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Interesting article in the UK Sunday Times today: Part 1
Part 2 of post...
All of this complexity, I would learn later, gives women several different areas in their pelvises from which orgasms can be produced, and all of these connect to the spinal cord and then up to the brain. Coady suspected that my problem was a spinal compression of one of the latter branches.
She wanted to assure me that because of the way women were wired, no matter how bad the spinal compression that she suspected I had might prove to be, I would never lose the ability to have an orgasm, from the clitoris. Minimally comforted, I left her office with an appointment for an MRI and a referral to Dr Jeffrey Cole, New York’s pelvic nerve man.
Calm and quietly amusing, with an old-fashioned, reassuring manner, Cole looked at my x-rays, examined my posture, then wrote me a prescription for a hideous black back brace.
All women’s wiring is different, that’s the reason women respond so differently from one another sexually Two weeks later, I went back for a follow-up visit. Azaleas were in bloom — it was the loveliest part of the spring — but I felt almost faint as I sped into the suburbs in the back seat of a battered taxi.
I was also very uncomfortable, since, for the past two weeks, I had been wearing the back brace. It extended from above my hips to below my rib cage and it made me sit up perfectly straight.
I was really scared to hear what Cole had to say, since I knew he had my MRI results. The MRI, he informed me, showed that I had lower-back degenerative spinal disease: my vertebrae were crumbling and compressed against each other. I was very surprised, having never had any pain or any problem with my back.
He startled me by showing me the additional x-rays he had taken during the last appointment; there was no way to miss or misread it: on L6 and S1, my lower back, my spinal column was like a child’s tower of blocks that had slid, at a certain point, exactly halfway off central alignment — so that half of each stack of vertebrae was in contact with the other, but half of each ended in space.
I dressed and sat in Cole’s consultation office. He put me through an unexpectedly tough and direct interview: “Did you ever have a blow to your lower back?†“Did anything ever strike your lower back?†He said it was a serious injury and I must have some memory of having sustained it.
After about five minutes, I realised that yes, I had indeed once suffered a blow. In my early twenties, I had lost my footing in a department store, fallen down a flight of stairs and landed on my back.
I hadn’t felt much pain, but I had felt shaken. An ambulance had arrived; I had been taken to hospital and x-rayed. But nothing had been found to be the matter and I had been released.
Cole ordered a more detailed x-ray. He also performed an uncomfortable test in which he shot electrical impulses through needles into my neural network, to see what was “lighting up†and what had gone dark.
At our third meeting he explained that the new set of x-rays had revealed exactly what was the matter. I had been born with a mild version of spina bifida, the condition in which spinal vertebrae never develop completely.
The blow from 20 years before had cracked the already fragile and incompletely formed vertebrae. Time had drawn my spinal column far out of alignment around the injury, which was now compressing one branch of the pelvic nerve — the one that terminated in the vaginal canal. I had been unbelievably lucky never to have had any symptoms until then, he said.
Given the severity of my injury, it was fortunate that though I had increasing numbness, I had had no pain. Much though I disliked working out, it seemed that a lifetime of grudging exercise had strengthened my back and abdomen enough to have kept any worse symptoms from manifesting until then. But time had done its work: where the two sections of spine were misaligned, the pelvic nerve was entrapped and compressed, and the signals from one of its branches were blocked from moving up my spinal cord to my brain. The neural impulses from that part of my body had gone dark.
I wondered if this had something to do with how I felt — or how I was not feeling — after sex, though I was too shy to ask. He explained that I would need to consider surgery to fuse the vertebrae and to relieve the pressure on the nerve.
After I had walked for him so he could check my gait to make sure my legs had not been affected, and after he had measured my shoulders to be sure they were level, I mentioned to him — perhaps partly for a second opinion, for reassurance — that Coady had assured me that my clitoral orgasms would not be affected, even if the branch of the pelvic nerve that was injured did not ever get better. He agreed that that was correct; if the clitoral branch of the network were to be affected, it would have been so by then.
The fact that that branch was unaffected was an accident of my wiring. And then he explained casually: “Every woman is wired differently. Some women’s nerves branch more in the vagina; other women’s nerves branch more in the clitoris. Some branch a great deal in the perineum, or at the mouth of the cervix. That accounts for some of the differences in female sexual response.â€
I almost fell off the edge of the exam table in my astonishment. That’s what explained vaginal versus clitoral orgasms? Neural wiring? Not culture, not upbringing, not patriarchy, not feminism, not Freud? Even in women’s magazines, variation in women’s sexual response was often described as if it were predicated mostly upon emotions, or access to the “right†fantasies or role playing, or upon one’s upbringing, or upon one’s “guiltâ€, or “liberationâ€, or upon a lover’s skill.
I had never read that the way you best reached orgasm, as a woman, was largely due to basic neural wiring. This was a much less mysterious and value-laden message about female sexuality: it presented the obvious suggestion that anyone could learn about her own, or his or her partner’s, particular neural variant as such, and simply master the patterns of the special way it worked.
“Do you realise,†I stammered, not self-possessed enough in my astonishment to consider that the debate I was about to describe might not have been as momentous to him as it was to me, “you’ve just given the answer to a question that Freudians and feminists and sexologists have been arguing about for decades? All these people have assumed the differences in vaginal versus clitoral orgasms had to do with how women were raised . . . or what social role was expected of them . . . or whether they were free to explore their own bodies or not . . . or free or not to adapt their lovemaking to external expectations — and you are saying that the reason is simply that all women’s wiring is different? That some are neurally wired more for vaginal orgasms, some more for clitoral, and so on? That some are wired to feel a G-spot more, others won’t feel it so much — that it’s mostly physical?â€
“All women’s wiring is different,†he confirmed gently, as if he were addressing someone who had become slightly unhinged. “That’s the reason women respond so differently from one another sexually. The pelvic nerve branches in very individual ways for every woman. These differences are physical.†(I would learn later that this complex distribution is very different from male sexual wiring, which, as far as we know from the dorsal penile nerve, is far more uniform.)
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