Phallocentrism

Psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud, a founder of psychoanalysis, is critiqued as overemphasizing the importance and significance of the penis. Freud theorized that both male and female sexual development involve the penis early in life. He thought that girls pass through a developmental stage of “penis envy,” in which they desire to have a penis, and that boys experience “castration anxiety,” a stage in which they suspect that girls' peruses were removed as punishment and that their own will be removed as well. Feminists have interpreted these developmental theories as phallocen-tric, casting females as inferior and less than whole because they do not possess a phallus.

[Page 637]Psychoanalytic theories of clitoral and vaginal orgasms have also been attacked as phallocentric. The clitoris is a sexual organ located in front of the vaginal and urethral openings, extending up to an inch externally, and in two 3.5-inch branches (crura) internally. Freud conceptualized the external part of the clitoris as a tiny, inferior penis. He thought that when a woman reaches puberty and begins having coitus (penile-vaginal intercourse) the source of her orgasms should transfer from the masculine clitoris to the feminine vagina (the internal tube-shaped organ leading to the uterus, or womb), signaling sexual maturation. Psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch went on to equate the vaginal orgasm with mature femininity. Feminist criticism of the Freudian school maintained that the ideal of vaginal orgasm supports a false notion of the penis as the ultimate source of sexual pleasure. Furthermore, according to this argument, because men experience the vaginal walls as stimulating to the penis, they will tend to support the phallocentric belief that the penis should be ultimately satisfying to the vagina.

Pioneering biologist and sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey and his research team were the first to claim that vaginal orgasm is anatomically illogical, as the innermost part of the vagina has almost no nerve endings. Sexologists William Masters and Virginia Johnson went on to conceptualize the clitoris as equivalent in sexual functioning to the penis. They are widely credited with describing the centrality of the clitoris to sexual arousal in females and dispelling popular belief in the vaginal orgasm.

Sexual Norms and Practices

Greater cultural importance of the penis is argued to produce sexual scripts (expectations that guide behavior) facilitating male orgasm. On average, men in the United States are far more likely (75 percent) than women (28.6 percent) to report always having an orgasm with their partner, although men overestimate whether their partner always has orgasms (43.5 percent). In the United States, a much more reliable source of orgasm for males than for females is the most commonly reported last sexual event (96 percent). Heterosexual attitudes frame coitus as true sex and the ultimate goal in coupling, also known as the coital imperative. Heterosexuals may see noncoital sexual behavior as a precursor to coitus rather than sex in its own right. Heterosexuals may also have difficulty conceiving of sex between lesbians or acknowledging it as being sex, because it does not involve a penis.

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