What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire Read Online Free PDF Page B

few
hundred years ago, Galen’s understanding dominated science. A woman’s “certain
tremor” was a key to procreation for the fifth-century Byzantine physician
Aetius of Amida. The Persian scholar Avicenna, whose eleventh-century Canon of Medicine was studied throughout the world,
worried that a small penis might be an impediment to reproduction. The woman
might not be “pleased by it,” might not feel enough sensation to send her into
blissful spasms, “whereupon she does not emit sperm, and when she does not emit
sperm a child is not made.” Gabriele Falloppio, discoverer of the Fallopian
tubes in sixteenth-century Italy, stressed that a man’s malformed foreskin might
impede a woman’s orgasm and impregnation.
    How did Galen’s thinking cling on so tenaciously?
The longevity of his teaching is all the more baffling, given that only about
one-third of women, nowadays, say they can climax through penetration alone.
Were men and women of Galen’s time, and long after, deftly attentive to the
clitoris during intercourse? Better coached in the methods of vaginal orgasms?
The shards offer up no answers. But, assuming that sexual skill was no better
then than now, didn’t women ever volunteer that they’d conceived without the
tremor? Hints and theories of procreation without pleasure did emerge over the
centuries, yet somehow Galen’s wisdom wasn’t supplanted. In the late sixteen
hundreds, the widely used English midwifery manual titled Aristotle’s Masterpiece , which asserted its scientific agreement
with Tiresias about women’s superior ecstasy, described the female role in
conception this way: “By nature much delight accompanies the ejection of the
seed, by the breaking forth of swelling spirit and the stiffness of nerves.”
    Still, this embrace of women’s sexuality, from
Exodus onward, shouldn’t be taken as the prevailing ethos of any period. The
ancient wariness and repression of female eros is a story that barely needs
telling. There is Eve’s position as first sinner: seductress and source of
mankind’s banishment from paradise. There is, from Tertullian, founding
theologian of Christianity, the assignment of Eve’s sinfulness to all women. All
women were destined to be “the Devil’s gateway.” There are Moses’s
transcriptions of God’s warnings in Leviticus. As the Jews encamp at Mount Sinai
on their journey toward the land of milk and honey, God descends in a cloud and
makes clear, again and again, that the center of a woman’s sexual anatomy
overflows with horror, with a monthly blood “fountain” so monstrous that she
must be quarantined, “put apart for seven days, and whosoever toucheth her shall
be unclean . . . and everything that she lieth upon shall be
unclean, everything also that she sitteth upon.” The litany of taint continues,
relentlessly, until the decree that those who “uncover” the fountain and have
sex will be expelled from the tribe, cast away from God’s people.
    For the Greeks, the original woman was Pandora.
Molded by the gods out of clay, her erotic thrall and threat—her “beautiful evil
. . . bedecked with all manner of finery” in the poet Hesiod’s
rendition, her “shameless mind and deceitful nature”—made her as dangerous as
Eve. Lust-drunk witches of the Middle Ages left men “smooth,” devoid of their
genitals; and to the long line of living nightmares caused by female carnality,
French and Dutch anatomists of the seventeenth century contributed the clitoris
that grew with too much touching into a full-blown phallus, turning women into
men who ravished their former sex.
    But if the pre-Enlightenment West had always been
frightened by female heat, sometimes extoling it, yet corralling it carefully
within the bounds of marriage—where, for the sake of women’s as well as men’s
sexual release, England’s early Protestant clergy prescribed conjugal relations
exactly three times per month, with a week off for