Women and orgasm

It was a confluence of items: a spam offer, a book review, and a book, all concerned with women and orgasm, which my online dictionary defines as "a climax of sexual excitement, characterized by feelings of pleasure centered in the genitals and (in men) experienced as an accompaniment to ejaculation." 

The offer in my spam filter promised "She’ll Be Shaking & Begging — Tonight, Make her scream your name." It is not offering a vibrator, but a product that promises to give men an erection that will give a woman an orgasm. Here we are, fifty years after The Hite Report was published and the myth lives on that way to orgasm is via a male erection.

A couple weeks ago, in a review of a new book about Shere Hite and her best selling book, The New Yorker reviewer Margaret Talbot writes, "[The book's] main takeaway was the the  startling revelation that most women achieved orgasm not by means of vaginal intercourse alone—or what Hite, to the sniggering discomfort of many audiences, often referred to penile' thrusting'—but through manual or oral stimulation of the clitoris." (The New Yorker, 3926, p68)

The narrator of Miranda July's popular novel All Fours doesn't need an erect penis—or a male lover for that matter—to enjoy multiple orgasms, although she has nothing against men and their erections. The publisher says, "All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman."

One reviewer called All Fours a female Portnoy's Complaint, which is not fair, but may prepare unsuspecting readers for the reading experience. I remain saddened that there are enough misinformed men apparently that spams like the one I cite can find customers. I'm sorry for the men, sorry for their partners.