Vagina: A New Biography

by Naomi Wolf

  We saw how powerful the role of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) is—that is, relaxation—in preparing a woman’s body for arousal. Buried within a study of an unrelated phenomenon—the famous 1981 study by John Delbert Perry and Beverly Whipple of the G-spot and female ejaculation—the researchers shared some important asides about the environment in which they tested their female subjects’ vaginal sensations.6 Perry and Whipple discovered a difference, in their terms, between uterine and vulval (clitoral) orgasms. They measured women’s responses when the G-spot was touched, they measured the women’s uterine contractions during orgasm, and they recorded whether or not they “ejaculated”—that is, emitted from their urethras a clear fluid. (Researchers are still debating whether or not female ejaculation has been proved, and are not completely certain what the urethral liquid consists of.)

  In this aside, Perry and Whipple cautioned other scientists to take into account the role that the environmental setting was likely to play on the orgasmic outcomes they measured. In other words, Perry and Whipple had sought to look at G-spot sensation versus other kinds of vaginal and clitoral sensation; but in the process they were finding that the comfort and lighting of the setting affected the intensity of the orgasms that they were measuring, and even affected whether or not their female subjects could ejaculate.

  In one case, the researchers tested a subject in a sterile, bright doctor’s office—a setting many people associate with pain, illness, and disease. The subject, disappointed in her “poor showing” in that environment, requested that the test be redone. “Propitiously,” the authors wrote, “the physician’s office [that had been used previously for the test] was not available for the re-evaluation procedure, which was carried out in the subject’s own living room, in the presence of her sexual partner. In this setting, her vaginal myograph measurement was 26 microvolts (compared with 11.8 in the office), and her uterine myograph measurement was 36 microvolts (compared with 6.88 a few days earlier). The subject was greatly relieved at the new data thus obtained, which she felt better reflected her self-understanding of her state of sexual health.”7

  Then another group confirmed this first subject’s dramatically different results in a more cozy setting. Because of a scheduling glitch, a whole group of test subjects also had to shift their second test locations. This second location was also a doctor’s office, as the first one had been. But this office, in contrast, was one in which biofeedback was done. Biofeedback requires a relaxation response in the subject, in order to be successful. The second office was soothingly lighted, comfortably furnished, and appealingly decorated.

  In the lower-lit, more aesthetically pleasing settings, the same women’s orgasm intensity measurements jumped. The same group of women even ejaculated more often in the more pleasant, more relaxing second setting than in the clinical first setting.

  If you read the researchers’ careful scientific language, you can see that they are saying that the more “seductive” physical setting led women who ejaculated to have almost twice as many “microvolts” in the measurements of their vaginal contractions and almost four times as many in their uterine contractions during orgasm than women had had in the brightly lit, clinical setting—and what girl doesn’t want that:

  The substantial difference between these two measurements on the same subject suggested a variety of post hoc explanations such as partner presence, fatigue, menstrual cycle position, experimental environment, and practice effects. The only variable for which data were available was experimental environment. Subjects were retrospectively divided into two groups; one consisted of those women who had been measured while on a standard gynecological examining table in a physician’s office or clinic, and the second group was comprised of women who were measured while in a reclining chair or upon a sofa in a biofeedback therapist’s office.

  The results of this post hoc analysis suggest that the environment of the examination may have been important. There were only slight differences in the case of non-ejaculators, who tend to have weaker muscles. But for ejaculators, the differences were substantial: the 6 ejaculatory women measured on a gynecological table averaged 8.32 uV (SD = 3.44) with the vaginal myograph, compared with 12.95 uV (SD = 6.15) for the remaining 19 women, t (16) = 2.33, p = .05. Uterine myograph differences were also noted. The 5 ejaculatory women on the gynecological table group averaged 7.38 uV (SD = 3.51) compared with 15.88 uV (SD = 4.42) for the 11 other ejaculatory women, t (10) = 4.13, p < .01.8

  Beverly Whipple has found an even more groundbreaking connection between the differences in how vaginal, clitoral, and G-spot orgasms are experienced by women, and different parts of the female brain. In a 2011 presentation, Whipple and her coauthors showed that indeed clitoral, vaginal, and G-spot sensations and orgasms appear in different—that is, separable—but related parts of the female brain; not only that, but they found that women use different emotional and sensory descriptors for clitoral, vaginal, G-spot, and “blended” orgasms (with most women preferring “blended”). These differences are so well documented by Whipple’s work that she calls cervical or G-spot orgasm “deep orgasm” and designed a vibrator specifically to activate it.9

  The conclusion that Whipple and Perry drew from their earlier, 1981, study is clear, and potentially very exciting: “this post hoc analysis . . . does suggest that careful attention to the experimental environment and its ‘sexual’ (or antisexual) mood is necessary in future research into sexual functioning.”10

  Many women have spoken to me about what they feel they have lost, sexually, in long-term relationships. I have noticed that many women speak with great bitterness about having to be the one to make reservations for “date night,” or to hire the babysitter on Valentine’s Day. This bitterness is intensified if the women remember a courtship period in which they did not have to do this kind of work. There seems, in their narratives, to be something about “having to be the one” to do this labor—it is described as labor—that is connected to sexual flatness; their resentment seems linked to some sense that if they make the reservation for date night, the night won’t be arousing to them; they will be, romantically, going through the motions somehow.

