In the early days of the second wave Women’s Movement, women gathered in small consciousness-raising groups to talk about their experiences as women, and, of course, sooner or later, the conversation turned to sex. What surprised most women as they began to talk openly was that they were not the only ones ever to fake orgasm. While the sexual revolution was rolling on for men, opening greater and greater access to sexual exploits with lots of women, women were finding themselves continuing to fall into the role prescribed by their gender – pleasing men sexually even when they themselves were not being satisfied. But as the Women’s Movement began to have an impact, women came to expect to be equal partners in the sexual revolution … and that meant no longer faking orgasms.

In 1968, Anne Koedt wrote “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” denouncing Freud’s construction of the vaginal orgasm as the truly mature sexual response and denigrating the clitoral orgasm as “infantile.” She argues that by marginalizing the clitoris, Freud and other doctors and scientists had controlled women’s sexuality and had made women feel sexually inadequate for not achieving vaginal orgasm. Soon, the “faked orgasm” became a metaphor for women’s sexual exploitation.

And feminists offered a variety of solutions, from sex toys to celibacy. In 1970, Shulamith Firestone argued that sex, not social class, was the root of all oppression. In The Dialectic of Sex, she argued that reproductive technologies should be pursued to deliver women from the tyranny of their biology.

Germaine Greer, author of The Female Eunuch, contended that all women should become sexually liberated, and she advocated a strike, the withdrawal of women from sexual labor. She said that women should have the same sexual freedom as men and, if need be, should use men for sexual pleasure.

The debate about sexuality swirled among feminists through the 70s, encompassing issues ranging from pornography to rape, abortion to prostitution. And while the question of the dangers and/or pleasures of sex remained an open one, the raising of the question itself had made an important mark on the consciousness of American women.

Source: Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open. New York: Viking, 2000