Is There a Female Orgasm? Beautiful Union, Part 4

Let's use some earthy language!

Photo by Jocelyn Morales on Unsplash

Over the last few sections we have dealt with a series of macro issues in this book that are flawed – namely, the thesis, the use of language associations, and the redefinition of English concepts. I wanted to return to this last question and explore an alternative explanation to the “redefinition” theory of what’s going on with the generosity/hospitality paradigm.

What I proposed as an alternative reading is this: the text of this book reveals a misunderstanding about how women have orgasms. This mistake can be attributed either to a plurality of voices involved in the book productions who did not know how women have orgasms, a willingness to indulge in misconceptions about female orgasms in order to make some of the signature images in this book work, or simply a critical mass of people who have adopted a public sexual script about women’s orgasms don’t want to be the one to out themselves as the “weird one” in the room, even if they aren’t. 

Okay, so how did I come to get this frankly ludicrous idea about a public theology book? This passage from ch. 3 depicts orgasm as “ideally” at the climax of sex. This is already an odd word. Two people have sex. Whose orgasm is at the climax of sex? What’s a climax? Is it not the same thing as an orgasm?

Well… it seems like both of their orgasms are at the climax, right? Orgasm is depicted as happening in a moment for both parties. The event that is explicitly named as the thing that signals that an orgasm is happening is the man ejaculating, thus able to impregnate a woman. This is established in the “trinity” image - the man (called the first person) releases semen, the woman (second person) takes semen into her, and the third person (the baby) is made from them both. This single event for all three people is described as “orgasm.”

The other possibility is that the man’s orgasm only is at the climax of sex, and the woman’s is unaccounted for. This possibility has to be entertained because of the presence of a third person in the experience (the baby) who is definitely not having an orgasm. However, the distinction between an “ideal orgasm” and a “climax” suggests that there is some conflation of multiple experiences having in the moment of “orgasm” - so it seems to be both parents. Nonetheless, there is some potential for unclarity here.

We keep conditioning this image - the man is “sharing his life” with the woman by having an orgasm, the woman is “receiving him,” and then a child will result from this.

So the moment of orgasm here for the man is figured, accurately, as the moment where he ejaculates. The moment of orgasm for the woman – if it is figured at all –  is also figured as the moment where the man ejaculates. The tricky word “ideally” is extremely confusing, because it suggests that this is not always exactly what happens. But it seems like the most plausible reading of the image is that usually, during sex, a woman has an orgasm when a man has an orgasm.

This is the part of the book that gets closest to describing women having an orgasm. It is strangely evasive, since the man’s orgasm and its obvious effects are highlighted, while the woman’s are seemingly included in it. But at the same time, while the text recounts the evidence of the man’s orgasm, the text only depicts the woman as being ecstatic right along with her baby. So women’s pleasure is at once on screen and off — both evident with the man’s, both invisible with the child’s. However, it seems that the woman’s ecstatic experience of sex is primarily included in the experience of the man having an orgasm. 

I am about 80 percent sure I am reading this passage right. The other 20 percent is that the woman’s orgasm is no more depicted than the zygote’s. But the 80-percent-likely reading - the woman having an orgasm as the man does - is not so outlandish that we need to find an alternative explanation. Beautiful Union has not appeared to posit that women have an orgasm while driving cars or licking envelopes, for example - it seems to be imagined during the course of sex (accurate), but specifically at the moment that men orgasm. This is a fairly common public sexual script that appears in entertainment – women have orgasms through penetration, without other stimuli, in a manner that is agreeable to the man’s orgasm (that is, roughly at the same time). 

It’s a publicly available script. But also, as most women can tell you, it’s not an accurate one. 

A Brief History of Ignoring Clitorises 

Here’s the reality. According to the good people at Bare Marriage, only 39 percent of women who have orgasmed reach orgasm through penetration alone. Other studies have found a number closer to 25 percent of all women. Most women require some other form of stimulation – that is, through the clitoris.

For those of us who were failed by the public school system, let’s all get caught up on what this is. Women have an organ, the clitoris, that 

• Causes orgasms

• Does nothing but cause orgasms

• That is primarily aroused not by penetration but by direct stimulation (manual, oral)

• That produces orgasms that are analogous to orgasms from penetration (among the women who can simply orgasm from penetration). One does not actually seem to be “stronger” than the other.

But as a species, we’ve had a really hard time talking about this organ.For most of human history we haven’t really understood female orgasms, even when we’ve assigned a lot of importance to them. 

Taking us back to olden times: Hippocrates and Galen defended what’s called the “dual seed” theory of conception, or pangenesis. Both men and women release necessary components of the embryo during sex (which they believed was, in both cases, semen), which are both connected to their feelings of sexual pleasure. Just as orgasm released semen for the purpose of reproduction in men, women released semen into their wombs through their orgasms. The idea here, that would continue to develop into the Middle Ages, is that female genitalia was basically an inverse of the male’s. Just as men reached orgasm and were able to conceive a child through releasing semen, women did the same. And yet, despite the long-standing belief that women needed to have an orgasm to get pregnant, it doesn’t seem that these early anatomists knew that the clitoris was there, or reliably caused them. Galen thought it was a failed penis.

