The Clitoral Truth

182 Pages·2018·5.22 MB·English

by  Rebecca Chalker

Copyright © 2000, 2018 by Rebecca Chalker, PhD
Illustrations © 2000 by Fish
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical,
electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Seven Stories Press
140 Watts Street
New York, NY 10013
www.sevenstories.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Chalker, Rebecca, author.
Title: The clitoral truth : about pleasure, orgasm, female ejaculation, the G-spot,
and masturbation / Rebecca Chalker, PhD ; illustrations by Fish.
Description: Second edition. | New York : Seven Stories Press, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017056314 (print) | LCCN 2017058371 (ebook) | ISBN
9781609807726 (Ebook) | ISBN 9781609807719 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Female masturbation. | Clitoris. | Women--Sexual behavior.
Classification: LCC HQ447 (ebook) | LCC HQ447 .C53 2017 (print) | DDC
306.77/2082--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017056314.
Dedicated to Betty Dodson,
Inspiration, role model, pleasure activist extraordinaire.
Mamasan to us all!
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
A WALKING TOUR THROUGH THE CLITORIS
1
There’s More to the Clitoris Than We Ever Imagined!
THE CLITORAL TRUTH
2
About the G-Spot and Female Ejaculation
THE MYSTERIES OF PLEASURE
3
AND ORGASM
MASTURBATION
4
As Natural As Breathing?
ACTIVATING YOUR RIGHT
5
TO SEXUAL PLEASURE
GLOSSARY
RESOURCES
NOTES
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
F
irst of all, eternal gratitude to my sisters and colleagues at the Federation of
Feminist Women’s Health Centers, past and present, for their dramatic
reinterpretation of how we define the “clitoris,” which began my own long and
interesting journey to this book. I also thank them for their unflagging dedication
to women’s reproductive health, and their long and mostly unacknowledged
stand on the front lines, fighting against the anti-abortion war. Sisters, salud!
I’d like to thank my publisher, Dan Simon at Seven Stories Press, for his
initial interest in a book called The Clitoral Truth, and I’d like to thank him and
operations director Jon Gilbert for keeping it in print for seventeen years. For a
small book, this is publishing gold! Much of the new material in this edition
evolved from research related to teaching women’s and gender Studies classes at
Pace University. I want to thank Karla Jay, founder of the department, who hired
me to teach “A Cultural History of Sexualities from Prehistory to the Present” in
2000, and my long time amazing friend, Chair Nancy Reagin, for letting me
develop and teach courses on what I call “Hot Button Issues in Sexuality,” “Job
Opportunities in Sexuality Education and Reproductive Justice in the Nonprofit
Sector,” and “Lesbians in Literature and Film.” Finally, I’d like to thank my
family, because they have supported me with unconditional love even though
they are somewhat mystified by what I have chosen to do.
INTRODUCTION
M
y introduction to the concept of what I now call “the clitoral truth” began
when I was hired to edit a book on women’s reproductive health, A New
View of a Woman’s Body, by the Los Angeles–based Federation of Feminist
Women’s Health Centers, an association of women-owned, women-staffed
clinics focused on reproductive health including birth control, abortion, vaginal
health, childbirth, and donor insemination. Besides running their clinics, their
core concept was “self-help,” enlightened self-care through self-knowledge. In a
quest to understand sexual response from a woman’s perspective, nine women
from the Los Angeles and Orange County, California, clinics—Carol Downer,
Lorraine Rothman, Sherry Shiffer, Francie Hornstein, Lynn Heidelberg,
Kathleen Hodge, Lynn Walker, and Suzann Gage—participated in an original
research project that resulted in a chapter in A New View entitled “The Clitoris:
A Feminist Perspective,” and Suzann’s brilliant illustrations crystallized their
findings. The group held regular consciousness-raising sessions and shared their
intimate sexual experiences. It is on this work that anatomical descriptions in
The Clitoral Truth are based. Their work was a revelation to me and my
encounter with it is the point at which I became interested in sexuality. After I
left the Health Center and moved to New York, I started to read popular and
academic sexuality literature and to attend sexology conferences in the United
States, especially the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality and the
American Public Health Association, and internationally, including the World
Congress of Sexology (now the World Association of Sexual Health) in
Washington D.C., Heidelberg, Yokohama, Hong Kong, Paris, Havana, and
Gothenburg, the First International Conference on Orgasm in New Delhi, as well
as the Beijing Women’s Conference in 1995. I’ve described my journey in “How
I Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Started Studying Sex . . . Ed” in How I Got into
Sex . . . Ed, edited by Karen Rayne, Catherine Dukes, and Bill Taverner.1
As I continued my interest in sexuality and its history, a question dogged me:
If the extent and power of the clitoris as highlighted by the Feminist Women’s
Health Centers was correct, how did this information get lost? If I could name
one book that was the most illuminating, it would be Thomas Laqueur’s Making
