The Selling of the Female Orgasm

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."