O My God: Discussing The Female Orgasm

Since just about forever, female sexuality has been seen as the Freudian ‘dark continent’, mysterious and terrifying. When I started buying Cosmo at about 13, all the articles (the ones that weren’t poorly advised blowjob tips or how to crimp your hair) were on whether or not you could find your G Spot. Before I’d even let someone take off my bra, I was worried about if I’d ever enjoy sex because enjoying it just seemed so difficult. By the time I was about 16, a few fraught and awkward encounters later, it was all the rage for the problem pages to let me know that most women didn’t actually orgasm through penetrative sex alone. Basically, throughout the many years I devoted myself to glossy-paged self-help magazines, sex advice for women changed a lot, to the extent where they were preaching the exact opposite just a few years later. When filmic technologies were developed, Edison commissioned a single-shot short film called `The Sneeze’, which he intended to be a `pretty young woman’ sneezing, losing control of herself (sadly for Edison, they couldn’t find one so he ended up with Fred Ott who worked at the factory). It doesn’t take the biggest leap of faith to imagine that this capture of an involuntary bodily function somehow correlates with orgasm, and how bizarre it is how preoccupied we are with capturing these moments, since the very start.

Woman’s sexuality has historically been derived from her similitude to man; he has a penis, she wants one; Adam is bored, God makes woman from his rib and so forth. Nowadays, we try as hard as we can to see the female orgasm because we are so accustomed to judging pleasure by the visible orgasm of men. This obsession with ocularity is blinding when it comes to women, because as long as their pleasure is being recognised in masculine terms, they’re fucked; their bodies just don’t work the same way, so there is no point in trying to see the unseeable. If female pleasure can only be understood in terms of masculine ocularity and ejaculation, the visually verifiable, then it can not be understood. And everyone seems like they really want to understand it.

Film critic Linda Williams says that ‘the late nineteenth-century invention of “machines of the visible” [cameras] create even more peculiar forms of blindness’- the more we try to show the female orgasm, the more invisible it becomes. We have abandoned the Keatsian notion that unravishment is the ultimate, that `heard melodies are sweet / but those unheard are sweeter’ but we want to see woman and see every aspect of her, like we can see man. We are compelled to finally comprehend every dimension of her sexuality, we have television programmes which insert cameras into the vagina whilst a woman has sex so we can see what that looks like (who wants to know?!), women in Playboy spread their legs as far apart as they can go, but we still can’t have the equivalent of the money shot of male ejaculation. Knowledge is power, and in order for this power, woman must be known- and you literally cannot see her come. And so the female orgasm is fetishised as the groans, the standardised posturing of a woman’s flung back head, etc in hardcore, but also on your Herbal Essences adverts.

Naomi Wolf points out: ‘The perfected woman lies prone, pressing down her pelvis. Her back arches, her nipples erect, there is a fine spray of moisture over her golden skin. The position is female superior: the state of arousal, the plateau phase just preceding orgasm. On the next age, a version of her, mouth open, eyes shut, is about to tongue the pink tip of a lipstick cylinder. […] for Triton showers, a naked woman, back arched, flings her arms upwards… In these images, where the face is visible, it is expressionless in a rictus of ecstasy. The reader understands from them that she will have to look like that if she wants to feel like that.’

And so the body, the appearance of the female body that is, comes to be innately associated with female orgasm. Men come to expect this as a signifier of their sexual prowess and women come to expect it within themselves. Pornography, implied within advertising or full on hardcore, doesn’t represent real sex between real people; these people are actors and actresses, their pleasure mimed, the sex stopped, started, and stopped again. It presents actual sex with a bizarre aim: to mimic the staged and, quite frankly, we cannot mime the female orgasm because it is internal (with the occasional variant, as I’m sure someone is going to point out somewhere if I don’t: see Samantha’s lesbian encounter in Sex and the City or any number of RedTube clips).

Woman’s ultimate experience of pleasure is now represented as a foil for someone else’s. Having a conversation about faking orgasms on a TV show, one of my friends joked ‘and we all bloody well know how to do that’. I just figured that summed up everything I felt about how much more there has to be done before there is a sense of actual sexual equality. If 21 year old girls are faking it, and faking it in the style of perfume ads or softcore porn or hardcore porn or whatever way female orgasm is culturally constructed, that sucks. Because I don’t know any women that come like that lady in the bathroom on the aeroplane (seriously? from shampoo?) and it’s not just because they aren’t having good enough sex.

I’m not saying that men hate female sexual liberty, or that women hate themselves, or anything like that because it’s not true at all. I do, however, think it’s important to remember that flinging your head back as dramatically as Jenna Jameson, you are probably just going to give yourself whiplash and little else, and that if your girlfriend isn’t screaming like Samantha Jones, it’s nothing to cry about. I mean, if she’s watching Newsnight over your shoulder, it’s not a great sign, but I just think that, when you’re doing whatever you’re doing, the last thing that needs to be on anyone’s mind is if they look like they are having fun. I suppose, if you are having that much fun, it’s not going to be what you’re thinking about anyway.