the male—an active function performed by the female in her own fertilization. Sherfey explained how the many differences between female and male favor the clitoral system, with its five networks of veins fanning out on either side of the vagina all the way into the pelvis. However, the most significant difference for her lay in the postorgasmic activity of both systems. Whereas in males the engorged blood drains back from whence it came, resulting in a comparatively long recovery time, in a woman each orgasm is followed by an almost immediate refilling of the erectile chambers. This subsequent engorgement is in no way diminished from the first and produces even more arousal in the tissues. “Consequently, the more orgasms a woman has,” Sherfey wrote, “the stronger they become; the more orgasms she has, the more she can have. To all intents and purposes, the human female is sexually insatiable in the presence of the highest degrees of sexual satiation.”
Sherfey termed this experience satiation-in-insatiation, which she differentiated from the mere “satisfaction” society told women to settle for with a single man. Again, based on biological data, the work of Masters and Johnson, and her own practice, she argued for “the existence of the universal and physically normal condition of women’s inability ever to reach complete sexual satiation in the presence of the most intense orgasmic experiences, no matter how produced. Theoretically, a woman could go on having orgasms indefinitely if physical exhaustion did not intervene.” Thus, acculturated women who enjoyed one or even five orgasms might be “satisfied,” she claimed, but they were not satiated, particularly during the two weeks around ovulation when her hormones made her most desirous of sex. “I must stress that this condition does not mean a woman is always consciously unsatisfied,” Sherfey wrote. “There is a great difference between satisfaction and satiation. A woman may be emotionally satisfied to the full in the absence of any orgasmic expression—The woman usually wills herself to be satisfied because she is simply unaware of the extent of her orgasmic capacity.”
Sherfey granted that these marathon orgasmic sessions were usually masturbatory, but this was not because of any inability of women to transfer to a single, satisfying, “mature” orgasm. The problem, she posited, lay with the inadequacy of the male in a monogamous relationship: “Few males can maintain an erection long enough for more than three or four orgasms in the woman.” And sex, she maintained, became more frustrating for the monogamous woman as she aged and had children; her “vasocongestion” capacity actually increased, as did her body’s relative amount of testosterone, the hormone governing libido, which climbed ever-higher as she approached menopause. Overall, while men’s capacity for orgasm and performance decreased, women became more inclined to experience, and more capable of experiencing, the fullness of their sexuality. As Sherfey noted: “These findings give ample proof of the conclusion that neither men nor women, but especially not women, are biologically built for the single spouse, monogamous marital structure.”
Just what were women built for then? It is now well documented that a woman is equipped by evolution to promote the competition of several inseminates inside her, but in Sherfey’s day no one dared speculate that the persistence of “insatiable” female capacity might have mating implications. For Sherfey, the implications were clear: women were built for a consider- able number of men during each ovulation phase. The modern human female’s complex and highly evolved structures, which produced insatiable capacity, must have been “selected for” to help her survive—otherwise, over time she would have dis- carded them as physiological traits. Sherfey assessed the sexual responsivity and hormonal changes of human females during ovulation and deduced that they were “too close to that of certain higher primates to be ignored. I would suggest (and will take to be true) that the use of the Masters and Johnson techniques on these primates, with sexual anatomy so similar to the human female’s, will reveal the same condition of satiation-in-insatiation. Having no cultural restrictions, these primate females will perform coitus from twenty to fifty times a day during the peak week of estrus, usually with several series of copulations in rapid succession.” Sherfey was roundly criticized for this observation on the grounds that she had discounted the “choosiness” of even the most promiscuous female primates, not to mention the spousal loyalty shown by the supposed monogamous gibbon. “If necessary,” she went on, “they will flirt, solicit, present, and stimulate the male in order to obtain successive coitions, then take up with another…. I suggest that something akin to this behaviour could be paralleled by the human female if her civilization allowed it.”
Sherfey rejected the notion that women were “naturally” more inclined than men to desire intimacy and privacy during the act of sex, pointing out that of 694 men and women observed in masturbation and coitus during the clinical trials of Masters and Johnson “women desensitize with appreciably greater ease than men: 85 per cent of performance difficulties from this cause occurred in men…. The most inconsequential psychosensory distractions easily impair the erection in all subjects regardless of how well acclimatized they are to the surroundings…. Analogous distractibility is not present in women.”
