Summary of Rachel E. Gross's Vagina Obscura

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

#1 Marie Bonaparte, the Princess of Monaco, was a woman who was unable to achieve orgasm during sex. She had decided to move her clitoris southward so that she could finally feel pleasure during intercourse. Only with this surgery, she believed, would she achieve the erotic harmony she desired.

#2 Marie was obsessed with Freud, the man who invented the field of psychoanalysis. She decided she would meet him, and when he told her he was not taking any new patients, she almost gave up on her dream.

#3 Marie Bonaparte was a patient of Freud’s, and she quickly became obsessed with him. She loved him, and he loved her, and they became very close. Freud understood Marie’s problem, and he thought it was because she had never fully accepted her role as a woman.

#4 The idea that the components of the female genitalia exist in constant conflict has deep roots. In ancient Greece, the vagina reigned supreme. The reason goes back to how ancient thinkers thought about sexual difference.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Apr 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669383192

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Insights on Rachel E. Gross's Vagina Obscura

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Marie Bonaparte, the Princess of Monaco, was a woman who was unable to achieve orgasm during sex. She had decided to move her clitoris southward so that she could finally feel pleasure during intercourse. Only with this surgery, she believed, would she achieve the erotic harmony she desired.

#2

Marie was obsessed with Freud, the man who invented the field of psychoanalysis. She decided she would meet him, and when he told her he was not taking any new patients, she almost gave up on her dream.

#3

Marie Bonaparte was a patient of Freud’s, and she quickly became obsessed with him. She loved him, and he loved her, and they became very close. Freud understood Marie’s problem, and he thought it was because she had never fully accepted her role as a woman.

#4

The idea that the components of the female genitalia exist in constant conflict has deep roots. In ancient Greece, the vagina reigned supreme. The reason goes back to how ancient thinkers thought about sexual difference.

#5

The Greeks believed that the male body was standard and ideal, while the female body was inferior and imperfect. The male body was set as both standard and ideal, while women were a lesser, stunted version.

#6

The clitoris was identified by Hippocrates, but it was Galen of Pergamon who solidified woman’s sexual lot. He envisioned the female reproductive system as an inverted penis, with the uterus a hollow phallus and ovaries as internal testicles.

#7

The seventeenth century saw a flowering of clitoral knowledge. In her 1671 birthing manual, Jane Sharp, a British midwife, described the clitoris as a small phallus that swells