Read Online The Clitoral Truth: The Secret World at Your Fingertips by Rebecca Chalker - Free Book Online Page A
Book: The Clitoral Truth: The Secret World at Your Fingertips by Rebecca Chalker
Read Free Book Online
Authors: Rebecca Chalker
Ads: Link
were two,” writes Laqueur. 20 The existence of specifically female nerve fibers was proposed. Most importantly, pregnancy and menstruation were now defined as illnesses that prevented women from playing a full and active role in society. Passion in women, who were weak from their maternal duties and functions, was classified as abnormal and considered properly replaceable by modesty. The role of sexual pleasure and orgasm for women began to be debated.
The leading philosophers of the day—the villains in our anatomical whodunit—abetted by men of the medical estate, concocted carefully crafted arguments for the sexual inferiority of women. The French philosopher Voltaire put it succinctly: “In physique, woman is weaker than man on account of her physiology. The periodic emission of blood that enfeeble women and the maladies that result from their suppression, the duration of pregnancy, the need to suckle infants and watch over them, and the delicacy of women’s limbs render them ill suited to any type of labor
21
women began to demand social and economic rights in salons,
or occupation that requires strength or endurance.”
In Book Five of
meetings, protests, and riots. Ironically, this was also the time when men began to “discover” significant sexual differences between themselves and women. “In the late eighteenth century, anatomists for the first time produced detailed illustrations of an explicitly female skeleton to document the fact that sexual difference was more
Emile , a social treatise disguised as a novel, Rousseau begins by
“examining the similarities and differences between her sex and ours,” arguing passionately that women were perpetually childlike and incapable of rational thinking. 22
Although women were philosophically stripped of their right to passion and pleasure, the ancient fear of their sexuality remained. The Greeks imprisoned their wives and condemned concubines and prostitutes to sexual slavery. Rousseau thought this a prudent idea, and believed, just as the Greeks did, that female reticence, discretion, and modesty really masked a fierce excess of passion that if unleashed, would disrupt the male-centered social order. Montesquieu pompously concurred, proclaiming in The Spirit of Laws , that “all nations agree in condemning female intemperateness.” 23 And such statements from these prominent spokesmen were the veritable tip of the iceberg. Laqueur notes that “there were hundreds if not thousands of such works in which sexual differences were articulated in the centuries that followed.” From this point on, women’s sexuality was seen as very different from men’s—increasingly weak, chaste, and passionless. Anatomists began to ascribe parts of the clitoris to the reproductive or urinary system. Medical illustrations became increasingly more simplistic, leaving parts of the clitoris unlabeled. By Victorian times, orgasm, which was previously accepted as a natural component of women’s sexual repertoire, was seen as unnecessary, unseemly, perhaps even unhealthy for women. “The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled by sexual feelings of any kind,” the influential English urologist William Acton famously harrumphed.24
Although it was distinctly a minority view, not all anatomists agreed with the official concept of separate and unequal anatomies. In 1844 the German anatomist George Ludwig Kobelt published an exhaustive study of the clitoral system. His principle concern, Kobelt asserted, was “to show that the female possesses a structure that in all its separate parts is entirely analogous to the male.” Citing the nineteenth-century view that women’s genitals were insignificant, Kobelt insisted that “up to the present, the glans of the clitoris has been and still is considered a rudimentary, almost meaningless little structure.” He later concluded that the function of the clitoris in sexual response “in accordance with its
The leading philosophers of the day—the villains in our anatomical whodunit—abetted by men of the medical estate, concocted carefully crafted arguments for the sexual inferiority of women. The French philosopher Voltaire put it succinctly: “In physique, woman is weaker than man on account of her physiology. The periodic emission of blood that enfeeble women and the maladies that result from their suppression, the duration of pregnancy, the need to suckle infants and watch over them, and the delicacy of women’s limbs render them ill suited to any type of labor
21
women began to demand social and economic rights in salons,
or occupation that requires strength or endurance.”
In Book Five of
meetings, protests, and riots. Ironically, this was also the time when men began to “discover” significant sexual differences between themselves and women. “In the late eighteenth century, anatomists for the first time produced detailed illustrations of an explicitly female skeleton to document the fact that sexual difference was more
Emile , a social treatise disguised as a novel, Rousseau begins by
“examining the similarities and differences between her sex and ours,” arguing passionately that women were perpetually childlike and incapable of rational thinking. 22
Although women were philosophically stripped of their right to passion and pleasure, the ancient fear of their sexuality remained. The Greeks imprisoned their wives and condemned concubines and prostitutes to sexual slavery. Rousseau thought this a prudent idea, and believed, just as the Greeks did, that female reticence, discretion, and modesty really masked a fierce excess of passion that if unleashed, would disrupt the male-centered social order. Montesquieu pompously concurred, proclaiming in The Spirit of Laws , that “all nations agree in condemning female intemperateness.” 23 And such statements from these prominent spokesmen were the veritable tip of the iceberg. Laqueur notes that “there were hundreds if not thousands of such works in which sexual differences were articulated in the centuries that followed.” From this point on, women’s sexuality was seen as very different from men’s—increasingly weak, chaste, and passionless. Anatomists began to ascribe parts of the clitoris to the reproductive or urinary system. Medical illustrations became increasingly more simplistic, leaving parts of the clitoris unlabeled. By Victorian times, orgasm, which was previously accepted as a natural component of women’s sexual repertoire, was seen as unnecessary, unseemly, perhaps even unhealthy for women. “The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled by sexual feelings of any kind,” the influential English urologist William Acton famously harrumphed.24
Although it was distinctly a minority view, not all anatomists agreed with the official concept of separate and unequal anatomies. In 1844 the German anatomist George Ludwig Kobelt published an exhaustive study of the clitoral system. His principle concern, Kobelt asserted, was “to show that the female possesses a structure that in all its separate parts is entirely analogous to the male.” Citing the nineteenth-century view that women’s genitals were insignificant, Kobelt insisted that “up to the present, the glans of the clitoris has been and still is considered a rudimentary, almost meaningless little structure.” He later concluded that the function of the clitoris in sexual response “in accordance with its
Similar Books
