Researchers Asked Over a Thousand Women How They Liked Their Genitals Touched

And they got REALLY specific. So I created diagrams.

Original Tomioka Eisen (1864 - 1905) Japanese Woodblock Print Series; Poetic Intercourse

Dear Conversationalists,

It’s vagina week! That’s one fun, filled week to discuss everything related to vaginas and vulvas - heath, anatomy, arousal, and an occasional vagina dentata story. (If you don’t know what the last one is then you have been watching way too much shark week and not enough vagina week.)

In case you missed it, over at A Grim Historian, we discuss what Presidents of lore (the ones not in bed with Saudi princes) have done when given extravagant and weird gifts.

How to Bribe an American President Without Spending $400 Million

Now, back to vaginas…

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In 1925, the great-grandniece of Napoleon Bonaparte, Marie Bonaparte, had lost her orgasm. She was determined to find it.

Marie believed that she could not orgasm from penetration because her clitoris was too far from her urethra. (She wasn't wrong. A shorter distance between the urethra and the glans clitoris correlates with more pleasurable penetrative sex.)

She partly got this hypothesis from her buddy Sigmund Freud who convinced her that women who only orgasm from direct clitoral stimulation were misdirecting excess masculinity. Freud taught that the correct way for ladies to find pleasure was through penetration because it involved the "mature" vagina and not the "immature" clitoris.

So Marie underwent a surgical procedure to move her misplaced clitoris to the correct location.

As you can imagine, it didn't go so well.

A century after Freud, researchers finally decided to ask women what they want when the penis is left out of the party. In a cross-sectional study published in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, researchers surveyed 1,200 women and asked them where and how they like their genitals touched.(1)

Here's how to learn your partner's sexual touch manual.