The Clitoral Truth: The Secret World at Your Fingertips (8 page)

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The definition of the clitoris articulated by the FFWHCs always made perfect sense to me. But over the years, as I continued writing and lecturing about it, and telling women why looking at the clitoris as a complex and powerful organ is important, a question kept lurking around in the back of my brain. If the clitoris is equivalent to the penis in extent and power, how did this information get lost? I began to think that I was the only person on the planet who was curious about this question, but it seemed that it would take an enormous amount of research to track down the answer. As I read and scrounged for clues, the pieces of this puzzle began to fall into

place, and a fascinating story emerged. This saga features some unlikely sleuths (a prominent history professor and two intrepid feminist sociologists), a host of respectable villains (some very famous European philosophers), a self-appointed world-class hit man (one Dr. Freud), and a bevy of accomplices (the vast majority of twentieth-century anatomists and sexologists). The drama details one of the grand heists of all time: the disappearance of women’s genitals from anatomy texts, medical understanding, and popular perception. In a larger sense, it is the theft of women’s right to comprehend, define, explore, and experience sexual pleasure on their own terms, rather than through male standards.

AN UNLIKELY DETECTIVE

In conducting a monumental study of the life cycle, Thomas Laqueur, Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley, stumbled over the mysterious disappearance of women’s genitals from anatomical illustrations quite by accident. In the introduction to his erudite and illuminating book,
Making Sex: The Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
, Laqueur describes his serendipitous encounter with a clue that led to his search for the answer:

I was on leave from St. Antony’s College, Oxford, doing research for what was to be a history of the life cycle. I was

reading seventeenth-century midwifery manuals—in search of materials on how birth was organized—but found instead advice to women on how to become pregnant in the first place. Midwives and doctors seemed to believe that female orgasm was among the conditions for successful generation, and they offered various suggestions on how it might be achieved. Orgasm was assumed to be a routine, more or less indispensable part of conception. This surprised me. Experience must have shown that pregnancy often takes place without it; moreover, as a nineteenth-century historian I was accustomed to doctors debating whether women have orgasms at I discovered early on that the erasure of female pleasure from medical accounts of conception took place roughly at the time as the female body came to be understood no longer as a lesser version of the male’s (a one-sex model) but as its incommensurable opposite (a two-sex model).
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Laqueur became intrigued and, as he describes it, his study of the life cycle “slowly slipped away.” Harking back to the ancient Greeks, he set out to discover how, by the Victorian age, the clitoris had not only disappeared from medical texts and illustrations but how orgasm was banished from the Victorian concept of women’s sexuality. Following is an outline of Laqueur’s search for the lost clitoris and the culprits who did it in.

The Greeks believed that the male body was “perfect” and that the female body was an imperfect reflection of this ideal, in spite of this perceived lack of perfection, the Greeks clearly understood that the genitals of men and women were similar and functioned in a similar way to produce orgasm. Claudius Galen, the most famous physician of antiquity was very straight forward about it: “All the parts, then, that men have, women have to, the difference between them lying in only one thing, namely, that in women the parts are within, whereas in men they are outside.”
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Galen argued that

it was the greater heat of men that caused the genitals to protrude, and thus “perfected” them. In women, the cooler, imperfect sex, the genitals remained hidden from view. Laqueur calls this concept of equivalent genitals and equivalent sexual response the “one-sex” model.

Further, Laqueur’s research reveals that the one-sex concept of equivalent genitals endured unchanged for more then 1,500 years, up to and throughout the Renaissance, and as a minority view during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

RENAISSANCE MEN CONFIRM GENITAL EQUITY

The Greeks were so in awe of the human body that dissection was unthinkable. Most of what they understood about the genitals was inferred by their animal dissections. The Catholic Church, which dictated life in the Dark and Middle Ages, strictly forbade human

ALTHOUGH THE GENITALS WERE UNDERSTOOD to be

equivalent, sex in ancient Greece was by no means equivalent for men and women. In the realm of the elite, men used sex to assert status and power over their inferiors; women, boys,

slaves, and foreigners. Pleasure was a secondary goal.

Women, who had no status to establish, were believed to be able to both give and receive pleasure. Men in fact, believed that once women were aroused, they were insatiable which presented a grave threat to the male-centered social order.

In an often quoted Greek myth, Hera, the queen of the Olympian goddesses, and her husband, Zeus, king of the Heavens, get into a furious row over who enjoys sex more,

men or women. Hera asserts that it is men, while Zeus insists that it is women. In order to settle the disagreement, they

decide to consult the sage Tireslas, who was known to have experienced sex as both a man and a woman. Tireslas agrees

with Zeus, saying that women experience pleasure nine times more then men. Hera was so angry for losing the argument

that she blinded poor Tireslas, who had only affirmed what Greek men believed about sex anyway.

dissection. Under the aegis of the church, medical research waned, but the masterworks of the Greeks remained available in surreptitious editions and served as the basis of rational medical knowledge until they were openly distributed again during the Renaissance.

