The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer Read Free Book Online Page A

obsolete swive , and the ambiguous ball . Propa- gandists like Theodore Faithfull (and me) are trying to alter the emphasis of the current imagery. To a man who had difficulty getting an erection Faithfull wrote:
    If you ignore any idea of erection and concentrate your attention on your girlfriend, ignore the clitoris and use your fingers to caress her internally and if you follow such activity by a close association of your sex organs you may soon find that she can draw your sex organ
    into her vagina without any need on your part for erection. 5
    This sounds like therapeutic lying, nevertheless serious attempts have been made to increase women’s participation in copulation.
    A. H. Kegel, teaching women how to overcome the bladder weakness that often afflicts women, showed them how to exercise the pubo-
    coccygeal muscles and found inadvertently that this increased their sexual enjoyment. 6 What their mates thought of it is not on record.
    The incontinence resulted from the same suppression of activity that inhibited sexual pleasure; we might find that if we restored women’s competence in managing their own musculature many of their pelvic disturbances would cease, and their sexual enjoyment might corres- pondingly grow. Of course we cannot do this until we find out how the pelvis ought to operate: as long as women cannot operate it, we cannot observe its action, and so the circle perpetuates itself. If the right chain reaction could happen, women might find that the clitoris was more directly involved in intercourse, and could be brought to climax

    by a less pompous and deliberate way than digital massage. In any case, women will have to accept part of the responsibility for their own and their partners’ enjoyment, and this involves a measure of control and conscious cooperation. Part of the battle wil be won if they can change their attitude towards sex, and embrace and stimu- late the penis instead of taking it. Enlightened women have long sung the praises of the female superior position, because they are not weighed down by the heavier male body, and can respond more spontaneously. It is after all a question of communication, and communication is not advanced by the he talk, me listen formula.
    The banishment of the fantasy of the vaginal orgasm is ultimately a service, but the substitution of the clitoral spasm for genuine gratification may turn out to be a disaster for sexuality. Masters and Johnson’s conclusions have produced some unlooked for side-effects, like the veritable clitoromania which infects Mette Eiljersen’s book, I accuse ! While speaking of women’s orgasms as resulting from the ‘right touches on the button’ she condemns sexologists who

    recommend…the stimulation of the clitoris as part of the prelude to intercourse, to that which most men consider to be the ‘real thing’. What is in fact the ‘real thing’ for them is completely devoid of sensation for the woman.
    This is the heart of the matter! Concealed for hundreds of years by humble, shy and subservient women. 7
    Not all the women in history have been humble and subservient to such an extent. It is nonsense to say that a woman feels nothing when a man is moving his penis in her vagina: the orgasm is qualit- atively different when the vagina can undulate around the penis instead of vacancy. The differentiation between the simple inevitable pleasure of men and the tricky responses of women is not altogether valid. If ejaculation meant release for all men, given the constant manufacture of sperm and the resultant pressure to have intercourse men could

    copulate without transport or disappointment with anyone. The process described by the experts, in which the man dutifully does the rounds of the erogenous zones, spends an equal amount of time on each nipple, turns his attention to the clitoris (usually too directly), leads through the stages of digital or lingual stimulation and then politely lets himself into the vagina,