The Problem: Lack, or What does Woman Want?

An age-old problem has resurfaced ? with a difference ? in the Biotech century. The problem: What does woman (sic) want? This question, once so exasperatedly asked by Freud ? as a corollary to his finding that woman "represents a lack" (of a penis) ? is once again being vigorously addressed in the practices of (mostly) male scientists and doctors with new biotechnological and medical processes at their disposal. Freud's formulation of the question presumes an essentially identical desire (for the penis) in all women regardless of age, race, sexual difference, education, economic status, or geographical residence. It also represents "woman" as essentially lacking (because she has been found "wanting?") and as problematic, mysterious, unknowable, and eternally unsatisfiable. Freud makes it clear that the "problem" ? traditionally described by the term "hysteria" ? is that women "want" sexual pleasure; they want to know how to have it, how to get it, and how to control and ensure the supply.

In Europe and the US, nineteenth and early twentieth-century responses to the problem of female "hysterical" anorgasmia and decreased or absent sexual pleasure often called for medical interventions and were sometimes quite drastic, including, for example, special body binding, purging, bloodletting, nasty douches and bath regimes, confinement to bed and bland diets, and in worst cases, hysterectomy and/or clitoridectomy. Women experiencing "vaginal relaxation"1 and vulval and vaginal damage due to too frequent childbirth, inadequate medical knowledge of women's genital structures and functions, and the total ignorance of the mechanisms of the female orgasm, had nowhere to turn except to their doctors, because the medieval traditions of women healers, midwives, and herbal women wise in the knowledge of women's bodies had long since eroded in the moralized and rationalized body practices of the Enlightenment.

A valuable light is cast on age-old treatments of female disturbances by Dr. Rachel Maines.2 She documents that an effective treatment for hysterical women since the Greeks had been "pelvic massage" ? sometimes performed by male doctors, but more often by female midwives ? to relieve women of the sexual tensions, pelvic edema, and nervous depressions brought on by the lack of orgasmic release in marital penetrative coitus. Maines chronicles the invention of the vibrator ? originally designed to relieve doctors of the tedium of hand manipulation of women's genitals (pelvic massage) ? and its fairly rapid adoption as a tool of "personal care" in private households; and shows that this technological solution to the "problem" of women's complicated sexual needs contributed to letting (male) lovers and husbands off the hook in terms of learning to satisfy their partner's sexual desires, as well as supporting the centrality of penetrative coitus climaxing in male orgasm as the dominant form of heterosexual practice.

Meanwhile, in many North African countries such as Kenya, the Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Mali, Egypt, and Chad (as well as in many parts of the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Yemen, as well as large parts of Indonesia, and to a lesser extent in other parts of the world), varying forms of female circumcision and female genital alteration have been practiced for centuries. While there are deep and complex reasons for the origin and perpetuation of these practices, nearly all African and Western researchers who have studied them ? as well as the evidence of extensive testimony from women on whom these operations have been practiced ? agree that most of these procedures are extremely painful and dangerous to a woman's health; they usually destroy women's sexual pleasure, and are done to "purify" and control women's sexuality.3 Thus, though there seems to be no comparable construction of female hysteria in these countries, it is significant that the circumcision practices have the effect of controlling and curtailing women's sexual pleasure which must seem to some as a threat to social order and masculine power. And although they are often compared, female genital circumcision can in no way be equated with the circumcision of men, even though some circumcised men do report diminished sexual sensation due to the loss of their foreskins. It is also important to note that in the past decade or so in the US, there has been a fairly vocal revolt against the almost universally adopted medical (and sometimes religious) practice of routine male circumcision right after birth.

Engineering Female Orgasms

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The Problem: Lack, or What does Woman Want?