Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology Author(s): Thomas Laqueur Source: Representations, No. 14, The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Spring, 1986), pp. 1-41 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928434 . Accessed: 23/04/2011 19:13 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucal. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Representations. http://www.jstor.org THOMAS LAQUEUR Orgasm, Generation,and the Politics of ReproductiveBiology SOMETIME IN THE LATE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY human sexual nature changed, to paraphrase Virginia Woolf. This essay gives an account of theradical eighteenth-century reconstitution of female,and more generallyhuman, sexualityin relationto the equally radical Enlightenmentpolitical reconstitution of "Man"-the universalisticclaim, stated with starkest clarity by Condorcet,that the "rightsof men result simply from the fact that they are sentientbeings, capable of acquiring moral ideas and of reasoning concerningthese ideas. [And that]women, having these same qualities,must necessarily possess equal rights."' Condorcet moves immediatelyto biology and specificallyto reproductive biology.Exposure to pregnancy,he says,is no more relevantto women'spolitical rightsthan is male susceptibilityto gout. But of course the factsor supposed facts of female physiologywere central to Condorcet, to Mill, to feministsas well as antifeminists,to liberalismin its various formsand also to its enemies. Even the politicalpornography of Sade is grounded in a theoryof generation.The body generally,but especiallythe female body in its reproductivecapacity and in dis- tinctionfrom that of the male, came to occupy a criticalplace in a whole range of politicaldiscourses. It is the connectionbetween politics and a new disposition of male and female thatconcerns me here.2 Near the end of the centuryof Enlightenment,medical science and those who relied upon it ceased to regard the femaleorgasm as relevantto generation. Conception,it was held, could take place secretly,with no tell-taleshivers or signs of arousal. For women the ancient wisdom that"apart frompleasure nothingin 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] withsleep." We no longer linkedthe loci of pleasure withthe mysteriousinfusing of lifeinto matter. Routine accounts, like that in a popular Renaissance midwifery textof the clitorisas thatorgan "whichmakes women lustfuland take delightin copulation,"without which they"would have no desire, nor delight,nor would theyever conceive;'came to be regardedas controversialif not manifestlystupid.3 Sexual orgasm moved to the peripheryof human physiology.Previously a deeply embedded sign of the generativeprocess-whose existencewas no more open to debate than was the warm, pleasurable glow thatusually accompanies a good meal-orgasm became simplya feeling,albeit an enormouslycharged one, The Politicsof ReproductiveBiology whose existencewas a matterfor empiricalinquiry or armchair philosophizing. Jacques Lacan's provocativecharacterization of female orgasm,"lajouissance, ce qui ne sert a rien,"is a distinctlymodern possibility.4 The new conceptualizationof the female orgasm, however,was but one for- mulation of a more radical eighteenth-centuryreinterpretation of the female body in relation to that of the male. For several thousand years it had been a commonplace thatwomen have the same genitalsas men, except that,as Neme- sius, bishop of Emesa in the sixth century,put it: "Theirs are inside the body and not outside it."Galen, who in the second centuryA.D. developed the most powerful and resilientmodel of the homologous nature of male and female reproductiveorgans, could already cite the anatomistHerophilus (thirdcentury B.C.) in support of his claim thata woman has testeswith accompanying seminal ductsvery much likethe man's,one on each side of the uterus,the onlydifference being thatthe male's are contained in the scrotumand the female'sare not.5 For two millenniathe organ thatby the earlynineteenth century had become virtuallya synecdochefor woman had no name of its own. Galen refersto it by the same word he uses for the male testes,orchis, allowing context to make clear with which sex he is concerned. Regnier de Graaf, whose discoveries in 1672 would eventuallymake the old homologies less plausible, continues to call the ovaries he is studyingby theirold Latin name, testiculi.A centurylater the Mont- pelierian physiologistPierre Roussel, a man obsessed withthe biological distinc- tivenessof women, notes that the two oval bodies on either side of the uterus "are alternativelycalled ovaries or testicles,depending on the systemwhich one adopts." As late as 1819, the LondonMedical Dictionary is stillsomewhat muddled in itsnomenclature: "Ovaria: formerlycalled female testicles;but now supposed to be the recepticlesof ova or the female seed." Indeed, doggerel verse of the nineteenthcentury still sings of these hoary homologies afterthey have disap- peared fromlearned texts: ... though theyof differentsexes be, Yeton thewhole they are thesame as we, Forthose that have the strictest seachers been, Findwomen are butmen turned outside in. By 1800 this view,like that linkingorgasm to conception,had come under devastatingattack. Writers of all sortswere determinedto base what theyinsisted werefundamental differences between male and femalesexuality, and thusbetween man and woman, on discoverablebiological distinctions.In 1803, for example, Jacques Moreau de la Sarthe,one of the foundersof "moralanthropology,' argued passionatelyagainst the nonsense writtenby Aristotle,Galen, and theirmodern followerson the subject of women in relation to men.6 Not only are the sexes different,they are differentin every conceivable respect of body and soul, in every physicaland moral aspect. To the physicianor the naturalistthe relation 2 THOMAS LAQUEUR of woman to man is "a series of oppositionsand contrasts."Thus the old model, in whichmen and women were arrayedaccording to theirdegree of metaphysical perfection,their vital heat, along an axis whose telos was male, gave way by the late eighteenthcentury to a new model of difference,of biological divergence. An anatomy and physiologyof incommensurabilityreplaced a metaphysicsof hierarchyin the representationof women in relationto men.7 But neitherthe demotion of female orgasm nor the biology of incommen- surabilityof whichit was a part followsimply from scientific advances. True, by the 1840s it had become clear that,at least in dogs, ovulationcould occur without coitionand thus presumablywithout orgasm. And it was immediatelypostulated thatthe human female,like the canine bitch,was a "spontaneous ovulator,"pro- ducing an egg during the periodic heat thatin women was knownas the menses. But the available evidence forthis half truthwas at best slightand highlyambig- uous. Ovulation, as one of the pioneer twentieth-centuryinvestigators in repro- ductive biology put it, "is silent and occult: neither self-observationby women nor medical studythrough all the centuriesprior to our own era taughtmankind to recognize it." Indeed until the 1930s standard medical advice books recom- mended that to avoid conception women should have intercourseduring the middle of theirmenstrual cycles-i.e., during days twelvethrough sixteen, now known as the period of maximumfertility. Until the 1930s even the outlines of our modern understandingof the hormonal controlof ovulationwere unknown. Thus, while scientificadvances mightin principle have caused a change in the understandingof the femaleorgasm, in factthe reevaluationof pleasure occurred a centuryand a half before reproductivephysiology came to its support.8 The shiftin the interpretationof the male and femalebody, however, cannot have been due, even in principle, primarilyto scientificprogress. In the first place the "oppositionsand contrasts"between the femaleand the male have been self-evidentsince the beginningof time: the one gives birthand the other does not, to state the obvious. Set against such momentous truths,the discovery,for example, that the ovarian arteryis not, as Galen would have it, the homologue of the vas deferensis of relativelyminor significance.Thus, the factthat at one time male and female bodies were regarded as hierarchically,that