"Social Construction Theory: Problems in the History of Sexuality", Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality?"

Social construction theory in the field of sexuality suggested that one of the last remaining outposts of the “natural” in our thinking was fluid and changeable, the product of human action and history rather than the invariant result of the body, biology or an innate sex drive.Social construction theory has become the influential, some charge orthodox, framework in the new sex history. It has generated enthusiasm, which make it all the more necessary to identify and explore current problems in social construction(160)

For all of us, essentialism was our first way of thinking about sexuality and still remains the hegemonic one in the culture. Only those who depart from the dominant system have cause to label themselves; those who work within it remain more unselfconscious.Construction theory is committed to asking the questions and to challenging assumptions which impair our ability to even imagine these questions. Construction theory is against premature closure, and its price is tolerating ambiguity. (161)

Social construction approaches call attention to the paradox between the historically variable ways in which culture and society construct seemingly stable reality and experience: here, the ways in which the prevailing sexual system seems natural and inevitable to its natives, and for many individuals the expression of some deeply felt essence.(161)

Sexuality is constructed at the level of culture and history through complex interactions which we are now trying to understand does not mean that individuals have an open-ended ability to construct themselves, or to reconstruct themselves multiple times in adulthood.(162) At minimum, all social construction approaches adopt the view that physically identical sexual acts may have varying social significance and subjective meaning depending on how they are defined and understood in different cultures and historical periods. Some social construction theory posits that even the direction sexual desire itself.(163)

The most radical form of constructionist theory is willing to entertain the idea that there is no essential, undifferentiated sexual impulse, “sex drive” or “lust”, which resides the body due to physiological functioning and sensation.(163)

The intellectual history of social construction is a complex one, The point of briefly noting a few moments in its history here is simply to illustrate that social construction theorists and writers differ in their willingness to imagine what was constructed.(164)Many other social constructionists assume that specific, core behaviors and physical relations are reliably understood as sexual, even though they occur in diverse cultures or historical periods. The often implicit assumptions about the sexual nature of physical acts or relations depend in turn on deeply embedded cultural frameworks that we use to think about the body. Social construction’s greatest strength lies in its violation  of our folk knowledge and scientific ideologies that would frame sexuality as “natural”, determined by biology and the body.(165)

Social constructionists do not grapple with theoretical issues about degrees of social construction, the object of study, or the meaning of the body in a vacuum. The new sex history is indebted to feminism and gay liberation for many of its insights, for non-academic settings which nurtured this work during the early states of its development when the university disapproved, and for its intellectual urgency. Variability, subjectivity, negotiation and change often violated the wish for a continuous history.(167)

In contrast, the social constructionist framework common in lesbian and gay history has become disseminated to a larger lesbian and gay public. (168)All movements of sexual liberation, including lesbian and gay, are built on imagining:imagining that things could be different, other, better than they are. Social construction shares that imaginative impulse and thus is not a threat to the lesbian and gay movement, but very much of it(169)

Trans Women and Orgasms

So far, the articles and chapters on women's orgasms that we've reviewed and summarized here have not made a point to take into account trans women's experiences, or acknowledge trans women at all.
Many people assume that trans women have the same experience with orgasm as cis men, but that's just simply not true. Trans women are socialized differently than cis men, have different hormone levels, are treated differently by sexual partners, and sometimes have different parts. In Julia Serano, PhD, 's best selling 2007 book, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Women on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, she spends a chapter, entitled "Boygasms and Girlgasms: A Frank Discussion About Hormones and Gender Differences", discussing her experience with orgasm, and what other trans women have experienced with their orgasms. She doesn't claim to represent all trans women, and I do know trans women who have had different experiences than what Serano discusses here, all experiences she discusses are experiences she says she's heard from many trans women, and appear to be common (67).  She discusses these experiences within the book's larger argument, that both a biologically deterministic view of gender, and a socially constructionist view of gender, are overly simplistic and flawed. One of her  overall arguments, which I highly recommend reading (the book as a whole is super interesting, and discusses things mostly within a cultural and social context, and is less focused on her body, which can be rare given society's obsession with trans bodies), is that there are biological differences between men and women, mostly related to hormones, that socialization exaggerates (74).

