Erogenous zone

Erogenous zones are those areas of the body that arouse sexual desire. Erogenous has two general meanings. The first refers to the genitals or breasts, which when stimulated produce pleasurable sensations in their owner. The phrase ‘erogenous zones’ was coined near the end of the nineteenth century and used in the early twentieth century by some psychologists to describe how simple pressure to these parts of the body could arouse complete orgasm in what were defined as ‘hysterical persons’ (generally understood to be women). The second general meaning of the phrase, to be dealt with at some length here, refers to a visual phenomenon associated with clothing and body adornment. For cultural anthropologists, erogenous zones are those areas of the female body which men find sexually arousing and which women alter or adorn to attract the male eye.

Erogenous zones vary from culture to culture and over time. Asian men prize the nape of the neck while Europeans are unique in their fixation on the waist. In defiance of common sense, the genitals rarely become erogenous zones. Suggestion is more arousing than exposure so male desire is displaced from the vulva to parts of the body like the mouth or the foot which symbolize or resemble it. Humans then increase this likeness through body painting, cosmetics, mutilation, or other procedures. Western women paint their lips bright red, enhancing the resemblance to the labia. Aristocratic Chinese women bound their feet so that these tiny, curled appendages more closely resembled the vulva. All societies alter erogenous zones to make them more ‘beautiful’ or prominent. Polynesians tattooed the thighs and buttocks of nubile girls; Africans scarred them. Both procedures were designed to exaggerate the secondary sexual characteristics, thereby helping the girl attract a mate. Westerners have not escaped this tendency to ‘perfect’ nature. In the nineteenth century, tight-laced corsets produced bulging hips and buttocks that made women more ‘feminine’ — that is, erotic.

When not laced, bound, stretched, pierced, or tattooed, erogenous zones are usually concealed or only partially exposed. In his influential study, The Psychology of Clothes (1930), psychoanalyst J. C. Flugel observed that bare flesh is boring. Male curiosity is sustained by veiling the erotic site, by covering and exhibiting it at the same time. In Africa and Polynesia, scarring and tattooing performed this function: erogenous zones appeared covered but were naked on a second glance. In the West, clothes perform this function, for they conceal while drawing attention to the erotic site. For example, heavy skirts concealed European women's legs for centuries, while colourful or decorated petticoats directed the eye to the feet and ankles. This ploy was so successful that Victorian men became fainthearted at the sight of a well-turned ankle. Then legs lost their sexual allure when hemlines rose after World War I. Female legs were exposed for the first time in centuries and the erogenous zone moved elsewhere, to the back in the 1930s and the breasts in the 1950s.

Erogenous zones should be distinguished from sexual fetishes. According to Freud, a fetish is an inappropriate object (a shoe for example) that is substituted for a woman and used for sexual gratification. An erogenous zone is a body part (a foot, for instance) that arouses sexual curiosity and draws a man's attention to the whole female body. Fetishism is an individual personality disorder, while erogenous zones are sexual preferences shared by most men at a given time or place. Fetishes belong to the science of psychopathology while erogenous zones belong to the social world of costume and fashion.

It was in fact a dress historian, James Laver, who first discussed ‘shifting erogenous zones’ in the 1930s. He used this concept to explain fashion or rapid changes in female dress. Influenced by psychoanalyst Flugel, Laver argued that women are born exhibitionists whose social subordination forces them to acquire male protection. Consequently, women dress mainly to attract men, and in order to do so they emphasize their erogenous zones by means of their attire. Male sexual curiosity is, however, highly unstable. Men quickly tire of a given erogenous zone and move on to other feminine body parts. Women must follow and adopt a new form of dress. The instability of male sexual curiosity means that women's dress is in a constant state of flux. This change of fashion and its dictates are directly related to shifting erogenous zones.