So when did people start noticing the clitoris?

Well, the Malleus Maleficarum noticed them. This is the 1486 guide to hunting witches. In this text, a prominent or engorged clitoris was considered “the devil’s teat,” from familiar spirits could drink blood from a devoted witch. So in this case, the clitoris is there, it’s just extremely bad. It wasn’t until the 1550s and 1600s that anatomists started to write about the clitoris as a source of pleasure - or in the words of midwife Jane Sharp, the “female penis.” However, other anatomists simply assumed the clitoris was only useful for urination, or that it was not present in healthy women at all. In the 19th century German anatomist George Ludwig Kolbelt made note of the presence of clitorises while trying to argue that female anatomy was quite similar to men’s, though his exploration of the subject was apparently minimal. Most of the interest was centered on the fact that the clitoris, like the penis, could become more erect.

Also in the 19th century, Freud began to write about female orgasms. He viewed “clitoral sexuality” as a childish, unrealized form of sexuality that depended on a tiny female penis that would never come to be as large as a real penis. In order to mature into adults, women needed to overcome their desires for clitoral stimulation and instead receive sexual pleasure through penetration by a penis. 

And this model predominated for some time. In 1948, the editorial team of the anatomy handbook Gray’s Anatomy actually chose to eliminate references to the clitoris in their anatomy textbook. It wasn’t until Kinsey began his research into human sexuality that the ground began to finally be laid to talk about the clitoris as a source of pleasure for women. 

Finally in the 1950s and 60s, doctors began to take the clitoris seriously and study it as a critical part of female anatomy. In 1966 anatomists Masters and Johnson released a study arguing that clitoral orgasms weren’t, in fact, less powerful than orgasms from penetration. What’s more, most women actually did require clitoral stimulation to orgasm. 

By 1998 Australian scholars finally began to map and document the extent of the clitoral nerves (and particularly, the ease with which they could be damaged during surgery by doctors who had no idea they were there). We now know that the clitoris is actually only partially external - the rest of it is an extended nerve net (with three times as many nerve endings as a penis!) that connects to the “g-spot” and throughout the rest of the vulva. This owes largely to the work of urologist Helen O’Connell, who microdissected clitorises and used images from living women to determine the range and scope of clitoral tissue. This work was only completed in 2005.

So: the clitoris is actually a sizable organ, with a complex net of nerve endings, that does nothing but produce powerful orgasms, and at least ⅔ of women require stimulation of these nerves in order to have an orgasm at all. And we didn’t really even talk about it, accept it was there, or agree it was good until after the invention of the microwave oven.

What did men do with that information?

What Did They Do, Laura?!

Well, they ignored it, of course. 

Why? What did you think they would do? 

It is not uncommon, in the Year of Our Lord 2023, for people to think that the normal experience of sex for women is to have an orgasm through penetration only. The orgasm gap remains sizable. A massive German study found that women were considerably trailing men for orgasms during heterosexual sex:

 Among married Christian women, Gregoire, Lindenbach, and Sawatsky found more optimistic numbers, but the gap is still considerable.

Despite the fact that a minority of women can climax from penetration only, and more women simply go without orgasms at all during sex rather than receive manual or oral stimulation to achieve orgasm, the idea that it would be best if women just learned to come through penetration alone still predominates. Now, not just orgasm from penetration, but simultaneous orgasm through penetration, is a dominant script in popular culture. In the 1930s it was part of being a well adjusted person.

Simultaneous orgasm, Gregoire et. al. note, is still valorized in modern Christian books about sex:

Even though, as they also note, it is extremely rare, except in contexts where women are having multiple, extended orgasms (which belies the idea of orgasm being a mutual “moment”):

So let’s review. Human history has run a historical sexual script that women orgasm as part of the reproductive process: through vaginal penetration by a penis. Modern Christian literature runs a script that the best sex, the ideal for the couple, is the simultaneous, penetrative orgasm. 

This is a model of sex where men never participate in a sex act that does not also sexually pleasure them. This is also a model of sex where very few women can have orgasms. 

So to this I ask: would it be that surprising if a plurality of individuals behind Beautiful Union were not aware, or not interested in, or did not want to voice a contrary opinion, to this sexual script?

This is all inseparable from the general fact that, on the whole, men in all fields today frequently and obliviously reveal total misunderstanding about how women’s bodies work. A 2018 crime novel depicted a murdered woman carrying her driver’s license, credit card, and wallet inside a tiny purse in her vagina - something the male author clearly thought women could do. A surprisingly high number of men think women’s period’s start on the first day of the month, and the news abounds with men in politics revealing their harebrained beliefs that a gynecological exam can be given through the mouth, that abortions and c-sections are the same procedure, or (tragically and infamously), that rape cannot cause pregnancy.   

And after 1900 solid years of ignoring the clitoris, men still don’t seem to uniformly know where it is. A UK study suggested that only about 60 percent of men can find a clitoris – this in spite of its visibility and the prevalence of porn that features full shots of vulvas.

