The Selling of the Female Orgasm

By Rachel Lehmann-Haupt, AlterNet
Posted on May 22, 2000, Printed on December 22, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/9188/

The last time so many well-bred, heterosexual women were so brazen about sexuality was that year at summer camp when they discovered lipstick, smoking and boys. Fed-up with dating by "the rules," many seem to be refusing to wait by the phone and are engaging in more casual encounters, then bragging about them to their friends. They may have come to this openness through countless 50-minute therapy sessions or simply taken to heart Sex and the City, but it seems that there's no going back for the ladies who power-lunch.

This ribald attitude towards female fleshy pleasure is not only pulling up a chair at fashionable restaurants and hogging the remote during primetime, but has jumped onto the big screen. Coming Soon, a new film by Colette Burson, 31, portrays precocious Manhattan teenager girls on the prowl for better sex. A year ago, Burson, a New York film maker, couldn't get distribution for the film because Hollywood told her that portraying teenager girls in pursuit of an orgasm was "too lurid." But now the film has Manhattan power babes laughing in their salads about younger version of themselves.

The film has officially joined the ranks of post-feminists icons like Bust magazine and Eve Ensler's frank-talking The Vagina Monologues, which played to women hipsters (and their sensitized male counterparts) at a fringe theater when it opened three years ago, but now has men and women on the upper west side popping in to the Barnes and Noble sporting buttons that read "Vagina Friendly."

Courtney Weaver, a former sex columnist for Salon.com and author of the upcoming erotic memoir Unzipped, agrees that the melting of taboos toward casual sex among mainstream women has helped set the atmosphere for her book. "It's part of our normal social lives. We say I'm going to get a pair of Prada shoes and then I'm going on my sex date," she says. "We don't question it."

Veterans of the sexual revolution say such changes have been a long time coming. Author Erica Jong, whose radically frank novel Fear of Flying, published in 1973, opened with a chapter called "The Zipless Fuck," observes that it's no longer possible to shock people. "Women's right to sexual pleasure is taken completely for granted," she says. "When Fear of Flying was published, the networks banned the ads on television." In the 1970s, feminists argued that although they had access to the technologies of pleasure in the form of birth control and vibrators, the culture still didn't value and respect female desire. "For so many women sex was about pleasing the male ego," says Betty Dodson, whose female masturbation clinics became a political icon of the sexual revolution. "One of the reasons that we were playing these games is that we didn't want to lose our financial security. I thought that if a woman could own her own sexuality that everything else would fall into place."

But Dodson seems to have the cause and effect reversed. Financial independence, it seems had led to sexual liberation, not the other way around. Now that women aren't dependent on men for their livelihood, cultural pulse takers from Hollywood to Madison Avenue are taking notice. It's easier than ever to find images of sexually ferocious women in the media. Let's face it: Sex has always sold. But now more empowered sexuality is being sold back to the women who fought for it in the first place.

The haute cosmetics company Nars has surrendered to its basest instincts in rolling out a shade of blush called Orgasm (a flushed pink, one assumes). And in a classic case of underestimating your audience, The advertising campaign for Clairol's Herbal Essences features a women who make noises that sound a lot more like bedroom pleasure calls than those of a good shampooing. "It's a totally organic experience," the slogan purrs, both coy and blatant. Mitch Nash, president of Blue Q, a company that manufactures lip balm in the flavors Dirty Girl and Virgin/Slut, is unabashed in his desire to woo the well-heeled vixen-consumer. "We're consciously exploiting taboos," he says. "We're reflecting the more spicy modern female sexuality."

But it's not just corporate suits hawking sex this way: Also tapping the spice market are women opinion-makers and entrepreneurs. Bonnie Fuller, who followed the iconic Helen Gurley Brown as editor of Cosmopolitan in 1997 and now edits Glamour turned more than a few heads last year with the Glamour cover line "Get Moregasmic!" This editorial audacity shocks Brown herself. "I see cover lines today that lift even my eyebrows," she says. "Even three years ago I wouldn't have been able to put the word 'orgasm' on the cover of Cosmo." Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl, in its day as frank a girl-talk book as could be found, betrays a bit of nostalgia in a sign outside her office at Hearst Communications that reads "Once upon a time I had sex all to myself."

Some think the explicit pitches have gone too far. "Sex is chic right now," says Genevieve Field, the 28-year-old executive editor of Nerve.com, which took home this year's Webby award for best e-zine, an online magazine devoted to "literary smut." "Some fashion ads have gone too far in selling this guerrilla sexuality." But Field argues that older, more rigid ideas about sexuality -- both from traditional morality and feminist discourse -- had to disperse before sexual glasnost could occur; to many women, thus feels relatively novel to experience sex without shame. "In my mother's generation, you we're expected to keep quiet or have a motto: sex is politics, sex is rape, sex is a meal ticket, etc. Today, we have moved beyond lipstick feminism to a more fun loving ideology -- we're even taking back the word Slut."

Such attitudes make shopping for vibrators like a trip to Crate and Barrel. When Claire Cavanaugh, a co-owner of Toys in Babeland, a wholesome, trendy sex shop on the Lower East Side, got into the business six years ago it was dominated by leering, unsavory types; she considered it a counter-cultural statement. "Now people are giving each other vibrators for birthdays and bridal showers," she says. "I even sold one to a woman who bought it as a present for mother's day." Although vibrators have been around since the turn of the 20th century, when they were used by doctors over 100 years ago to treat female "hysteria," at the beginning of the 21st they appeal to generation girl power. "My friends and I talk about vibrators over coffee as casually as we'd discuss a new restaurant," says Karen Rabinovich, 26, an editor at Mirabella magazine. "It's eye-opening to talk about which models you like and why. It's like the way men talk about cars."

