Ava talked in her post about “androcentrism,” or the practice of placing the male experience in the center of one’s world view and history. This affected how men sought to cure hysteria (believing marriage with a man to be the only good solution) but it also affected all the other scientific aspects. The reading mentioned that for a long time, medical professionals had no unique words for the genitalia commonly belonging to women, instead adapting male-centric language to talk about something completely different. I think this could be said about a lot of science’s history. For example, the Stanford Prison Experiment was considered a profound insight into the human disposition, but failed to account for the disposition of anyone who wasn’t white, male, and middle/upper class. Scientists can’t just study men and then apply what they’ve learned to everyone, since this can lead to lasting misconceptions.
It was also interesting to me how often these male medical professionals would describe the female orgasm as a paroxysm, either dispelling the notion that women could orgasm at all, or reinforcing the belief that women should only be able to orgasm via penetration, and any woman who orgasms differently was depraved. In addition, doctors were afraid of “overindulgence,” or women experiencing too much sexual pleasure, especially when it wasn’t via their husband’s penis.
The reading also made me remember this post from a few weeks ago, about how there are still ongoing projects trying to demystify female sexual pleasure. To a large extent, it is still very much a taboo subject. We know now that women can orgasm, but female masturbation is still stigmatized, and women are told to not expect orgasms from their partners, because it’s just too hard (something past medical professionals complained about as well).
