Thomas Laqueur, Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology

Thomas Laqueur, Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology, in Representations, No. 14, The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century. (Spring, 1986), pp. 1-41.

Near the end of the century of Enlightenment, medical science and those who relied upon it ceased to regard the female orgasm as relevant to generation (1)

By 1800 this view, like that linking orgasm to conception, has come under devastating attack. Writers of all sorts were determined to base what they insisted were fundamental differences between male and female sexuality, and thus between man and woman, on discoverable biological distinctions. … Not only are the sexes different, they are different in every conceivable respect of body and soul, in every physical and moral aspect. (2)

Indeed until the 1930s standard medical advice books recommended that to avoid conception woman should have intercourse during the middle of their menstrual cycles—i.e., during days twelve through sixteen, now known as the period of maximum fertility. Until the 1930s even the outlines of our modern understanding of the hormonal control of ovulation were unknown. Thus, while scientific advances might in principle have caused a change in the understanding of the female orgasm, in fact the reevaluation of pleasure occurred a century and a half before reproductive physiology came to its support. (3)

In this model, sexual excitement and the “very great pleasure” of climax in both men and women are understood as signs of a heat sufficient to concoct and comingle the seed, the animate matter, and create new life. Friction heats the body as it would two objects rubbing together. (5)

Though her orgasm occurs whether she emits before or after the man, it is most intense if it occurs at the moment the sperm and its heat touches the womb. Then, like the flame flaring when wine is sprinkled on it, the woman’s heat blazes most brilliantly. (7)

Indeed, the menses, until one hundred years before its phantasmagoric nineteenth-century interpretations by Michelet and others, was still regarded, as it had been Hippocrates, as but one form of bleeding by which women rid themselves of excess materials. (9)

…orgasm in both sexes the sign of warmth sufficient to transform one kind of bodily fluid into its reproductively potent forms… (9)

Of course, it is argued in a great body of Renaissance literature that barrenness might well be due to anatomical defects and arguably to witchcraft, but either a lack of passion or an excess of lust had to be considered in any differential diagnosis. In men, insufficient heat manifested by a lack of sexual desire could be remedied by rubbing the loins with heat-producing drugs. … In women adversity and indisposition “to the pleasures of the lawful sheets” or “no pleasure and delight” in intercourse, along with a slow pulse, little thirst, thin urine, scant pubic hair, and similar signs, were almost certain indicators of insufficient heat of the testicles to concoct the seed. … Conversely, too much desire (prostitutes were thought seldom to conceive); curly, dark, and plentiful hair (marks of the virago, the virile, unnaturally warm woman); normal women were eliminated through the monthly courses) indicated excessive heat, which will consume or shrivel up the see. (9-10)

…the command to be fruitful and multiply linked personal experience to a greater social and cosmic order. On the one hand concupiscence and the irresistible attractions of sexual rapture stood as marks in the flesh of mankind’s fall from grace, … only the fact that a mercifully short memory and an insatiable desire made women forget the dangerous agonies of childbirth allowed the human race to continue. (12)

The female reproductive system can be, and indeed on occasion was still in the late nineteenth century, “accurately” rendered in the manner of Vesalius long after the old homologies had lost their credibility. But after the late seventeenth century and the collapse of the heriarchical model there was, in general, no longer any reason to draw the vagina and external pudenda in the same frame with the uterus and the ovaries. Bodies did not change, but the meanings of the relationship between their parts did. (12)

Thus, until the very end of the seventeenth century there seemed no difficulty in holding that women had an organ homologous, through topological inversion, to the penis inside their bodies, the vagina, and another one morphologically homologous to the penis, outside, the clitoris. (14)

The fact that criticisms of the Galenic model are not only self-evident but were also sprinkled throughout the literature is a reminded that the cultural construction of the female in relation to the male, while expressed in terms of the body’s concrete realities, was more deeply grounded in assumptions about the nature of politics and society. It was the abandonment of these assumptions in the Enlightenment that made the hierarchically ordered system of homologies hopelessly inappropriate. The new biology, with its search for fundamental differences between the sexes and between their desires, emerged at precisely the time when the foundations of the old social order were irremediably shaken. Indeed, Havelock Ellis discovered, “It seems to have been reserved for the nineteenth century to state that women are apt to be congenitally incapable of experiencing complete sexual satisfaction and are peculiarly liable to sexual anaesthesia” (16)

Neither advances in reproductive biology nor anatomical discoveries seem sufficient to explain the dramatic revaluation of the female orgasm that occurred in the late eighteenth century and the even more dramatic reinterpretation of the female body in relation to that of the male… Writers form the eighteenth century onward sought in the facts of biology a justification for cultural and political differences between the sexes that were crucial to the articulation of both feminist and antifeminist arguments. Political theorists beginning with Hobbes had argued that there is no basis in nature for any specific sort of authority—of a king over his people, of slaveholder over slave, nor, it followed, of man over woman. There seemed no reason why the universalistic claims made for human liberty and equality during the Enlightenment should exclude half of humanity. And, of course, revolution, the argument made in blood that mankind in all its social and cultural relations could be remade, engendered both a new feminism and a new fear of women. (17-18)

But reinterpretations of the body were more than simply ways of reestablishing hierarchy in an age when its metaphysical foundations were being rapidly effaced. Liberalism postulates a body that, if not sexless, is nevertheless undifferentiated in its desires, interests, or capacity to reason. In striking contrast to the old teleology of the body as male, liberal theory begins with a neuter body, sexes but without gender, and of no consequence to cultural discourse. The body is regarded simply as the bearer of the rational subject, which itself constitutes the person. The problem for this theory then is how to derive the real world of male dominion of women, of sexual passion and jealousy, of the sexual division of labor and cultural practices generally from an original state of genderless bodies. … A novel construal of nature comes to serve as the foundation of otherwise indefensible social practices. (18-19)

If women are indeed simply a version of men, as the old model would have had it, then what justifies women writing, or acting in public, or making any other claims for themselves as women? Thus feminism, too—or at least historical versions of feminisms—depends upon and generates a biology of incommensurability. (19)

Rousseau … Hobbes, he argues, erred in using the struggle of male animals for access to females as evidence for the natural combativeness of the primitive human state. True, he concedes, there is bitter competition among beasts for the opportunity to mate, but this is because for much of the year females refused the male advance. [animals, not humans] (19)

Rousseau… “In everything not connected with sex, woman is man… In everything connected with sex, woman and man are in every respect related but in every respect different”. But, of course, a great deal about women is connected with sex: “The male is male only at certain moments. The female is female her whole life… Everything constantly recalls her sex to her.” (20)

Rousseau… Indeed, all of civilization seems to have arisen in consequence of the secular fall from innocence when the first woman made herself temporarily unavailable to the first man. (21)

Scottish Enlightenment, John Millar… Thus civilization in Millar’s account leads to an increasing differentiation of male and female social roles; this greater differentiation of roles—and specifically what he takes to be improvements in the lot of women—are signs of moral progress. But women themselves in more civilized societies are also the engines of further advance. “In such a state, the pleasures which nature has grafted upon love between the sexes, become the source of an elegant correspondence, and are likely to have a general influence upon the commerce of society.” In this, the highest state—he is thinking of French salon society” (22)