      She starts off her chapter by stating that while yes, biological determinism is wrong, the backlash against biological determinism often overemphasizes socialization, and ignores the importance of hormones, though she stresses that hormones are not "on off switch", and that everyone has some of both, in varying levels, on a continuum (66). One of things she talks about, rather tongue-in-cheek,  is what hasn't changed since she started taking estrogen and androgen blockers. She cries as much as she used to (although she says her emotions are harder to ignore than they used to be), is still as rational, still has the same tastes in women, food, and culture, and has retained all her skills related to mathematics, science, and reading maps (68, 72).  Even before transition, she was never as competitive or aggressive as men were, and remained the same personality-wise after transition (73).
     When it comes to sex, however, the hormones changed not everything- her sexual orientation, for example, remained the same- but a lot of things. She reports a sharp decrease in sex drive, with her going from wanting sexual release at least once a day, to only desiring it a few times a week (70). The way she masturbated also changed. While she always preferred erotic stories and fantasies over pictures of naked bodies, the way many women do,  she used to prefer  "back and forth stroking action", but after she started hormones, and without having had surgery, she began to prefer vibrators (70).  With her wife and by herself, she noted that it took her longer to orgasm, but that when an orgasm finally happened, it was much more intense, and diffused throughout her entire body, in a way that pre-hormones orgasms didn't (71). The orgasms are also multiple, when they weren't before, starkly different from each other, when they used to be more or less the same, and are less dependent on anything visual (71).  After treatment with hormones, her orgasms and sexual experiences were the same, more or less, as a cis women's. Though Serano does not discuss this, I know trans women whose sexual experiences were like this pre-transition as well, which might complicate this slightly.
    What does this tell us about orgasm and gender more generally? Certainly that hormones have a lot to do with the physical mechanics of orgasm, much more so than, perhaps, the actual clitoris itself, or certainly anything vaginal. It also tells us about some of the major differences between orgasms that men have  (and non-transitioned women) and orgasms that women have (and non-transitioned men).

Lesbians Have Orgasms More Than Straight Women, Bisexual Women May Have Less

    In the December, 1994 volume of Off Our Backs, a peer-reviewed journal of contemporary women's issues, a short article, without an author's name attached was published entitled, "Lesbians More Likely to Have Orgasms." More appropriately, it would have been titled "Women Who Have Sex With Women More Likely to Have Orgasms", as it was reporting on the National Lesbian and Bisexual Women's Health Survey, put out by the Lesbian Health Clinic,  of lesbian and bisexual women (4).  In any case, it was discovered that, using another study that asked heterosexual women about their orgasms, that 65% of lesbian and bisexual women regularly experienced orgasm during sex, compared to 26% of heterosexual women (4).

    This actually makes a lot of sense, because we know from previous studies reviewed here, that women are socialized from a young age to put their partner's s pleasure before their own,  including sexual pleasure, and we know from Kimmel's chapter on social construction, that socialization has a powerful influence on the way people think about themselves and others, and act. If women consider their partner's sexual pleasure the most important thing, and men are not socialized this way, as been shown in other studies discussed on this blog, then in a heterosexual relationship, it makes sense that women don't orgasm very often. However, when both partners are women and they are both socialized to put the other's sexual pleasure before their own, it's no wonder they both enjoy sex more! (Perhaps to answer Mary D. Pellaneur's question of whether it's men or women who need to change their attitudes about sex- should women care less about men's pleasure? should men care more about women's?- this study would suggest both partners prioritizing the other's pleasure gets good results!) Furthermore, we know from Maines' book that the majority of women cannot orgasm from intercourse alone, and need clitoral stimulation, and sex between women definitely emphasizes the clitoral. 

When another study was done twenty years later, in 2014, in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, that compared sexual pleasure between heterosexual, bisexual, and lesbian men and women, and was covered by the Huffington Post by Cavan Sieczkowski, it was discovered that not only were men still more likely to orgasm then women (85% vs. 61%- so the number of even heterosexual women orgasming has increased significantly since 1994!), but lesbians were still more likely to orgasm then heterosexual women- 74% to 61%. The gap is closing, but lesbians still orgasm fairly significantly more often, so the above factors should still be present as well- women are still socialized to prioritize others over themselves, and men are not. A reason why the gap might be closing, is that men might be more encouraged than now than before to take women's needs into consideration, women may be in better places to advocate for themselves more, and also other forms of sexual pleasure might be becoming more popular. (The article is entitled, "Lesbians Are Having More Orgasms Than Straight Women.")

What's different, and interesting, is that bisexual women orgasm only 58% of the time, which is not only lower than the percentage for heterosexual women by just a little bit, but also lower than bisexual women's orgasm rate in 1994, and I can't think of why this is the case.

Any ideas?

Summary: Gerhard on Koedt's Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm

 In her article, “Revisiting ‘The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm’: The Female Orgasm in American Sexual Thought and Second-Wave Feminism” published in 2000 in vol. 26 of Feminist Studies, Jane Gerhard, PhD, describes the trends, conversations, and  controversies amongdoctors, psychologists, and feminists in 20^th century America, surrounding women’s orgasms.  The titular ‘Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm’ was a 1968 treatise written by Anne Koedt and published by New York Radical Women (449). An instant success, it argued against the common assertion that women received intercourse exclusively through intercourse, and explored women’s sexuality. In Gerhard’s article, she places this piece in its historical context.

Book by Anne Koedt.

