Introduction
In module 6, the Sciences of Sex, we saw that both Leonore Tiefer and Michel Foucault argued that too much emphasis is placed on sexual normalcy, and not enough emphasis is put on sexual pleasure. At the same time, some people’s sexual pleasure is considered more important than other’s and some groups of people are having more sexual pleasure than others. In particular, we have seen that women report having much less pleasure in their sex lives than men, and the sex industry primarily caters to men rather than to women. Other groups of people, notably children, are considered to be asexual, and so the mere notion of their having sexual pleasure, even if it is autoerotic, is considered abnormal and dangerous and is currently taboo. This module will explore the politics of pleasure with respect to these two cases: children and women.
Children’s Sexuality
Contemporary media (movies, TV, magazines, and most importantly the Internet) is often criticized for corrupting youth through exposure to explicit sexual content. Educational institutions are also under fire and parents have protested sex education that gives students birth control information as part of the curriculum. The claim is that exposing minors to this knowledge will give them ideas that will lead them down the path to premature sexual relationships and unwanted pregnancies. While objections to sex education and other ways in which children are exposed to sexual information are frequently framed in terms of protecting children’s innocence, Sexuality Studies scholars John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman have demonstrated that who is perceived as sexually innocent has changed over the course of history.
In their book, Intimate Matters (1988), John D’Emilia and Estelle Freedman argue that in Victorian society there were dichotomized public and private spheres for upper and middle class men and women which carried moral implications. The public sphere was considered the sphere of immoral behavior while the feminized, domestic sphere was a space of innocence. White, upper and middle class Victorian women were supposed to be the moral pillars of society. This meant that they were responsible for controlling sexuality within the household, both within the marital relation and by watching over their children to intervene in masturbation. As we saw in an earlier module, in the 19th and early 20th centuries masturbation was constructed as a health hazard. Children, especially male children, were not considered sexless or innocent but were understood to be highly prone to “self-abuse.” The construct of women as themselves lacking sexual desire helped to define upper and middle class white mothers as sexually innocent. Not all women in Victorian times could be constructed as innocent, however. Women who had to work for living – either in the factory or on the street – were at the bottom of the moral hierarchy and were often characterized as fallen women.
Women could not remain the symbols of moral purity in the twentieth century, however, when they began arguing for new ways of organizing society on a sexual basis, for sexual liberation, and for access to birth control. In the wake of these sexualized protests, children took women’s place as symbols of moral purity. They were constructed as innocent and free from sin until they became enveloped in the adult world of moral corruption. In the realm of sexuality, children came to be considered blank slates, unaware of adult desires and lust, and sexual knowledge was thought to morally ruin children.
Historians of childhood have shown, however, that the idea of childhood as an “age of innocence” is a recent construct in the West. For much of history children were treated as small adults, were expected to work from a young age, and were not protected from profane language and exposure to subjects such as sex and violence. Historically children would have witnessed adults having sex in their households as it was common to share sleeping spaces including beds. Typical 20th-century Western architectural designs for middle-class family homes in which children’s bedrooms are distanced by hallways and stairs from the parents’ bedroom and bathroom reflect relatively recent ideas about protecting children from seeing or hearing sex and even adult nudity.
Today, children’s agency is often perceived as a challenge to adult power and authority and the notion of a child’s or young adult’s sexual citizenship is met with particular resistance because it is perceived to be inappropriately crossing the adult/child boundary. Sexuality has been constructed as both irrelevant to children’s lives and a danger to them. In Western cultures today, children are constructed as needing protection from sexuality and as beings for whom sexuality is otherwise unimportant. While there is a dominant perception that sexuality is irrelevant to children except as a danger, social practices demonstrate a dismissal of children’s desires and curiosity about sexuality. In fact, children’s sexuality is being contained through myths and misinformation. For instance, children were and are still sometimes told that babies are delivered to parents by storks, or that they are found under cabbage patches, or that they came out of the mother’s stomach through the bellybutton.
Often sexuality is narrowly perceived as physical sexual acts rather than a process of identity formation, which in fact begins early in many children’s lives. Kerry Robinson explains that children’s sexual citizenship is about the following:
“learning to become ethical gendered and sexual subjects, with an understanding of consent and what it means to respect others in relationships; to respect gender and sexuality diversity that exists in life; having an awareness and understanding of their rights as sexual subjects; to be supported in building confidence and resilience in order to become informed sexual subjects; and fostering children and young people’s health and wellbeing”
Kerry Robinson, Introducing the New Sexuality Studies
According to scholars such as Robinson, it is crucial to recognize the impact that the discourse of childhood innocence and the need to protect and shelter children from sex has on sexual health and wellbeing. If we assume that sexuality is experienced and expressed in multiple ways across the life span, then it is important to include the lives of children. According to this perspective, the relationship between sexuality and childhood is a socio-cultural, historical, and political construction, representing the values of the dominant culture of a specific time period. Part of developing sexual citizenship is having access to ongoing comprehensive sexual education, both at home and in schools, and sex positive feminist activists have argued that this sexual education should cover sexual pleasures as well as sexual risks and dangers.
Female Pleasure
As was seen in the last module with the discussion of anti-pornography feminism in the 1970s and 80s and “sex negative” feminisms today, much feminist scholarship and activism around sex and sexuality has focused on women’s sexual victimization and sexual danger. How different might the world be if women were not only seen as sexual victims, but were allowed and encouraged to experience sexual pleasure? The second part of this module will explore this question by considering the politics of pleasure with a focus on women’s pleasure. In particular, we will examine both patriarchal and feminist discourses on the clitoris.