Sherfey supposed that the rise of patriarchal civilization coincided with the “ruthless subjugation of female sexuality (which necessarily subjected her entire emotional life).” Based on an examination of Near Eastern myths and artifacts, she speculated that well into the Bronze Age societies existed that were ruled by women, and these early women would have been free to display “the fluctuating extrem
es of an impelling, aggressive eroticism…. For about half the time, women’s erotic needs would be insatiably pursued”: hence, Sherfey syndrome—the more controlled manifestation of which Edward Brecher would later observe described the behavior of some swinging women “when sexual inhibitions are cast off.”
It is now generally accepted by anthropologists that the balance of power between the sexes—and thus the control of sexuality—rests on which gender controls the wealth in a society. Some scientists theorize that there may have been a pre-historical time, as recently as 10,000 B.C., when women did have at least equal rights with men based on their equal or even dominant role in accumulating wealth through food gathering and “net-hunting” of small animals—which in some societies might even have opened up ruling roles for women at all levels, from the spiritual to the sexual. But at some point in the transition from a hunter-gatherer existence to the development of agriculture, men, wielding the heavy plow women couldn’t handle, got the upper hand on resources in settled communities. Desiring assured paternity, they enforced the state of matrimonial dominance that has characterized much of recorded history. Tales of prehistoric gynarchies and unleashed females like Lilith have indeed been around since the dawn of civilization. Sherfey offered up the body of modern woman to lend weight to the notion of a prehistorical reign of the human female’s “intense, insatiable eroticism,” an eroticism that “could be contained within one or possibly several types of social structures.” She went so far as to predict that with the “scientific revolution… and the new social equality and emotional honesty sweeping across the world,” our society could well be heading back to the structure from whence it arose.
We don’t know that, of course, and we don’t know if she was near the mark in her speculations about the unrecorded sexual past. Yet feminist North American civilization—where over one-third of women have had multiple sex partners by the time they enter university (a rate six times higher than when Sherfey posited her theory thirty years ago), and where the swinging lifestyle is established in hundreds of cities—is beginning to resemble one of the “social structures” Sherfey thought could have accommodated “aggressive eroticism in women.” In 1997, the remains of a female warrior society thought to be the six-foot-tall Amazons of myth were discovered in Kazakhstan; they in turn were thought to be the remnants of the mysterious Minoan civilization, which the Greeks all but annihilated thirty-five hundred years ago in a battle with enormous females. Minoan art shows women driving chariots, fighting in wars, farming, sailing ships, and hunting with bows and arrows. It also depicts both men and women wearing very sexual clothing in daily life. Whether they lived in a culture of unbridled promiscuity is unknown, but it’s worth pointing out that one of the most fastlane women at New Horizons, Jodie, outranked a couple of million men when she served in the U.S. military during the time of the Gulf War.
In the end, Sherfey did not argue that indulging inordinate sexual appetite was the way women should behave in our civilization, and she warned that if women threatened male virility, paternity, and the family, men would react violently and attempt to subjugate them in the manner of the patriarchs. The controversial point she stressed was that promiscuous female lust was innately part of a woman’s sexual nature, and that this explained the behavior of some women “throughout historic time.” As a psychiatrist her emphasis was on compassion, not promotion; evolutionary recognition, not cultural denial. “I urge the re-examination of the vague and controversial concepts of nymphomania and promiscuity without frigidity,” she wrote. “It could well be that the ‘oversexed’ woman is actually exhibiting a normal sexuality—although because of it her integration into her society may leave much to be desired.”
Sherfey published her theory in 1966 in The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association—the most respected in its field—and republished it in book form in 1972. As can be imagined, it was widely discussed and people breathlessly wondered if women would really behave that way if they ran the world and were given the total freedom to have sex with whomever they wanted. Evolutionary biologists soberly argued that, yes, women could behave that way, but most women wouldn’t. A quick comparison of the “hinder end” of a monkey and the anterior side of even the most aroused female tells the story, they said. Ovulating women do not exhibit the irresistible sexual swellings of other primates that make them Sherfian creatures for a time. In human females ovulation is “hidden.” Hidden ovulation was for a long time assumed to be the great divide between human females and nonhuman female primates. The various explanations given for the evolution of concealed ovulation rest on what might literally be called a motherhood issue: the helplessness of the human infant at birth. This, in part, say the theorists, accounts for the evolution of monogamy and human female choosiness—the natural way to be. Let’s have a look at this theory.
