When it was suggested recently that UK schools should explain the role of the clit­oris, mothers were up in arms. They objected to their daugh­ters knowing that a girl might find it pleas­ur­able later in her life to touch her clitoris.

There was no uproar over boys’ genitals. Were the boys also told that their willies might give them pleasure later on? Boys discover their sexu­ality ‘natur­ally’ and many people believe that girls should be left ‘natur­ally’ not to discover theirs.

I suspect very few mothers ever talk to their daugh­ters about enjoying orgasm through clit­oral stim­u­la­tion. But then how many fathers talk to their sons about their enjoy­ment of orgasm through penile stim­u­la­tion? They don’t have to because it’s so obvious. Male sexual arousal and orgasm happen fairly spon­tan­eously but many women never orgasm throughout the whole of their lives.

One mother believed that her five-year-old should be left alone in childish inno­cence happily ‘pushing her dolly around in a stroller’. It’s ques­tion­able whether chil­dren as young as five would be able to make much of this inform­a­tion even if they could compre­hend what they were being told. But what about that dolly in the stroller? To have a real baby, male ejac­u­la­tion and orgasm are essen­tial but many people do not see that an expli­citly sexual phenomenon such as orgasm is relevant to women.

“Inter­course is neces­sary for repro­duc­tion, and sexual pleasure and orgasm are involved with repro­duc­tion. But exactly how? Looking closer, one sees that only male orgasm during inter­course is neces­sary for repro­duc­tion.” (p37 The Hite Reports 1993)

Many women relate to their role as a mother (the repro­ductive aspects of female sexu­ality) but are less comfort­able with the idea that women can enjoy sexual pleasure through their own arousal and orgasm. Since the concept of female sexu­ality (in terms of their own arousal) is alien to them, many women are never even inter­ested in discov­ering orgasm.

Women have to learn to appre­ciate eroticism

Girls need inform­a­tion and encour­age­ment if they are to exper­i­ence what boys learn more spon­tan­eously. If girls explore sexual activ­ities other than inter­course, not only might they discover orgasm but also ways of enjoying sex with a partner with a lower risk of preg­nancy (oral sex, for example). But you can’t make girls as inter­ested in orgasm as boys natur­ally are.

A fascin­ating collec­tion of letters by two literary men, who corres­pond with each other between 1955 and 1962, provides some enlight­en­ment. Rupert Hart-Davies explains his extra-marital affair, which came about after his wife lost interest in sex: “She is one of the (I suspect) many women whose sex instincts are in fact wholly directed to the produc­tion of chil­dren, and when their quiver is full they want no more (as they say in the courts) intercourse.”(p150 ‘The Lyttelton Hart-Davies Letters’ 2001)

Even in 2009, a major UK book­seller told me they remove the women’s erotic fiction before a head office audit. Many women are offended by books such as those in the ‘Black Lace’ range and yet for me they are so mildly erotic that I can rarely use them for orgasm. I go to London for erotic liter­ature with any bite (e.g. book stores along the Charing Cross Road).

Many people believe in shel­tering young women from erot­i­cism and yet enjoy­ment of erot­i­cism is funda­mental to a long-term sexual rela­tion­ship. A loving part­ner­ship involves supporting each other’s life goals of both family and an active sex life.

“The person who said that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach was aiming too high” (p98 Why men don’t listen 1999)