by Anne Summers
Suppression of women’s sexuality
Women are denied control over their bodies in other ways besides the violent invasion of rape. Women are kept ignorant about, and unable to fully express, their sexuality, and the technological means that do exist, and with which women could more adequately control their biology, are not made freely available to them.
The sex education most children receive is usually sparse and is phrased in such remote clinical language that it is puzzlingly irreconcilable with the sexual urges experienced by the recipient of the information. Moreover ‘sex education’ is an erroneous label: few children ever receive more than reproductive education and this is not, in the case of women, the same thing. Children learn how babies are made, which means they learn about copulation and, specifically, the vagina and the penis which are posited as the only sexual organs. Seldom is either sex told about the female clitoris, which is the principle organ for women’s sexual arousal and satisfaction. This omission invariably leaves girls confused and wondering, for few can reach adolescence without becoming aware of the pleasurable sensations that an accidental brushing against the clitoris produces, and once these sensations have been triggered, most women will engage in some form of clitoral self-stimulation even if reticence, shame or fear prevents them from prolonging their masturbation to orgasm.
At the same time, however, most women are abysmally ignorant about what their sexual organs actually look like. Few women have thought, or been encouraged, to take a mirror and examine themselves and so they have little idea how closely the line drawings in sex education books resemble the organs they are meant to represent. Even women who masturbate regularly often have little occasion to explore their entire genital area; most women insert tampons by ‘feel’, often without fully understanding exactly where the tampon rests. Modern methods of contraception absolve women from having to touch their genitals: users of the douche or the diaphragm were obliged to be familiar with their internal genitalia, but most women today either use the contraceptive pill or rely on a doctor to insert an intra-uterine device. With adult women being confused or ignorant about their genitalia, it is not surprising that young girls are imparted inadequate information and are left to try and resolve for themselves the puzzling contradiction between the ‘facts’ of sex education and their own cursory experience.
Women who, seeking to try and resolve this puzzle, consult a sex manual might, depending on the author and date of publication of the book, gain some rudimentary information about the clitoris. Books published in the last decade are likely to inform them of what they already know: that the clitoris is highly sensitive and that it must be stimulated if the woman is to achieve orgasm. Prior to that, sex manuals treated the clitoris as if it were a vestigial organ, or else relegated any discussion of it to the Freudian notion that clitoral sexuality is ‘infantile’, and that to achieve sexual maturity a woman must transfer her sexuality to the vagina.
It now seems highly probable that Freud’s formulation was based on an inadequate understanding of female biology and especially of the mechanisms of the female’s sexual arousal13, yet this notion has been overlaid by countless psychiatrists who have diagnosed women unable to experience vaginal orgasms as frigid or neurotic. Generations of women have grown up with the information that there are two sorts of orgasms and that one is infinitely superior to the other. In the absence of any scientific or other contradiction to this proposition, thousands of women have thought themselves frigid, have felt guilty about their persisting clitoral fixation or have been denied sexual satisfaction because of their partner’s adherence to the idea of the superiority of the vaginal orgasm. It was not until the early 1960s with the publication of Masters and Johnson’s clinical studies on the physiology of sexual response that it was irrefutably demonstrated that the clitoral–vaginal dichotomy is a false one, and that anatomically all orgasms are centred in the clitoris no matter whether they are produced by manual stimulation or through vaginal intercourse.14 This finding was followed by a spate of writing by women in which they endorsed the discovery and denounced the ill-informed view it replaced.15
Neither scientific discovery nor psychiatric orthodoxy is always available to wide numbers of people, however, and the majority of women has almost always had only their own experience to inform them. Human sexuality has never been a high priority among researchers in Australia and so our knowledge of people’s sexual experience is not very great. But what we do know suggests that a very large percentage of Australian women have only rarely, or never, experienced orgasm and this in turn implies that the clitoris has been neglected in perhaps a majority of heterosexual relations in this country, at least until recently.
The only survey of Australian women’s sexuality so far published found that of its sample, 47 per cent of women said they experienced orgasm all or most of the time during sexual intercourse, 41 per cent said they did sometimes or occasionally, and 12 per cent had never had an orgasm.16 The survey found also that the older a woman was, the more likely she was to have never experienced orgasm.17 It is doubtful if the findings of this survey can be generalised to the whole female population, since the sample was selected rather unsystematically, and it included a higher proportion of highly educated women than is found in the general population – and most sex surveys have found orgasmic capacity to increase with level of education. Thus it seems likely that the percentage of women who never, or only occasionally, experience orgasm is considerably higher than is suggested by the figures cited above. This seems to be borne out by the statement of Sydney gynaecologist Derek Llewellyn-Jones that: ‘A few women reach orgasm at every episode of sexual intercourse, and some of these have multiple orgasms during the episodes; but most women only have orgasms occasionally, a few rarely or never’.18 If this statement is not based on clinical information then it amounts to a gross example of male chauvinist medical endorsement and perpetuation of female frustration.
