The Elusive Female Orgasm

In an otherwise unremarkable Kulturkampf piece in the New York Times Magazine, this bit caught my eye:

Dr. Joseph B. Stanford, who was appointed by President Bush in 2002 to the F.D.A.'s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee despite (or perhaps because of) his opposition to contraception, sounded not a little like Daniel Defoe in a 1999 essay he wrote: "Sexual union in marriage ought to be a complete giving of each spouse to the other, and when fertility (or potential fertility) is deliberately excluded from that giving I am convinced that something valuable is lost. A husband will sometimes begin to see his wife as an object of sexual pleasure who should always be available for gratification."

Ah bon?

As a realtively early-blooming fag, my experience with the elusive female orgasm is essentially nil, though I managed to feel up a fair number of high school titties in my time. Still, I generally give credence to the idea that, yes, even women, with the Big Complicated Icky down there, are capable of orgasm.

So I find it pretty silly that so-called conservatives should tether their moralizing to the notion that men will use their wives instrumentally for mechanical gratification wherever and whenever desire for a warm hole presents itself, whereas women, being anorgiastic by nature, must simply lie their and take it, cut off from their Virgin Mary, earth-mother, soul-gaia whatever and how have you by men grown tired of self-stimulation (also, I'm told, an evil).

Then again, I suspectan implicit and certainly unconscious acknowledgement in Dr. Stanford et al.--that hetero men are, at the end of the day, so lousy in bed as a general rule that their wives would never view them as an opportunity or availability for gratification in the first place, preferring the gardner, the poolboy, or, pace Queen Vicotria, the instrumental presence of their fellow fecund vessels.