As we saw in the module on the sexual sciences, 19th- and early 20th-century sexologists such as Havelock Ellis read female genital physiology as evidence of their sexual experiences and perversions, often citing an enlarged clitoris as proof of prostitution or lesbianism. In this context, the clitoris was thought to reveal a woman’s transgression against patriarchal sexual norms. In the biomedical textbooks of the 1900s through the 1950s, the clitoris was depicted as homologous to the penis – that is, it is formed from the same evolutionary structure – but is also considered inferior to the penis.
In 1905, Sigmund Freud published essays that argued for a differentiation between clitoral and vaginal orgasms. Freud assumed that the clitoris was recognized immediately by children as inferior to the penis, or, indeed, as the stump of a castrated penis. He argued that when little boys saw their sister’s genitals, they experienced “castration anxiety,” while little girls who saw their brother’s genitals experienced “penis envy.”
According to Freud, boys naturally assume that all humans start out with penises, and so when they notice that their sisters lack penises, they believe that the girls had them cut off as punishment for some transgression. This causes little boys to worry that the same thing could happen to them; this is “castration anxiety.”
For their part, Freud assumed that little girls have already discovered their clitoris as a small phallic structure and a source of pleasure, and upon seeing their brother’s genitals, they are naturally envious of what is an obviously bigger and better version of their own genitals; this is “penis envy.” For Freud, a girl who develops normally will at this point feel so disappointed in her puny clitoris that is so obviously inferior to the penis that she will give up on this part of her body as a source of sexual pleasure, and will eventually transition to a vaginal (hetero)sexuality instead.
For Freud, vaginal sexuality is most conducive to reproductive sex and, eventually, maternity, and so is the normal, mature, and healthy path for a woman’s sexuality to take. On Freud’s view, lesbians are women who never got over their clitoral attachment or accepted that they were “castrated,” who still hope to be “men,” and have thus not “matured” sexually. Women who cannot have vaginal orgasms (or orgasms from vaginal intercourse alone) were considered “frigid” by Freud and his contemporaries, even if these women could have clitoral orgasms.
In 1953, Alfred Kinsey and his research team published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, which was comprised of 5,940 interviews with women. Kinsey and his colleagues interpreted this data to define the clitoris as the locus of female sexual sensation and orgasm. Indeed, the clitoris has almost infinitely more nerve endings than the vagina, and so Freud was decidedly wrong to think that vaginal orgasms were more “normal” than clitoral orgasms.
In the 1960s and 70s, feminists began reclaiming the clitoris and increasing literacy around the clitoris became part of feminist scholarship and activism. Numerous feminists critiqued Freud’s claims about the vaginal orgasm, including French feminists Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous and radical feminists Adrienne Rich and Anne Koedt in the United States.
In 1968 Koedt published “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” in which she questioned whether the so-called vaginal orgasm existed at all or whether it was just a fiction invented by men such as Freud. Koedt argues that the myth is maintained by women who fake vaginal orgasms to make men happy or to perform what they perceive to be sexual normalcy. According to Koedt, all orgasms are in fact clitoral, and on the relatively rare occasions that women have orgasms from vaginal intercourse alone (without direct clitoral stimulation), Koedt argued that this was because the clitoris was somehow being stimulated by the movement of bodies. Even “vaginal orgasms,” then, would be clitoral.
In the 1970s feminist sex education Betty Dodson led masturbation workshops for women, teaching them about the clitoris.
In 1971 the Boston Women’s Health Collective published Our Bodies, Ourselves, a book that remains in print and is today accompanied by a website that provides health information to women. Take a look at how Our Bodies, Ourselves contributors talk about orgasm, sexual pleasure, and the clitoris here.
These feminist insurgencies were met with resistance from mainstream anatomists through the 1980s and 90s, who attempted to reassert that women’s anatomies were primarily made for reproduction rather than pleasure. For instance, we can consider the following quote from Alvin Silverstein’s 1980 book, Human Anatomy and Physiology:
“With the current emphasis on sexual pleasure and the controversy over the role of women (and men) as sex objects, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that a large part of a woman’s body is adapted specifically for functions of conceiving, bearing and nurturing children.”
Alvin Silverstein, Human Anatomy and Physiology, 740
In response to this backlash and ongoing ignorance about the clitoris and the female orgasm, feminists continue to conduct research on women’s genital anatomy. For example, Rebecca Chalker (2002), a pioneer of the Self-Help Health Movement, has established that the clitoris is made up of eighteen distinct and interrelated structures. Biometric analysis of a diverse sample of female genitals has shown that there is a great range of variation in women’s genital dimensions, including clitoral size, labial length and color. Watch the 1 minute video below as an example of this ongoing feminist research.
In sum: mapping, representing, and defining the clitoris is a political act. As a result, the clitoris has many competing and contradictory narratives that vary depending upon personal, cultural, political, and historical circumstances. Depending on who is defining the clitoris, it can be classified as an inverted and diminutive penis, a small erectile sex organ of the female, a love button, an unhygienic appendage to be removed, a site of immature female sexual expression, a key piece of evidence of sexual perversion, or a vibrant subject of pornographic mediations. These different definitions of the clitoris are constrained by the political and cultural context, including who is representing the clitoris, for what purposes, and under what conditions.
The two assigned resources for this module are both feminist responses to scientific misrepresentations of and cultural ignorance about the clitoris and female sexual pleasure. The first of the assigned resources is a lecture by feminist philosopher of biology, Elisabeth Lloyd, who in 2005 published the book, The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution. The lecture you will watch/listen to is based on this book. Second, you will read feminist philosopher of science Nancy Tuana’s article, “Coming to Understand: Orgasm and the Epistemology of Ignorance.” The video lecture for this module, which can be found below, provides a discussion of Tuana’s reading.