Napoleon’s granddaughter, Marie Bonaparte (1882 – 1962), in addition to being a princess of Greece and Denmark, was a French writer and psychoanalyst who was closely associated on a professional level with Sigmund Freud . Her first contact with him took place, in fact, because she suffered from frigidity and wanted advice on her sexual dysfunction.
From then on, Marie became so interested in psychoanalysis that she chose not only to support Freud financially, but also became a psychoanalyst. Among other things, Marie conducted a pioneering study on orgasms and how the distance between the clitoris and the urethra influenced them.
Masturbation and orgasms
Marie’s problem is that, although she had orgasms when she masturbated, it was impossible for her to reach them during intercourse . Her first hypothesis in this regard was that perhaps the clitoris was too far from her vagina and, therefore, her husband could not reproduce the same friction on the clitoris that she achieved during masturbation.
Marie was at a time when there was hardly any scientific literature on orgasms , much less on the clitoris, the organ of the female genital system whose tip or glans protrudes at the top of the vulva, but extends through the inside of the lips older, the perineum and surrounds the lower third of the vagina.
To find out if the arrangement of her clitoris was normal or abnormal (and therefore obtaining orgasms through penetration were equally difficult for other women like her), Marie teamed up with a doctor to conduct a unique scientific study for the time .
After recruiting 243 women , he measured the distance between their clitoris and their vaginas for all of them, as well as asked them about the frequency of their orgasms during intercourse.
In 1924, Marie Bonaparte published the results of her study under a pseudonym (AE Narjani) in the scientific journal Bruxelles-Médical , concluding that the distance of the clírotis and the vagina, indeed, influenced the frequency of orgasms .
Marie thus divided women into three types: mesoclinical (those with the clitoris located about 2.5 cm from their urethra), teleclitoral (a distance greater than 2.5 cm), and paraclitoral (a distance less than 2.5 cm). 2.5 cm).
The most surprising thing about Marie’s study is that, despite its limitations, her intuition had been correct, as subsequent analyzes confirmed that, in effect, a smaller distance between the clitoris and the vagina facilitated obtaining orgasm during sexual intercourse. intercourse.
One of the most recent studies in this regard is from 2011: it was published in the journal Hormones and Behavior and was carried out by researchers Kim Wallen , from Emory University, and Elisabeth Lloyd , from the Kinsey Institute, University of Indiana, probably the most important center for research on human sexuality. Its starting point was precisely the review of the data published almost a century ago by Napoleon Bonaparte’s granddaughter.
