Sexology of the Vaginal Orgasm (14 page)

1. Ethnological Evidence of Female Ejaculation
   

   There is much more ethnological evidence of female ejacu- lation. The American anthropologist Phil Kilbride, for
   

   instance, reports that the Toro (Batoro) south of Lake Albert in Uganda practice a custom known as
   kachapati
   , which roughly translates as “splashing the wall,” which is a sort of marriage suitability test. In this tribe, a woman is not considered eligible for marriage until she has learned to eja- culate. The older women in the village perform the ritual of initiation.
   

   On the Trobriand Islands in the South Seas, female orgasm is also known as “ipipisi momona,” which basically means “the seminal fluid flows out” (Malinowski, 1948; p. 285 f.). This confounded the legendary Bronislaw Malinowski when he wrote his book “Sexual Life of the Savages”. His col- league Edgar Gregersen was there 35 years later and made the error committed by many ethnologists of completely misinterpreting foreign behavior by looking at it through the eyes of Western scholarliness: “She experienced one orgasm after the other and urinated a bit each time.” Due to the fact that “momona” was used to designate the emissions of both sexes, he actually concluded that the men there were so perverse that they urinated in the vagina during the sexual act (Gregersen, 1982)!
   

   Malinowski invented field research as a method of ethnolo- gy, which means that the researchers live for an extended period among the people being studied. The portrayal regar- ding sexual life of the population of the Trobriand Islands had an unforeseeable political and social impact on the Western world. Malinowski’s descriptions were recorded by Wilhelm Reich, who demonstrated, on the basis of the depicted con- ditions on the Island, the causal combination of private prop- erty and the transition from a matriarchy to a patriarchy and the ensuing regimentation of the hitherto free sexual behavior (Reich, 1931). It appeared that free sexuality was
   

   associated with peacefulness, solidarity, kindness and the equality of women. Reich and his successors held that sexu- al liberation could guide the entire society in an antifascist, peaceful, women-friendly direction. After Malinowski’s death, his wife published the journals he wrote while living on the Trobriand Islands. These entries clearly show that he was proceeding under a misapprehension.
   

   Perhaps the world’s most famous ethnologist, Margaret Mead (1901–1978), suffered an even more embarrassing fate. Her studies were often cited as evidence of the theory of cultural determinism, according to which it is primari- ly the cultural environment and not the inborn “nature” which determines human behavior and therefore sexuality. As a young postgraduate student, she lived on the South Sea Island of Samoa and reported back to the prudish Western world about the paradisiac promiscuity and part- ner swapping without the slightest hint of jealousy. “As the dawn begins to fall among the soft brown roofs and the slen- der palm trees stand out against a colourless, gleaming sea, lovers slip home from trysts beneath the palm trees or in the shadow of beached canoes, that the light may find each sleeper in his appointed place.” (Mead, 1928). She describes an idyllic lifestyle devoid of stress and strife, where there is neither competition nor the onerous responsibility of deci- sion-making. By virtue of this “free and easy friendly warmth,” the Samoan girl enjoys a harmonious, sexually liberal transition into the world of adulthood and thus the luxury of “gradually developing her emotional life free of constraints.” This is in stark contrast to the United States or Europe, where adolescence, as Mead often stresses, is fil- led with conflict and stress.
   

   For fifty years the world was enraptured and her work be-
   

   camea bestseller. Then the Australian anthropologist Derek Freeman came and ripped this romantic tale to shreds (Free- man, 1999). He traveled to Samoa many times after Mead and spoke of fist fights between clans that went on for days, frequent rape, cruel punishment and an exaggerated virgi- nity cult. He observed how brothers beat up their sisters’ overly amorous admirers and wives strangled their hus- bands’ mistresses. Freeman found out that Mead had con- ducted her “research” solely in the form of conversations with young people whose language she hardly understood. The youths that Mead had conversed with confessed that they had simply been having fun making a fool of the odd Mead woman. Moreover, Mead had not even lived among the natives, staying instead with American friends there. And so the world of science made room for yet another scandal.
   