        In her first section, “Woman as Vaginal”, she discusses the beliefs about the orgasm that existed in the first half of the 20^th century. At this time, a “companion marriage” where a heterosexual couple would love and care for one another, and have sex, was considered the proper and “normal” thing to do (451). It was agreed upon, amongst psychologists and sexologists, that intercourse was normal for women, but most strongly discouraged clitoral stimulation, warning that it would lead women to reject intercourse, and begin masturbating (452). As discussed in my other posts, Freud associated the clitoris with immaturity, and the vagina with maturity in women (452). In the 30s, 40s, and 50s America, his beliefs were solidified, and his followers placed an emphasis on this that even he did not- in those decades, sexologists strongly emphasized that naturalness of intercourse and heterosexuality, and the “masculine” and “immature” nature of the clitoris (454).  

        His student, Helene Deutsch, especially argued that female sexuality was rooted in the vagina, and that a normal, proper woman neither had sex too much or too little, and was subordinate, passive, dependent, and maternal- a female sexuality rooted in the clitoris, she argued, is associated with improper sexuality and improper femininity in general (455-457). A woman, she argued, could adapt to any sexual practice, and enjoy it- even rape (456). Certainly, no effort should be made to please her.  Hischmann and Berger agreed, connecting vaginal orgasm not only to proper femininity, but heterosexuality as well (459). Thus, when Koedt and other feminists attacked the “vaginal orgasm”, they were arguing against not only the idea that orgasms in women were mostly vaginal, but also the expectations for femininity associated with them.

Helene Deutsch.

    Her second section, “Clitoral Visions”, examines sexual thought, as it pertains to women, from 1953-1966. Kinsey, Masters, and Johnson all challenged the existence of vaginal orgasm, and argued for an understanding of sexuality that was based in pleasure, not reproduction- and thus, they focused on clitoral orgasm (460). They discovered that vaginal intercourse was not what was most pleasurable for most women, and that in fact, women behave sexually like men, and enjoy clitoral simulation (461-462). Both feminists and sex revolutionaries found these findings useful, but feminists also criticized the sexologists for being focused solely on the body, not on psychological responses, and being unconcerned with politics, and both criticized their maintenance of the status quo, as Kinsey, Masters, and Johnson  were mostly concerned with improving marital sex.  (461, 463).

     Her third section, “The Politics of Sexual Freedom”, explores sexual thought from 1968-1973, which is the era in which Koedt wrote her text. Like the sexologists from the earlier period, most sex revolutionaries emphasized the bodily (464). Much to the frustration of feminists, and women in general, the “radical” men of this period, looked at sex in an entirely ungendered way, and put forth an idea of freedom that only amounted to , “I have the right to have sex with women whenever I want, and they have the right to have sex with men whenever they want.” (465). There was little to no advocacy for  the social or political freedom that was badly needed for women to truly have a liberated sexuality, and women were subjected to sexism, objectification, and assault in the pursuit of this particular kind of sexual “freedom” (465, 468).  Black women, and other women of color, were especially subjected to sexual exploitation and violence, and they found that many white feminists  instead of working with them, were unwilling to examine these consequences of racism (471).

            Feminists in this period, including Koedt, were part of a productive dialogue, in which “a range of perspectives” were put forward. They agreed on little, but the conversation had not yet transformed into the divisive Sex Wars of the 1980s (450). Agreed upon goals were to emphasize the importance of the clitoris, see women’s sexuality as “female sexuality”, not heterosexual or homosexual sexuality, and to criticize the two main constructions of women’s sexuality in a way that would allow for the development of  women's sexual empowerment and agency (451). These two constructions were the original construction of sexuality, advanced by Freud and still present, which approved only of sexually passive women, and the modern construction of sexuality, advanced by the sexual revolutionaries, that defined women primarily by her sexuality, and expected women to be sexual only with men (451).  Many of these ideas were originally Koedt’s, or formed with her help, and all are highlighted in the treatise.

    Koedt, in her text, emphasizes that these constructions of female sexuality resulted in women experiencing feelings of guilt, inadequacy, and shame, and were constantly receiving messages how they should be behaving, sexually, everywhere, and especially from the therapists who they turned to for help (459). She advanced the idea that if women were unhappy with their sex lives, it was not because of anything they were doing or not doing, but because of sexism, homophobia, and mandatory heterosexuality (466). She wanted women to be able to “full sexual agents” who could be responsible for their own sexual pleasure, and she believed that the clitoris was integral here, because anyone, the woman herself, or a partner of any gender, could pleasure her via the clitoris (466-467). Feminists in general, in this period emphasized intimacy, love, psychological pleasure, and lesbianism and bisexuality, as important components of women’s sexuality (469-471).

    Overall, I was really impressed by this article, which I found through, helpful, and attentive to many other women’s experiences- unlike in other articles, queer women and women of color are not ignored, although more attention to Black women’s criticism of not only “radical” men, but white feminists as well, would have been good, and I am also interested in how trans women figured into all of this. But as a whole, the argue provided a good, cursory overview of the period that incorporated multiple views and experiences.