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240
Thomas Hardy
not only intensity that is at issue here, it is variety. To admit as much,
however, would be to topple Lawrence’s entire love ethic, or mis-ethic.
It is ironic that America should discover the clitoral organism in
the laboratories of the Masters-Johnson sex research team, aided by a
US government grant, when every second page of the uncharted sea of
Victorian pornography tells the same story, and far more organically.
Laboratory lovers are the electroded robots of sex. And it will be more
than ironic, it will be tragic if the public consciousness accepts the
aggressive, self-seeking role placed on the clitoral orgasm by so many
noisy, and sometimes noisome, feminists in our midst today. It will be
to play directly into the hands of the dominant technology to objectify
this experience, seal it off and code it as some sort of independent rival
of the male ejaculation. Why make the mistakes of a masculine society
all over again? As Susan Lydon puts it:
‘female sexuality is subtle and delicate, conditioned as much
by the emotions as by physiology and sociology. Masters and
Johnson proved that the orgasm experienced during intercourse,
the misnamed vaginal orgasm, did not differ anatomically from
the clitoral orgasm. But this should not be seen as their most
significant contribution to the sexual emancipation of women. . . .
As they wrote, “With orgasmic physiology established, the
human female now has an undeniable opportunity to develop
realistically her own sexual response levels.” Two years later this
statement seems naive and entirely too optimistic. Certainly
the sexual problems of our society will never be solved until
there is a real and unfeigned equality between men and women.
This idea is usually misconstrued: sexual liberation for women
is wrongly understood to mean that women will adopt all the
forms of masculine sexuality. As in the whole issue of women’s
liberation, that’s really not the point.’ 22
Equality, in other words, doesn’t mean sameness, and I for one
think Hardy was trying to show this. Women’s sexuality is immensely
varied and delicate, and literature—even the subliterature of pornography—may
be a better guide to it than the clinics. It is currently a
sort of platform with American feminists to attack pornographies as
‘encouraging rape and other forms of sexual sadism and exploitation.
They are an insult and a crime against women’. 23