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Controversy over vaginal versus clitoral orgasm is nothing new; it's a debate that has consumed sexologists and psychoanalysts for the last 100 years. Now, new research has added fresh fuel to the controversy.

Completed by a team of Italian sexologists and published in the journal Clinical Anatomy, the review concludes vaginal orgasms don't exist. Female orgasm is only possible if the clitoris is stimulated during masturbation, cunnilingus, partner masturbation or with a finger during intercourse, the researchers say. Penetration alone is not enough.

This latest swing of the pendulum – from the view that vaginal orgasm is the ideal that women should aspire to and anything else is second rate – is unlikely to actually affect women. Indeed, one of the more interesting threads in this whole debate is the predominance of men's voices. Perhaps what we should be talking about is why male experts dictate the parameters of women's pleasure.




Frigidity and failure

Sigmund Freud was one of the first to investigate the "dark continent" of female sexuality. He declared the clitoral orgasm "infantile and immature". A woman could claim sexual maturity only when she experienced a vaginal orgasm, he said, ignoring her "amputated penis", the clitoris.

Inability to achieve vaginal orgasm meant a woman was "frigid" or "not a real woman", claimed Freud and many of his followers. This failure was attributed to deep-rooted neurotic problems.

The pressure was on. To be "normal" and "mature", women had to orgasm during sexual intercourse. And successive generations were diagnosed with sexual dysfunction when they failed to achieve this holy grail of sexual response. Many felt like failures; their bodies had let them down.

Unsurprisingly, faking orgasms during intercourse became the norm. No one wants her partner to think she is failing to be a "real woman".
Celebrating the clitoral orgasm

Then US sexologists William Masters and Virginia Johnson came along. Observing couples having sex in the laboratory in the 1960s, they concluded women's orgasms started in the clitoris and then extended to the vagina.

Any pleasure women experienced through penetration was due to the connection between clitoris and vagina. They reported "frigidity" as resulting from poor sexual technique, not women's ambivalence about their social role. And that women were capable of multiple orgasm, while men were not.

Feminists in the 1960s took up this research with glee, declaring the clitoral orgasm the mark of a liberated woman. Some went further, arguing women should eschew penile penetration altogether. Now a symbol of women's oppression, it was unnecessary for sexual pleasure.

The feminist argument went mainstream when Shere Hite appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1987. She had interviewed 1844 American women and declared the "true" female orgasm was clitoral. The female sexual revolution seemed to have been won with women speaking for their own sexual pleasure.