Unlike women, modern men have escaped the tyranny of fashion. In medieval and early modern times, male dress was opulent and highly erotic, as the Renaissance codpiece attests. Around 1800 male dress changed: men forswore exhibitionism and renounced brightly coloured, erotic attire. This ‘Great Male Renunciation’, as Flugel called it, produced the sober, undemonstrative suit, which two hundred years later men still wear. Male attire is impervious to fashion because it is indifferent to sexual display or allure: it need not follow shifting erogenous zones.

For fifty years, historians accepted this version of costume history and believed that shifting erogenous zones fuelled fashion. Then in the 1980s a new generation of costume scholars (most of them women) challenged the old theory. Art historians insisted that costume was a part of a broader visual culture and obeyed the same laws as painting or architecture. Feminists pointed to the sexism that underlay Flugel and Laver's theories and argued that women dressed to please themselves as much as to please men. Costume historians observed that fashion always produces its opposite anti-fashion and menswear, appearances notwithstanding, conveys subtle but strong erotic messages. All these scholars agreed that sexuality was not the primary motive for dress. People dress, the young scholars insisted, to express themselves, to project their ideal self image, to display their political views, to signal their racial and national identity, and to assert their social position. In the new costume history, sexuality still shapes costume; dress is too close to the skin to avoid it. But the erogenous zone no longer dictates fashion nor serves as the only explanation for the human compulsion to decorate, ornament, and alter the body.

— Kate Norberg

Bibliography

• Steele, V (1985). Fashion and eroticism: ideals of feminine beauty from the Victorian era to the Jazz Age. Oxford University Press, New York.
• Wilson, E. (1985). Adorned in dreams. Virago, London

See also body decoration; body mutilation and marking; buttocks; fashion; fetishism; scars; tattoo.

Any part of the body susceptible of becoming excited, of being a seat of pleasure, is an erotogenic zone. Freud nevertheless used the term to refer primarily to a number of specific areas, notably, the genitals, mouth, and anus. These zones he saw as locations of particular instincts known as "component instincts." In neurosis, on his account, nongenital erotogenic zones come to function as substitutes for the genitals. The idea of erotogenic zones was inseparable from the theory of libidinal stages, each of which, at a certain age, is fixed upon a particular zone.

Freud found support in the work of the pediatrician S. Lindner for his assertion that the child pursues the kind of sucking that develops anaclitically from feeding at the breast, for the pleasure obtained from excitation of the oral erotogenic zone. "The child's lips, in our view, behave like an erotogenic zone, and no doubt stimulation by the warm flow of milk is the cause of the pleasurable sensation" (1905d, p. 181). Sexual activity centered on an erotogenic zone rests first on its utility for self-preservation but is subsequently repeated independently of that function. Erotogenic zones are thus seen as the source of the sexual instinct, its place of origin, and (for the appropriate instinct) its place of residence.

Freud nevertheless broadened his definition of an erotogenic zone well beyond its original link with a bodily function, noting that "any other part of the skin or mucous membrane can take over the functions of an erotogenic zone, and must therefore have some aptitude in that direction" (1905d, p. 183). An area may be affected by chance as the child explores the body and discovers its potential for pleasure through an association with the simultaneous pleasure of sucking. For the adult who represses the sexual nature of the genitals, this opens up the regressive possibility of instating any part of the body as an erotogenic zone. In this case, hysterogenic zones present the same characteristics as erotogenic ones.

How is pleasure produced at the level of the erotogenic zone? The pressure of the need for satisfaction, which is of central origin, is projected outward, stimulating a peripheral erotogenic zone, whose manipulation, in a manner analogous to sucking on the breast, relieves the feelings aroused and so generates satisfaction. The erotogenic zone may also be stimulated directly, in which case it by itself creates a need, which, to be satisfied, calls for further stimulation of the zone in question.

