Bonk (7 page)

“It is interesting,” he wrote back, “that you could reach this stage of life and never really have any call to know how the parts line up.” It is, I guess, yes. But you can’t even see the real estate in question without a hand mirror. I would wager that most men can better visualize a woman’s vulval particulars than can most women.

If you try this yourself, I recommend doing so when no one is home. Otherwise, you will run the risk of someone walking in on you and having to witness a scene that includes a mirror, the husband’s Stanley Powerlock tape measure, and the half-undressed self, squatting. No one should have to see that. It’s bad enough you just had to read it. Also, put the tape measure away when you’re done. My husband saw it on the bedside table and said, “What were you measuring?”

Bonaparte also discovered a correlation between a woman’s height and how close together her vulval features are. Shorter women tend to have shorter spans. Wallen says the relationship is less reliable among taller women, owing to certain vagaries of puberty, but a general trend seems to exist. Then again, women were a lot shorter in Bonaparte’s day; Wallen is less comfortable with this part of the equation.

By the time you are reading this, Wallen’s analysis of Bonaparte’s data will likely have been published. The journal editor already has plans to issue a press release. If you publish this, I said to Wallen last week, think what it will do to tall women. Are men going to hear about this and think tall women are a difficult lay? Wallen didn’t think men would give it all that much thought. He also believes—or, at least, hopes—that the long-spanned nonorgasmic-in-intercourse woman might be relieved to learn of an anatomical (rather than psychological) explanation for her situation.

Based on a small, anecdotal survey that he’d probably prefer I not mention, Wallen has also been finding that women with small breasts seem more likely to have shorter distances. Put it all together and it spells bad news for the stereotypical American male. The stereotypical ideal female—Barbie tall with Barbie big breasts—is the one least likely to respond to a manly hammering.

r
oy Levin has a mildly different take on the intercourse orgasm debate. Levin is the founder of a sexual physiology lab at the University of Sheffield and the author of all the most eye-catching papers (e.g., “The Isolated Everted Vagina,” “Wet and Dry Sex,”
*
“Vocalized Sounds and Human Sex”). Sadly (for me and for you), Levin has retired and so I could not watch him at work. I had to make do with watching him at lunch, which was less, but not that much less, of a spectacle. Levin’s father was a butcher, and the family affinity for meat lives on. Levin lustily dispatched a calf’s liver that, in my memory anyway, was as big as his shoe.

Levin ran a small investigation that focused on the erotic sensitivity of the female urethra. More specifically, his interest was in the toenail-sized patch of tissue that surrounds the outlet of the urethra: the periurethral glans. In men, this glans, which lies at the tip of the penis, is exquisitely erogenous. Levin has observed that when women have intercourse, the female glans, as he calls it, is repeatedly pulled partway inside the vagina—as much as half of it typically disappears into the crevasse with each thrust. Perhaps women who have orgasms during intercourse, he reasoned, are women who are more erotically sensitive in this spot. (Though you’d think that, here again, proximity might play a role; i.e., the closer the glans is to the vagina, the more gets pulled inside.)

I asked Levin how he had documented the disappearing glans. I pictured him in his lab with a camera and headlamp, hunched over a copulating couple. In fact, he was hunched over a TV. He took his measurements off freeze-frame images from porn video close-ups. “These guys know how to shoot this stuff,” Levin said, spooning English mustard onto his plate. “They’ve got the good lighting, they get the angles right, they’ve got people who know how to direct it, you know—‘Just lift your leg up a little bit, darling.’”

The next step would be to compare the sensitivity of this bit of vulval acreage in two groups of women: those who have orgasms from intercourse, and those who don’t. The study would be simple enough. You’d need little more than a set of von Frey hairs.
*
These are boar hairs—or, nowadays, nylon threads—of differing stiffness pressed to the skin to quantify tactile sensitivity. Why hasn’t anyone done this? Because almost no one gets funding for purely physiological research anymore. The grant money these days goes to studies of drugs for female sexual dysfunction (men’s troubles having been more or less vanquished by Viagra and its kin). “The money’s impossible, unless you’ve got an obvious application,” said Levin. “They want to know, How’s it going to help patients?”

