She Comes First: The Thinking Man's Guide to Pleasuring a Woman (Kerner)

by Ian Kerner

IMAGINE A WORLD in which a woman’s orgasm, along with the male’s, is a necessary and critical part of the reproductive process: a world in which human beings can’t reproduce unless both man and woman experience orgasm at the moment of insemination. In this bizarre world, men are selected as mates based not on their proficiency to wield a spear or look good in a tux, but on their ability to consistently lead a woman to climax; only those men who are able to experience their pleasure as part of a woman’s find themselves accepted by society. The rest are ostracized, cast out, banished to the margin. Sounds strange, like the makings of a Margaret Atwood novel or an X-rated episode of The Twilight Zone, but in fact, up through the eighteenth century, scientists, doctors, and philosophers believed that the female orgasm was an integral component of reproduction. As Natalie Angier noted, “The ancients also saw no difference between men’s and women’s capacity for sexual pleasure and the necessity of the female orgasm for conception. Galen proclaimed that a woman could not get pregnant unless she had an orgasm.”