Joan Smith
Body Language
A device to produce female orgasms? Excuse me, but I think we’ve been here before, and I’m not talking about the penis whose value in this context has long been the subject of debate or the kind of battery- driven vibrator you can buy in sex shops. It was mooted as long as 32 years ago, in Roger Vadim’s sci-fi movie Barbarella, when Jane Fonda found herself wired up to a machine called an Orgasmatron.
But that was very much a male fantasy and this, apparently, is real life, an implant created by an American doctor that will give women a controlled number of orgasms, via a hand-held remote control.
Such an invention immediately raises all sorts of questions, the most obvious being whose hand will be on the remote, not to mention what happens if your dog buries it in the garden. There is also, inevitably, a plan to include a regulator in the device to limit the number of orgasms each woman is permitted to have. “But whether it’s once a day, four times a week who am I to say?” its inventor, Dr Stuart Melroy, a surgeon from Winston-Salem in North Carolina, says.
Melroy discovered how to give women orgasms by accident, while researching implants to control pain. He went on to develop an implant for women who have not, for one reason or another, been able to achieve orgasms “naturally”.
Not every woman would want to have a titanium generator, attached to more than 40 electrodes, implanted under the skin at the top of her buttocks. But it might strike some women as preferable, and no less mechanical, than a bunk-up in a restaurant broom cupboard with the former Wimbledon champion Boris Becker, who has just accepted responsibility for a child conceived in just these circumstances.
Sex is everywhere, in the form of endless stories about footballers and rap artists doing it five times a night, but the emphasis is as relentlessly on numbers as it was in the old pre-feminist days of the sexual revolution.
When Germaine Greer suggested that “giving yourself a few jolts from a titanium implant is about as bad as sex can get”, she may have temporarily forgotten the anguished discussions that went on in the 1970s as women talked openly for the first time about how difficult it was to have orgasms.
Indeed Vadim’s Orgasmatron appeared in exactly the same year as one of feminism’s ground-breaking texts, The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm, by Anne Koedt, which challenged Freud’s insistence on the primacy of the vaginal orgasm. Koedt pointed out that “since the clitoris is not necessarily stimulated sufficiently in the conventional sexual positions, we are left ‘frigid'”.
Koedt’s confident article opened the floodgates, building on the work already published by Masters and Johnson in Human Sexual Response in 1966. Suddenly everyone was talking about the female orgasm, a creature that turned out to be as elusive in some corners as the sighting of a very rare bird.
Feminists drew on the work of sexologists to support their angry discovery that women were not getting what they wanted in bed, with statistics pouring out from all kinds of sources. Only a third of the women studied by the sexologist Alfred Kinsey reported experiencing orgasm; Seymour Fisher found in 1973 that almost two-thirds of the women in his study did not have them with any consistency, while nearly 6% never had them at all; Shere Hite’s survey in 1976 put the figure for non-orgasmic women even higher, at 11,6%.
It is true that the combined effect of research and feminist rhetoric in the 1970s was dramatic, on women at least. Some feminists questioned whether heterosexual sex was capable of satisfying women at all; as they were quick to point out, placing the emphasis on the clitoris rather than the vagina effectively dethroned the penis from its primary role in straight sex, at least as far as women were concerned.
Up and down the country, women enthusiastically set about examining their own bodies, blaming their lovers for their failure to stimulate them to orgasm instead of accepting Freud’s dismissal of the clitoral orgasm as inferior. There was an urgent need, everyone agreed or so it seemed at the time for men to get their act together and start pleasing their partners.
So what happened? As recently as 1986, the feminist author Lisa Tuttle was still suggesting that “normal” sexuality needed to be reconsidered and redefined, with women’s preferences at last taken into account. Yet eight years later, in 1994, Hite reported that more than half the women in her latest survey were faking orgasm, with only 42% getting there with a male partner. More recently, studies have put the number of women who don’t come regularly as high as 58%.
What this suggests is that all those discussions, and revelations about the size and sensitivity of the clitoris, have not in the end got us very far. On the contrary, they imply that large numbers of women are unsatisfied in bed, but have learned to do without orgasms or believe their partners don’t understand their needs.
Of course this isn’t true of all men, or there wouldn’t be that happy fortysomething per cent of women who say in surveys that they come regularly with their lovers. But the chief difference between now and 30 years ago, as far as the female orgasm is concerned, is the fact that women have stopped talking about it. Clearly it is as problematic as ever, but in a laddish culture there seems even less point complaining. So perhaps titanium implants are the way forward and this week’s headlines should have read: “Men still failing in bed, women turn to machines”.