2. Do Women Actually Want a Prostate?
   

We all design our own reality. It is real, but has nothing to do with truth. And ideology is by far the most dogmatic creator, blinded by the tinted glasses it wears. In 1971, Germaine Greer wrote in her book,
The Female Eunuch
, which is subtitled “A Call for Women’s Liberation”: “All kinds of misconceptions are still circulating about women, even though they were refuted years ago:
Many men refuse to let go of the notion of female ejaculation, which, despite its long and considerable history, is completely fanciful!
” (Greer, 1971; p. 48).

In actual fact, the opposite is true today. For many men, the notion that they are not the only ones who “can” ejaculate is absurd. This often causes great insecurity. To a large extent

because ejaculation has been regarded as a male privilege for the last 100 years, many men are not aware of the phe- nomenon of “the pleasure flow” or simply relegate it to the realm of pathology.

Where ejaculation is concerned, in many cases it is pre- cisely those women who represent a point of view which is explicitly specific to women who in actual fact adhere to an image of female sexuality which is defined by men. One example of this is journalist Katharina Stein, who addressed my laboratory analysis in an article appearing in the German issue of Cosmopolitan in February 1984: “Do we actually want a prostate?” she asks in disgust. “… But don’t you want to help us poor oppressed women devoid of penis

– and until now devoid of prostate and ejaculation? Hea- ven knows how horrible it must be to wear ones genitals hidden inside the body with just an itsy-bitsy clitoris pit- ted against the glory of an erect penis with its opulent eja- culation … Aside from the pressure to perform which this theory ruthlessly tries to impose on us, at no extra charge we are given the feeling that a women can only be consi- dered adequate if she also has a prostate and ejaculates like a man. If we allow ourselves to be measured by such a yard- stick, then we haven’t understood the miracle of our own bodies and of the sexuality and sexual desire specific to women and revert into an archaic time when we were talk- ed into believing that we were underdeveloped, atrophied little men … as long as we allow ourselves to be patron- ized and appraised by men who don’t have a clue as to what really satisfies a woman sexually, as long as we don’t love and trust ourselves enough to stand by our own sexual de- sire, there will continue to be wounded and casualties on the sex front” (German Cosmopolitan, Issue No. 2, 1984; p 25).

Well there certainly will be victims as long as hundreds of thousands of ejaculating women will fail to abandon false notion that they are urinating during sex. Because as a result of this alleged handicap, their body image suffers greatly, they try to control themselves too much, thereby blocking the way to orgasm. It goes without saying that men also have to be taught that their female partners’ ejaculation is just as normal as the lack thereof.

Asking whether or not a man wants to have a prostate is unintentionally amusing. The true circumstances will scarcely bend to his wishes. History, even that of recent de- cades, teaches us that in the field of sex we continually run the risk of falling back into the arrogant superstition that we hold the stone of wisdom in our hands. Every time that a personal point of view is given precedence over scrupu- lously objective knowledge, we should think of the frog sit- ting in the fountain who considers the rim of the fountain to be the end of the world. Ultimately, the phenomenon of female ejaculation confuses and frightens in many respects. Fear blinds people to verifiable facts. The fear of absurd clas- sification in categories of sexual adequacy would be taken particularly seriously. Consider in this context the discus- sion surrounding the G spot. For months the goings-on in countless bedrooms were reminiscent of the procedure for awarding inspection stickers. Men turned examining their sex partners for this “equalizer button” into a popular sport. For the inspectee, however, the result was often frustration and humiliation.

The dramatic exclamation “Do we actually want a prostate?” conceals one of the most important inhibitors to orgasm, weighing more heavily than the reflex of withholding out of fear of assumed urine leakage. These words are filled with

anger that is so blind that it even ignores objective laboratory findings; a deep-seated protest not only against sex research, which until recently was a male-dominated field, but also against the oppression of female sexuality by men in general. In principle, you cannot
let go
if you cannot
relinquish
. Overtly and covertly aggressive ten- dencies and feelings toward your sex partner can undermine the very same mutual trust which is essential in order to let yourself go. And “trust” is the operative word here. Only those who trust themselves to be able to achieve orgasm can give themselves over to sexual ecstasy. Those who are afraid of losing their emancipatory autonomy during sex do not possess the trust necessary to abandon themselves to it. The bedroom is the wrong setting for power games, which should be relegated to more suitable arenas. Ecstasy only bestows the climax of pleasure on those who do not contest her reign …

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