Word: orgasm
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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SEYMOUR FISHER'S The Female Orgasm is much more fertile ground for enlightened thinking about female sexuality. It is the first significant post-Freudian study of the psychology of sexual response--of the extent to which sexuality may both reflect and influence the individual woman's personality. Fisher and his staff carried on an intensive examination--through interviews, questionnaires, and an immense variety of psychological and physiological tests--of the character of sexual response and the personality traits of 287 married women. At no point were any of the women, in the Masters and Johnson style, actually observed in sexual...
...psychological health stood in some direct relation to her sexual capacities or preferences--is widely maintained today. Women seeking psychiatric help in college health services will more often than not find the initial questions of their counselors probing their sex lives. And women still long after the elusive vaginal orgasm, having been told that it is more "fulfilling" or "feminine," and been warned that a preference for clitoral stimulation was a sign of immaturity or maladjustment...
...Masters and Johnson findings regarding woman's potential for numerous multiple orgasm, and the lack of any physiological distinction between "vaginal" and "clitoral" orgasm seemed to suggest the need for major reappraisals of these theories. The first such effort was Mary Jane Sherfey's The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality-- originally appearing in 1966 as an article in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Sherfey is a New York psychoanalyst whose initial research into premenstrual tension led her to more radical speculations about female sexuality. Her book is largely a summary of the Masters and Johnson findings...
SHERFEY'S INTERPRETATIONS of the Masters and Johnson report are no less positively inclined toward the Woman's Lib point of view. She suggests that woman, given optimal conditions for realizing her sexual potential, is virtually insatiable: one orgasm stimulates the need for another, and so on to sheer physical exhaustion. The only reason that woman's sexuality is now in such an apparent state of inhibition is that society has curbed her appetites, in the interest of stable monogamous relationships and successful child rearing. Sherfey plans a second volume in her study--a kind of "Civilization and its Discontents...
...GIVEN the limitations of any such ground-breaking inquiry, Fisher's results are remarkably persuasive, and often unexpected. He performs his greatest service in disproving many popular and seemingly reasonable explanations for the puzzling fact that 30 per cent of all adult women never or only occasionally experience orgasm. He found no correlation whatsoever between a woman's orgasmic capacity and early traumatic sexual experiences, puritanical or repressive upbringing, traits of her sex partner, variety of techniques practiced, or years of sexual experience. He also concluded that a woman's likelihood to climax could not be measured by any externally...