How Freud's untested orgasm theory was taken apart by later sex researchers
In 1905 Sigmund Freud declared that grown women ought to switch from one kind of climax to another, and he offered no data at all. Decades of interviews and lab work later, Alfred Kinsey, Masters and Johnson and a feminist essayist had dismantled the idea, though many women had already been told they were failing.
The word comes from the Greek orgasmos, meaning excitement or swelling. Clinicians tend to define the event narrowly: rhythmic involuntary contractions in the pelvic region plus characteristic shifts in heart rate, blood pressure and breathing, all run by the autonomic nervous system. Even so, a 2001 issue of Clinical Psychology Review catalogued at least 26 competing definitions, and psychologists, endocrinologists and neurologists each frame it differently.
Freud's claim was that a response centred on the clitoris belonged to adolescence, and that mature women should transfer to a purely vaginal response. He never tested this. Its effect was large anyway, because it put intercourse at the centre of female satisfaction and left many women feeling inadequate. Kinsey, who ran the first big national surveys of American sexual behaviour, became the first researcher to attack the notion head-on; after interviewing thousands of women he concluded that most of them could not climax through the vagina alone and accused Freud of projecting male ideas onto female bodies. Masters and Johnson, and later Shere Hite, broadly backed him. Their findings arrived during second-wave feminism and prompted Anne Koedt to write The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.
Attempts to sort female responses into types kept multiplying. The philosopher Irving Singer proposed three categories in 1973, drawn from literature rather than a laboratory. Ladas, Whipple and Perry offered their own trio in 1982, and in 1999 Whipple and Komisaruk suggested a fourth route via the cervix. Most scientists now argue that no such typology is needed, and a January 2012 review in The Journal of Sexual Medicine found the G-spot far less well defined than popular media implied.
Some findings cut across the sexes. In a 1976 study by Vance and Wagner, independent raters reading written accounts could not tell which were by men and which by women. Brain measurements show reduced metabolic activity across much of the cerebral cortex while limbic areas hold steady or grow busier, and the calm afterwards is linked to oxytocin, prolactin and endorphins. Climax through arousal of the mind alone was first documented in people with spinal cord injuries.
Source: Orgasm
