To commit atrocities, you must first believe absurdities.
Voltaire

It's a world gone crazy that keeps Woman in chains . . .
Tears for Fears

No discussion of our favourite subject—Sex and its Discontents—could be complete without touching on the sensitive business of orgasms, and the extraordinary fuss we still make about them. Women's orgasms that is—so much more mysterious than men's; so much more promising; so much more intense. Indeed, if women's orgasms really are as good as they seem then women must be every bit as interested in sex as men—a possibility that terrifies many, and which goes some way towards explaining why the control of sexuality—especially female sexuality—has been considered so necessary for millennia. Consider this charming passage from the Handbook for the Subjugation of Women:

I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. (Genesis 3:16)

It is hardly surprising that feminist thinkers have long been among the most vocal critics of religious authority. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for instance, was typically forthright when she declared in 1896 that: "The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of woman's emancipation." [1] (see also here & here.) Brave words in her day. But even in the relatively liberated years of the 1960s and 70s, women's sexual behaviour was still the hottest of hot-button issues. Erica Jong, for instance, gamely trying to sell the "zipless fuck" at a time when female virginity was still widely seen as a marital asset, remarked on the confusion rife among women themselves when it came to their orgasms:

Oh Doris Lessing, my dear—your Anna [in The Golden Notebook] is wrong about orgasms. They are no proof of love—any more than that other Anna's fall under the wheels of that Russian train was a proof of love. It's all female shenanigans, cultural mishegoss, conditioning, brainwashing, male mythologizing. What does a woman want? She wants what she has been told she ought to want. Anna Wulf wants orgasm, Anna Karenina, death. Orgasm is no proof of anything. Orgasm is proof of orgasm. Someday every woman will have orgasms—like every family has color TV—and we can all get on with the real business of life. [1a]

Jong wrote these lines nearly thirty years ago, but it might as well have been yesterday, because despite centuries of nostrum and nonsense, thinkers of every stripe are still chasing the dragon of female sexuality with unbridled zeal. The unfortunate beast is romanticized, politicized and pathologized as obsessively as ever—a longstanding cultural addiction that shows no sign of abating. The taboo-ridden mystique surrounding women's sexuality may not be quite as unspeakable as it once was, but for many the whole business remains as recondite and confining as ever. And to complicate matters further, the wave of eroticization that has swept through western culture over the last generation [2] seems to have left many women facing a battery of new sexual expectations and dilemmas which, far from liberating them sexually, have only served to make the world of sexual relationships seem more daunting than ever. Orgasms, of all things, should not be political phenomena. No wonder they can be so elusive. [3]

Men's orgasms might be somewhat more reliable, but we are no less conditioned. Nature and culture have fashioned our desires in particular directions too. Men are supposed to crave power, possessions, admiration, status—more mishegoss that is equally elusive and promises vastly more than it can deliver. Granted, some men are now having to contend with some of the stereotypical obligations that women have had to endure for generations, but this is hardly an advance. Even so, heterosexual male sexuality isn't nearly as prescribed and proscribed as women's. There certainly isn't anything resembling the Orgasm Police for men. [3a]

Not so for the distaff side, for whom the violent denial of orgasm has long been a favoured from of sexual control. The prima facie example is the genital mutilation of girls—a barbarity still routinely performed in many parts of the world, and one designed specifically to deny women pleasure. [4] This gruesome practice (see World Health Organization description here) may be the most institutionalized form of orgasm control yet invented, but the psychology behind it is arguably responsible for some pretty crazy behaviour in the West too—not least our huge appetite for cosmetic surgery [Ref & Ref], which is now a multi-billion dollar industry.[5] Nevertheless, the fact that forced clitoridectomy and infibulation are still tolerated at all, never mind defended (not least by the women who perform these procedures on their daughters) is both a disgrace and strong evidence, as if it were needed, that we are all capable of believing nonsense—no matter whether we profit from it or are harmed by it. [6] (see also here)

It seems to me that this sexual miasma is emblematic of a wider angst within modern western culture—a central feature of which is our perennial failure of empathy. As a friend put it to me recently, we seldom "pay attention to the quiet cries for help around us"—a failing that is one of our more shameful "daily sins of omission"[7]. George Eliot said much the same thing a century and a half ago, although for her the villain's name was egoism.[8] Her insight, which remains as ungrasped in our time as it was in hers, was that our obsession with Self allows so little regard for the Other that we seldom even acknowledge injustice unless it hits close to home—a feat we accomplish by either  ignoring or demonizing whatever threatens our preferred, Self-sustaining view of the world.

