Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology

Abstract

Sexual orgasm moved to the periphery of human physiology. The new conceptualization of the female orgasm, however, was but formulation of a more radical eighteenth-century reinterpretation of the female body in relation to that of the male. 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. Rather, a new model of incommensurability triumphed over the old hierarchical model in the wake of new political agendas. Men and women are, in this model, not different in kind but in the configuration of their organs; the male is a hotter version of the female, or to use the teleologically more appropriate order, the female is the cooler, less perfect version of the male.