  When they have to do all the romantic “work,” they are angry because they are rightly perceiving that their men have abdicated their role of tending to the absolutely minimally necessary tasks that continually reignite their wives’ desire for them. They are angry because they know the men will want sex later, but they feel that the men have stopped valuing the wives’ own arousal.

  (They are also angry because they probably are starting to get tense and uncomfortable, anticipating, as Dr. Pfaus’s sexually frustrated female rats eventually did, bad sex; arousal without good release—negatively activated dopamine—is, as Dr. Pfaus explained earlier, an extremely physically negative experience for female mammals, whether they are in a laboratory cage, or in a suburban bedroom.)

  Straight men would do well to ask themselves: “Do I want to be married to a Goddess—or a bitch?” Unfortunately, there is not, physiologically, much middle ground available for women. Either they are extremely well treated sexually, or, if solo, treat themselves well sexually—or else they are at risk of becoming physically uncomfortable and emotionally irritable. As Dr. Pfaus’s studies on female sexual stress reveal, the stress levels caused by sexual frustration are not something female mammals can control. Tantra and neuroscience strongly suggests to men in that situation, even if they think their wives or girlfriends are temporarily insane: Bring home a rose. Make the restaurant reservation. Tidy the bedroom. Light the candle.

  HELP HER GO INTO AN ORGASMIC TRANCE STATE

  Relaxation and disinhibition go together. The SNS, when it is really activated, is a female sexual trance state’s best friend.

  Recent neuroscience is confirming what Tantra has always maintained—and what the loss-of-self scenes in women’s greatest fictions hint at: climaxing women go into a trance state that is different from what men exper
ience in orgasm. In “Regional Cerebral Blood Flow Changes Associated with Clitorally Induced Orgasm in Healthy Women,” Janniko R. Georgiadis and others looked at MRI images of the brains of women subjects who had been asked, first, rather awkwardly, to imitate the body contractions of arousal and orgasm but try not to become aroused—this was to control for movement showing up on the MRI—and then, having done that, they were asked to go ahead and masturbate, or be masturbated by their partners, to orgasm. The MRI images of the women’s brains exploding in rainbow spots of color at the moment of orgasm—in different places in the brain than the researchers had expected—was an image of breakthrough science: “the first account of brain regions involved in experience of clitoral stimulation.”11

  The findings could be read as hinting—not by any means confirming—that the ages-old fear that sex makes women into something like witches, or into maenads who have no moral boundaries at the moment of orgasm, may have a bit of truth to it. The researchers found “significant deactivation of dorsomedial prefrontal cortex,” which is the location of the brain’s engagement with “moral reasoning and social judgment.” This finding “implies absence of moral judgment and self-referential thought” in just that part of the brain that usually takes care of those functions, at the moment of orgasm. This suggests that when women are climaxing they lose an awareness of a separate self, lose self-consciousness, find it hard to self-censor—as when a woman can’t help vocalizing, for instance, in a hotel room with thin walls, even if she will be embarrassed after lovemaking that she has caused a ruckus. The Georgiadis group found “increasing RCBF during stimulation for inhibition,” which means that the women’s brains were showing less activity in the area where behavior can be inhibited. This confirmed an earlier finding by Mah and Binik, in 2001, which showed engagement in the area of the female brain during orgasm that regulated “loss of conscious control.”12 The later researchers also found that female orgasm was experienced in the “ventral midbrain”—which is exactly where the Tantric “third eye” is supposed to extend into. (Dopamine is active here: the ventral midbrain is where the “dopaminergic cell” group is located.)

  But the finding of this group of scientists, that women go into a disinhibited, out-of-conscious-control trance state, is important to understand for other reasons as well. Indeed, when Janniko Georgiadis and his colleagues found that clitoral orgasm creates activity in a part of the brain related to behavioral disinhibition and deregulation, they explained, quite poetically for a journal of neuroscience, why the French refer to female orgasm as “le petit mort” (the little death). They made the point that for women, unlike for men, orgasm leads to a state that feels like a loss of a certain kind of regulated consciousness, or a loss of a certain kind of self. I think this finding is extraordinarily important in our understanding that sex has radically different meanings and associations for women than for men. We should realize that in terms of certain aspects of pleasure, there are similarities in sex for women and men; but we err if we stop there. In some senses having to do with consciousness—and not with pleasure—sex for women is a different thing altogether than sex is for men.

