{"id":22721,"date":"2023-01-05T12:34:04","date_gmt":"2023-01-05T12:34:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ounews.co\/?p=22721"},"modified":"2023-01-05T12:34:04","modified_gmt":"2023-01-05T12:34:04","slug":"the-clitoris-a-brief-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/arts-social-sciences\/the-clitoris-a-brief-history\/","title":{"rendered":"The clitoris \u2013 a brief\u00a0history"},"content":{"rendered":"
Helen King<\/a> is an Open University Emerita Professor of classical studies – here she explores the history of the clitoris and shows just how much <\/em>wasn’t<\/strong> known about it and how far science has come to understand it.<\/em><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s the difference between a bar and clitoris? Most men have no trouble finding a bar.\u201d In the world of humour<\/a>, the clitoris remains a mystery: supposedly small, and so inevitably difficult to locate. \u201cWhich dinosaur will never be discovered? The Clitaurus<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

It sometimes seems medical science has been far more interested in the penis<\/a> than the clitoris. Indeed, up until very recently the number of nerve endings thought to be on a woman\u2019s clitoris was only an estimate and this was based upon research on cows<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But recent research on the actual human clitoris has found it has more than 10,000 nerve fibres<\/a> \u2013 20% more than previously thought. The new research studied tissue donated by trans men during female to male gender affirming surgery. Tissues were dyed and magnified 1,000 times under a microscope so individual nerve fibres could be counted.<\/p>\n

This follows the 2005 research of the Australian urologist Helen O\u2019Connell<\/a> who become famous as the first person to fully map the clitoris, using MRI scans of women. And it turns out that it\u2019s not small at all, it\u2019s just that only 10% of the organ is visible.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Connell has described<\/a> how her initial medical training used textbooks that never mentioned the clitoris and which regarded female genitalia as a \u201cfailure\u201d. So she made it her mission to better understand this part of a woman\u2019s body.<\/p>\n

An erotic place<\/h2>\n

Both the penis and the clitoris are erectile organs<\/a>. Along with the \u201csmall\u201d oblong of the visible part \u2013 the glans \u2013 the clitoris includes erectile tissue. This engorges with blood on arousal and extends up to 9cm, making it larger than an unaroused penis. That matters because, once aroused, the \u201cbulbs\u201d of the clitoris will extend to touch the vagina and urethra. Pleasure travels.\"Drawing<\/a><\/p>\n

The history of the clitoris goes back much further than the last few decades. Indeed, in ancient Greek and Roman medicine<\/a>, it was known as \u201can erotic locus (place) in its own right\u201d. It was called the womb-gate, the little tongue, the chick-pea and the myrtle-berry. Yet most of the words used still suggested it to be small.<\/p>\n

Through its long history, studies of the clitoris were more likely to be based upon the dissection of dead bodies or animals rather than real live women. In 1844 the German anatomist, George Ludwig Kobelt<\/a>, used dissected clitorises to illustrate not just the visible part, but the internal parts as well, giving a much better sense of its true size.<\/p>\n

Kobelt would inject the blood vessels and lymphatic vessels so he could better understand how the erectile organs were supplied with blood. He argued there were many more nerves supplying the clitoris than the vagina, and saw it as far more important for sexual pleasure.<\/p>\n

\u2018A new and useless part\u2019<\/h2>\n

Kobelt wasn\u2019t the first to realise that the clitoris was a substantial organ. In 1672, in his book, Treatise on the Generative Organs of Women, the Dutch physician and anatomist Regnier de Graaf<\/a> observed that every female body he\u2019d dissected had a visible one, \u201cquite perceptible to sight and touch\u201d.<\/p>\n

He went on to describe \u201cother parts\u201d of the clitoris hidden in the fatty area of the pubis, including those bulbs of the clitoris. He commented<\/a>: \u201cwe are extremely surprised that some anatomists make no more mention of this part than if it did not exist at all in the universe of nature.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, before de Graaf, some anatomists had denied there even was such a thing as the clitoris. In 1543 Andreas Vesalius<\/a>, an anatomist, physician, and author of one of the most influential books on human anatomy, De Humani Corporis Fabrica<\/a> (On the Fabric of the Human Body), responded to rumours of its existence by dismissing it as \u201ca new and useless part\u201d.<\/p>\n

Not everyone agreed, and in 1559 the Italian surgeon, Realdo Colombo, published his De re anatomica<\/a> (On Things Anatomical). What\u2019s striking about Colombo\u2019s work is that, like O’Connell\u2019s, it was not just based on dissection, but also on the living female body \u2013 hands-on experience of it.<\/p>\n

He described finding a beautiful thing, \u201cmade with such art\u201d, the very seat of women\u2019s erotic pleasure: a small oblong which, if rubbed with a penis or even simply touched \u201cwith your little finger\u201d, causes great pleasure and the flowing out of \u201cseed\u201d in all directions, \u201cswifter than the wind\u201d. One of the words for clitoris in Latin was the \u201cgaude mihi\u201d, which translates as \u201cplease me\u201d.<\/p>\n

Pleasure vs procreation<\/h2>\n

But caution is in order here, because all this earlier historical attention on the clitoris wasn\u2019t due to scientists being interested in female pleasure in its own right. It was because people believed<\/a> that both sexes had to reach orgasm for conception to happen. Pleasure was seen as necessary for procreation, not as something to be experienced on its own terms.<\/p>\n

This ancient claim was recently resurrected in a 2019 article<\/a> in the journal Clinical Anatomy, where the reproductive physiologist Roy Levin suggested that clitoral excitement changes the lining of the reproductive tract to make it more likely that conception will occur.<\/p>\n

For pleasure, procreation or both, even though science now knows far more about the clitoris than ever before, it\u2019s clear there\u2019s still a way to go given recent research<\/a> shows many women are still not able to properly identify their genital parts.\"The<\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Picture credits:(top) Christina Paliy for Shutterstock and (bottom) Mister X for Shutterstock<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Helen King is an Open University Emerita Professor of classical studies – here she explores the history of the clitoris and shows just how much wasn’t known about it and how far science has come to understand it.   \u201cWhat\u2019s the difference between a bar and clitoris? Most men have no trouble finding a bar.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":22723,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[858,869,1525,1640],"class_list":["post-22721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-social-sciences","tag-faculty-of-arts-and-social-sciences","tag-fass","tag-news-home","tag-ou-home"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22721\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}