Each particular erotogenic zone (the mouth, anus, genital organs) is wedded to a habitual stimulation that will vary according to the life stage reached. Like the labial zone before it, the anal zone is eroticized by means of an anaclitic dependence on a corresponding bodily function, in this case excretion. The genital zone (the penis in the case of a boy, the clitoris in that of a girl) first becomes erotogenic through an anaclitic relationship with the function of micturition, the first sexual excitation of this zone constituting the point of departure for a normal sexual life. Freud (1908b) associated specific character types with adult fixations on the erotogenic nature of this or that zone.

The sexual life of early childhood is not confined to the stimulation of erotogenic zones, for so-called component instincts can emerge independently of those zones. The instinct to see and be seen, even though it is not autoerotic in nature and calls for an outside object, may turn the eye into the equivalent of an erotogenic zone. Likewise, the cruelty component of the sexual instinct, which seems at first even more independent of the erotogenic zones, is in fact linked to the instinct for mastery and to the musculature. By contrast, the skin of the buttocks, because of the chastisements it so often receives, can easily become an erotogenic zone and the site of passive masochistic pleasure.

With the introduction of narcissism, Freud added an important dimension to the theory of erotogenic zones by joining it with the ego-libido: "We can decide to regard erotogenicity as a general characteristic of all organs and may then speak of an increase or decrease of it in a particular part of the body. For every such change in the erotogenicity of the organs there might then be a parallel change of libidinal cathexis in the ego" (1914c, p. 84). The withdrawal of libido into the ego and the libido's cathexis of organs, as erotogenic zones now become painful and sensitive, may be thought to underlie hypochondria, and in such cases of hypochondria, health can be restored only by redeploying libido to objects external to the subject's own body.

The erotism aroused in these zones is essentially polymorphous in the young child. Save in the case of perversion, the child's erotism is later unified under the primacy of the genital zone, but the fate of this infantile sexuality varies: repressions, reaction-formations, and sublimations come into play as ways of dealing with the excitations emanating from the erotogenic zones, excitations that are normally unusable, or largely unusable, for the adult. In such cases, the instinctual object of the drive is often modified. Sándor Ferenczi (1916) showed, for instance, that an interest in money was founded on the anal erotogenic zone and the possibility of establishing a symbolic link between feces and money.

In this light, and in view of the potentially infinite number of transformations of instincts deriving from the erotogenic zones, it is fair to say that any form of human activity might be attributable to erotogenic sources. The psychoanalytic theory of the erotogenic zones appears to fall under the rubric of autoerotism, for it is the component instincts, independent of these zones, that are said to be directed straight at the object. Yet, as has often been pointed out, it would seem impossible to dissociate the emergence of these multiple erotogenic zones from pleasure-generating encounters with the object, especially in the context of maternal care.

It is worth mentioning that theorists since Freud have considered other erotogenic zones, such as those that affect the functions of respiration and hearing.

Bibliography

Ferenczi, Sándor (1916). Stages in the development of the sense of reality. In his Contributions to psycho-analysis. Boston: Richard Badger.

Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE, 7: 123-243.

——. (1908b). Character and anal erotism. SE, 9: 167-175.

——. (1914c). On narcissism: An introduction. SE, 14: 67-102.

—SOPHIEDE MIJOLLA-MELLOR

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An erogenous zone (from Greek eros - love; and genein - to produce) is an area of the human body that has heightened sensitivity, the stimulation of which may result in the production of erotic sensations or sexual excitement. There are individual variations as to which areas of the body are erogenously sensitive.^{[citation needed]} The most sensitive erogonous zones for a majority of men are the penis, the testicles and the anus; while for women it is the lips, clitoris anus and nipples, besides others.^{[citation needed]}

It is important to note that while these erogenous zones are generally found on all humans, they are not specific from one person to another, and attempts at stimulating someone may or may not work depending on their personal sensitivity. Some people, in fact, have adverse reactions to stimulation in any one or more of the body areas discussed below. To enhance a positive experience with a partner, or to avoid a negative experience, effective two-way communication is necessary.

