Kinsey and the Female Orgasm

In class, I wondered out loud if Kinsey's report was radical in its celebration of the female orgasm. This article helps us understand how Kinsey's report was one of the "top five" major events for the history of the female orgasm,  but it was by no means the first time science and sociology had been concerned with it or wrote about it. In Medieval times, people believed the female orgasm to be essential for conceiving children. In the 1800s, scientists and medical professionals used massive vibrators to induce female orgasms as a way to cure "hysteria." So Kinsey's report wasn't radical in the sense that it admitted that women do, in fact, have orgasms--people had publicly known that for years. But it was radical in so far as it celebrated female orgasms as something that men wanted to supply for women in sex, even instructing men to learn from other women how to please females.