• DOI:10.2307/2928434
• Corpus ID: 145792105

Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology

@article{Laqueur2020OrgasmGA,
  title={Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology},
  author={Thomas Walter Laqueur},
  journal={The Body},
  year={2020}
}

• T. Laqueur
• Published 1 April 1986
• Art
• The Body

SOMETIME IN THE LATE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY human sexual nature changed, to paraphrase Virginia Woolf. This essay gives an account of the radical eighteenth-century reconstitution of female, and more generally human, sexuality in relation to the equally radical Enlightenment political reconstitution of "Man"-the universalistic claim, stated with starkest clarity by Condorcet, that the "rights of men result simply from the fact that they are sentient beings, capable of acquiring moral ideas and of reasoning concerning these ideas. [And that] women, having these same qualities, must necessarily possess equal rights."' Condorcet moves immediately to biology and specifically to reproductive biology. Exposure to pregnancy, he says, is no more relevant to women's political rights than is male susceptibility to gout. But of course the facts or supposed facts of female physiology were central to Condorcet, to Mill, to feminists as well as antifeminists, to liberalism in its various forms and also to its enemies. Even the political pornography of Sade is grounded in a theory of generation. The body generally, but especially the female body in its reproductive capacity and in distinction from that of the male, came to occupy a critical place in a whole range of political discourses. It is the connection between politics and a new disposition of male and female that concerns me here.2 Near the end of the century of Enlightenment, medical science and those who relied upon it ceased to regard the female orgasm as relevant to generation. Conception, it was held, could take place secretly, with no tell-tale shivers or signs of arousal. For women the ancient wisdom that "apart from pleasure nothing in mortal kind comes into existence" was uprooted. We ceased to regard ourselves as beings "compacted in blood, of the seed of man, and the pleasure that [comes] with sleep." We no longer linked the loci of pleasure with the mysterious infusing of life into matter. Routine accounts, like that in a popular Renaissance midwifery text of the clitoris as that organ "which makes women lustful and take delight in copulation," without which they "would have no desire, nor delight, nor would they ever conceive;' came to be regarded as controversial if not manifestly stupid.3 Sexual orgasm moved to the periphery of human physiology. Previously a deeply embedded sign of the generative process-whose existence was no more open to debate than was the warm, pleasurable glow that usually accompanies a good meal-orgasm became simply a feeling, albeit an enormously charged one,