  I believe that this neurological activation of an experience of a lost self, a submersion in a tide of a force beyond one’s own control, an overtakenness with disinhibition against all of one’s conscious will, has powerfully influenced women’s fiction. Images of awakened sexuality leading to the dissolution of a limited sense of self abound in women’s novels. Edna Pontellier, the heroine of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, once she is sexually awakened, swims out naked to sea, and to a possible death. Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, once sexually awakened, as we saw, is swept out to her death in a flood. Christina Rossetti’s Laura and Lizzie, in “Goblin Market,” once they taste the erotic fruits of “goblin men,” are nearly torn apart and annihilated. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, in the novel of that title, once sexually awakened, loses consciousness, nearly starving to death on a heath after a storm. Perhaps these scenes are not about sexual punishment, but rather reflect glimpses of altered states related to sexual fulfillment, and perhaps, too, they reflect the understandable anxiety caused in women writers and subjects who value self-control over the disinhibition of the female brain in a state of sexual transcendence. So many women writers, from Charlotte Brontë to Christina Rossetti to Edith Wharton, express both an attraction to and a fear of an erotic loss of self or loss of control. If you understand the science, this fear of and attraction to the female orgasmic experience—because it involves the sense of a dissolved self and a loss of conscious control—are both very reasonable reactions on the part of women writers and artists, and indeed, women in general.

  Neuroscientists are identifying parts of the brain that may be connected to some people’s self-reported experiences of “oneness” or the dissolution of a sense of self, even if that experience is very brief. Kevin Nelson, M.D., in his book, The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist’s Search for the God Experience, speculates that the sense of a “loss of self” in the mystical experience may be related to the shutting down in certain moments of “the temporoparietal brain”; he notes that “important parts of the neurological self are within the tempoparietal brain,” and that when the brain centers that construct a “neurological self” are quieted, people can have the sense of “oneness with something larger.”13 Could this be useful in reading the possible implications of the Georgiadis study? Could it be useful in understanding the attraction and dread that recurs in women’s fiction toward scenes of sexual awakening that are followed with scenes that seem to threaten erasure of the self?

  Edith Wharton writes to her lover Morton Fullerton about the “golden blur” that her thoughts and words—her conscious identity—become at his touch, and she uses a vaginal metaphor of a chest or box full of treasures to enter and describe this mind-state:

  I’m so afraid that the treasures I long to unpack for you, that have come to me in magic ships from enchanted islands, are only, to you, the old familiar calico and beads of the clever trader. . . . I’m so afraid of this, that often & often I stuff my shining treasures back into their box, lest I should see you smiling at them!

  Well! And if you do . . . And if you can’t come into a room without my feeling all over a ripple of flame, &, wherever you touch me, a heart beats under your touch, & if, when you hold me, & I don’t speak, it’s because all the words seem to me to have become throbbing pulses, & all my thoughts are a great golden blur—why should I be afraid of your smiling at me, when I can turn the beads and calico into such beauty?14

  In The House of Mirth (1905), Wharton also seeks to describe the loss of self that realized sexual passion threatens, or proposes, to women as she describes her heroine, Lily Bart’s, sexual temptation: “The mortal maid on the shore is helpless against the siren who loves her prey: such victims are floated back dead from their adventure.”15

  This activation of the part of the brain involved with a loss of all conscious boundaries poses an incredible challenge to the female writer or female philosopher because it means that women’s experiences of the boundaries of the self—if these women are orgasmic—are regularly different from men’s experiences of the boundaries of self. The self has been constructed in masculine, Western philosophy as rational, conscious, guided by will, and master of discrete boundaries and of autonomy; but orgasmic women’s brains regularly have a subjective experience of the self as unbounded, flowing into or overtaken by a greater force, limitless, not subject to conscious control. The uncanniness of that orgasmic loss of control certainly could be why men have portrayed women sexually as irrational, as maenads and witches.

  That wild cell group in that crazy, out-of-control female ventral midbrain? It responds ecstatically to a whole range of stimuli: “this cell group plays a crucial role in a wide range of rewarding behaviors [Macbride et al. 1997, Sell et al. 1999], including euphoric states induced by drugs [Breite et al. 1997, Sell et
al. 1999], pleasurable music [Blood and Zotorre 2001] and eating chocolate [Small et al. 2001].”16 These researchers found the physical mechanism for why orgasm was reinforcing in women—how it led them to seek out those ecstatic feelings, those heroin-like feelings, again and again: “PSA correlated positively with RCBF in ventral midbrain” which explained “the reinforcing nature of orgasm in women.” That is, they found the science that underlies millennia of patriarchal fear of female sexuality: when women have orgasms they are indeed biologically designed to find them reinforcing—to want more and more and more.

  The Georgiadis researchers cited other studies that showed—feminists may not like this—that “cervical stimulation was more important than clitoral in activating the female hypothalamus [Komisaruk et al 2004].” Why does this matter at all? The hypothalamus is “well known for its role in female reproductive behavior [Dr. Pfaus 1999]” and “during female orgasm it may release oxytocin [Carmichael 1999].”17 If you are a heterosexual couple, a vaginal or blended orgasm is more likely to get you pregnant because of the role of what is unpoetically called “upsuck” in vaginal contractions. This is not to advocate any one approach over any other or to suggest that you should try to like something, sexually, that you may not like. It is just to disclose what scientists are beginning to know about the different kinds of female orgasms that are more or less likely to get you pregnant, and more or less likely to make you fall in love and stay in love.