The Woman Who Moved Her Clitoris,
and Other Ruminations on Intercourse Orgasms
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nce upon a time, there was a princess named Marie.
She had long, thick curls and beautiful brown eyes, and her clitoris was three centimeters away from her vagina. This last bit was very depressing for the princess. She could never manage an orgasm during intercourse, and she felt certain that the far-off placement of her clitoris was the reason. Princess Marie—whose last name was Bonaparte and whose great-grand-uncle was Napoleon—was a passionate woman with a commanding libido. Yet sex left her unsatisfied. Her troubles had partly to do with her husband, Prince George of Greece, a latent homosexual,[17] who, she wrote in her diary, took her on their wedding night “in a short, brutal gesture, as if forcing [himself] … and apologized, ‘I hate it as much as you do. But we must do it if we want children.”’ But you could not hang the princess’s discontent entirely upon the gigantic handlebar mustaches of Prince George. For intercourse with the prime minister of France also left her cold, as did intercourse with her husband’s aide-de-camp and the three other lovers that she took while married to George.
Marie, who lived mainly in France, went so far as to seek scientific proof for her anatomical theory of frigidity. Bonaparte was not a physician, but she played one from time to time, and well enough to have published a paper in a 1924 issue of the medical and surgical journal Bruxelles- Medical. She used a pseudonym, A. E. Narjani, but readers surely sensed this wasn’t the handiwork of the customary Bruxelles-Medical contributor. Flere she is in the journal’s pages, describing women like herself:
They remain, despite all the caresses, even with all the tender gestures that should fulfill their heart, eternally unsatisfied by their bodies. Because, for these women, the moment which should bring them the greatest escape to joy, brings each time instead the torture of the ancient Tantalis. The ecstatic smile of the truly satisfied woman never shines on the face of these women tantalized by love. .. . And as happiness is for them unattainable, they are fated to pursue it, from lover to lover, in a hopeless hunt, until the knell of old age tolls.
Princess Bonaparte, working with doctors she knew, put the ruler to 243 women and interviewed them about their sex life. The subjects landed in one of three categories, based on the distance between their vagina and their clitoris. The women with the lengthiest span, a distance longer than two and a half centimeters (an inch), she labeled teleclitoridiennes. They made up 21 percent of her sample. Women in this category, she claimed, were incapable of volupte—or “normal voluptuous reaction,” meaning orgasm—during intercourse. Teleclitoridienne means simply “female of the distant clitoris,” but it had a lovely, aristocratic ring to it—calling to mind a career woman in heels and sweater set, cabling reports from her home in Biarritz. At the very least, it had a nicer ring to it than “frigid.”
The luckier women were the paraclitoridiennes (para — meaning “alongside”). These women, 69 percent of Bonaparte’s sample, had clitorises less than an inch distant and, she said, were almost guaranteed a voluptuous reaction from the in-and-out thrust of a penis. (This does not jive with more modern data, which puts the figure for women who have orgasm from intercourse alone at about 20 to 30 percent.) The remaining 10 percent of Bonaparte’s women, the mesoclitoridiennes, whose distance lay right at the one — inch cutoff point, inhabited the “threshold of frigidity.” They fell upon either side, depending on their mood, their husband’s compensatory skills, his feelings about Greek sprinters, and what have you.
Luckiest of all, Bonaparte wrote, are mares and cows. “Nature has favored domestic animals over womankind,” she lamented in her paper, pointing out that the clitorises of these animals were “located right on the border of the genital orifice.” Given that the average horse or cow liaison is over in a matter of seconds, these creatures sorely need a clitoral leg up. It’s just as well Bonaparte never investigated the private bits of the domestic sow, whose clitoris sits inside its vagina.
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f the distance is less than the width of your thumb, you are likely to come.” This catchy anatomical ditty was penned not by Marie Bonaparte, but by Kim Wallen, an Emory University professor of behavioral neuroendocrinology. Wallen spends most of his time studying sex hormones at the Emory-based Yerkes National Primate Research Center on the outskirts of Atlanta, but he has of late been researching the physiology of intercourse. Wallen, who has a starring role in chapter 14, was the person who first told me about the princess and her clitoral travails. He was intrigued by Bonaparte’s findings, but he did not, at first, put much stock in them, mainly because the science of statistics in 1924 was relatively primitive. Then he ran her numbers himself. The vaginal-clitoral distances, he said, turned out to perfectly predict which women would have orgasms in intercourse and which wouldn’t. The cutoff point, as Bonaparte had noted, lay at around an inch— the width of a typical thumb. I asked him if he was going to trademark his “rule of thumb.”
‘Yes,” he deadpanned. “And I’m going to start selling a little custom-made ruler.”
Bonaparte includes only 43 of the 243 subjects’ measurements in her paper, so Wallen’s data were limited to those. Nonetheless, the data are so consistent that 43 turns out to be more than enough to say that there is, as he puts it, a very powerful, statistically reliable relationship. “Certainly strong enough to say there’s something here that’s worth looking at.” Wallen plans to do a larger study himself, as soon as he has time.
