Back in the fifties, Dr William Masters and Virginia Johnston were pioneers in the world of sexual health and wellbeing. As you may have seen on current Channel 4 series Masters of Sex, Masters and Johnston broke boundaries, challenging everything wellness experts ever thought about sexuality – particularly female sexuality. Before Masters and Johnston came along, women who climaxed from vaginal stimulation alone – i.e. without the help of a big, strong man – were thought to be mentally unbalanced. Still, while Masters and Johnston found no medical difference between clitoral and vaginal orgasms, thereby breaking down misconceptions that female sexuality was linked to poor mental health, a new series of essays has found that there may be differences between the two kinds of orgasm after all.
The new series of essays, which were published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, lays out the evidence that vaginal and clitoral orgasms are, in fact, separate phenomena, activating different areas of the brain. This may indeed reveal key psychological differences between women. Emmanuele Jannini, a professor of endocrinology at the University of Aquila in Italy, who organised and contributed to the essay series, notes, ‘We have plenty of evidence regarding the difference between the two main orgasms, clitoral and vaginally activated orgasm.’
In one essay, French gynaecologist Odile Buisson argues that the front wall of your vagina is inextricably linked with the internal parts of your clitoris, and so it may be next to impossible to stimulate the vagina without activating the clitoris. Out of this point, Buisson concludes that “vaginal” orgasms could be clitoral orgasms by another name. Still, researchers like Barry Komisaruk of Rutgers University claim that the different kinds of orgasm are reflected in different responses in your brain. ‘If the vagina stimulation is simply working via clitoral stimulations, then vaginal stimulation and clitoral stimulation should activate the exact same place in the sensory cortex,’ Komisaruk says. ‘But they don’t.’ While these clitoral, cervical and vaginal stimulation areas are close together in the brain, they only overlap slightly.
Then you have anecdotal reports from women that vaginal and clitoral orgasms feel different. If you have a spinal cord injury that cuts off all communication between your clitoris and your brain, you can still have orgasms via vaginal stimulation. If you’re a very fortunate lady indeed, it’s even possible to think yourself into having an orgasm, or to have one from a tough abdominal workout at the gym. According to Rutgers University professor emerita Beverly Whipple, one of the discovers of the also-controversial “G-spot,” ‘[O]rgasm in women is in the brain, it is felt in many body regions, and it can be stimulated from many body regions as well as from imagery alone.’
So what does this all mean for you? While these new fMRI studies and more sophisticated understandings of anatomy are unravelling what Jannini refers to as a woman’s “very complicated machinery,” this is not to say that you should feel inferior if you don’t orgasm vaginally. She explains, ‘A woman should have an understanding — who is she, how is her body composed, what is the possibility of her body, but she should not be looking for something like a race, like a game, like a duty. Looking for the G-spot orgasm or the vaginal orgasm as a need, as a duty, is the best way to lose the happiness of sex.’ Doing that puts us right back to before Masters and Johnston changed the way we view sex and – trust me on this – you don’t want to go back there.
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