I think the simple but disagreeable fact is that we haven't drawn the bead on truth nearly as sharply as we like to think. "The truth", said Oscar Wilde, "is seldom pure and never simple." Unfortunately it can also be elusive, counter-intuitive, ephemeral, and hotly disputed. But truth matters, because unless we have some notion of what's true, it can be very difficult to say what's right. If the rains haven't come, and you believe the gods need to be placated, perhaps in the form of a blood sacrifice, then as the Mayan people "knew", it's not a question of whether or not to cut the throats of virgins, it's simply a question of how many. Are we to suppose that they were correct in their belief and thus right in their action?

But even if we all agree that truth matters, getting at the truth is often difficult—and because the truth can hurt or embarrass, getting at it usually requires some courage too. Looking back on the history of science, for example, the single most important lesson we can draw is that we must regularly test our beliefs, all of them, no matter how obvious, universal or eternal we suppose them to be. We also need to test the ways in which we arrive at our conclusions. In short, we should have good reason to believe the things we believe.

The first casualty of this exercise (of testing belief) is what Carl Sagan called "intellectual docility"[8a]—our evident inclination to accept that some ideas or practices are right (or true) just because they have come from the mouth of a Nobel Prize winner, priest, or Prime Minister,[9] or because they have gone unquestioned for generations.[10] As another scientist, Richard Feynman, repeatedly said, we must reject the mirage of "certainty"; we must always doubt, because it is only through doubting what we believe to be true that we make any kind of progress.[10a] After all, we only bother to investigate what we don't know.

But doubting accepted wisdom can be a risky business. The first people to argue for the abolition of slavery, votes for women, a heliocentric solar system, continental drift, natural selection, gay rights, almost any issue you like, were vilified and excoriated as dangerous, heretical, revolutionary, crazy, or even wicked. But despite such obloquy, a few pioneers found the courage to give voice to their disquiet; to doubt when all around them were certain. If only a few more of us would follow their example and question some "obvious" truth from time to time.

I labour this because the same docility of mind that allowed the evils of slavery, child prostitution, and even the holocaust, also allows every other injustice, including the absurd denial of women's sexual pleasure. A mother doesn't arrange for the bloody severance of her daughter's clitoris—with or without anaesthetic—unless she believes it's the right (or at least the best) thing to do; yet many loving mothers permit or practice this abomination every day.[11] And we can't just shrug and declare these women stupid, mad, or evil, or say that they have been co-opted or brainwashed or whatever, even if such accusations are true, because unless we can back up our arguments with evidence and reason they could just as well point an indignant finger at us! No, if we're going to take the moral high ground on these matters (and thereby profess some kind of superiority), we need to be able to defend it—intellectually—against all comers.

Unfortunately, most of us pay scant regard to the disciplines of logic, epistemology and ethics—the big guns of philosophy we should all be packing. Instead we delude ourselves with convenient, comforting, and self-justifying stories, many of which are socially necessary. We avoid ideas that threaten our cherished beliefs, and we deftly rationalize nonsense when doing so allows us to remain comfortable, and silent, in the face of injustice. Until, that is, we become victims. Then we howl.

Martin Luther King, that champion of victims, famously said: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."[12] In other words we shouldn't try to pick and choose when it comes to injustice because there's only one kind. To borrow a phrase from another moral philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, it's the same racism, the same misogyny, the same misology—failure to doubt—that lies in wait for us all. [13]

If we want a better world—a world free of sexual mishegoss in which children's genitals aren't butchered and women can enjoy orgasms without fear of being branded a Hester Prynne—we need to snap out of our intellectual docility, start paying attention to those quiet cries around us, and most importantly, admit that we're not nearly as good as we like to think when it comes to distinguishing truth from falsity.

© RSP 2003-2004

Professor Richard Shweder has very different vies on genital mutilation - see here
See William K Clifford (1877) on the necessity of doubt - here

Notes