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Wednesday 6 February 2013

Getting the ladies fixed

Disturbing rise of the G-spot jab: It's the latest cosmetic treatment that promises to pep up your sex life. But, warn doctors, it could do exactly the opposite. Reported in, believe it or not, the Daily Mail and discovered through the good offices of Dr Petra Boynton, whose sensible comments are cited in the course of that article.

Thinking more generally about medical attention to the female genitalia, I was reminded that I never reported here on Peter Cryle and Alison Moore's Frigidity: An Intellectual History (2011), which I read and enjoyed last year, but never got around to posting on, as this was more or less concurrent with the final throes of getting the completed ms of Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880 (MK II) out of the door. Although it doesn't have much to say specifically on the UK, it's a very useful study of a relatively complex history, and attentive to the different genres within which 'frigidity' got represented/presented as a problem/theorised, etc.

A particular association with the above news report was their extensive, highly nuanced and sympathetic discussion of Freud's disciple Marie Bonaparte, who famously underwent an operation to relocate her clitoris in a search for 'orgasmic normality'.

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