Come as You Are (4 page)

Homology is also why both brother and sister will have nipples. Nipples on females are vital to the survival of almost all mammal species, including humans (though a handful of old mammals, such as the platypus, don’t have nipples, and instead just leak milk from their abdomens), so evolution built nipples in right at the very beginning of our fetal development. It takes less energy to just leave them there than to actively suppress them—and evolution is as lazy as it can get away with—so both males and females have nipples. Same biological origins—different functions.

the clit, the whole clit, and nothing but the clit

The clitoris and penis are the external genital organs most densely packed with nerve endings. The visible part of the clitoris, the glans clitoris, is
located right up at the top of the genitals—some distance from the vagina, you’ll notice. (This fact will be crucial when I talk about orgasm, in chapter 8.) The clitoris is . . .

The hokey pokey—it’s what it’s all about.

Two turntables and a microphone—it’s where it’s at.

A Visa card—it’s everywhere you want to be.

It is your Grand Central Station of erotic sensation. Averaging just one-eighth the size of a penis yet loaded with nearly double the nerve endings, it can range in size from a barely visible pea to a fair-sized gherkin, or anywhere in between, and it’s all normal, all beautiful.

Unlike the penis, the clitoris’s only job is sensation. The penis has four jobs: sensation, penetration, ejaculation, and urination.

Two different ways of functioning, one shared biological origin.

The visible part of the clitoris—the glans—is actually just the head of the clit, just as the glans penis—the vaguely acorn-shaped cap at the end of the penile shaft—is just the head. There’s a lot more to it, though. The shaft of the penis is familiar to many. It is constructed of three chambers: a pair of cavernous bodies (corpora cavernosa) and a spongy body (corpus spongiosum), through which the urethra passes. All three of these chambers extend deep into the body. The corpus spongiosum ends in the bulb of the penis deep inside the pelvis. The corpora cavernosa taper away from each other and attach the pelvic bone.

The cultural understanding of clitoris is “the little nub at the top of the vulva.” But the biological understanding of clitoris is more like “far-ranging mostly internal anatomical structure with a head emerging at the top of the vulva.” Like the penis, the clitoris is composed of three chambers: a pair of legs (crura) that extend deep within the tissue of the vulva, which are homologous to the corpora cavernosa, and the bulbs of the vestibule, homologous to the corpus spongiosum, including its bulb of the penis. The vestibule is the mouth of the vagina; the bulbs extend from the head of the clitoris, deep inside the tissue of the vulva, then split to straddle the urethra and the vagina. That’s right: The clitoris extends all the way to the vaginal opening.

The anatomy of the clitoris.
The cultural meaning of “clitoris” is often limited to the external part, the glans. The biological meaning includes a vast range of internal erectile tissue that extends all the way to the vaginal opening.

The anatomy of the penis.
As with the clitoris, the cultural meaning of “penis” is limited to the external part—the glans and shaft. And, like the clitoris, the penis has internal erectile tissue. All the same parts, organized in different ways.

The clitoral hood covers the head of the clitoris, as its homologue, the foreskin, covers the head of the penis. And the male frenulum—the Y-spot near the glans, where the foreskin attaches to the shaft—is the homologue of the female fourchette (the French word for “fork”), the curve of tissue on the lower edge of the vagina. This is a highly sensitive and undervalued piece of real estate on all bodies.

meet your clitoris

If you’ve never met your clitoris “face-to-face,” now is the time. (Even if you’ve had some good chats with your clitoris in the past, feel free to take this opportunity to get reacquainted.) You can find it visually or manually. After you’ve read the next two paragraphs, put down the book and try either method.

To find it visually, get a mirror, spread your labia (the soft, hairy outer lips of your vulva), and actually
look at it
. You’ll see a nub at the top of your vulva.

Or you can find it with your fingers. Start with the tip of your middle finger at the cleft where your labia divide. Press down gently, wiggle your finger back and forth, and scoot your fingertip slowly down between your labia until you feel a rubbery little cord under the skin. It might help to pull your skin taut by tugging upward on your mons with your other hand. It might also help to lubricate your finger with spit, commercial lube, some allergen-free hand cream, or even a little olive oil.

I have a specific reason for asking you to actually
look
at your clitoris:

A student came up to me after class one night and told me that she had been Skyping with her mom, talking about her classes that semester, including my class, “Women’s Sexuality.” The student mentioned to her mom that my lecture slides included actual photos of women’s vulvas, along with diagrams and illustrations. And her mom told her the most astonishing thing. She said, “I don’t know where the clitoris is.”

The mom was fifty-four.

So my student emailed her mom my lecture slides.

