Sex Researchers Discover the Clitoris

As an historian of sex, I surely must open this post with the following delightful quotation from Tom Laqueur’s book Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud:

"In 1559 [...] Columbus—not Christopher but Renaldus—claims to have discovered the clitoris. He tells his 'most gentle reader' that this is 'preeminently the seat of woman’s delight.' Like a penis, 'if you touch it, you will find it rendered a little harder and oblong to such a degree that it shows itself as a sort of male member.' Conquistador of an unknown land, Columbus stakes his claim: 'Since no one has discerned these projections and their workings, if it is permissible to give names to things discovered by me, it should be called the love or sweetness of Venus.' Like Adam, he felt himself entitled to name what he found in nature: a female penis."

I am happy to report that finally—four hundred and fifty years later—sex researchers have rediscovered the clitoris. What am I talking about?

For years now, we’ve been hearing that men on average are sexually target-specific, while women on average are not. In other words, if you show men various kinds of pornography while having a little measuring device strapped to their penises, those penises don’t get hard to every type of pornography; instead, they seem to evince a distinct preference for either men or for women as sexual “targets.” By contrast, if you insert a blood-flow measuring device into women’s vaginas and show them various kinds of porn, well, they appear to become aroused to just about everything sexual—men, women, monkeys, you name it.

Fetish or Orientation? The Case of Men Wearing Female Masks

This week in his ever-pleasurable Savage Love iPhone app, the internationally-syndicated sex advice columnist Dan Savage reprinted a question from a woman whose boyfriend "enjoys wearing women's clothing and acting like a submissive woman when we have sex." The woman told Dan, "Nothing gets him off more. We have only just started exploring his fetish in the past year because he has been ashamed of it all his life. I have encouraged him so far and now we have a couple hundred dollars' worth of sexy women's clothing that fits him. Last night he asked me if he could wear a latex mask of a woman's face during sex."

As one can see, Dan’s reader termed her boyfriend’s proclivities “his fetish,” but as Dan implied in his response, the boyfriend’s interests may be more like a sexual orientation. What’s the difference? In sex research and in clinical psychology, “fetish” usually refers to an object (like a particular article of clothing) or substance (like latex) that an individual finds particularly sexually arousing. By contrast, a sexual orientation is more about how we are wired to interact (or not) sexually with others.

Out of curiosity, I asked Ray Blanchard, a sex researcher, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, his thoughts on this reader’s boyfriend. Ray and I actually met over the sexual orientation possibly at issue here, namely autogynephilia, when I wrote a history of a controversy over autogynephilia.

Does Monogamy Really Drive Us to Drink?

A recent article by Mara Squicciarini and Jo Swinnen in the journal of the American Association of Wine Economists (and no, I'm not making that up) suggested the answer to that question might be "yes." Wrote the authors: "Historically, we find a correlation between the shift from polygyny to monogamy and the growth of alcohol consumption. Cross-culturally we also find that monogamous societies consume more alcohol than polygynous societies in the pre-industrial world."

Naturally, lots of bloggers picked up the story, delighted (as bloggers almost always are) to be told what they already believed to be true: monogamy is so frustrating it drives us to drink. Implicitly they were suggesting a beer in the hand is not worth two in the bush.

I was curious to know whether this article might actually support the idea that monogamy drives us to drink, so I asked my colleague Raymond Hames, Chair of Anthropology at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, to give it a look-see. Ray seemed the perfect person to ask, since his work is cited in this article, he's studied some of the populations considered, and he's engaged (with a former student) in a major study of polyandry.

Pink Boys with Puppy Dog Tails

What to do with a "pink boy"?

In my e-mail in-box a few weeks ago, I received a polite message from a woman named Sarah Hoffman who was writing to ask why I was being such a gender conservative. Sarah didn't quite put it that way, but that was the gist of her message, and given that I'm usually accused of being a gender radical, I sat up and listened. And as I read the whole of Sarah's message, I realized she was absolutely right.

Sarah identifies herself as a mother of a "pink boy" - a boy whose manner of play and dress has often tended toward what's common in girls. Sarah was writing to me specifically in response to a piece I'd written for the Hastings Center Report called "Gender Identity Disorder in Childhood: Inconclusive Advice to Parents." There I had outlined the two basic clinical approaches taken to children labeled as having "gender identity disorder," and had mentioned my sympathies for and reservations about each.

Meet the Hebephiles, the Missing Link between Pedophiles and the Rest of Us

Consider the little-known group falling between pedophiles and the rest of us. But first, their sponsors....

Like the dinner party guest who manages to put more feet in his mouth than he even has, on Tuesday, the Vatican equated pedophiles and those who seek the ordination of women, at least in terms of their place in Church doctrine. Yes, apparently priests who use their office to repeatedly sexually assault children are now officially akin to those who might dare to suggest women are capable of serving the Lord in the same manner as men. The mind reels.

This whacked worldview is at least sort of cohesive. To do the Vatican Hustle, you just pair up any non-normative gender behavior with the devil (or his alleged earthly representatives), and dance! Damn to hell any women who might actively seek power, and tell the world that the root problem of the sexual abuse of young boys is gay men, not pedophilia

For those of you who haven't been following the Vatican edition of "Dancing with the Stars (around Your Head)", the issue of the ordination of women has arisen in this context because some have suggested that introducing women into the priesthood might help stem the problem of sexual abuse. And indeed, if the guys at the Vatican knew any sexology, they'd know there's something to this idea.

Hot Cosmo Piece Screws Nasty Men!

Why do some women pay to let scummy men get into their pants?

I've been bemoaning the death of the free press a lot lately. With Internet competition, newspapers just don't have the resources to support good investigative journalism much anymore. So imagine my surprise when, on the check-out line of my grocery store yesterday, I discovered that the free press is alive and well in the form of . . . Cosmo?

"VAGINAS UNDER ATTACK," screams the cover of the July issue: "Don't Let Greedy Gyno Talk You Into This Horrible Mistake." So I'm going to forgive Cosmo the mistake of capitalizing a preposition in a title. Because Molly Triffin's on-the-ground reporting for Cosmo has the potential to save scores of young women from unnecessary pain, scarring, and loss of sexual function.

Inside the magazine, Triffin's story gets the title "WARNING: These Doctors May Be Dangerous to Your Vagina." Again, I'm going to forgive Cosmo, this time for using the word "vagina" to talk mostly about vulvas. Why? Because Triffin kicks ass. She bothered to go for herself to the International Society of Cosmetogynecology's Global Symposium on Cosmetic Vaginal Surgery.

And what did she see there?

Notes Home

What if we admitted to children that sex is primarily about pleasure?

A couple of months ago, the sex education notice came home in my nine-year-old son's backpack. I didn't realize that, in our district, sex ed starts in the fourth grade. Another sign of the state having more access to my baby than I sometimes wish.

When I handed the note to my mate at the dinner table, our son said with something of a proud smile, "I told Mrs. Reverby we've already talked about it at home."

The mate and I looked at each other and obviously had the same thought. Two weeks before, the class had been learning about electricity. The teacher had gotten stuck on some questions about batteries, so she had turned to our son, who was able to explain to the class exactly how batteries charge, recharge, and discharge. He's learned a lot about electricity at home.

And quite a lot about sex.