Exploring and mapping the body was one of the grand obsessions during the Renaissance. In medical schools across Europe, the restrictions on human dissection loosened, opening the floodgates of discovery. The first anatomical illustrations of the human body were done in the late fifteenth century and, as Laqueur notes, “the more Renaissance anatomists dissected, looked into, and visually represented the female body, the more powerfully and convincingly they saw it to be a version of the male’s.”
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Echoing Galen in 1546, Charles Estienne, physician to King Louis XIV, confidently insisted that “what is inside women, likewise sticks out in males, but what is the foreskin in males is the pudendum [vulva] in women... what is a small covering [clitoral hood] in the opening of the vulva, such appears as a circular outgrowth [foreskin] of the male genitals.”
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In the sixteenth century, the clitoris became the object of a famous Renaissance turf war between two preeminent Italian anatomists, Gabriel Fallopius and Renauldus Columbus. Each claimed to have “discovered” the clitoris. But Laqueur points out that “Kaspar Bartholin, the distinguished seventeenth-century

anatomist from Copenhagen, argued in turn .that both Fallopius and Columbus were being vainglorious in claiming the ‘invention or first Observation of this Part,’ since the clitoris had been known to everyone since the second century.”
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Fallopius succeeded, nonetheless, in having the egg transport tubes named in his honor, and today, we speak of the Fallopian tubes, although egg tubes would be a more descriptive and serviceable designation.

Laqueur explains that this knowledge of the entire clitoris was not the sole province of the intelligentsia. In a popular midwifery manual published in 1671, the English midwife Jane Sharp argued that the penis and the clitoris were nearly identical in structure and function. “The clitoris,” she notes, “will stand and fall as the yard [penis] doth and makes women lustful and take delight in copulation.”
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VIVA LA DIFFERENCE?

According to Laqueur, the one-sex concept remained intact until the eighteenth century when “sex as we know it was invented.”
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Amidst the political ferment that led up to the French Revolution,

than skin deep. Where before there had been only one basic structure, now there were two,” writes Laqueur.
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The existence of specifically female nerve fibers was proposed. Most importantly, pregnancy and menstruation were now defined as illnesses that prevented women from playing a full and active role in society. Passion in women, who were weak from their maternal duties and functions, was classified as abnormal and considered properly replaceable by modesty. The role of sexual pleasure and orgasm for women began to be debated.

The leading philosophers of the day—the villains in our anatomical whodunit—abetted by men of the medical estate, concocted carefully crafted arguments for the sexual inferiority of women. The French philosopher Voltaire put it succinctly: “In physique, woman is weaker than man on account of her physiology. The periodic emission of blood that enfeeble women and the maladies that result from their suppression, the duration of pregnancy, the need to suckle infants and watch over them, and the delicacy of women’s limbs render them ill suited to any type of labor

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women began to demand social and economic rights in salons,

or occupation that requires strength or endurance.”

In Book Five of

meetings, protests, and riots. Ironically, this was also the time when men began to “discover” significant sexual differences between themselves and women. “In the late eighteenth century, anatomists for the first time produced detailed illustrations of an explicitly female skeleton to document the fact that sexual difference was more

Emile
, a social treatise disguised as a novel, Rousseau begins by

“examining the similarities and differences between her sex and ours,” arguing passionately that women were perpetually childlike and incapable of rational thinking.
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Although women were philosophically stripped of their right to passion and pleasure, the ancient fear of their sexuality remained. The Greeks imprisoned their wives and condemned concubines and prostitutes to sexual slavery. Rousseau thought this a prudent idea, and believed, just as the Greeks did, that female reticence, discretion, and modesty really masked a fierce excess of passion that if unleashed, would disrupt the male-centered social order. Montesquieu pompously concurred, proclaiming in
The Spirit of Laws
, that “all nations agree in condemning female intemperateness.”
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And such statements from these prominent spokesmen were the veritable tip of the iceberg. Laqueur notes that “there were hundreds if not thousands of such works in which sexual differences were articulated in the centuries that followed.” From this point on, women’s sexuality was seen as very different from men’s—increasingly weak, chaste, and passionless. Anatomists began to ascribe parts of the clitoris to the reproductive or urinary system. Medical illustrations became increasingly more simplistic, leaving parts of the clitoris unlabeled. By Victorian times, orgasm, which was previously accepted as a natural component of women’s sexual repertoire, was seen as unnecessary, unseemly, perhaps even unhealthy for women. “The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled by sexual feelings of any kind,” the influential English urologist William Acton famously harrumphed.24

Although it was distinctly a minority view, not all anatomists agreed with the official concept of separate and unequal anatomies. In 1844 the German anatomist George Ludwig Kobelt published an exhaustive study of the clitoral system. His principle concern, Kobelt asserted, was “to show that the female possesses a structure that in all its separate parts is entirely analogous to the male.” Citing the nineteenth-century view that women’s genitals were insignificant, Kobelt insisted that “up to the present, the glans of the clitoris has been and still is considered a rudimentary, almost meaningless little structure.” He later concluded that the function of the clitoris in sexual response “in accordance with its corresponding anatomical structure, can be no different than in the male.” Alluding to the abysmal neglect of female sexual anatomy, Kobelt pointed out that at the time of his essay—mid-nineteenth century—the descriptions of certain parts of the clitoris had “completely disappeared from Physiology” Dismissing the eighteenth and nineteenth century views of women’s sexuality as less passionate and rewarding than men’s, Kobelt surmised that descriptions of women’s genital anatomy would be remarkably different “if our physiological textbooks were in the hands of as many women,” that is written by women, “as they are of men.”
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DR. FREUD SHIFTS OFFICIAL FOCUS TO VAGINA

Sigmund Freud, the Viennese father of psychoanalysis, is the hit man who delivered the final blow to the concept of the multifaceted clitoris. Laqueur is certain that Freud was well aware of the anatomy of the clitoris as detailed by Kobelt and others. Yet, in his famous
Three Essays on Sexuality
, Sigmund Freud insisted that the marvelous clitoris, which provides much unsupervised pleasure for young girls and adolescents, is “like a pile of pine shavings” useful only to “set a log of harder wood” i.e., the vagina, “on fire.”
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In