Revisiting "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm": The Female Orgasm in American Sexual Thought and Second Wave Feminism

Abstract

become major concerns of the emergent movement-the meaning of sexual freedom, the political significance of sexual pleasure, and the psychological roots of male domination and female subordination.3 The vaginal orgasm, attained exclusively through intercourse, had long been a keynote in the clamor of expert ideas about female sexual health and normality. When Koedt attacked it as a myth, or more pointedly, as a fraudulent misinformation campaign that created a host of psychological problems for women, she appeared to challenge the very foundation of heterosexuality as it was understood in psychoanalytic, medical, and popular discourse. Although Koedt's article became one of the more widely disseminated and well-known pieces on the political significance of sexuality, hers was not the only one that addressed the issue of orgasm. In fact, a number of feminists wrote about the meaning of sexual pleasure for women in a patriarchal society and their articles filled anthologies and journals from 1968 to the mid1970s. Ti-Grace Atkinson, Dana Densmore, Roxanne Dunbar, Germaine Greer, Rita Mae Brown, and Martha Shelley, among others, in groups like Boston's Cell 16, New York's Redstockings and The Feminists, or Washington, D.C.'s the Furies, wrote polemical articles exploring the relationship between female sexuality and male domination.

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