What Do Women Want

story behind Komisaruk’s experiment traced back to Freud. The father of psychoanalysis, who made eros the essential substance of our psyches, decreed that stimulation of the external clitoris—he had no knowledge of the bulbs and wings—was like “pine shavings” compared to the vaginal “hard wood fire.” A woman who relied on the clitoris for her orgasms was stymied, locked in an immature sexuality, thwarted physically and psychologically. Erotic womanhood was marked by orgasms through vaginal intercourse.
    But Freud was hazy about one thing, a physiological problem that still bedevils the research of sexologists. He didn’t deal with the dilemma that intercourse sometimes grazes, pulls, or puts pressure on the clitoris. Did he mean that mature, womanly climaxes were solely internal or was this external tugging and pressing acceptable?
    It is impossible to know how many women attempted to train themselves to meet Freud’s orgasmic standard, and which interpretation they took as the goal, but Marie Bonaparte—the same French psychoanalyst to whom Freud posed his question, “What does a woman want?”—was tormented by Freud’s edict. Driven by her inability to climax through intercourse, and, it seems, interpreting the edict the second way, in the nineteen twenties she enlisted physicians to measure the distance between the tip of the clitoris—the glans—and the upper edge of the vaginal opening in their patients. She and the doctors collected, too, reports of the women’s ecstasies. Then Bonaparte scrutinized the evidence. She concluded that her personal failure was due to the three centimeters that divided her key parts. Two and a half centimeters, she determined from her data, was the threshold; less than that and a woman stood a good chance of reaching bliss from a man’s thrusting.
    Next, Bonaparte consulted a Viennese surgeon. She had her clitoral ligaments snipped, her clitoral glans moved. Though the organ’s nerves survived, the operation didn’t achieve her orgasmic longings. Nor did a second try. She saw herself as doomed to what she termed “frigidity.” But she kept on with her research, zeroing in on African women whose clitorises had been ritually cut, excised. Because of the loss of clitoral sensation, she asked, “Are African women more frequently, and better, vaginalized than their European sisters?” As a start toward interviewing subjects and finding out, she befriended Jomo Kenyatta, who was soon to lead Kenyans in rebellion against British rule, a war of liberation waged partly to preserve the Kenyan custom of clitoridectomy.
    Bonaparte seems to have abandoned her African project without gathering much evidence either way, and by midcentury, scientific doctrine started to shift. Kinsey, from his interviews with thousands of women, and Masters and Johnson, from watching women having sex and masturbating in their lab, doubted the existence of the internal orgasm. Then, in 1970, feminist writer Susan Lydon published a clitoral manifesto. Men had forever “defined feminine sexuality in a way as favorable to themselves as possible. If a woman’s pleasure was obtained through the vagina, then she was totally dependent on the man’s erect penis . . . she would achieve her satisfaction only as a concomitant of man’s seeking his.” She proclaimed, “The definition of normal sexuality as vaginal, in other words, was a part of keeping women down, of making them sexually, as well as economically, socially, and politically subservient.” But with the proper exaltation of the clitoris, “woman at long last will be able to take the first step toward her emancipation, to define and enjoy the forms of her own sexuality.”
    And soon the manifesto seeped into sexology. A kind of clitoral absolutism took hold. With her bestseller of the seventies, The Hite Report on Female Sexuality , researcher Shere Hite commanded an audience of tens of millions. She announced that the clitoris was the only locus of women’s ecstasy. Whether from tongue or finger or the tuggings of intercourse, the external organ was where climax happened.
    The absolute became accepted truth, imbued in popular consciousness. But in 1982, Beverly Whipple, Komisaruk’s eventual collaborator, published her book on the G-spot. There was, she and her co-authors maintained, an area along the interior of the vagina’s front wall that could bring on astonishing orgasms. She first hit on this phenomenon while