Buried pleasure
Like an iceberg, the full structure of the clitoris lies mostly below the skin’s surface. This scientific discovery in 2009 was a giant leap for womankind, but as Sarah Barmak writes in her new book, also a unsettling reminder of how little effort society has made to understand a woman’s erogenous zones
In 2009, two French gynecologists named Pierre Foldès and Odile Buisson used a sonogram to create a 3-D map of the female pleasure centres. Hoping to shed light on the still-controversial “G spot,” they scanned five volunteers with a vaginal probe, having the participants squeeze their muscles and creating sonographic images of the clitoris in motion. The images produced by their study show the full, expansive clitoral structure: its external nub, called the glans, giving way to its long legs or wings, called crura, and the bulbs, which straddle the vaginal canal like a wishbone.
Closer: Notes from the Orgasmic Frontier of Female Sexuality by Sarah Barmak
Sorry – what? Legs and bulbs? Yes, we’re still talking about the clitoris. The clit isn’t just the small, sensitive pea at the top of the vulva, the rubbery nub it’s normally billed as. Like an iceberg, the full clitoral structure lies mostly below the skin’s surface, inside the body. In comparison to the head (glans) that’s visible and touchable outside the body, the Real Clitoris is expansive, containing about as much erectile tissue as a penis. Illustrations of it resemble a swan, with arched neck, spread wings and bulbous lower body. When I saw an illustration of the clitoris’s true shape for the first time I felt like a blind man finally seeing a whole elephant when all he’d ever known was the tip of its trunk.
What these bulbs and legs told the world was: Hey, the clit is a literally bigger deal than we thought! For women who have reached climax by massaging just their outer labia, their pubic mound or even areas inside their vagina that aren’t the G spot, the concept that there’s a lot more responsive tissue down there than previously advertised makes a lot of sense.
In one way, this “discovery” was one giant leap for womankind. In another, however, the fact that this seemingly basic bit of anatomy was still being elucidated so recently was an unsettling reminder of how little effort society has made to understand women’s body parts when the parts in question aren’t crucial for making babies. As biologists and feminists alike have pointed out, the clitoris, packed with over 8,000 nerve endings, is likely the only human organ whose sole purpose is pleasure – unlike the penis, which is responsible for procreation and urination as well. None of this jives with Western, Christian views of proper womanhood, and that’s reflected in the science. Leonardo da Vinci was lovingly sketching cross-sections of male genital anatomy back in 1493, but we haven’t focused nearly as much on female anatomy. To put it another way, the mapping of the entire human genome was completed in 2003, years before we got around to doing a detailed ultrasound on the ordinary human clit.
But don’t listen to me. Here’s Dr. Foldès, who has performed surgery to restore sensation to over 3,000 victims of female genital mutilation, quoted by New York’s Museum of Sex: “The medical literature tells us the truth about our contempt for women. For three centuries, there are thousands of references to penile surgery, nothing on the clitoris, except for some cancers or dermatology – and nothing to restore its sensitivity. The very existence of an organ of pleasure is denied, medically.” A 2005 report by urologist Helen O’Connell in the American Urological Association’s Journal of Urology said the anatomy of the clitoris has “been dominated by social factors … Some recent anatomy textbooks omit a description of the clitoris. By comparison, pages are devoted to penile anatomy … The clitoris is a structure about which few diagrams and minimal description are provided, potentially impacting its preservation during surgery.”
Ignorance isn’t the whole story, however. Over millennia, we have produced a wealth of knowledge about women’s sexuality; the problem is that we’re very good at ignoring it. Although the full clitoral structure – whose dense connections to the urethra and uterus have led some experts to see it as part of an even larger whole, the clitourethrovaginal (CUV) complex – was mapped via ultrasound in 2009, it was described in detail over a decade before, in a 1998 paper by O’Connell and her three co-authors in The Journal of Urology. In fact, detailed illustrations of internal clitoral structures appeared much earlier, in German anatomist Georg Ludwig Kobelt’s classic cadaver-dissection work, The Male and Female Organs of Sexual Arousal in Man and Some Other Mammals … back in 1844.
Yes, 1844 was more up-to-date on the Real Clitoris than, say, 1995. Sadly, even after so many separate “discoveries,” the Real Clitoris isn’t known to many, although a rising number of new studies mentioning it and the CUV since 2009 are sparking more (if always bewildered) reports in the media.
The essence of this centuries-long disagreement about female sexuality can be expressed in a question: is the vulva a thing or is it an absence? Is what lies between women’s legs an organ, with emphasis on what protrudes: the clitoris, the labia, the 8,000 nerve endings, flesh? Or is it a void, a vessel, an opening, an orifice, a place that exists to be filled by something else? Through history, the latter view has been accompanied by violence and the erasure of women’s sexual desire in favour of men’s. The former has typically gone hand in hand with a view of women as sexually independent agents who experience desire, pleasure and power.
History has regularly produced remarkable insights into women’s sexuality: awareness of the clitoris’s role in pleasure, the female orgasm, even female ejaculation. But, whether accidentally or wilfully, we’ve then omitted or erased this information from the canon. We’ve hidden the richness and power of it for so long that even women have come to regard their own bodies as enemy territory – weird, marine, mucosal and alien. There have been repeated cycles of forgetting and rediscovering, as Naomi Wolf observes in Vagina, where she presents a sweeping chronology of the decline of the vulva and vagina: from millennia of being worshipped as sacred by prehistoric civilizations, to being downgraded by the classical Greeks, to being hated as profane in monotheistic societies centred on a father god.
In other words, women’s sexuality began by being celebrated, then was feared as too potent, before being downplayed and denied in the scientific era. The efforts that so many women (and men) are making today to understand female sexuality are not just discovery – they’re attempts at recovery and resuscitation.
Excerpted from Closer: Notes from the Orgasmic Frontier of Female Sexuality, published by Coach House Books.