From the vagina as a ‘cloaca’ to medical masturbation against hysteria: the long battle of the female orgasm

Female sexuality is no longer taboo. Women seek pleasure, enjoy it, and have orgasms. And this does not make them vicious, or crazy, or diabolical. Niceties with which they have been qualified throughout history. Nor does it turn his genital organ into “a temple built on a sewer & rdquor; nor “the entrance door of the devil & rdquor ;, as Tertullian assured, one of the Fathers of the Church. Amen! Truism? Not much less. As obvious as what has been said so far may seem, the truth is that this current sexual freedom (or reality) is only a few years old. For millennia the female orgasm has been a battlefield that has swung between control and emancipation, winning the repression by a landslide. Limiting the sexuality of women has been the best way to subdue and dominate her.

‘Uterine massages’ against hysteria

There have been many bad times for female pleasure, among the wildest, the years of the puritanical and hypocritical (double standards were at ease) Victorian times. In the 19th century, industrialization and better education resulted in increasingly emancipated women. So you had to tie them short and what better than to do it through her vagina. So Victorian culture he became obsessed with female pleasure and masturbation. Things, both, that for the supposedly well-thought-out minds of the moment, were source of all evil affecting the subjects of her gracious majesty. “The Victorian obsession with eradicating female masturbation often had to do with the fear that women would receive an education,” says the political scientist and cultural critic Naomi Wolf in ‘Vagina. A new biography of female sexuality ‘. He adds more: “It should be understood as a reaction against the dangers that the emancipation of women from the patriarchal home entailed & rdquor ;.

Thus, orgasm was not well regarded even in conjugal intercourse – & rdquor; a decent woman rarely desires sexual gratification for herself & rdquor;, stated the gynecologist William Acton in 1857 – and the pleasant self-exploration, which led, at best, to perdition, could be uprooted with a cliterodectomy. Female genital mutilation, moreover, solved the hysteria that, curiously, could also be fixed with ‘uterine massages’. A euphemism, the latter, for what were actually legal masturbations performed by doctors on good ladies to relieve nervous disorders. Thus, the possibility of having an orgasm without losing social position generated so much demand that some doctors, exhausted as well as enriched, they invented electric masturbating machines for their patients. As incredible as it is true.

Magical and sacred vagina

A brutality that of the 19th century that had little to envy that of the middle Ages, moment in which the obligatory feminine continence was obtained, if it was necessary, with a chastity belt. An object of torture that prevented sexual relations as well as the hygiene of the ladies and subjected the entire population without a penis to suffer painful ulcers and health problems. Although despite all these atrocities, at the beginning of time the verb was goddess. Yes, all primitive religions (from the Sumerians to the Egyptians) had a female sex deity with magical and sacred vagina. And a male consort to copulate with pleasure. But in these came the Hebrew patriarchal god and twisted everything.

Pablo de Tarso was belligerent with sexuality in general and that of women in particular. For the saint, the former was bad and shameful; and the second, particularly bad and embarrassing. His teachings became synonymous with Christianity and Christianity synonymous with Western culture. The Church Fathers also did not fall short on the subject. Do you remember the “sewer & rdquor; of Tertullian from the beginning of the text? Well, add it up and go on. The witch hunt also preyed on women and their pleasure. So it can be said that the preaching of monotheism with a male God was not a blessing for the female orgasm.

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The sexual revolution

The winds began to blow in favor of women and the right to enjoy their own body with the entry of the 20th century. New cultural movements helped; women making political, social and artistic manifestations about their sexuality – from Gertrude Stein to Josephine Baker to Georgia O’Keeffe and Edna St. Vincent Millay -; the appearance of the first reliable methods of contraception; and the African-descendant ladies of the blues celebrating female sexuality without shame or guilt. The rest, until reaching the current moment in which women have become the main consumers of the sexual well-being business, go through the 70s, the famous report of Shere Hite and the so-called (and unfinished) sexual revolution.