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Female sexuality and especially the nature of female orgasm has been a highly contested area, both within and outside psychoanalysis. Throughout the ages, and despite the efforts of many campaigners, female sexual pleasure, if any is allowed for at all, has been tightly tied to reproductive aims and functions, in many ideologies and discourses. Sexual liberation and reform movements of many kinds have consistently tried to re-evaluate the importance of the clitoris to female pleasure and orgasm, and to question the purported role and ideological dominance of the vagina and vaginal orgasm in ideals of femininity and heterosexual pleasure. As Zachary points out, and many authors before her have said, the clitoris has constantly been discovered, then disappeared, then rediscovered; an interesting example of disavowal and denial in the cultural history of purportedly scientific knowledge about contested subjects. What to this reader is welcome about this book, is the description of allegedly recent anatomical knowledge that might have a progressive and helpful role in advancing women's and men's understanding of the clitoris, its intricate connections to the surroundings of the vagina, and its centrality to sexual pleasure for many women. As Zachary says, knowledge about the body may change and this must affect the psychic representation in our minds - anatomy is not a complete given.
What is less clear - because only relatively old diagrams are provided - is whether the knowledge that Zachary argues is so recent and so ground-breaking is in fact that new. Certainly younger readers, not subject to the tyranny of the dominant myth of the vaginal orgasm, so effectively challenged by feminists (whom Zachary barely mentions, and then only to misrepresent and criticize), the researchers Masters and Johnson, and many in the sex therapy world, might feel this is largely old news, or common knowledge, at least for some. However, the clitoris is really only the topic of a few cha