If there's any doubt that sex consumerism among women is blossoming, Dr. Carol Queen, a sexologist who works for the San Francisco-based sex shop Good Vibrations, the total sales of vibrators in 1977 were $15,000 compared to 1998 in which they were $6,500,000. "It wasn't until the 1980s that sex positive feminists gained a strong voice," she said. "The AIDS epidemic opened up the conversation about sex for women because they needed other options."

Many academics are backing up observations of increased freedom. In her new book The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They Are Changing the World, Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University reports that women today are having sex younger, having more partners, and expressing less sexual remorse then at the beginning of the sexual revolution. In a 1997 national sexual health survey Dr. Joe Catagna, a professor at University of California-San Francisco, found that among women in their 50s and 60s, 15 percent reported that their first orgasm came from masturbation compared to 22 percent among women in their 20s and 30s. "Masturbation is a very important developmental stage in which we learn to control our sexual feelings," he said. "Increased masturbation among younger women represents a big change in sexual comfort. It's a sign that women have become more sexually liberated."

But by and large, science hasn't caught up with us. Back In the early 1970s, Dr. Julia Heiman discovered that women, like men, are turned on by erotic talk. But since then there has been very little research done on female sexual response. "In the past no one was willing to pay to do research on female sexuality," says Dr. Sandra R. Leiblum, a psychologist at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical Center in New Brunswick, New Jersey. "Now that Viagra has sparked an interest in male sexuality, pharmaceutical companies are trying to corner the market."

Which brings us back to the power of the purse strings: Women, after all, represent a huge untapped market for pharmaceutical giants. According to a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 43 percent of women suffer from sexual dysfunction compared to 31 percent of men. In May, researchers at Boston University concluded a study of 17 post-menopausal women, and concluded that Viagra enhanced female sexual response both physiologically and subjectively. Bring on the little blue pills!

"There is going to a big social impact when the pill is released for women," says Dr. Robert Francoeur, a biologist and sexologist at Fairleigh Dickenson University. "The female brain has evolved for a greater range of erotic pleasures than the male brain, which tends to be genitally focused. When the pill creates a sexual arousal in women, it's a whole body arousal and will change the focus of sex between men and women."

If it sounds too good to be true -- you know the story. Many think there's still a long way society has to go to accommodate straight women's sexual freedom. In many circumstances, reticence holds sway and the double standard reigns. "Women still worry about being judged, that if you are sexually aggressive, it's not a sign of sexual liberation, but a sign that you don't respect yourself. A lot of women still have a sense of embarrassment and shame about their own desires," says Ensler. "Many women think that if they assert themselves sexually that it will be read as too aggressive and the guy will run away." Field, of Nerve.com, agrees. "I think that we forget that there is still an element of vulnerability and shame attached to female sexuality," she says.

One exploration of the contradictions of modern sexual attitudes can be found in Melissa Bank's best-selling book of short stories, A Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing. As a liberated single woman, her protagonist, Jane, meets a guy she likes at a wedding, but makes the dating neophyte's mistake of buying a book about how to catch a man. She enters into a internal battle of whether to follow her desire or hold back according to the old-fashioned rules. "It's sexier to be active rather than waiting," says Banks. "But when and if you're rejected and the spell of your own sexuality is broken, it almost like you judge yourself by the older standard. I think in that moment what can feel sexy or seductive can all of sudden seem like a grotesque sexual need. In our minds, there is still a consequence for rearranging the rules."

Though it may sound like Oprah-ready punditry, social and cultural changes do cause emotional dislocation. Some would argue that women, especially younger women have become more sexually confused. Leora Tanebaum, the author of Slut: Growing up Female With a Bad Reputation believes that, "Girls are getting conflicting sexual messages," she says. "It used to be that you weren't made fun of if you were asexual, but now if you're too sexual you are called a slut or a ho and if are asexual you are called a prude. Girls and women are caught in a double bind."

But if the new Wild West of the Internet is any indication, there's a good chance that today's girls are already growing into sexually confident cowgirls. On sites like Chickclick.com and Gurl.com, discussion board subjects range from whether women should make the first move to "Do Altoids really work" to "Masturbation: why lie about it?" Ester Drill, Editor in-Chief of Gurl.com and co-editor of Deal With It: A Whole New Approach to Your Body Brain and Life, which are both directed at girls aged 10 to 18 [ck] says: "The idea that teenage boys masturbate while teenage girls don't is definitely being shattered on our site."

Drill's efforts are paying off. "For a lot of young girls, I think on-line chat is their only source of sexual knowledge," said Courtney L, an 18 year old from Virginia who frequently talks about her sex life on Gurl.com. "I try to help girls younger than me because when I was younger I had to figure it out on my own."

So instead of following the siren calls of corporate pant suits, perhaps it's best to follow our daughters. Beyond consumerism, Women specific sites such as iVillage and Women.com employ sex coaches who offer advice on everything from increasing orgasms to sex during pregnancy. Since Good Vibrations launched their web site in 1998, according to Carol Queen, the sales of vibrators have increased by close to a million dollars. Of course the reality is that a platinum AmEx can buy the vibrator, have it shipped door-to-door, even in under an hour, but it can't turn it on. Some things you have to do for yourself.

© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
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