Sigmund Freud once described female sexuality as the ‘dark continent’ of psychology.{50} Given the amount of time he seemed to spend wandering around it, clearly lost and terrified of the natives, I am inclined to agree with him. One of Freud’s less than gold-star brilliant theories was that clitoral orgasms are sexually immature. In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud argued that the female child’s sexuality is entirely clitoral and masculine until she reaches puberty, when she must transfer her ‘erotogenic susceptibility to stimulation… from the clitoris to the vaginal orifice’ for her to become mature and feminine.{51} Freud might not have been circumcising the clitoris, but his ideas had the effect of metaphorically cutting the clitoris out of ‘healthy’ sexuality nonetheless. And although Freud wasn’t the only doctor distinguishing between ‘vaginal’ and ‘clitoral’ orgasms, he was certainly the most influential.[14]
One of Freud’s most famous patients was Princess Marie Bonaparte (1882–1962), great-grandniece to Emperor Napoleon I. Princess Marie married Prince George of Greece and Denmark in 1907 and she had several lovers on the go as well, but she was never able to achieve an orgasm through vaginal penetration. Heavily influenced by Freud’s theories and being a scientifically minded kind of woman, Marie began to research her own sexual ‘frigidity’ and arrived at the conclusion she couldn’t achieve the almighty vaginal orgasm because her clitoris was too far away from her vaginal opening. She confirmed this by conducting a survey of 243 women and published her results in the 1924 edition of the Bruxelles-Médical, under the name A. E. Narjani. Marie identified women with a short distance between the clitoris and the vaginal opening, who orgasm easily, as ‘paraclitoridiennes’, and those with a difference of more than two and a half centimetres, who struggle to orgasm, like Marie, as ‘téleclitoridiennes’ (with the ‘mesoclitoriennes’ being somewhere between the two).{52} Marie became Freud’s patient in 1925, which further reinforced her belief that she would only be satisfied if she came through penile penetration (listen carefully and you can hear the lesbians laughing). The upshot of Princess Marie’s obsession with mature and immature orgasms was that in 1927 she employed surgeon Josef Halban to operate and reposition her clitoris closer to the vaginal opening. When this operation did not achieve the desired result, Halban operated again in 1930 and yet again in 1931. Poor Princess Marie never got her vaginal orgasm and wound up with a clit that must have been left dangling like a loose button. Poor, poor Marie.
And not just poor Marie. As Freud’s theories about the difference between vaginal and clitoral orgasms took hold across the medical world, women were routinely told that they were sexual failures if they could only orgasm through clitoral stimulation. In 1936, Eduard Hitschmann and Edmund Bergler published their highly influential Frigidity in Women, where they claimed that the ‘sole criterion of frigidity is the absence of the vaginal orgasm’.{53} In 1950, Dr William S. Kroger claimed that women for ‘whom sexual response occurs only after clitoral stimulation’ were ‘frigid’. He went on to explain that the vaginal orgasm was the ‘optimum type of sexual response’.{54} In America, this led to numerous gynaecologists operating to ‘free’ the clitoris from its hood, which would supposedly allow a frigid wife to climax with her husband. Even Alfred Kinsey recommended this ‘very simple’ procedure; ‘with a tool the physician can strip the clitoris, allowing the foreskin to roll back and may make a distinct difference in the response of the female’.{55} Bizarrely, there are still plastic surgeons today who offer clitoral hood reduction surgery to improve orgasm, despite partial or total hoodectomy being classed as female genital mutilation by the World Health Organisation.{56}
But what is particularly galling about all this vaginal versus clitoral orgasm nonsense is that as we have learned more about the structure of the clitoris, it has become glaringly obvious that ALL orgasms are clitoral. The structure of the clitoris is as complex as it is extensive, comprising clitoral glans, prepuce, body (or corpora), crura, bulbs, suspensory ligaments and the root – the only visible parts being the glans and the hood.{57} The structure descends downwards from the pubic bone into the adiposity of the mons pubis. It was only in 2009 that Pierre Foldes and Odile Buisson used 3-D sonography to get a complete picture of a stimulated clitoris, and we finally started to understand what the hell is going on down there. They found that when the clitoris was engorged, it swelled to touch the anterior walls of the vagina.{58} Then, in 2010, Buisson and Foldes joined forces with Emmanuele Jannini and Sylvain Mimoun and scanned the vagina and clitoris of a volunteer woman during sex in the missionary position. The results showed that the penis stretched the clitoral root and during the (ahem) thrusting, the now stretched root crashed repeatedly into the anterior vagina wall – offering clear evidence that the much lauded G-spot has actually been the C-spot all along.{59} A kind of clitoral Scooby-Doo ending to a debate that has raged throughout medicine for centuries.[15]
The question remaining is surely ‘why?’ Why has the ‘pussy pearl’ (2007) been so horribly victimised throughout history, and indeed continues to be abused throughout much of the world, when all it wants to do is bring pleasure? The World Health Organisation cites numerous reasons why FGM is carried out today, including to ‘reduce a woman’s libido and therefore… to help her resist extramarital sexual acts’.{60} Looking back throughout history, this certainly rings true here. Although the clit was recognised as the ‘seat of pleasure’ very early on, it was not regarded as a very stable seat. Rather, it was thought the clitoris could provoke an excessive libido in women, which had all manner of health problems attached – both somatic and psychosomatic. But attacking the clit is about more than just curbing female desire, it’s about protecting the primacy of the penis. The clitoris brings pleasure without penetration, and it doesn’t need a man operating the controls to do so. The fears that an overused clitoris would morph into a penis, which could be used to penetrate other women, speaks to an anxiety that the penis is redundant or that the man is being replaced. Freud’s insistence that the only orgasm it was worth a woman having required a penis also speaks to a need to pay deference to the mighty rod. Likewise, the ridiculing of men who performed cunnilingus in the Ancient World, the clitoral association with lesbianism and ‘clitorism’ caused by masturbation all tacitly accuse the clitoris of ignoring the penis.
14
An excellent source of nineteenth- and twentieth-century medical practices of clitorectomy is Sarah B. Rodriguez,
15
Not everyone was happy with this theory, most notably Vincenzo Puppo, who was adamant that there was no such thing as an internal clitoris (Vincenzo Puppo, ‘Anatomy of the Clitoris: Revision and Clarifications About the Anatomical Terms for the Clitoris Proposed (Without Scientific Bases) by Helen O’Connell, Emmanuele Jannini, and Odile Buisson’,