A Brief History of the Female Climax

So after conversing with a friend of mine earlier today who is 33.5 weeks pregnant (read: the super, ultra uncomfortable stage) and it brought back all of my thoughts about the gross inequality in the creation of children.

I mean think about it - what is a man's contribution to the process? He has a great time in the sack and thats it. Sure he does have to live with the pregnant woman and hold her hand while she's in labor but thats nothing compared to what the woman goes through. I mean for me it was 9 months in purgatory followed by tour of hell. Oh and then your memory gets tampered with by biology so you forget JUST how bad it was until of course you wind up in that position again and now its too late and theres only one way out of it....

I decided after I had my first child that God knew what he was doing when He ensured the creation of effective pain control right about the same time that effective birth control came about. Because otherwise no woman in her right mind would do that TWICE. I mean you'd do it once b/c babies are just so cute and it can't really be THAT bad... right??

Oh yeah it really is that bad. And humanity would be doomed to a slow decline if you had the option to never do that again and still get all the perks of an active sex life. And thus you have the miraculous creation of the epidural to ensure that humanity will survive.

On reflection, I've also decided that the ability to have multiple climaxes is God's way of apologizing to women for putting them through the whole process, epidural or no.

Which puts me in mind of one of my favorite lectures of my college career. It was my Psychology of Women/Sex and Gender Differences class and she gave us a brief history of sexuality in western culture.  The condensed version looks something like - women used to be allowed to have appetites, passions and a healthy sex life. Then the Normans invaded and decided women were wilting flowers and delicate and asexual (what a bunch of bastages). They thought if a woman actually liked sex there was something wrong with her. She was a deviant or some such thing and should be shunned (or made into a prostitute). Which is pretty much how it was until roughly the early 1900s.

Thats not to say that everybody had a crappy sex life - some of the journals from back then are quite amusing. One woman talks about how after she got married she was conversing with a few other women who were bemoaning what a pain their conjugal duties were and she confessed that she found the whole experience to be exhilarating personally tho she definitely didn't say so. At the time the pre wedding chat for upperclass women went something to the affect of "lay there and count the cracks in the ceiling until its over". Ugh.

Another amusing example involved a couple of arctic explorers who took note of the sexual practices of the Inuit people and how the women there commonly enjoyed the process (1 room igloo = NO privacy). Well apparently one of the explorers had a good relationship with his wife and told her about it and she told the other guys wife who decided to try actually moving/participating to see how that worked. Apparently guy 2 (who clearly needs to talk to his wife more) kinda freaked b/c he thought that he had hurt her b/c she'd never moved or made a peep before.... lol

But so you get up to the 1800s and medical science has decided that the reason why women get moody/hormonal/hysterical is because their uterus is detaching from its seat and wandering around the body cavity thereby making the woman crazy. No, sadly, I'm really NOT making this up (for perspective consider they also thought bleeding you would cure disease).

It was determined the proper course of treatment to temporarily remedy the problem was that if you stimulated the seat of the uterus you could cause a "great spasm" during which the woman would writhe and scream and which would result in the uterus being reseated properly and the woman would then become very calm, peaceful and happy.

I'll give you a moment to digest that bit.

Please remember that women of this period were NOT sexual creatures and what they're experiencing couldn't possibly be what it sounds like because those delicate flowers would never be so crass.

In fact this treatment became such a staple that medical science invented the first wind up vibrators to save the doctors hands which were becoming tired and sore after assisting these poor women all day to properly reseat their uteri.

And there we were pretty much up until Freud showed up on the scene at the turn of the century and shocked the whole world by declaring that those women were having what you and I know they were having and turned psychology on its head by declaring that women did in fact have appetites, passions and drives and we are in fact sexual creatures.

Freud might have a whole host of issues but I do have to thank the old boy for that one.