At some point in evolution, probably about three million years ago, the pelvic changes required to accommodate the upright posture of early humans made it more difficult for females to bear their large-headed young. The solution selected for by nature was for the mother to bear offspring at an earlier stage of their development. The evolutionary difficulty, however, was that the infant was left so needful at birth that for at least four years considerable nurturing was required just to keep it alive. Also, if one assumes that women did not run the group of early humans or raise their children in primitive “day cares,” infant helplessness necessitated that the father lend consistent support to the mother. If in a group of male-dominated Homos females were flying fertile sexual flags everywhere a male looked, and he was being approached by those females, he might be tempted to leave his defenceless “wife” and offspring, and go off and have intercourse willy-nilly. But if all the women in the group “hid” their fertile phases, he would be less tempted to stray and would stay home. A corollary to this theory is that females no longer experienced the hormonal rush and heightened sensitivity of periodically engorged flesh; with their sex drive thus diminished they became better wives and mothers. And so the human female became “continually receptive,” like a turned-down flame on the back burner of sexuality, pleasuring her ravenous male when he wanted it and helping him resolve the dilemma of whether to stay or stray.
That leads us to one of the most resonant, persistent, and appealing explanations offered for hidden ovulation: it accounts for the origin of romantic love and fidelitous attachment between spouses. It goes like this: the male, wanting to father offspring and pass on his genes, would never know the precise week when he should have intercourse with his continually receptive mate, and so he would hang around and keep trying to have a baby by her until he fell in love, thus cementing their bond in time for the birth of their child. This presupposes that he and his mate would have known that sex causes babies—something many peoples such as the Trobriand Islanders in the Pacific hadn’t figured out until the missionaries arrived (and many teenagers still haven’t). However, if we take for granted that the early human male, with the approximate mental capacity of a modern five-year-old, was aware of the consequences of sex, the theory that hidden ovulation led to romantic love seems to work.
It may in fact be the origin of human primary pair-bonding. Almost everyone on earth falls in love, and even the most fastlane married swingers believe so deeply in romantic love, the pair-bond, and responsible child-rearing in a nuclear family that they would toss me out of their clubs if I claimed they didn’t. But we don’t know for certain that the consensual non-monogamy they practice—including open eroticism, group sex, and all the rest—was not on occasion practiced by our distant ancestors even as they felt the attached, romantic love that supposedly arose from hidden ovulation. And we don’t know that they would not have practiced it even more frequently if they had lived into their late thirties, forties, and fifties. As Timothy Taylor points out, many peoples of the world have practiced open sexuality—and some still do.
But if you visit the American Museum of Natural History i
n New York City, you will see a diorama that stands as a model of our currently approved behavior and represents the monogamous outcome of hidden ovulation: a pair of Australopithecines, “Lucy” and her “husband,” walking arm in arm across the three-million-year-old landscape as a loving couple. The scene has a lot of appeal for evolutionists, even those who believe Lucy might have been “occasionally” tempted by other males. “In a few years, she and her male might break up and start second families,” Diane Ackerman wrote in A Natural History of Love. “But that emotional cataclysm would be the farthest thing from her mind as she travels with her lover.”
Despite the fact that the museum presents this scene as “natural history” (with an assumed emphasis on the word natural) it is in large part coded fable, an example of the cultural wishful thinking we have allowed ourselves to cast over what we don’t know about the past, based on what Ackerman approvingly calls “the version of relationships that has come down to us.” Footprints of our chimplike, bipedal ancestors have been found, but there is no evidence to indicate that males and females walked together as couples, or that females didn’t rule, or that they weren’t as casually promiscuous as bonobos—the species evolutionists like De Waal and Taylor consider to be “the closest living analogue to the early Australopithecines.” What we can read from the diorama, however, was possibly unintended. The hair of both creatures is shown thickest around the pubic region, where the eye is drawn—the reason for which pubic hair is thought to have evolved. “Look down here, I’m old enough to produce children,” it virtually shouts. “Let’s have sex.” In addition, the male Australopithecus has a good-sized, thick penis for female pleasure and a strong rump for thrusting, while the female has good-sized breasts and fit-looking gluteus maximus. These characteristics are believed to have evolved because they gave both sexes visual hints fore and aft. We can presume that another Australopithecus would perceive their healthy bodies as flying the sexual flags as high as they could be hoisted, even if there were no telltale “swellings.”