Contents 1 Classification 1.1 Nonspecific Zones 1.2 Specific Zones 2 Pubic Area 2.1 Female 2.2 Male 3 Head 3.1 Lips 3.2 Mouth 3.3 Neck 3.4 Ears 4 Torso 4.1 Chest 4.2 Abdomen 5 Arms 6 Armpits 7 Fingers 8 Feet & Toes 9 See also 10 External links 11 References

Classification

Erogenous zones are either nonspecific or specific.

Nonspecific Zones

In these zones, the skin is similar to normal-haired skin and has the normal high density of nerves and hair follicles. These areas include the sides and back of the neck, the inner arms, the axillae (armpits) and sides of the thorax. An exaggerated tickle and anticipatory response are responsible for the heightened sensual response.

Specific Zones

These zones produce stronger sensation than nonspecific zones, and include the genitals, prepuce, penis, clitoris, vulva and perianal skin, scrotum, lips, and nipples. The rete ridges of the epithelium are well-formed and more of the nerves are close to the external surface of the skin than in normal-haired skin.

Pubic Area

Female

The clitoris is an erogenous zone on a woman and has the densest concentration of nerve endings of any part of the skin.

Located past the clitoris, just above and on either side of the urethral opening, is sensitive erectile tissue known as the Skene's gland, or the U-Spot.

Within the anterior of the vaginal canal, there is a patch of ribbed rough tissue which has a texture that is described as similar to the palate (the roof of a mouth) or a raspberry, and may feel spongy when a woman is sexually aroused. This is the Gräfenberg spot, or G-spot.

At the deepest point on the anterior (front) wall of the vagina, located between the cervix and the bladder, is the Anterior fornix erogenous zone, or A-Spot. It is described as having a wrinkly texture similar to the tip of the nose.

Other areas known to be orgasmic for some women include the rectouterine pouch, accessible through both the back of the posterior wall of the vagina and the anterior wall of the anus, the perineal sponge, accessible though the perineum and the anterior wall of the anus, several inches in, and the uterus, which, when stimulated, can result in a uterine orgasm.

^[1]

Male

The penis is the most sensitive erogenous zone in the male body. In particular, the frenulum (Frenulum_of_prepuce_of_penis), the corona around the glans (head) and penile mucosa (foreskin) are highly sensitive and may elicit strong sensations from the slightest touch or movement. The ridged band, theorized by John R. Taylor, is believed to be a sensitive part of the penis as well.

The skin of the scrotum (testicles) is very sensitive to light touching and stroking, causing a pleasurable sensation; the scrotum may also be quite ticklish.

Males can also be aroused by light stroking and touching of the perineum (the area between the scrotum and the anus). The prostate gland is a male erogenous zone that may be stimulated through firm pressure on the back of the perineum or through the anus. Applying pressure to the perineum just before ejaculation can heighten the intensity of orgasm,^{[citation needed]} although this causes retrograde ejaculation and the pressure is sometimes harmful to the pudendal nerve and other anatomical structures in the area.

The foreskin, which carries the ridged band and lower frenular delta, has mucocutaneous end-organs extending from the distal margin to the point where hairy skin starts.[1] The thin dermis and minimal subcutaneous tissue results in closely-set nerve networks. Vater-Pacini corpuscles are present. The mucocutaneous end-organs are formed after birth, with few in newborn infants and many well-organized endings in adults. Winkelmann suggests that the prepuce is a "specific erogenous zone."[2]

Head

Lips

Mouth

Kissing and the usage of tongue.

Neck

The neck and clavicle area is a very sensitive region in both males and females. Licking, kissing or caressing in this area is sexually arousing to many people. Additionally, the back of the neck is very sensitive to arousal by lightly caressing. Some people also like being bitten gently (or not gently) in these areas, often to the point that a "hickeys" is formed. A hickey is a bruise caused by intense kissing and sucking of the skin wherein all the blood from broken blood vessels has been pulled to the surface, causing a purple- or red-colored spot to appear.