A more recent study of genital variations among fifty women confirmed the range of distances Bonaparte found: from a half inch to almost two inches, with an average at around an inch. This study, by U. K. gynecologist Jillian Lloyd and colleagues, had nothing to do with orgasm. Lloyd sought to document the truly remarkable degree
of variation in the size and shapes of women’s genital features.[18] The hope was to reassure those who worry that their clitoris, say, is abnormally large or their pubic hair too rangy. Pornography, Lloyd points out, exposes us to idealized, highly selective images, making women needlessly self-conscious (and labia-reduction surgeons rich).
Wallen, like Masters and Johnson, thinks it’s possible that a majority of the so-called vaginal orgasms being had during intercourse are in reality clitoral orgasms. But unlike Masters and Johnson, he doesn’t suggest that most women are having them easily. He believes, like Bonaparte, that the women having them—the paraclitoridiennes of the world— are an anatomically distinct group whose sexual response is different from that of the majority of women. And that maybe these women are “where the whole notion of the vaginal orgasm originally came from.”
I offered to be a statistic in Wallen’s new study. He sent me detailed instructions on how to do the measuring. It’s not as simple as it sounds, because Bonaparte’s measurements—and thus Wallen’s too—were from the clitoris to the urethra (where urine exits the body), rather than from clitoris to vagina. (The urethra is dependably close to the clitoris and makes a more precise measuring point.) A clitoris is easy to find, but urethras are sometimes hidden inside the opening to the vagina, and often hard to see. I emailed Wallen twice with questions.
“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.
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оу 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,”[19] “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.[20] 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”
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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 Hal — ban. 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,[21] 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. t
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 teleclitoridienne’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 teleclitoridienne 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,[22] 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 teleclitoris: “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-avis 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—teleclitoridienne or other—to limit the tools of sexual gratification to her husband’s penis. Van de Velde was an advocate of cunni — lingus—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 benefit — ting 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.
It seems Kegel didn’t read Kinsey’s book all that closely. Kinsey may have dethroned the vagina, but he didn’t kick it out of the castle. Item 5 on his list of “six or more sources of the satisfactions obtainable from deep vaginal penetrations” is stimulation of the pelvic-floor nerves. Though it is true that Kinsey gives more weight to item 3—“stimulation by the male genitalia or body pressing against. . . the clitoris” and the rest of the vulva.
The backlash to Kinsey and the general tide of conservatism turned the passive, vaginal orgasm into the holy grail of female sexuality, “the hallmark,” wrote Carolyn Herbst Lewis in the Journal of Women’s History, “of a well — adjusted and normal femininity.” The attitude was evident in the new crop of marriage manuals, now circumcised of their clitoral references, and even in the medical journals of the day. Lewis writes that some doctors used the newly sanctioned premarital medical examination—a venereal — disease-prevention measure enacted in a majority of U. S. states during the fifties and sixties—to prepare women for a life of completely fulfilling intercourse. A woman was “assured that her responses could be as full and satisfactory as her husband’s” yet given no advice about clitoral foreplay. The chief obstacle to the vaginal orgasm, in the physicians’ minds, seemed to be penetration anxiety. Journal articles counseled doctors to administer, in cases of thick and ornery hymens, some pre-wedding-night snipping or stretching during the premarital exam. The latter could be done with their fingers or, as one 1954JAMA author counseled, a “well-lubricated Pyrex centrifuge tube.” Again with the Pyrex tubes.
Marriage manuals and premarital exams had long disappeared by the time the front wall of the vagina and its “G-spot” gained widespread status as an erogenous zone. Otherwise, you might have found a curiously unconservative tidbit of advice for women bent on having intercourse orgasms: Try it doggie style. Zwi Hoch, of the Center for Sexual Therapy at the Rambam[23] Medical Center in Haifa, Israel, published a paper in which he trained 64 percent of a group of 56 noncoitally orgasmic women to have orgasms by stimulating the front wall of their vagina. While most were using their finger, some had managed it with “anteriorly directed intercourse.” Ernst Grafenbergt—the gynecologist who, in 1950, first wrote of “an erotic zone” on the front wall of the vagina “along the course of the urethra”—also advocated sex “a la vache” (like the cow) as a better way to hit the spot. “The stimulating effect of this kind of intercourse,” he wrote, “must not be explained away… by the melodious movements of the testicles like a knocker on the clitoris.” The premarital doctor’s visit was not an entirely bad idea. There are some couples for whom a quick inspection and some frank chat was clearly in order. For example, Robert Latou Dickinson writes that he encountered, over his many decades of clinical practice, eighteen women whose virginity had remained intact despite having (what they mistook to be) intercourse for years. “The husbands and wives, though otherwise intelligent, thought the cleft of the vulva was as deep as his organ was expected to go.” Then there was the woman written up in a 1965 issue of JAMA whose husband was mistaking her urethra for her vagina. By the time a doctor discovered what was going on—she was, understandably, having some continence issues—her urethra had been stretched so far that it “readily admitted two fingers.” The author of the paper found thirteen such cases reported in various medical journals, all attributable to rigid, unyielding hymens.
You could not blame a tough hymen in the case of the gay man who—he told Kinsey collaborator Wardell Pomeroy—had intentionally stretched his urethra to accommodate his lover’s penis.
