No longer the female eunuchs

Press, 28 December 1985, Page 14

No longer the female eunuchs

Woman’s Experience of Sex. By Sheila Kitzinger. Penguin, 1985. 320 pp. $16.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Ralf Unger) Some months ago I heard a radio interview with Ms Kitzinger, when she was visiting New Zealand, by a wouldbe liberal conservative. The confusion caused by Ms Kitzinger’s frank discussion of the sexual woman, including her lesbian daughter, caused the interviewer some atypical moments of stammering. This book is in the same vein of keeping nothing in darkness, or even artistic shadow, but to describe the sexual functions and the machinery kept at a high level of perfection and satisfaction. “For women,” says Ms Kitzinger, “Sex is not something restricted to bottoms and breasts ... Sex involves the whole body and is expressed in different ways at different times in a woman’s life. ... We are only just beginning to share with each other what sex really is in terms of the women’s unique experience.” Where in the past the gaining of pleasure — heterosexually,

homosexually, and auto-erotically — was seen as being a dangerous fault and possible illness, now the nongaining of full satisfaction from this activity requires treatment as a dysfunction. She quotes Dr Szasz as saying, “In the nineteenth century, masturbating was an illness and not masturbating was a treatment- today, not masturbating is a disease and masturbating is a treatment” In the philosophy of the sexual liberationist, sex is a drive that requires regular expression for healthy, fulfilled living and it is also a leisure activity. Feminists started looking at sex in the context of history and ideology and felt that women essentially need to look at themselves and work out what they really want in life and who they really are. Sex, they see, as simply another way of women relating to men. From this viewpoint the book covers a great deal of the avenues of sex by discovering and having clearly set out maps to find different pleasure-giving parts of the anatomy — from the clitoris to the “G spot” — with the

latter now being seen as the seat of ultimate orgasm. Complications, such as making love again after being stitched following an episiotomy after childbirth, are not overlooked and advice includes many self-help measures, such as the use of herbal treatments for inflamed tissues.

In the end Ms Kitzinger, with her numerous conversations with other women, is astonished that up till then she had accepted a predominantly male view of sex. Men’s bodies, she says, had been the basis for anatomy and physiology and sexual behaviour, and women’s bodies and behaviour were seen as deviation from this.

This is a valuable book designed for women of all ages from adolescence to the elderly, with the former trying to understand themselves and the latter as well the changing patterns of youth and middle age. It is particularly distinguished in that there is no antimale feeling expressed, but rather the sense that we in the end are all struggling together to try to decode physical and emotional messages in ourselves and others.