Ears

Licking and sucking gently on earlobes is arousing to many people. Also, licking, whispering or breathing softly in one's ear can also be very pleasurable.

Torso

Chest

The areola and nipple contain Golgi-Mazzoni, Vater-Pacini and genital corpuscles. No Meissner's corpuscles and few organized nerve endings are present. There are concentrations of nerve tissue in the area of ducts and masses of smooth muscle. The hair surrounding the areola adds additional sensory tissue. The mass of smooth muscle and glandular-duct tissue in the nipple and areola block the development of normal dermal nerve networks which are present in other erogenous regions and the development of special end organs. Indeed, the entire breast has a network of nerve endings, and they have the same number of nerve endings no matter how large they are. Accordingly, smaller breasts are more sensitive while larger breasts can be stimulated (e.g. fondled, bitten, sucked) more forcefully. Intense stimulation of a woman's nipples may result in a surge in the production of oxytocin and prolactin which could have a significant effect on her genitals. Placing a face in between the cleavage and kissing the breasts also increases sexual pleasure in most women. Having the chest, breasts and nipples stimulated manually (hands), digitally (fingers, toes) and/or orally (mouth, lips, teeth, tongue) is a pleasurable experience enjoyed by many males and females.

Abdomen

Many people find stimulation (kissing, biting, scratching, tickling, caressing) of the abdomen to be pleasurable, especially close to the pubic region. It can cause strong arousal in men and women, in some even stronger than stimulation of the genitals. For some people, the navel is an especially arousing area, yet many other people find it too ticklish.

Arms

The skin of the arms, and specifically the softer skin of the inner arms and across the creased mid-arm bend covering the dorsal side of the elbow, are highly sensitive to manual or lingual stimulation. Light stroking with fingers or tongue, more vigorous kneading, and butterfly kissing can initiate arousal and, in some cases, induce clitoral/vaginal orgasm or penile ejaculation without direct contact with the latter areas. The mid-arm bend is especially sensitive due to the thinner skin found there, which makes nerve endings more accessible. Arm sensitivity may be reduced or concentrated to a more narrow range by excessive muscularity or obesity on the one hand, or transformed to uncomfortable tenderness by excessive thinness on the other.

Armpits

Researchers have discovered that women adjust their menstrual cycles when exposed to the scent of a male underarm.^[2]

Some consider armpits be an erogenous zone. If pheromones exist for humans, they would likely be secreted by a mixture of liquid from the sebaceous glands with other organic compounds in the body.^[2] George Preti, an organic chemist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia and Winnefred Cutler of the University of Pennsylvania's psychology department, discovered that women with irregular menstrual cycles became regular when exposed to male underarm extracts.^[2] They hypothesized that the only explanation was that underarms contain pheromones as there was no other explanation for the effects, which mirrored how pheromones effect other mammals.^[2]

Fingers

The fingertips have many nerves and are responsive to very light touches, like the brushing of a tongue, light fingernail scratching or teeth stroking. The sides of the fingers are somewhat less sensitive and more ticklish.^{[citation needed]} Both light and firmer touches work well at the junction of the fingers. Human fingertips are the second-most sensitive parts of the body, after the tongue.

Feet & Toes

Due to the concentration of nerve endings in the sole and digits of the human foot, the sensations produced by sucking or licking the feet can be pleasurable to some people. Similarly, massaging the sole of the foot produces similar nervous stimulation. Many people are extremely ticklish in the foot area, especially on the bottom of the soles.

See also

• Foreplay
• Orgasm
• Human sexuality
• Sexual intercourse

External links

• Erogenous Zones: Their Nerve Supply and Significance, Winkelmann RK, Mayo Clin Proc 1959;34(2):39-47

References

Look up erogenous zone in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

1. ^ http://www.heretical.com/miscella/g-spots.html
2. ^ ^{a b c d} Looking for love potion number nine, Cathryn M. Delude, Boston Globe, September 2, 2003.

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