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

perhaps waiting until the retrac- tion of the clitoris tells him that he is welcome, is laborious and in- humanly computerized. The implication that there is a statistically ideal fuck which will always result in satisfaction if the right proced- ures are followed is depressing and misleading. There is no substitute for excitement: not all the massage in the world will ensure satisfac- tion, for it is a matter of psycho-sexual release. Real gratification is not enshrined in a tiny cluster of nerves but in the sexual involvement of the whole person. Women’s continued high enjoyment of sex, which continues after orgasm, observed by men with wonder, is not based on the clitoris, which does not respond particularly well to continued stimulus, but in a general sensual response. If we localize female response in the clitoris we impose upon women the same limitation of sex which has stunted the male’s response. The male sexual ideal of virility without languor or amorousness is profoundly desolating: when the release is expressed in mechanical terms it is sought mechanically. Sex becomes masturbation in the vagina.
    Many women who greeted the conclusions of Masters and Johnson with cries of ‘I told you so!’ and ‘I am normal!’ will feel that this criticism is a betrayal. They have discovered sexual pleasure after being denied it but the fact that they have only ever experienced gratification from clitoral stimulation is evidence for my case, because it is the index of the desexualization of the whole body, the substitu- tion of genitality for sexuality. The ideal marriage as measured by the electronic equipment in the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation laboratories is enfeebled—dull sex for dull people. The sexual personality is basically anti-authoritarian. If the

    system wishes to enforce complete suggestibility in its subjects, it will have to tame sex. Masters and Johnson supplied the blueprint for standard, low-agitation, cool-out monogamy. If women are to avoid this last reduction of their humanity, they must hold out not just for orgasm but for ecstasy.

    The organization of sexuality reflects the basic features of the per- formance principle and its organization of society. Freud emphasizes the aspect of centralization. It is especially operative in the ‘unifica- tion’ of the various objects of the partial instincts into one libidinous object of the opposite sex, and in the establishment of genital suprem- acy. In both cases, the unifying process is repressive—that is to say, the partial instincts do not develop freely into a ‘higher’ stage of gratification which preserved their objectives, but are cut off and reduced to subservient functions. This process achieves the socially necessary desexualization of the body, leaving most of the rest free
    for use as the instrument of labour. The temporal reduction of the libido is thus supplemented by its spatial reduction. 8
    If women find that the clitoris has become the only site of their pleasure instead of acting as a kind of sexual overdrive in a more general response, they will find themselves dominated by the per- formance ethic, which would not itself be a regression, if the perform- ance principle in our society included enterprise and creativity. But enterprise and creativity are connected with libido which does not survive the civilizing process. Women must struggle to keep altern- ative possibilities open, at the same time as they struggle to attain the kind of strength that can avail itself of them.
    The permissive society has done much to neutralize sexual drives by containing them. Sex for many has become a sorry business, a mechanical release involving neither discovery nor triumph, stressing human isolation more dishearteningly than ever before. The orgies feared by the Puritans have not materialized on every street corner, although more girls permit more (joyless)

    liberties than they might have done before. Homosexuality in many