Read She Comes First for Free Online

idea that the clitoris was an immature source of sexual pleasure, a mere launching pad for the more “mature” vaginal orgasm, which, of course, could only be produced via genital intercourse. What’s particularly insidious is that at the time of his postulating Freud had a rather clear understanding of the anatomical role of the clitoris and chose instead to promote his personal ideas about female sexuality over current scientific knowledge. In short, he abused the bully pulpit.
    Freud demoted the clitoris and promoted the vagina, characterizing clitoral orgasms as “infantile.” According to Freud, adult women needed to get past their need for clitoral orgasms and develop a desire for penetration; after all, isn’t that what penises do? Penetrate? Female masturbation was criticized as creating clitoraldependency; oral sex was verboten. In Freud’s view, there were no two ways about it: if a woman couldn’t be satisfied by penetrative sex, something must be wrong with her. As Dr. Thomas Lowry commented in his essay “The Cultural Psychology of the Clitoris,” “The idea sprang into Freud’s head in 1910 without a visible shred of experimental evidence and it has probably caused more unnecessary worry than any other single psychological notion.”
     
    W ith the change to femininity the clitoris should wholly, or in part, hand over its sensitivity and at the same time its importance to the vagina.
     
    (Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis )
     
    Since it was well known at the time that sensitive nerve endings contributing to sexual response were on the surface of a woman’s genital area, Freud’s views were not based on physiology, or an understanding of anatomy, but rather on a conception of human sexuality that reinforced the penetrative, reproductive model. Hence, a woman’s sexuality became subsumed by a male’s. From there, it was all downhill.
    “Freud’s summary dismissal of the clitoris as an important focus of sexual sensation for women had an atomic effect on how physicians and psychologists perceived women’s sexuality. It was as if, for most of the twentieth century, women’s extensive genital anatomy, and even the explosive little glans, was vaporized. Memory of the clitoris gradually faded until it became an anatomical nonentity.” (Chalker)
    Alas, if only Freud, who himself said “anatomy is destiny,” had had the “clitoral sense” to see that this powerful organ would eventually rise from the ashes of his much-ballyhooed cigar. In fairness to Freud, it should be acknowledged that as he neared the end of his life he acknowledged his incomplete understanding of female sexuality and said, “If you want to know more about femininity, youmust interrogate your own experience, or turn to the poets, or else wait until science can give you more profound and more coherent information.”
    Today, our understanding and appreciation of the importance of the clitoris, and the stimulation of it, owes much to the dogged efforts of those impassioned individuals who bucked the conventional wisdom and did battle throughout the sexual revolution of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s: prominent figures such as Dr. Alfred Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, Shere Hite, Betty Dodson, and less prominent, but equally important ones like Dr. Mary Jane Sherfey, who pioneered the idea that the clitoris is a powerful organ system.
    But knowledge is only powerful when disseminated and put into practice. Men need to take the time to learn what most women know intuitively about their bodies—how to listen to and feel them—and sex needs to be redefined as an activity that accommodates a wide variety of sensual and erotic activities; including, but by no means limited to, genital intercourse.
    In both philosophy and practice, any definition of sex must, first and foremost, include a powerful element of respect. According to journalist Paula Kamen, author of the survey of sexual attitudes Her Way, “Women