Yes, yes, yes ... yessssssssssss
Or maybe no. Can the latest female orgasm theory really hold up?
Yvonne Roberts Sunday June 12, 2005 The Observer
Imagine the scenario, five or 10 years hence. 'Did the earth move for you, darling?' 'No.' 'Well, keep on taking the medicine. It's bound to work one day.' Where puritanism and Darwinian science have already gone before, Professor Tim Spector of St Thomas' Hospital, London now follows: female orgasm, he says, is all in the genes.
To come or not to come is out of a woman's hands or, for that matter, her partner's. It's all been decided by nature; biology rules that some women will never enjoy what the family planning pioneer Marie Stopes described as 'wonderful tides'. But given sufficient research, Professor Spector suggests, a drug may eventually be fund to 'cure' the non-orgasmic.
The medicalisation of women's sexuality rolls on apace, once again relieving many struggling men of the worry that they just haven't been trying hard enough, while females are left high and dry - metaphorically and physically - because of their rotten choice in partners.
According to Spector's speculations, women who reach orgasm easily are more likely to be satisfied with poor-quality men who love and leave. Males who are good enough to hang around long enough for a female to climax (12 minutes) have passed the evolutionary test which says they are likely to be 'dependable, patient and caring enough to look after the kids'. (Lust, libido and childcare aren't often mentioned in the same sentence.)
Spector's team used a national register of twins to ask 4,037 women about their sex lives and to compare their DNA. Half were identical twins who share genes. Some 32 per cent of the total said they never or infrequently experienced orgasm; only 14 per cent said they had an orgasm during intercourse. Genetic comparisons showed that 34 per cent of the variation during intercourse was inherited, and the difference was down to genes. According to Spector, genes could work on a physical level, for instance, causing differences in the angle of the vagina or the clitoris. They may also have a psychological effect, varying the activities of hormones.
Spector's research is undoubtedly impeccable, but what kind of study is able definitively to disentangle biology from social construction? Or, to put it another way, perhaps in questioning women only about their sex lives and not their lives in general, a major piece of the puzzle has been left out?
In the US, female sexual dysfunction (FSD) is already big business. The quest is on for the female equivalent to Viagra and entry to a business allegedly worth more than £2 billion. Last week, the New York Times reported on the success of sex therapist Laura Berman who runs the Berman Centre in Chicago. She prescribes low-dosage testosterone cream, 'the fuel of love', to women, a treatment not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Leonore Tiefer, associate professor of psychiatry at New York University, says that long before reaching for testosterone (the long-term effects of which are unknown), a therapist ought to assess a range of issues.
'The first is political, cultural, social, relational, psychological and then medical. You can have a perfectly good sex life, even if you don't have any genitalia, if you are in a relationship and feel good about yourself. A uniform model of sexuality doesn't exist.'
You can also, of course, be perfectly happy in a relationship having no sex at all but the general impression today is that everyone is at it. As sociologist Professor Carol Smart has said, sex has moved from sin and procreation 'into a major part of our quest for identity'. If sex has ceased to be what we do and become the measure of who we are, then the results of Professor Spector's study may tell us as much about the power of conditioning as the versatility of science.
One in three women in the Spector survey said they rarely or never had an orgasm during sex. In Kinsey's survey in 1953, 55 per cent rarely experienced orgasm. By the Seventies, in a study by the Playboy Foundation, the figure had dropped to 48 per cent. In another 30 years, general satisfaction may well have spread across the (female) land.
Or perhaps not. A brief gallop through the history of sex makes it clear that it is a miracle inhibitions are being shed at the rate they apparently are. Female sexuality, as defined by men, has moved from dangerously and insatiably predatory to officially non-existent. In Victorian times, a woman who revealed a lusty appetite (unless she was paid) was in danger of being treated for hysteria or subjected to the surgical removal of her clitoris, the only organ designed entirely for pleasure and omitted from many 19th-century anatomy books. (As late as 1948 in the US, a five-year-old had her clitoris removed to 'cure' her enthusiasm for masturbation.)
'Nice girls don't - except in times of war' is burned so indelibly on the consciences of many baby-boomers that 'free love' and the Sixties debate on the vaginal versus the clitoral orgasm passed them by. ('I'll take both' is probably today's consumerist response.)
In the Seventies, the question shifted from where it happens (or not) to what makes it happen. In California, Eleanor Stephens, author of Our Body, Ourselves, ran courses optimistically entitled 'pre-orgasmic workshops', which taught women how to reach orgasm through masturbation. Four months later, 50 per cent were reaching orgasm in intercourse. And, no, the workshops no longer run.
Today, of course, we have a paradox. Anyone, in theory at least, is free to 'go the whole way', as it was once quaintly worded ... except that competitiveness, greed, individualism, stress, exhaustion, null-points lovers and the time squeeze, added to the urge to do it 'right', mean that, as Professor Spector has discovered, sex for some is anything but a pleasure. But, Doc, it can't all be about biology.
· Yvonne Roberts's novel Shake! was issued last week in paperback. Nick Cohen is away. -- "Life sure is weird but what else am I to know?" [Jason Pierce]