Medical authority has been used to condemn female sexual pleasure as decadence.

Evidence

Still, in our times, woman’s claim to pleasure incites male anger; a striking document on this subject is Dr. Grémillon’s treatise La vérité sur l’orgasme vénérien de la femme (The Truth About the Genital Orgasm of the Woman). The preface informs us that the author, a World War I hero who saved the lives of fifty-five German prisoners, is a man of the highest moral standing. Taking serious issue with Stekel in Frigidity in Woman, he declares, “The normal and fertile woman does not have a genital orgasm. Many are the mothers (and the best of them) who have never experienced these wondrous spasms … the most latent erogenous zones are not natural but artificial. They are delighted to have them, but they are stigmas of decadence … Tell all that to a man seeking pleasure and he does not care. He wants his depraved partner to have a genital orgasm, and she will have it. If it does not exist, it will be made to exist. Modern woman wants a man to make her vibrate. To her we answer: Madam, we don’t have the time, and hygiene forbids it!… The creator of erogenous zones works against himself: he creates insatiable women. The female ghoul can tirelessly exhaust innumerable husbands … the ‘zoned’ one becomes a new woman with a new spirit, sometimes a terrible woman capable of crime … there would be no neuroses, no psychoses if we understood that the ‘two-backed beast’ is an act as indifferent as eating, urinating, defecating, or sleeping.” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1383

Categorization

• SHARE: Extremely quotable source: a decorated war hero physician declares female orgasm a ‘stigma of decadence’ and insatiability a route to crime — perfect material to send to anyone interested in medical misogyny.
• ADDENDUM: Complements the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article — the same pattern of moral authority (here medicine rather than dress codes) policing female bodily pleasure as class/identity signaling.
• XREF: Connects to how medicine pathologized female pleasure, echoing the same dynamics Sandra Bartky and contemporary phenomenologists of oppression describe; also mirrors Foucault’s medical power analysis. — connects to: The new morality condemns marriage and prostitution as forms crushing erotic life — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 862; Marriage, designed to regulate female eroticism, instead destroys it — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1179; Purity culture assigned women responsibility for controlling male sexual desire — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White…, 389

Broader Connections

• Purity culture assigned women responsibility for controlling male sexual desire #expands (0.82) — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 389
• The new morality condemns marriage and prostitution as forms crushing erotic life #expands (0.75) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 862
• Marriage, designed to regulate female eroticism, instead destroys it #expands (0.72) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1179