So would it really be surprising that, in a random sampling of conservative American Christians, that enough of them would not know how women orgasm that these misconceptions would make it to print?

What Am I Trying To Say?

I am not trying to say that any individual person behind Beautiful Union is personally a bad lover, or has not been able to reliably orgasm (in the case of women) or cause their partner to orgasm (in the case of men). I am not trying to take a cheap emasculating shot that the voices behind this book are bad in the sack. That would be unfair, and I don’t have any direct evidence that is true.

What I am saying is that the history and present of public discourse about female sexuality makes it very plausible that the people behind this book would not understand how women have orgasms, or be able to execute it successfully with a woman. This seems to be a fairly common occurrence. Anyone who has fallen into this trap is no outlier.

Now. To dial it up a notch: does Beautiful Union make more sense if the plurality of voices behind it think that women orgasm, through penetration, just at the moment that men do?

Yeah, it does. Remember all that chatter about generosity?

Or sacrifice?

What about the prevalence of semen imagery in multiple chapters?

Doesn’t this make more sense if the text supposes that the experience of male orgasm is also the experience of female orgasm?

Of course, the other explanation for this is that the book is indulging the usually-fantastic image of simultaneous orgasm at the moment of conception in order to create the Trinity image. Man, woman, and baby have an ecstatic moment together. That would be a plausible reading. It would also be a plausible reading that the “giving” of the semen was simply not critically considered, and a lot of unserious people didn’t think through the implications. 

If this is true, the best case scenario here is that no one noticed that women actually usually don’t orgasm at the same time as men during sex, and no one involved in bringing this book to print thought that an entire half of the population’s experience of sex was not worth getting correct, because they’re not the important half. 

But I just keep getting stuck on that little word. “Ideally.” Ideally, unless something is going wrong, unless there’s a problem - the way this is supposed to go is that women orgasm through penetration just when their male partner does. 

How many desks did this extremely incorrect statement pass across without anyone noticing? How did so many people think it was right, or at least, close enough to being right? Why were so many people behind Beautiful Union willing to stand by the claim that the female orgasm is simultaneous with men’s and occurs through penetration? Wouldn’t personal experience simply overcome this dominant and incorrect historical script?

I don’t know if I want to guess exactly, but I can think of three possibilities. 

1) A surprisingly high concentration of that ⅓ of women who climax through penetration are represented in this literary team (not likely).

2) A critical mass of people still believe the “ideal simultaneous orgasm through penetration” myth and none of them wanted to reveal themselves as not living up to these standards during this process (very likely).

Or 3)...

Stage left, Laura takes a shot, shakes out her hands, comes back to keep typing.

Or 3) Just going off of statistics without any inside knowledge to speak of: because women don’t want to tell men they’re not having orgasms.

Without making any particular claims about any individual involved in this book, I think we have to talk about the general possibility. Sixty percent of women say they’ve faked an orgasm. Why? Because they want sex to be over and for their husbands to not be sad. Women care about men’s feelings. They’re taught to. No one wants their spouse to feel like they’re not good at sex. And, if women have also absorbed a narrative where they’re supposed to have an orgasm from penetration only, right when their husbands are finished, wouldn’t they wish to conform?

Here’s Gregoire et. al. again:

So what if no one is admitting it? What if no one wants to be the one to say this is not correct? If women can’t speak up at home, can they speak up in public?

I cannot make any claims about the environment at Multnomah, Tempe, or any other setting where this book was primarily brought to fruition. I can, however, speak to TCG, where the first chapter of this book enjoyed a hectic day of being contextualized and recontexualized before finally being removed, apparently as the TGC editorial team slowly realized they had committed themselves to something that should not have been printed. We can speak a lot of the possible carelessness of editorial teams, or, as Skye Jethani noted, the slow rollback of benefits that publishing companies offer their writers to prevent something from going to print.

Nonetheless, I see something else at work here. In conservative Christian spaces, it is not uncommon for women to, if they reach a level of influence at all, only reach it because they have been extensively screened for their willingness to agree with men. I know by looking at the acknowledgements of this book that women were involved in bringing this book to print. What I cannot see in this text is evidence that women’s experiences of sexuality, and their knowledge of their own bodies — if indeed they have been allowed to have this knowledge at all— was permitted to enter the pool of information that has been put forth in this text. 

And so, we have a book that either promotes an extremely implausible account of women’s orgasms, or perhaps elides them entirely. 

The subtitle of this book is how sex can explain “almost anything.” What appears to be absent from the list of things sex can explain is women having sex. I could use a lot of words to describe this state of affairs. It’s appalling, it’s invalidating, it’s insulting, it’s demeaning –

But to be completely honest with you all, my readers who have now read 10,000 words of me engaging with Beautiful Union: I, personally, as a woman with a body who likes her body and knows what’s in it – I, with all the sensitivity in the world for the women whose bodies have been kept behind a heavy curtain of ignorance, I myself can only experience this as downstream from reading a crime novel where a woman keeps her driver’s license in her vagina. 

It’s at least a little funny.

This series is continued in Part Five.