Sex: The Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud.2 As a scholar of the
nineteenth century, Laqueur knew that the Victorians believed that orgasm was
inappropriate, shameful, unnecessary, and perhaps even unhealthy for women.
But reading seventeenth-century midwifery texts, he noticed that midwives of
the day recommended orgasm for pleasure as well as for getting pregnant and
thought: If midwives were recommending orgasm to women in the seventeenth-
century, why weren’t they still doing it in the nineteenth century? No one knew
the answer to this extremely baffling question, so Laqueur decided to get to the
bottom of it and documented how women’s genitals—the glans or tip of the
clitoris and its multiple associated parts—had been variously defined—socially
constructed—over the past two millennia by the ancient Greeks, medieval Arab
scholars, the great Renaissance anatomists, the philosophes of the eighteenth-
century Enlightenment, and finally, by Freud and the Victorians. Making Sex
assured me that the FFWHC’s redefinition of the clitoris was anatomically
correct, and it greatly enhanced my study of sexualities, past and present.
The task of transforming the male-centered model of sexuality and
developing a more equitable ideal is a challenging endeavor. It requires, in part,
reclaiming information about women’s bodies and sexual response that has been
lost or ignored under the antique phallocentric model. It also demands a broader
understanding of what sexuality is and isn’t, that it isn’t just mood, body parts,
revealing underwear, and orgasms. It’s a part of who we are as sentient human
beings, and it varies from person to person, culture to culture. Constructing a
new model requires a thorough evaluation of the psychological, social, and
biological facets of sexuality.
While the larger part of sexuality is certainly psychological, The Clitoral
Truth focuses on the physical aspects of pleasure. The text and illustrations are
designed to give women and their partners information, tools, resources, and
ideas about how to understand and expand their sexual interests and potential.
To create a more equitable framework for the physical elements of sexuality,
men must modify their socialized model of stimulation-erection-ejaculation,
which works very well for them, but has been shown in study after study to be
far less effective for women. The key is that men must be willing to learn some
degree of ejaculatory control. Perhaps the biggest step in constructing a new
vision of sexuality is for women to develop a stronger sense of themselves as
independent sexual beings and assume a sense of sexual agency that has for so
long been solely the birthright of men.
This is not a relationship book, although many relationships may be sexually
enlivened and deepened through use of the information it provides. It is a book
about our physical bodies and the significant part they play in the larger
constructs of sexuality.
Since the majority of women relate to men sexually, and many of their
sexual problems are the result of a deficit of male knowledge about women’s
sexuality, The Clitoral Truth is primarily focused on heterosexual women’s
sexuality. However, most of the material is relevant to lesbians, bisexuals and
even transwomen and transmen, as I have made efforts to include information
that is useful and relevant to everyone, regardless of gender identity or
orientation. This may also enable women to educate their male partners.
Chapter 1, “A Walking Tour Through the Clitoris,” is designed to make the
complex description of women’s genital anatomy accessible to anyone who
wants to understand it. You will acquire an intimate knowledge of, and if you are
so inclined, an intimate relationship with, your pleasure anatomy, and learn a
new vocabulary that will help you visualize and conceptualize how these parts
work together and their potential for enhancing pleasure and orgasm.
Chapter 2, “The Clitoral Truth About the G-Spot and Female Ejaculation,”
describes the urethral sponge, an anatomical feature that has been
mischaracterized as the “G-Spot,” and details its precise structure and function.
It then explains how the idea of a little spot that could cause instantaneous
orgasms got started, and why this concept, now deeply embedded in the culture,
has caused so much confusion. It then explores the mechanics of female
ejaculation and answers the many questions that women have about what is still
considered by many a somewhat controversial phenomenon.
Chapter 3, “The Mysteries of Pleasure and Orgasm,” explores the
conundrum of why all women don’t orgasm as routinely as all men do. We take
a look at the brain/body connection and the how the multiple parts of the clitoral
network work to create pleasure and orgasm. I frequently use the phrase
“pleasure and orgasm” because it’s clear that not all “sexual” events, either
masturbation or partner sex, end in orgasm, nor do they need to in order to be
valid and rewarding experiences.
Chapter 4, “Masturbation,” begins with the fascinating, and in the perception
of many, the fantastical phenomenon of fetal masturbation. It explores the
negative cultural history that has dogged the virtually universal human practice
of masturbation, and highlights the sometimes abusive medical treatments and
the typically useless fire-and-brimstone efforts of religious fundamentalists to
stop it.
Chapter 5 encourages all women to assert their entitlement to pleasure and
suggests ways to actualize it.