got people who know how to direct it, you know—‘Just lift your leg up a little bit, darling.’”
The next step would be to compare the sensitivity of this bit of vulval acreage in two groups of women: those who have orgasms from intercourse, and those who don’t. The study would be simple enough. You’d need little more than a set of von Frey hairs. * These are boar hairs—or, nowadays, nylon threads—of differing stiffness pressed to the skin to quantify tactile sensitivity. Why hasn’t anyone done this? Because almost no one gets funding for purely physiological research anymore. The grant money these days goes to studies of drugs for female sexual dysfunction (men’s troubles having been more or less vanquished by Viagra and its kin). “The money’s impossible, unless you’ve got an obvious application,” said Levin. “They want to know, How’s it going to help patients?”
In this case, of course, it wouldn’t help them much. If the sensitivity of the female glans turns out to make the difference in who has orgasms from intercourse, then, as Levin says, “anatomy may well be destiny.”
m arie Bonaparte was not willing to accept her destiny. Drastic measures were undertaken. The princess had her clitoris moved. The relocation was carried out by a Viennese surgeon of Bonaparte’s acquaintance, Josef Halban. It was apparently her idea. A later paper by her shows photographs of the procedure—blessedly obscured by the poor quality of the photocopy I have—and she has labeled it the Halban-Narjani operation. The “simple” procedure, as Bonaparte called it in her paper, entailed cutting the organ’s suspensory ligaments, * freeing it to be stitched in place slightly lower. She must have believed it was simple, because she allowed Halban—after an initial test run on a cadaver—to perfect his technique on her. Given that much of the clitoris is hidden below the body’s surface, moving it was perhaps not as simple a matter as Halban had thought. † Though Bonaparte writes that the operation was a success in two later patients, it did nothing for her. Some years later, Halban offered to redo the procedure. Bonaparte took him up on it, and again was disappointed.
All the sadder, given that Bonaparte, in her own paper, outlines a perfectly workable nonsurgical solution to the téléclitoridienne ’s predicament: Try a different position. “Only a change in position during the embrace—the best being the face-to-face seated position—which forces contact between the clitoris and the male organ can give the téléclitoridienne the experience of simultaneous pleasure that other women enjoy.” Sadly, Prime Minister Briand was a man with little discernible lap.
Had Bonaparte paged through any one of the “marriage manuals” popular at the time, she would have found still more promising coital configurations. Sexually, the 1920s and ’30s were an oasis of openness and common sense between the twin deserts of Victorian repression and fifties-era conservatism. Jessamyn Neuhaus, in an article about marriage manuals in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, credits the birth of the birth-control movement for this change. Having spent the past century shackled to reproduction, sex suddenly emerged as a recreational pastime. Orgasm—particularly women’s—became a prerequisite for good health and matrimonial harmony, and dozens of authors, medical and not, chimed in with tips on how to achieve it.
The best known of these authors was Dutch gynecologist Theodoor Van de Velde. Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique was the first in his trilogy of advice manuals aimed at nurturing “the perfect flower of ideal marriage” and “combating the forces of mutual repulsion”—the latter including fermented clitoral smegma (“extremely disgusting”), bad breath, * and purulent rhinitis. The book, some of whose European editions went through more than forty printings, includes twenty-five
The next step would be to compare the sensitivity of this bit of vulval acreage in two groups of women: those who have orgasms from intercourse, and those who don’t. The study would be simple enough. You’d need little more than a set of von Frey hairs. * These are boar hairs—or, nowadays, nylon threads—of differing stiffness pressed to the skin to quantify tactile sensitivity. Why hasn’t anyone done this? Because almost no one gets funding for purely physiological research anymore. The grant money these days goes to studies of drugs for female sexual dysfunction (men’s troubles having been more or less vanquished by Viagra and its kin). “The money’s impossible, unless you’ve got an obvious application,” said Levin. “They want to know, How’s it going to help patients?”
In this case, of course, it wouldn’t help them much. If the sensitivity of the female glans turns out to make the difference in who has orgasms from intercourse, then, as Levin says, “anatomy may well be destiny.”
m arie Bonaparte was not willing to accept her destiny. Drastic measures were undertaken. The princess had her clitoris moved. The relocation was carried out by a Viennese surgeon of Bonaparte’s acquaintance, Josef Halban. It was apparently her idea. A later paper by her shows photographs of the procedure—blessedly obscured by the poor quality of the photocopy I have—and she has labeled it the Halban-Narjani operation. The “simple” procedure, as Bonaparte called it in her paper, entailed cutting the organ’s suspensory ligaments, * freeing it to be stitched in place slightly lower. She must have believed it was simple, because she allowed Halban—after an initial test run on a cadaver—to perfect his technique on her. Given that much of the clitoris is hidden below the body’s surface, moving it was perhaps not as simple a matter as Halban had thought. † Though Bonaparte writes that the operation was a success in two later patients, it did nothing for her. Some years later, Halban offered to redo the procedure. Bonaparte took him up on it, and again was disappointed.
All the sadder, given that Bonaparte, in her own paper, outlines a perfectly workable nonsurgical solution to the téléclitoridienne ’s predicament: Try a different position. “Only a change in position during the embrace—the best being the face-to-face seated position—which forces contact between the clitoris and the male organ can give the téléclitoridienne the experience of simultaneous pleasure that other women enjoy.” Sadly, Prime Minister Briand was a man with little discernible lap.
Had Bonaparte paged through any one of the “marriage manuals” popular at the time, she would have found still more promising coital configurations. Sexually, the 1920s and ’30s were an oasis of openness and common sense between the twin deserts of Victorian repression and fifties-era conservatism. Jessamyn Neuhaus, in an article about marriage manuals in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, credits the birth of the birth-control movement for this change. Having spent the past century shackled to reproduction, sex suddenly emerged as a recreational pastime. Orgasm—particularly women’s—became a prerequisite for good health and matrimonial harmony, and dozens of authors, medical and not, chimed in with tips on how to achieve it.
The best known of these authors was Dutch gynecologist Theodoor Van de Velde. Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique was the first in his trilogy of advice manuals aimed at nurturing “the perfect flower of ideal marriage” and “combating the forces of mutual repulsion”—the latter including fermented clitoral smegma (“extremely disgusting”), bad breath, * and purulent rhinitis. The book, some of whose European editions went through more than forty printings, includes twenty-five
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