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how
    was to be brought to
    to make it happen.
    orgasm. The Kama
    Sutra and the Tao and
    Tantric books do not
    have a single picture of a clitoris being touched by either partner during intercourse, and they don’t contain instructions on how to work around the asymmetries of males’ and females’ bodies.
    So despite the rhetoric about mutual pleasure, the how-to of female orgasm was left to the imagination. The sexologists of ancient Asia did no better than those of other cultures at figuring out the geography of making love. The bottom line in these books is one of men pursuing their appetite for a variety of sexual positions and having lots of high-quality orgasms—their own.
    • In Tudor and Stuart England and early Colonial America, the function of the clitoris was also N o Fe m a l e O r g a s m — B u t H e Tr i e d 4 7
    widely understood. And in the nineteenth century, some religious leaders had a remarkably enlight-ened view of the role of female pleasure. In 1848, the Bishop of Philadelphia, Francis Patrick Kenrick, recommended orgasms for women and strongly advised men to give their wives sexual pleasure.
    Great concept—but again, no details.
    Did these Jewish, Chinese, and English advocates of female pleasure hold back secrets that they didn’t pass along to the masses? Is it possible that they whispered their valuable insights to a highly satisfied elite and never wrote them down? This seems improbable, given the graphic nature of the illustrations and text in surviving manuals and the highly explicit stone carvings in parts of Asia. It’s more likely that through the ages, sexual-advice givers had simply not figured out a straightforward, practical route to mutual sexual satisfaction during intercourse.
    Another question: is it possible that women in this era knew what it would take to have equal satisfaction in bed, but were too disempowered to share their insights?
    Laqueur wonders whether “those who knew—women—
    did not write and those who wrote—men—did not know.” Perhaps. But when women did write about sex during the Renaissance, Laqueur found that they followed the male party line. It appears that among many men and women, the role of the clitoris and the glories of female pleasure were well understood, but ways to 4 8
    T h e G r e a t S e x S e c r e t reliably bring a woman to orgasm during intercourse were not.
    The bottom line: over the years, eager readers of even the most sophisticated sex manuals were getting exhortations , not explanations .
    And why were men (at least in some cultures) being exhorted so insistently to give their partners an orgasm?
    Perhaps it was out of genuine concern for female pleasure, but there may also have been another, more exis-tential motive. For more than a thousand years, it was believed that a woman would not get pregnant if she did not have an orgasm. This misconception seems to have originated with Hippocrates around 600 BC and was perpetuated (or recreated) by a succession of
    “experts” through the years, including the Greek physician Galen in the second century AD and the Arabic writer Rhazes in the tenth century. The idea stemmed from the belief that women’s sexual functions mirrored those of men. If a man’s orgasm accompanies the ejaculation of semen, then a woman’s orgasm must be similarly tied to procreation. No orgasm, no baby.
    Based on this theory, it was widely believed that prostitutes did not get pregnant because they did not have orgasms with their clients. And if a woman became pregnant after being raped, it was assumed she must have had an orgasm and was therefore guilty of licen-tiousness and adultery and needed to be put to death.
    N o Fe m a l e O r g a s m — B u t H e Tr i e d 4 9
    Taking this logic a
    step further, some early
    Through the years, there’s
    scientists asserted that
    been a persistent myth that
    for conception to take
    male penetration produces a
    place, a man and woman
    female orgasm—but