A Super Progressive 1961 Book! Female Sexual Response by Hiroshi Yoshida Found at the Kinsey Institute

Books and MagazinesHighlighting Other Activists

Dec 6

Written By Trisha

This is my first in the WHAT I FOUND AT THE KINSEY INSTITUTE LIBRARY! series. It's about a book I found there called Female Sexual Response by Hiroshi Yoshida, and it blew my mind at how before its time it was. I'd never heard of it before, and when I just did a Google search for it, the only entries about it were in the catalog at the National Library of the Czech Republic and in the catalog at Indiana University (where I found it 'cause that's where the Kinsey Institute is).

It has a date of 1961, and it said it had been translated from Japanese, but it didn't really get any more info about the publishing than that. Here's the table of contents.

Notice the "NO WOMAN IS FRIGID" and the "FEMALE MASTURBATION" chapter. Two of my very favorite things. Seriously though, this book was boldly and clearly making the point that women are no less able to orgasm than men and no more in need of psychological over physical stimulation than men. It made no bones about the fact that women need clitoral stimulation in order to orgasm and that intercourse was not good a good way to get that. It even straight up said that people do sex in a way that's good for dudes, not women. I didn't read the whole thing. I skimmed relevant chapters, but it still blew the top of my head off.

It was feminist, progressive, and it's even pretty on point about the physical things involved in orgasm - like discussing muscle spasm in the vagina and anus. It references The Kinsey Report on Female Sexuality quite a bit, and although that book clearly talks about how females masturbate more than was thought and discussed the importance of clitoral stimulation for women, it certainly doesn't put it all together as clearly or speak as boldly as this Japanese book does. It was also a good 5 years before Masters and Johnson released their studies on the physical parts of female sexual response, yet this Japanese book speaks about the muscle spasms of orgasm and the utter necessity of clitoral stimulation in a surprisingly similar way.

Dude, this book is an amazing find. It is saying all the things that still - even to this day - need to be said. It was crazy progressive in its time, and it's still progressive for this time. I can't give you the whole book to read, so I took some pictures of some pages that you can check out below, and here's a few progressive-ass quotes. Enjoy.

"The disillusionment a woman feels in her sexual life, every time her anticipation is frustrated, will sooner or later cause her to regard sex with aversion and although she has no defect in herself she comes to be regarded as frigid". p.16
"The clitoris is the most sensitive of erogenous zones in a woman and is exclusively concerned with sexual pleasure." p.48
"Most of the cases of female frigidity are due to the lack or the inadequacy of stimulation of this organ." p. 49 (speaking of the clitoris. of course)
"For men, sexual intercourse means orgasm, which can be easily and surely attained at every coitus...For women sexual intercourse do not always end in orgasm. In spite of their essential superiority to men in their speed and endurability of response and the intensity of sexual sense, women are traditionally obliged to submit docily to sexual customs established for the most part by men." p.71