Vagina Read Online Free Page A

pelvic nerve was entrapped and compressed, and the signals from one of its several branches were blocked from moving up my spinal cord to my brain. The neural impulses from that part of my body had “gone dark.” I wondered if this had something to do with how I felt—or was not feeling—after sex, though I was too shy to ask. He explained that I would need to consider surgery to fuse the vertebrae, and to relieve the pressure on the nerve.
    After I had walked for him so he could check my gait to make sure my legs had not been affected, and after he had measured my shoulders to be sure they were level, I mentioned to him—perhaps partly for a second opinion, for reassurance—that Dr. Coady had assured me that my clitoral orgasms would not be affected, even if the branch of the pelvic nerve that was injured did not ever get better. He agreed that that was correct; if the clitoral branch of the network were to be affected, it would have been so by then. The fact that that branch was unaffected was an accident of my wiring. And then he explained casually, “Every woman is wired differently. Some women’s nerves branch more in the vagina; other women’s nerves branch more in the clitoris. Some branch a great deal in the perineum, or at the mouth of the cervix. That accounts for some of the differences in female sexual response.”
    I almost fell off the edge of the exam table in my astonishment. That’s what explained vaginal versus clitoral orgasms? Neural wiring? Not culture, not upbringing, not patriarchy, not feminism, not Freud? Even in women’s magazines, variation in women’s sexual response was often described as if it were predicated mostly upon emotions, or access to the “right” fantasies or role playing, or upon one’s upbringing, or upon one’s “guilt,” or “liberation,” or upon a lover’s skill. I had never read that the way you best reached orgasm, as a woman, was largely due to basic neural wiring This was a much less mysterious and value-laden message about female sexuality: it presented the obvious suggestion that anyone could learn about her own, or his or her partner’s, particular neural variant as such, and simply master the patterns of the special way it worked.
    “Do you realize,” I stammered, not self-possessed enough in my astonishment to consider that the debate I was about to describe might not have been as momentous to him as it was to me, “you’ve just given the answer to a question that Freudians and feminists and sexologists have been arguing about for decades? All these people have assumed the differences in vaginal versus clitoral orgasms had to do with how women were raised . . . or what social role was expected of them . . . or whether they were free to explore their own bodies or not . . . or free or not to adapt their lovemaking to external expectations—and you are saying that the reason is simply that all women’s wiring is different? That some are neurally wired more for vaginal orgasms, some more for clitoral, and so on? That some are wired to feel a G-spot more, others won’t feel it so much—that it’s mostly physical?”
    “All women’s wiring is different,” he confirmed gently, as if he were addressing someone who had become slightly unhinged. “That’s the reason women respond so differently from one another sexually. The pelvic nerve branches in very individual ways for every woman. These differences are physical.” (I would learn later that this complex, variegated distribution is very different from male sexual wiring, which, as far as we know from the dorsal penile nerve, is far more uniform.)
    I was silent, trying to absorb what he had said. Women have so many judgments about themselves, I have found, based on how they do or don’t reach orgasm. Our discourse about female sexuality, which pays no attention whatsoever to this neural reality, which is the very mechanism of female orgasm, suggests that if women have trouble reaching