Vagina by Naomi Wolf

etiquette for men to give women, chivalrously, a bit of advance help in the stimulation department (these gestures, cast as gildings on the lily of intercourse, are still infuriatingly called “foreplay”) but that the pacing of “sex” is essentially that of the male sex response cycle.
    These assumptions are not accurate. It turns out that male sexuality and female sexuality are very different. It turns out that, for women, the clitoris is sexually important, the vagina is sexually important, the G-spot is sexually important, the mouth of the cervix is sexually important, the perineum is sexually important, and the anus is sexually important. Recent research has found that what Masters and Johnson argued—that all female orgasm goes through the clitoris—is incorrect. According to the newest data, the G-spot and the clitoris are both aspects of a single neural structure; and women have, as we saw and as Dr. Komisaruk’s MRI findings confirm, at least three sexual centers: clitoris, vagina, and the third at the mouth of the cervix. (He adds a fourth, the nipples.)
    When I first learned that new science had confirmed the sexual responsiveness of the cervix, I was shocked that I had heard nothing about it from science reporting (though I had from literature: “At the back of the womb there lay flesh that demanded to be penetrated. It curved inwards, opening to suck. The flesh walls moved like sea anemones, seeking by suction to draw his sex in. . . . She opened her mouth as if to reveal the openness of the womb, its hunger, and only then did he plunge to the very bottom and felt her contractions . . . ,” writes Anaïs Nin, who was not waiting for scientific confirmation, in Delta of Venus 3 ). That elision of information was one of many weird omissions I would find on this journey as I stumbled upon hugely important scientific discovery after hugely important scientific discovery that had received virtually zero mainstream ink. If a sixth unknown sense were confirmed by science, if they had found that every man had, tucked away, somewhere about his person, an extra sexual organ , for God’s sake— would that not make the evening news?
    Another recent study has found that the whole “clitoris versus vagina”—Masters and Johnson versus Shere Hite—debate is itself wrongly framed: the G-spot, in the anterior wall of the vagina, is now being understood by many researchers to be part of the anterior root of the clitoris. The female sexual organ, which includes all these areas, is being proved by new science to be far more complex and far more magical than the utilitarian thrusting totted up by Masters and Johnson can account for, or the goal-oriented, male-identified model of female sexuality mistakenly popularized to this very day in sex advice columns in magazines from Good Housekeeping to Cosmo.
    It turns out that women are designed to have many different kinds of orgasms; that women have the potential to have orgasms without any end except physical exhaustion; that if you understand female sexuality, you pace all the action around her; that while this is a high bar to set, you still want to set it, because properly treated, some women can ejaculate, and because all women in orgasm can go into a unique trance state; that women’s orgasms last longer than men’s; that memory plays a role in female arousal in a way that is not the case with male arousal; and that women’s response to arousal and orgasm is biochemically very different from men’s. We’re like guys sexually in superficial ways, but in many ways we are, sexually, profoundly not like guys.
    Maybe one reason this new information has been underreported has to do with anxieties about the male ego, even if the censorship involved is unconscious. Why wouldn’t every newspaper be reporting new data that suggest that women are potentially sexually insatiable? Or that many of them are unhappy with the current sexual status quo? Or that certain kinds of