The Best You'll Ever Have by Shannon Mullen

Author:Shannon Mullen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307421845
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

This thinking lingers, even now. Consider this: is it “real sex” if your partner penetrates you and comes, but you don’t? Is it “real sex” if you give him a blowjob or jerk him off? Is it “real sex” if he goes down on you and nothing more? Expanding the definition of real sex to revolve around a woman’s orgasm or to include oral and manual sex without penetration is still a hard sell. Bill Clinton didn’t view his hummer from Monica as “real sex.” For the most part, the nation agreed.

Medieval writers actually thought that women experienced pleasure by receiving male semen and believed nothing else was required to satisfy them. Semen was promoted as salubrious for women, so much so that contraceptive barriers were discouraged despite sexually transmitted disease and the life-and-death risks of childbirth.

Cultural taboos around masturbation made this situation even more horrible. A solo flight was considered immoral, a danger to women’s health, and a cause of insanity (ironic, isn’t it, that NOT masturbating drove these poor, frustrated women over the edge). More crucially, the men of that age believed that masturbation could lead to a lack of interest in intercourse and infertility. Furthermore, as men wrote in medical journals through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, woman who actually enjoyed sex were considered nymphomaniacs who were likely to cheat on their husbands, thereby threatening the concept of monogamy, the framework of the family, and the entire construct of a civilized society. Women were doomed if they didn’t get off and under suspicion if they did.

The diagnosis of hysteria ended in the middle of the twentieth century, not that long ago, only to be replaced with “frigidity” (a concern that went back to the early Freud days as well), which is defined as a lack of interest in intercourse or coldness to a husband’s advances. Frigidity was treated with muscle relaxants, hypnosis, and psychotherapy. In 1910, up to 75 percent of “civilized” women were thought be frigid (see how the numbers remain creepily consistent?). Turn-of-the-century radicals spoke out and suggested that hysteria and frigidity were both due to brutish treatment by husbands. But these dissidents were thought of as a bunch of crazies. As recently as the 1960s, doctors were actively discouraging men from satisfying their wives. Dr. Alexander Lowen, author of the 1965 book Love and Orgasm, was a student of Wilhelm Reich’s, who was looking into the orgasmic response and repression of sexuality, and Dr. Lowen had been writing on it himself since the early 1940s. By 1965, he knew and was clear in his writing that women needed direct clitoral stimulation to orgasm, but he made it clear that he empathized with the men at that time who thought that there was no good time to do this. He said that most men feel that bringing a woman to “climax through direct clitoral stimulation is a burden.” Before intercourse was a bad time because the man could lose his erection doing all that hard

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