Word: sherfey
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
Much as we need radical efforts at disproving and dispelling the erroneous assumptions of psychoanalytic theory, Sherfey has presented us with what is least helpful in the quest for sexual enlightenmnet--a counter-mythology. Her statements are for the most part purely speculative and overtly feminist, and they contribute only to prolonging, rather than resolving, a tedious battle of the sexes. In the effort to proceed from sexual politics and polemics to knowledge, Sherfey's tack is a dead...
...mystery of sex, to the "enigma of orgasm," as he puts it, to "the orgasm as the mirror of one's existence." As a result, he will not give credence to laboratory evidence presented by Kate Millett (collected from Drs. Masters and Johnson and Dr. Mary Jane Sherfey) that an artificial phallus could induce, in an hour's time, twenty to fifty orgasms in some guinea-pig of a woman lying on an operating table. For "what value," he wants to know, "would be attached to the mirror of the sexual moment when orgasms could be measured by periodicity...
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