That story is why the first chapter in this book is about anatomy. That story makes me want to print T-shirts with a drawing of a vulva and an arrow pointing to the clitoris, saying
IT’S RIGHT HERE
. It makes me want to hand out pamphlets on street corners with instructions for locating your own clitoris, both manually and visually. I want an animated GIF of a woman pointing to her clitoris to go viral on the Internet. I want a billboard in Times Square. I want everyone to know.

But even more, it makes me want every single woman reading this to stop right now and look directly at her clitoris. Knowing where the clitoris is is important, but knowing where
your
clitoris is . . . that’s power. Get a mirror and look at your clitoris, in honor of that student and her brave, amazing mom.

When I first looked at my clitoris, during my earliest training as a sex educator, I actually cried. I was eighteen and in a bad relationship and looking for answers. And my instructor had said, “When you go home tonight, get a mirror and find your clitoris.” So I did. And I was stunned to tears to find that there was nothing gross or weird about it, it was just . . . part of my body. It belonged to me.

That moment set the stage for a decade of discovering and rediscovering that my best source of knowledge about my sexuality was my own body.

So go look at your clitoris.

And as long as you’re in the neighborhood, check out the rest of your vulva, too.

I love having nontraditional students in my class—those who aren’t in that eighteen-to-twenty-two age range—and Merritt was as nontraditional as they come: a perimenopausal lesbian author of gay erotica, with a teenage daughter whom she was raising with her partner of nearly twenty years. I was uninformed enough when I first met her to be surprised when she told me that her Korean parents were Fundamentalist Christians and that she grew up with quintessential socially conservative values. Which made her outness as a lesbian, her writing, and her presence in my classroom all the more remarkable.

At forty-two, Merritt had never considered looking at her clitoris. It didn’t even cross her mind as a possibility until I suggested it during the first lecture, as I always do. She came up to me after class and said, “Is it really a good idea to suggest that kids this young look at their bodies? What if they just . . . shut down?”

“That’s a really important question,” I said. “No one has ever told me of an experience like that, but it’s not a requirement, so maybe the folks most likely to have that experience don’t try it. Still, it’s something I recommend, especially for students who plan to continue on in public health or medicine, but it’s entirely up to each person whether or not they want to look.”

Merritt didn’t do it.

Instead, she had her partner, Carol, look—which in some ways is braver than looking herself—and she looked at her partner’s. And they talked about what they saw and about how they had never before taken the time to deliberately look at and talk about their sexual bodies. And Merritt learned something remarkable, which she told me about the following week:

“Carol told me she’d looked at her vulva! She was part of a feminist consciousness-raising group in the ’80s, and they all got together in a circle with their hand mirrors.”

“Wow!” I said, and meant it.

She held her hands out, palms up, weighing her feelings. “I don’t know why this kind of thing is so much harder for me than it is for her. When it comes to sex, I always feel like I’m teetering at the edge of a cliff with my arms windmilling around me.”

The ambivalence Merritt experienced is absolutely normal for anyone whose family of origin taught them that sex should fit into a certain prescribed place in life and nowhere else. But it made sense for Merritt for other reasons, too, having to do with the way her brain is wired. I’ll talk about that in chapter 2.

lips, both great and small

Female inner labia (labia minora or small lips) may not be very “inner” at all, but extend out beyond the big lips—or they may tuck themselves away, hidden inside the vulva until you go looking for them. And the inner labia may be all one homogeneous color, or they may show a gradient of color, darkening toward the tips. All of that is normal and healthy and beautiful. Long, short, pink, beige, brown—all normal.

The male homologue of the inner labia is the inner foreskin. If a penis has been circumcised—that is, had its foreskin surgically removed—there is very often a color change midway down the shaft. That’s because the skin at the top of the shaft is actually the inner foreskin. (Because the color change is sometimes evident only after puberty, guys have asked me if something they did made the color change, but nope, that’s just how some penises look, bless them.)

The outer labia, too, vary from person to person. Some are densely hairy, with the hair extending out onto the thigh and around the anus, while others have very little hair. Some lips are quite puffy while others are relatively flush with the body. Some are the same color as the surrounding skin, and some are darker or lighter than the surrounding skin. All normal, all beautiful.

As with the clitoris, the cultural view of labia doesn’t match the biological reality. Vulvas in soft-core porn are digitally edited to conform to a specific standard of “tucked-in” labia and homogeneous coloring, to be “less detailed.”
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This means that cultural representations of vulvas are limited to a pretty narrow range. In reality, there is a great deal of variety among genitals—and there is no medical condition associated with almost any of the variability. But such limited representations of women’s bodies may actually be changing women’s perceptions of what a “normal” vulva looks like.
³