Summary of Rachel E. Gross's Vagina Obscura

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 Marie Bonaparte, the Princess of Monaco, was a woman who was unable to achieve orgasm during sex. She had decided to move her clitoris southward so that she could finally feel pleasure during intercourse. Only with this surgery, she believed, would she achieve the erotic harmony she desired.
#2 Marie was obsessed with Freud, the man who invented the field of psychoanalysis. She decided she would meet him, and when he told her he was not taking any new patients, she almost gave up on her dream.
#3 Marie Bonaparte was a patient of Freud’s, and she quickly became obsessed with him. She loved him, and he loved her, and they became very close. Freud understood Marie’s problem, and he thought it was because she had never fully accepted her role as a woman.
#4 The idea that the components of the female genitalia exist in constant conflict has deep roots. In ancient Greece, the vagina reigned supreme. The reason goes back to how ancient thinkers thought about sexual difference.

Sujets

• Love
• Love (disambiguation)
• Sexualité
• sexualité
• Sexualité
• Life science

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 10 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 6
• EAN13: 9781669383192
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Rachel E. Gross's Vagina Obscura
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Marie Bonaparte, the Princess of Monaco, was a woman who was unable to achieve orgasm during sex. She had decided to move her clitoris southward so that she could finally feel pleasure during intercourse. Only with this surgery, she believed, would she achieve the erotic harmony she desired.

#2

Marie was obsessed with Freud, the man who invented the field of psychoanalysis. She decided she would meet him, and when he told her he was not taking any new patients, she almost gave up on her dream.

#3

Marie Bonaparte was a patient of Freud’s, and she quickly became obsessed with him. She loved him, and he loved her, and they became very close. Freud understood Marie’s problem, and he thought it was because she had never fully accepted her role as a woman.

#4

The idea that the components of the female genitalia exist in constant conflict has deep roots. In ancient Greece, the vagina reigned supreme. The reason goes back to how ancient thinkers thought about sexual difference.

#5

The Greeks believed that the male body was standard and ideal, while the female body was inferior and imperfect. The male body was set as both standard and ideal, while women were a lesser, stunted version.

#6

The clitoris was identified by Hippocrates, but it was Galen of Pergamon who solidified woman’s sexual lot. He envisioned the female reproductive system as an inverted penis, with the uterus a hollow phallus and ovaries as internal testicles.

#7

The seventeenth century saw a flowering of clitoral knowledge. In her 1671 birthing manual, Jane Sharp, a British midwife, described the clitoris as a small phallus that swells when the spirits come into it and makes women lustful and take delight in copulation.

#8

The clitoris had been demonized by the time Freud came along. He believed that all women were born with a clitoris, but it was removed during childhood due to the fear of masturbation leading to disease.

#9

Masturbation was seen as a sign of being male, and not in the interest of the reproductive health of the nation. It was seen as a loathsome ulcer, and society’s worst evil.

#10

When Freud met Martha Bernays, she was peeling an apple at his dining table. She was a member of an intellectual class even above Freud’s, and he courted her by sending her poems in Latin.

#11

Freud’s theory of female sexuality was that a woman’s role was to accept her lot as a little creature without a penis and passively receive the penis. She had to enjoy this penetration.

#12

While Freud approached female sexuality from a theoretical standpoint, Marie lived it. She met her first lover during a summer spent hiking in the Swiss Alps with her father, Prince Roland Bonaparte. She was sixteen, he thirty-eight. They engaged in an innocent affair, composed of a single kiss and playing footsie under the dinner table.

#13

Marie was able to conduct research on women’s sexuality, and she found that the size of the clitoris had no effect on whether or not a woman achieved orgasm during intercourse. The outcome appeared to depend solely on the distance between the base of the clitoris and the urethra.

#14

Marie was a téleclitoridienne, which is when the clitoris is too far away from the vagina to ensure orgasm during intercourse. She proposed moving her clitoris closer to her vagina in a surgery called the Halban-Narjani operation.

#15

Marie’s surgery did not give her satisfaction. It did not help her orgasm, and she had to have it again in 1930. She continued to build on her theory of female sexuality, but she never repudiated her clitoris.

#16

Marie, the creator of the orgasmic woman, had a difficult life trying to find pleasure in penetration. She never understood female anatomy, and thought of her clitoris as a diminutive penis.

#17

The clitoris and vagina were not two separate entities, but were interwoven in their nerves and fates. They were part of the same thing. The clitoris is an underwater volcano, a pyramid mostly buried in sand, a jellyfish-spider reaching its tingling tendrils into every crevice of the female pelvis.