In this case, of course, it wouldn’t help them much. If the sensitivity of the female glans turns out to make the difference in who has orgasms from intercourse, then, as Levin says, “anatomy may well be destiny.”

m
arie Bonaparte was not willing to accept her destiny. Drastic measures were undertaken.
The princess had her clitoris moved.
The relocation was carried out by a Viennese surgeon of Bonaparte’s acquaintance, Josef Halban. It was apparently her idea. A later paper by her shows photographs of the procedure—blessedly obscured by the poor quality of the photocopy I have—and she has labeled it the Halban-Narjani operation. The “simple” procedure, as Bonaparte called it in her paper, entailed cutting the organ’s suspensory ligaments,
*
freeing it to be stitched in place slightly lower. She must have believed it was simple, because she allowed Halban—after an initial test run on a cadaver—to perfect his technique on her. Given that much of the clitoris is hidden below the body’s surface, moving it was perhaps not as simple a matter as Halban had thought.
†
Though Bonaparte writes that the operation was a success in two later patients, it did nothing for her. Some years later, Halban offered to redo the procedure. Bonaparte took him up on it, and again was disappointed.

All the sadder, given that Bonaparte, in her own paper, outlines a perfectly workable nonsurgical solution to the
téléclitoridienne
’s predicament: Try a different position. “Only a change in position during the embrace—the best being the face-to-face seated position—which forces contact between the clitoris and the male organ can give the
téléclitoridienne
the experience of simultaneous pleasure that other women enjoy.” Sadly, Prime Minister Briand was a man with little discernible lap.

Had Bonaparte paged through any one of the “marriage manuals” popular at the time, she would have found still more promising coital configurations. Sexually, the 1920s and ’30s were an oasis of openness and common sense between the twin deserts of Victorian repression and fifties-era conservatism. Jessamyn Neuhaus, in an article about marriage manuals in the
Journal of the History of Sexuality,
credits the birth of the birth-control movement for this change. Having spent the past century shackled to reproduction, sex suddenly emerged as a recreational pastime. Orgasm—particularly women’s—became a prerequisite for good health and matrimonial harmony, and dozens of authors, medical and not, chimed in with tips on how to achieve it.

The best known of these authors was Dutch gynecologist Theodoor Van de Velde.
Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique
was the first in his trilogy of advice manuals aimed at nurturing “the perfect flower of ideal marriage” and “combating the forces of mutual repulsion”—the latter including fermented clitoral smegma (“extremely disgusting”), bad breath,
*
and purulent rhinitis. The book, some of whose European editions went through more than forty printings, includes twenty-five pages on coital positions and directly addresses the téléclitoris: “When the clitoris is set very high the woman must take an attitude which accentuates pelvic inclination.” Yes, but inclined in which direction? Van de Velde went into admirable detail about the different positions and their pros and cons vis-à-vis orgasm and fertility, but his Twisteresque descriptions cry out for illustration. The Anterior-Lateral Attitude, for example, has the woman “half-lateral, half-supine, with a corresponding half-lateral, half-superposed attitude of the man, which is possible by appropriate arrangement of pillows.” Just the names alone are daunting. Faced with “Second Extension Attitude: Suspensory (Variation [b]),” all but the most motivated couple might well throw in the towel and let the damn perfect flower wilt. Alas, as relaxed as the era was, it was not ready for mainstream books with pictures of people having sex. Even with no illustrations, the Catholic Church put
Ideal Marriage
on its list of prohibited books.

The first to prevail on this front was our hero, the gynecologist-turned-sex-researcher Robert Latou Dickinson. His
Atlas of Human Sex Anatomy
includes a two-page spread of fourteen thumbnail Coital Diagrams with terse, pronoun-sparse titles: “Pillow Lifts Hips,” “He Diagonally Across.” Chaste as these drawings are—the bed beneath the couple is drawn in more detail than are their faceless, featureless bodies—they were edited out of the first edition. Dickinson tried to appease his publisher by replacing the human forms with a pair of entwining robots; however, he reports, “these evasions proved to be not a little absurd” and the publisher eventually relented.

