[lbo-talk] A History of Female Orgasm; Or, Why Think Scientifically (At Least Sometimes

[Gar Lipow]

On 6/7/05, Mike Ballard <swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> Yoshie wrote:
> 
> In short, women discovered and developed their capacity for orgasm on
> their own, for their own pleasure rather than reproduction, in spite
> of men who either have neglected it or sought to curtail or destroy
> it (as in the case of female genital cutting).
> 
> If two parents are more advantageous than one parent, three, four, or
> more parents are even more advantageous than two.  As a matter of
> fact, the practice of making the entire community responsible for
> each and every child would be the most advantageous.  Given likely
> much lower survival rates of children, higher rates of maternal
> deaths during childbirth, and lower life expectancies of both men and
> women at the dawn of humanity than at present, it would make more
> sense to expect a communal approach to child rearing than a nuclear
> family model, as the latter would have likely left many children
> without parents back then.
> --
> Mike B) responds:
> 
> This makes a lot of sense to me.  Humans have brains and cultures and
> as Charles pointed out, they tend to pass knowledge of the wheel down
> to the following generations.  So, women found out about sexual
> pleasure and passed the knowledge down to others.  Why not?
> 
> And as far as I have been able to determine, men used to worship women
> as THE child producers--little fat/pregnant Venus statues all over the
> place.  Then, when animal husbandry, agriculture and classes came into
> being, they seemed to have begun to notice that the male had something
> to do with procreation.  "Hey, when I fence the female sheep off from
> the males, no spring lambs?  What da ya make of that Samson?"
> 
> Of course, because men were usually the ones in positions of class and
> familial power at that point in history, they turned the whole worship
> thing around (no more Venus statues) and began abusing women (cutting
> the clit off) and/or just plain putting them into secondary positions
> of power, queen as opposed to king and so on down the hierarchical
> line.
> 

Blood Rites by Barbara Ehrenreich has an interesting alternate take on
this - in some ways  quite similar to  Engels, but placing  the key
moment much earlier than the transistion  to agriculture.

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