The only other evidence available is impressionistic – based on conversations with women and with doctors – but the overall picture suggests that women’s sexual satisfaction has been sacrificed to the imperatives of reproductive sexuality, that is, sexual intercourse involving only the vagina and the penis. This has occurred partly through ignorance in both sexes about how to engage in forms of sexual activity that sufficiently stimulate the woman – and such ignorance is a by-product of the initial rejection of the clitoris as a sexually important organ – and partly through male reluctance or refusal to try and ensure that his sexual partner is satisfied. This last reason is undoubtedly a major one, for it is decidedly in the interests of the colonisers to keep women ignorant about their sexuality and thus prevent that sexuality from erupting as a demanding and consuming force.
The object of colonisation is to ensure that women reproduce, and that they do so within an approved kinship structure. The target of the colonising process is therefore women’s bodies, their wombs in particular, and the womb can only be reached, and the woman impregnated, through the vagina. As already pointed out, it is not biologically necessary for women to be even sexually aroused, let alone satisfied, for them to conceive. Male arousal, on the other hand, is an essential prerequisite. Male ejaculation does not always coincide with, or produce, a totally satisfying orgasm, but an ejaculation will generally give the male some pleasure and satisfaction.19 The failure of the male to experience full orgasm may be related to male denial of female sexuality:
Ann [sic] Koedt in her pamphlet The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm argues that men created this myth to deny the sexuality of women and therefore their personality, and to perpetuate male dominance, symbolized by the centrality of the penis in the sexual act. The myth has a rebound. The negation of female sexuality and the female as a person, psychologically rebounds on the male and deprives him of full male potency – of orgasmic potency. The male ideology of virility is anti-female but also denies the relationship the dynamic necessary for male orgasm and the male thereby lo
ses orgasmic potential. This, I think, explains the emphasis on quantitative measurement in male ideology. Part of the rebound is the creation, unconsciously and also consciously, of fear of women. There is the fear of her rebellion against her submissive role, fear of her use of her frustration against him by destructive subtlety and deeply, the fear that she could expose him as sexually negative. This becomes an impediment to full male sexuality.20
If this is the case, then it should provide a powerful motive for men to begin to recognise women as human beings with a unique and responsive arousal mechanism. But the above writer has suggested a further reason why men are reluctant to do so: fear of women and, although he does not say so, especially fear of their sexuality and the effects that allowing it to flower could have.
While male sexual capacity is physiologically limited inasmuch as a man is only capable of a finite number of arousals and orgasms in any sexual encounter, women’s sexual capacity, once aroused, is unlimited. Mary Jane Sherfey who has conducted research on female sexuality, particularly on their orgasmic capacity, writes:
I urge the re-examination of the vague and controversial concepts of nymphomania and promiscuity without frigidity. Until now, it has not been realized that regular multiple orgasms, with either clitoral or vaginal stimulation, to the point of physical exhaustion could be the biological norm for women’s sexual performance … It could well be that the ‘oversexed’ woman is actually exhibiting a normal sexuality.21
She hypothesises about:
the existence of the universally and physically normal condition of women’s inability ever to reach complete sexual satisfaction in the presence of the most intense, repetitive orgasmic experiences, no matter how produced. Theoretically, a woman could go on having orgasms indefinitely if physical exhaustion did not intervene.22
No wonder men are reluctant to assist in the arousal of female sexuality! Their inability to either match the woman’s sexual appetite, or to provide her with total satisfaction, would make rather drastic inroads in men’s self-conceptions of their superiority.
