epublishing store: Intro

Sexual Health eBook Volume3
Chapter 6

Cultural Perspectives on Orgasm Imbedded in Medicine, Science, Philosophy and Literature, June Machover Reinisch, Carolyn S. Kaufman, Liana Zhou & Leonard A. Rosenblum

There is a tendency to consider the modern age, represented by our own time, as reflecting the pinnacle of human wisdom and understanding to date about all science and perhaps particularly with regard to the science of sexology. Certainly, great progress has been made in the scientific study of human sexuality by such researchers as Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, Beach, and Money, who sought and fought to discover, describe, and understand human sexual experience in all its variations. Yet a long-term literary, historical, scientific, philosophical, and cross-cultural perspective reveals a richly complex picture—one in which the contemporary scientific understanding of orgasm, including the “discovery” of female sexuality and orgasmic potential, is not new and certainly not the product of a Western mid-twentieth-century sexual revolution that some critics would hold was created by sexologists.

Historically, it appears that knowledge of orgasm (and female orgasmic response in particular) has been known and suppressed only to be rediscovered or allowed to come to light for consideration over and over again at times when the political, social, or religious climate became more tolerant of such notions.
Orgasm has occupied a central position in the human experience, and control, of sexuality for more than 2,000 years. This discussion is an attempt to increase our understanding of this psycho-physiological event by examining it historically in various literary, medico-scientific, philosophical, and cultural contexts, using materials from the extensive historical and contemporary archives of The Kinsey Institute covering all aspects of sexuality.

There are several broad themes regarding orgasm that will be evident throughout this discussion and the materials presented, which can best be conceptualized as dichotomous or dialectical notions. These themes appear to characterize ideas about orgasm both within and between cultures, often alternating over time. We present them here in their extreme bipolar forms as guidelines to organize the material to follow. As will become clear below, when dichotomies of thought exist, sex-negative themes, in general, are more prevalent in Western thought than are sex-positive ones.

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