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ven Marie Bonaparte succumbed to vaginal propaganda. In Bonaparte’s case, the change of viewpoint coincided with a midlife career move. In 1925, a year after publishing the Bruxelles-Medical paper, she met Sigmund Freud and decided to become a psychoanalyst. Freud was no friend of the clitoris. Freudian theory holds that grown women who derive their sexual satisfaction from their clitoris are stuck in a childlike state. This “phallic” phase is supposed to end at puberty, when a woman embraces her proper role as a passive, feminine being. “With the change to femininity,” he wrote in New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis, “the clitoris should wholly or in part hand over its sensitivity, and at the same time its importance, to the vagina.”
Bonaparte had to do some backpedaling on her clitoral placement theory. For if, as Freud insisted, the well-behaved clitoris relinquishes its sensitivity to the vagina at puberty, then in theory a woman shouldn’t need a clitoris for sexual gratification, let alone care where it’s placed. In her 1953 book Female Sexuality, she discredits her Bruxelles-Medical article, saying she had since encountered both frigid para- clitoridiennes and teleclitoridiennes with no problems achieving volupte. (Robert Latou Dickinson, in his Atlas of Human Sex Anatomy, also mentions having encountered exceptions to Bonaparte’s “sweeping statements.”)
Obviously torn, Bonaparte tried to gain a better understanding of the matter by interviewing women whose clitorises were beyond distant—they were removed, or anyway, the protruding bits were. “Are African women more frequently, and better, ‘vaginalized’ than their European sisters?” she wondered in Female Sexuality. Freud got her interested in this. He had told her that cultures that remove clitorises do so in order to further feminize the woman.[24] (The more common belief is that it is done to quash sexual pleasure and desire and keep women from committing adultery.)
In 1941, during the German occupation of France, Bonaparte and her family were evacuated to Egypt, and she had her chance to talk to a couple of women who had had clitoridectomies. The women were not, in fact, fully “vaginalized.” Both women—though they did report having orgasms from intercourse—still masturbated clitorally, on their scars. Probably because (more on this to follow) the majority of the organ is hidden below the deck.
Purely as an aside, Bonaparte needn’t have gone to Africa to find women to talk to. American women were given clitoridectomies from the 1860s up until the turn of the century. The practice was started in London, in 1858, by a well-respected obstetrician-gynecologist named Isaac Baker Brown. Brown put out a book stating that masturbation—in women, that is—caused hysteria, epilepsy, and “idiocy” Excising the clitoris, he stated, was the only sure cure. Often he wouldn’t tell patients exactly what he was planning to do to them. When Brown’s colleagues got wind of what he was up to, they voted to expel him from the Obstetrical Society of London, and his reputation swiftly disintegrated. Happily, most of his patients went right on masturbating the way they always had.
In the meantime, alas, the practice had spread to the States, where gynecologists had of late gone scalpel-happy, working out one new surgical procedure after another on indigent women—without telling them they were guinea pigs. (A long-standing tradition, says historian Ben Bark — er-Benfield. The much-revered obstetrician-gynecologist Marion Sims, Barker-Benfield writes, purchased slaves with vaginal fistulas[25] as surgical practice material for a fistula procedure he wanted to try. One poor woman was given thirty unwarranted gynecological operations.)
In the end, Marie Bonaparte concluded that some women were simply born with a clitoral orientation and some with a vaginal, and there wasn’t a thing to be done about it. Neither surgery nor psychoanalysis, it turned out, could fix what ailed Marie.
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lfred Kinsey had the most sensible take on the intercourse orgasm conundrum. Sure, it may make a difference how your clitoris is situated. And, yes, some positions are more promising than others. But what matters more, Kinsey concluded, is one’s level of engagement in the proceedings. Kinsey believed the erotic responsiveness of a woman on top was not a mere matter of “anatomical relations.” He made the point that “the female who will assume such a position is already less inhibited in her sexual activity.” And it is the person on top who’s in control—making the movements and controlling their speed and depth and direction. “In the younger generations,” Kinsey wrote, “there is an increasing proportion of the females who have become aware of the fact that active participation in coitus may contribute not only to the satisfaction which the husbands receive, but to their own satisfaction in coital activity.” Maybe Marie Bonaparte just never got into it.
Kim Wallen, who recently began interviewing women about intercourse and orgasms for a new study, has been finding what Kinsey said to ring true. “Women who routinely have orgasm in intercourse without explicit clitoral stimulation all say that it makes little difference what the guy does, as long as he doesn’t come too soon,” Wallen said in an email. Meaning, it’s the women’s own movement that matters most. “In fact it is sometimes preferred that he just lie there and anchor the woman’s pelvis to his. The movie image of wild abandoned thrusting seems to have exactly the opposite of the intended effect in these women.” Well, yes and no, I replied. Sometimes they want that. Later, you know, toward the end. There were days, talking to Wallen, when I sensed he was nearing the end of his orgasm-inintercourse (or O-in-I, as he’d shorthanded it) rope. “The only conclusion I feel sure of at this point,” he mused, “is that women are too complicated.”
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