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christina


History of the female orgasm, and so-called female ejaculation, in Western culture.
By Christina Neofotistou

Strange as it may sound today, it remains a fact that the female orgasm and the –still controversial- phenomenon of female ejaculation, have long been kept deliberately obscure. In today’s western culture, the female orgasm is recognised and considered a natural and integral part of human sexual activity. It isn’t widely known, however, that the acknowledgement of this facet of female sexuality has been battled against for centuries, having evoked the wrath of the Church, the contempt of the medical profession and the resentment of the patriarchally-structured society.

The history of the female orgasm begins with the first writings, based on observations by Hippocrates and commited to paper by his students. Hippocrates believed that “the foetus results from mixing the male and female sperm”. He held, therefore, that in order to ensure reproduction, the woman has to produce enough “sperm” and thus it is essential that she is pleasured during intercourse.

The next allusion to the female orgasm is rather disappointing and comes from Aristotle. Aristotle’s opinion of the female reproductive system as an inferior version of its male counterpart is well-known. This seemed to be rather easy to accept at the time, since women (as well as juvenile boys and girls) were considered socially inferior. Moreover, a prominent feature in Aristotle’s views on reproduction is the conviction that, contrary to the male sperm, the “female sperm” is infertile, and therefore women have no active part in conception, and don’t deserve pleasure. Taking into consideration that Aristotle affected all mankind’s beliefs in anatomy and medicine (as well as philosophy) in a major way up until the 18th century, the impact of his theory has been especially harmful against the acceptance of female anatomy, physiology and psychology, with regards to the sexual act. In fewer words, he left the world with the wrong idea about what the female body worked like, and what physical and emotional needs women have during the sexual act.
Claudius Galen ,the famous 2nd century AD Greek doctor, supported Hippocrates’ assumption, and proceeded to describe what he called the “female prostate” which he also studied with surgical cuts, way ahead of his time. This organ, he maintained, secretes a kind of fluid which is released during orgasm. This description, to this day, remains our first written report on female ejaculation.

Galen’s and Hippocrates’ wild ideas, however, were rejected during the Middle Ages, and were as we know replaced by the more down-to-earth, and more consistent with the patriarchy, beliefs of Aristotle. The Leadership of the Clergy imposed upon their flock an extensive system of confession and repentance, in order to surgically disassociate sexual drive from sexual pleasure, in both men and women. However on women in particular, abstinence was enforced, in conjunction with “chastity” and sexual isolation, since female sexuality was inexplicably associated with the devil. People still believed that female orgasm exists, but leaders of the Church and of the Medical community (which had gradually earned respect and invariably served the purpose of the Clergy) were placing into dispute the morality of women who actually experienced it.

The act of masturbation, as is known, suffered the most vehement attack, during this period. Modern-day sociological analysis translates this fear and persecution of masturbation (and also homosexuality) as an attempt on behalf of the Church to avert low birthrate, which would deprive the Christian army of valuable human cannon fodder, since imperialism was strongly pursued by both Christians and Muslims at the time. It is to this bright idea that we owe tales of sin and divine retaliation surrounding such acts. Masturbation (still today synonyms of “self-abuse” and “self-pollution” in dictionaries) and homosexuality were meticulously turned into sin, which could result in physical disability (blindness, toothlessness and the like), mental retardation and even excommunication. Naturally, female masturbation was even more punishable, to such an extent that it probably was wiped out for some time.
Reports of female ejaculation during this period are frequent in a multitude of published stories. Yet, it is difficult to. identify which cases were written by an actual beholder of the phenomenon, as opposed to the widely-spread male sexual fantasy.

During the Renaissance, the belief that woman’s pleasure is necessary to achieve pregnancy recurs. Despite the fact, though, the common admonition at the time was to avoid getting women “addicted” to frequent sexual activity.

In the 17th century, Regnier De Graaf- a Dutch doctor- left us the first modern observation and description of both the female genitalia and the question of vaginal discharges. He also described an organ which “completely surrounds the urethra and could be named the ‘female prostate’ or ‘glandular body’ (corpus glandulosum)”.

