The Depressing History of Discovering Female Orgasms

Hey everyone, we are diving headfirst into the weird and infuriating history of the female orgasm. We start with the big question that kicked this off: why don’t we have a complete picture of the clitoris and female pleasure until basically our lifetimes? Perhaps because for centuries, a whole lot of men decided women were just passive penis-shaped receptacles, and they really weren’t looking (or caring) very hard??We follow the fascinating journey of Marie Bonaparte (Napoleon’s great-grandniece) who measured hundreds of women’s genitalia, became besties with Freud, decided her clitoris was in the “wrong” spot because she couldn’t climax in missionary, and actually had surgery (twice!) to move it closer to her vagina in hopes of achieving that “proper” vaginal orgasm. We roast the ancient Greeks (thanks, Hippocrates and Galen, for the inverted penis theory and the idea that the vagina and clitoris are in constant conflict) and Victorian doctors who declared most women aren’t troubled by sexual feelings...and how the whole “vaginal orgasm is the only feminine one” myth stuck around from ancient times straight through to Bridgerton.Along the way we hit hysteria cures via pelvic massage (hello, hand-crank vibrators that look like medieval torture devices), Freud’s nonsense about rejecting clitoral pleasure to become a “real” woman, and the slow, glorious comeback thanks to researchers like Helen O’Connell who finally mapped the full clitoris with MRIs in the early 2000s. If we don’t laugh at centuries of men getting female anatomy spectacularly wrong, we might cry. So grab a drink, settle in, and join us...it's going to get a little cringey fast.