Not content to sketch the hows of what he called vulvar orgasm—meaning an orgasm that arrives during intercourse but owes its existence to clitoral involvement—Dickinson dug into the whys. Figure 147 shows disembodied penises rubbing against little button-mushroom clitorises and stretching them to and fro. The key, explained Dickinson, was to find a position in which the man’s pubic bone pressed against the woman’s clitoris and/or moved it to and fro. The end points of the to-and-fro, which he termed “excursion,” are illustrated in such a manner that the vulva, at first glance, appears to have three clitorises, as though perhaps Josef Halban had been mucking about.

Dickinson, carlengths ahead of his time, was a champion of “Woman Above” postures, and included three in his Coital Position pages. “Woman, if above, can regulate excursion and pressure,” says the Dickinson caption, striving to be as untitillating as possible.

Unlike Marie Bonaparte, marriage manual authors of the era saw no reason for a woman—
téléclitoridienne
or other—to limit the tools of sexual gratification to her husband’s penis. Van de Velde was an advocate of cunnilingus—as long as it was a prelude to, and not a substitute for, intercourse, and as long as the “spotless cleanliness and wholesomeness of the bodies” could be counted upon. Even then, he sort of gets to it by the side door, in a passage on vaginal lubrication:

The most simple and obvious substitute for the inadequate lubricant is the natural moisture of the salivary glands. It is always available; of course it has the disadvantage of very rapid evaporation…. During a very protracted local or genital manipulation, this form of substitute must be applied to the vulva, not once, but repeatedly. And this may best, most appropriately, and most expeditiously be done without the intermediary offices of the fingers, but through what I prefer to term the
kiss of genital stimulation,
or
genital kiss:
by gentle and soothing caresses with lips and tongue…. The acuteness of the pleasure it excites and the variety of tactile sensation it provides, will ensure that the previous deficiency is made good.

In his advice for the high clitoris owner, Van de Velde references the “obvious method of combining vaginal friction by the phallus with simultaneous clitoral friction by the finger.” Neuhaus quotes the 1935 edition of
Sex Practice in Marriage
: “Should a man be unable to restrain himself and have an orgasm before his wife, he
must
keep up the clitoris stimulation until his wife has reached the climax.” It was a good time to be a woman. They got the vote, they got birth control, and now they had husbands who gave genital kisses and finger friction. The stage was set for Alfred Kinsey. The survey results presented in his 1953 book
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
gave vaginocentrists a drubbing from which you’d imagine they would not easily recover. Only a third of his subjects reported easily and consistently having orgasms from intercourse, and those that did were benefitting from clitoral stimulation by the man’s organ or body. Ninety-five percent of them said that their husbands practiced “manual stimulation” before the couple got down to the business of intercourse.

But times had changed. The fifties were not the twenties.
Sex Behavior in the Human Female
was met with a hail of outrage and criticism. American manhood would not abide the sexually sophisticated (i.e., demanding) woman, and it fought back hard. Among the more vocal vaginal crusaders was Arnold Kegel, inventor of the eponymous pelvic squeezing exercises. (Dr. Kegel originally prescribed the exercises as a remedy for incontinence, but patients began reporting a happy side effect: They were having orgasms during intercourse where none were had before.) “I believe, as many others do, that research in the physiology of the [pelvic floor] muscle[s] has produced overwhelming evidence in favor of the existence and importance of vaginal orgasm,” harrumphed Kegel in a critique of Kinsey’s book in a letter to the editor of the
Journal of the American Medical Association
(
JAMA
)
.
Kegel added that the one-third of women who reported to Kinsey that they could not climax during intercourse were simply afflicted with flabby pelvic-floor muscles. They need only take up Kegeling—up to sixty squeezes, three times a day—to enjoy, if they had any spare time left, the vaginocentric ecstasies of their better-toned sisters. “Concentration on the muscle seems to cause patients in this group to forget the clitoris,” said Kegel, in a direct inversion of Kinsey, who wrote that once his interviewers had explained the effectiveness of clitoral stimulation to women who had confessed to masturbation by “vaginal insertion,” they dropped the latter.