In the 19th century, well-known for its Puritanism, it was discovered that ovulation isn’t associated with the woman’s pleasure, that it is instead a normal, completely automated process of the female body. Female pleasure was once again rejected within wedlock, while the husband had to do everything he could to avoid causing sexual desire to his spouse, even during intercourse! Syphilis played a dramatic role in favour of sexual repression, and all the while the American movement of the “hygienists” was spreading the motto “the infected woman rots the man’s sex and body”.
De Graaf’s description of the “prostate” in females, referring to the glands that surround the female urethra, summarizes the common views about the anatomy of this bodypart for about 200 years. In 1880 Dr Alexander Skene, professor of gynecology at the Long Island College Hospital of Brooklyn, wrote a research paper in which he described and drew charts of various glands and ducts surrounding the female urethra. In contemporary medicine, they are known as Skene glands, a term used to this day.
World War II intervenes. After the end of the hostilities, the feminist movement earned the female population more confidence. Women got a chance to explore their sexuality, and female orgasm was once again established as normal sexual behaviour, this time by women themselves.
Also important is the leading figure of Sigmund Freud, who in his book “General Introduction in Psychoanalysis” in 1916, insisted that “the transition towards the state of female maturity strongly depends on the early and complete transfer of the sensitivity of the clitoris to the vaginal cavity”. The importance of this infamous proposition is that it marked clitoral orgasms as “childish”. Alfred Charles Kinsey overturned Freud’s theory in 1953, by proving that 50% of the 2700 Americans included in his study reached orgasm with clitoral stimulation, and that nothing attested to these women being less mature that the ones who had vaginal orgasm. Later still, in the 70ies, sexologists Martins and Johnson ascertained the suspicion that there is only one kind of orgasm, and the feeling spans the clitoris up until the muscles surrounding the vagina. The argument of immature orgasms is considered resolved today, however a large portion of the sexologists keep resenting the Freudian hypothesis because they believe it still confuses women about their orgasm.
In 1953 Dr Samuel Berkow, urologist, concluded Skene’s glands are made of erectile tissue, much like the penis and the clitoris. He was satisfied with the explanation that what it does is control the compliance of the urethra. The question of erection during sexual activity wasn’t examined at the time.
Which brings us to 1950- German obstetrician Ernst Grafenberg, who wrote down his observations on the forceful ejection of some type of transparent and clear fluid from the urethra of women during climax. His article appeared in the International Journal of Sexology. Grafenberg initially thought that the intensity of the orgasm had momentarily paralysed the urethral sphincter (the valve which controls urination). The known bibliography already contained cases of involuntary urination during intercourse. However, analysis of the samples that Grafenberg studied clearly showed no urinal character of the specimens. His explanation was that these weren’t cases of urination, but instead secretions of glands inside the urethra, which had something to do with the erogenous area along the urethra, on the front vaginal wall. Moreover, he observed that these secretions had no lubricant function, otherwise they would be excreted when intercourse started and not during climax.
At the same time, the medical and scientific society were violently against studying indications of female ejaculation, considering them instead as the consequence of incontinence. They thought of the “ejaculation” as an unwanted dysfunction, which was the cause of much distress, feeling of guilt and shame in female “patients/ There were also many recorded cases of criticism from their spouse and even divorce against women who experienced the phenomenon, and in some cases, “corrective surgery” was performed on the urethra.
It should be noted here that doctors at the time (and sadly even today), while they might have a fairly good grasp of urology and obstetrics, they nonetheless had little to no training or hands-on practice on human sexuality. If a woman came to a doctor complaining of alleged urine discharges during intercourse, he would have difficulty even considering to manually examine the sensitivity of the frontal vaginal wall to the touch. Even if the doctor in question was learned enough and clever enough to suspect the discharge originated from Skene’s glands, morality prohibited him from performing a simple Ob/Gyn examination to replicate sexual stimulation in order to study the phenomenon.
This prudishness is also evident from the fact that the first vibrators for medical use weren’t phallic in shape. It is well-known that since as old as the middle ages, priests used to “cure” women’s sexual desire –which they would translate into “possession from malevolent spirits”-by secretly copulating with them. This practice went on even when “possession” was dubbed “hysteria”, or “neurasthenia” (hysteria from greek “hysteraia” = uterus). Doctors in spite of refusing to accept orgasm as a normal human need inherent in woman, began to manually stimulate the clitoris of their hysteric “patient”. This treatment concluded, of course, with an orgasm or, as it used to be called, “hysterical tension release”. As expected, the “cure” wasn’t permanent, and consequently the female sexual desire was considered a “chronic disease”. The first vibrators, therefore, were non-sexual organs, since the phallic-shaped speculum of the gynecologists had provoked the wrath of moralists.
In the early 1980s, the book “The G Spot and Other Recent Discoveries about Human Sexuality” introduced the term “G spot”, referring to the aforementioned 1950 research by Grafenberg (whose initial is what the G spot is named after, in his honour). The term G-spot (more aptly-named G-crest) is used to describe a protrusion of the frontal vaginal wall, about 4-5 centimeters away from the vaginal opening, which according to Grafenberg and the authors of the book is especially sensitive to stimulation. The recognition of the G spot is of interest to this very essay, because its stimulation is –apparently- the cause of female ejaculation.
Another important announcement was made in 1980, when Perry and Whipple presented the medical community with a recorded abstract from the SSSS (Society for the Scientific Study of Sex), showing clearly a woman ejaculating. Martin Weisberg MD, a gynecologist at the Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, following the projection and after private study, accepted female ejaculation. His conclusions agreed with Whipple and Perry’s, that the composition of the fluid isn’t urinal in character, and that it is instead close to the composition of prostate fluid.
The end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st are causing rapid changes in the way that medicine and the Western society in general perceive the human body, its functions and needs. Contraception, the recent discovery of the “morning after pill”, the choice of abortion and also the widespread decrease in religious fanaticism around the world, have all caused us to reconsider the female body. From the reproductive machine it was once considered to be, to the human body full of sexual needs and rights that we believe it today to be. The phenomenon of female ejaculation isn’t fully acceptable, especially to gynecologists, although it causes more of a stir among sexologists. The female orgasm is totally undisputable today. It is comforting to see, however, that the history of this double question on female sexuality is one of progress and not regression.

Sources:
1. Masters W and Johnson V. – Human Sexual Response” Boston, Little Brown 1966 page 135
2. Whipple Beverly, Komisaruk Barry: “The G spot, orgasm and female ejaculation: Are they related?” – The First International Conference on Orgasm Presentation, February 1991, page 230
3. Perry John D., Whipple Beverly “Pelvic muscle strength of female ejaculation” – Journal of Sex
4. Ladas Alice K., Whipple Beverly, Perry John D “The G Spot and Other Recent Discoveries About Human Sexuality” – New York, Dell Publishing 1982, page152
5. Graaf Regnier (1672) “New treatise concerning female ejaculation and the female prostate”
6. Gr’a’fenberg Ernst “The role of urethra in female orgasm” – International Journal Of Sexology
7. Zaviacic M., Zaviacicova A., Holoman I. K. and Molcan J “Female urethral expulsions, evoked by local digital stimulation of the G-spot: Differences in the responsive patterns” – The Journal of Sex, Research,24 1988 pages 311-318
8. Fouceault M, “History of Sexuality” – volume 1