It may also be the case that the sexually aroused woman would refuse to acquiesce in her subjugation to the passive and domestic roles assigned to her in all patriarchal societies. It is likely that the repression of female sexuality is a precondition for the existence of ‘the family’ and for women accepting responsibility for the care of children. Says Sherfey:
Many factors have been advanced to explain the rise of the patriarchal, usually polygynous [sic], system and its concomitant ruthless subjugation of female sexuality (which necessarily subjugated her entire emotional and intellectual life). However, if the conclusions reached here are true, it is conceivable that the forceful suppression of women’s inordinate sexual demands was a pre-requisite to the dawn of every modern civilization and almost every living culture. Primitive woman’s sexual drive was too strong, too susceptible to the fluctuating extremes of an impelling, aggressive eroticism to withstand the disciplined requirements of a settled family life – where many living children were necessary to a family’s well-being and where paternity had become as important as maternity in maintaining family and property cohesion. For about half the time, women’s erotic needs would be insatiably pursued; paternity could never be certain; and with lactation eroticism, constant infant care would be out of the question.23
The colonisation of women is usually disguised or justified by the arguments that maternity and domesticity are natural to the female. Yet there is evidence to show that modern women have not biologically adapted to child-bearing, and that the ‘natural’ method of childbirth does considerable physical damage to women which seriously impedes their capacity for sexual enjoyment. Sherfey reports on
the fact that the female sexual and procreative apparatus was evolved for mothers giving birth to small-headed babies. Man is much too recent an evolutionary innovation for the female pelvic adaptations necessary to deliver big-headed babies without trauma to the birth canal. (Of the 75,000,000 years the primates have been working themselves up to us, men with heads big enough to produce consistent maternal damage have been around for only the past 500,000 years at most – and probably much less – perhaps .6 to .3 per cent of the total.) Obstetrical damage to the sexual structures is far more frequent than most psychiatrists [who diagnose frigidity in women] realise, I believe. Without the best of modern obstetrical care, it occurs to a greater or lesser extent in close to 100 per cent of all women bearing their first full-term babies; and even with that care, it occurs to some degree in a very large number of them.24
The two most common forms of perineal tears either reduce or totally remove women’s orgasmic capacity.25 It is difficult to label as ‘natural’ a process that causes such damage to women’s sexual and reproductive organs. In this context, ‘postpartum’ depression assumes yet another dimension: the very understandable misery of a woman who has fulfilled what society ordains is her natural role, only to find that it entails her body being lacerated and perhaps permanently mutilated. Yet what measures are taken to try and prevent or reduce the appalling toll taken by maternity? Why is there no advocacy by the medical profession that women have their babies delivered by Caesarean section so as to preserve their sexual organs intact? How many so-called frigid women realise that their inability to enjoy orgasm may in fact be due to their dutiful complicity to the motherhood imperative? Were more women in possession of this knowledge it is likely that they would refuse to give birth in the ‘natural’ fashion and would demand that their babies be delivered by Caesarean. Why is it that doctors do not point out to pregnant women the danger they face in giving birth?
The only plausible answer to this question in the face of the evidence available is that the medical profession is no more interested in women obtaining knowledge about, and power over, their sexual capacity than any other group of men. (It will be shown later in this chapter that despite the increasing number of women doctors, medicine can still be regarded as a male-dominated profession.) Rather, the medical profession can be seen as a principle agent in the colonisation of women, as a body that not only is uncaring about women’s ability to express and enjoy their sexuality but does not wish women to control their bodies in any way.
The Pill: The new oppressor
The Pill is posed as a panacea to all women’s worries about unwanted pregnancies: the daily swallowing of a tiny tablet will ensure that fertility can be controlled with none of the risk of failure that accompanies every other method of contraception. The Pill is the most commonly employed form of contraception in this country and it has such popularity here that in the late 1960s Australian women were reported to have the highest per capita consumption of the Pill in the world.26 A survey conducted in late 1971 of a sample of 1 per cent of the population of Melbourne to yield information about married women’s contraceptive practices found that in 1970–71, the Pill was used by 38 per cent of the sample, and was at least twice as popular as any other method of contraception.27 If the number of single women also taking the Pill were added to this, the percentage would be much higher. In late 1973, more than 750 000 Australian women were using the Pill.28 But these figures showing an apparent high acceptance of the Pill by Australian women do not reveal the dark side of Pill-taking: the plethora of problems experienced by women who have to use this method of contraception.
One of the questions asked of women in the Melbourne survey was designed to elicit women’s opinion of the Pill: the statement, ‘The Pill has brought more benefit to women than any other modern invention’ was affirmed by 52 per cent of respondents.29 This was a clear majority – and to a very strongly worded statement. But when we ponder on the benefits that the Pill has supposedly brought to women, is this a very high response? When we consider that, for the first time in history, women are at last freed from the monthly horror of waiting to see if they were pregnant yet again, the affirmation seems less than enthusiastic. Perhaps it is the case that many women who feel their lives to be in
delibly imprinted with their domestic duties could only respond unambiguously to items such as washing machines or vacuum cleaners, which have reduced the workload of those duties. But most women who are burdened with such work have also to face the worry of unwanted pregnancy – and each pregnancy brought to term means an incalculable increase in the daily workload of any housewife. So perhaps the failure of a higher number of women to give the Pill the Invention of the Century award is due to other factors. To dissatisfaction with this supposed liberator of women, perhaps?
The Pill indisputably does what it claims to do: it prevents pregnancy. It does this so reliably that if a woman does get pregnant while taking the Pill, the fault invariably lies with the user (she must have missed several days of taking it) rather than with the product. But in addition to fulfilling its professed function, the Pill does a lot of other things, and very unpleasant things, to women’s bodies. One of these ‘side-effects’ is so serious that it can cause death. Professor HM Carey, who researches the Pill at the University of New South Wales, writes:
Thrombosis is the most serious, although a relatively rare, complication of oral contraceptives. The risk of thrombosis is related mainly to the dose and type of oestrogen used in the formulation, but the type of progestogen employed probably also influences the magnitude of the risk.30
He cites the following table:
Deaths per 100 000 women per year31
Age in years