“What is the difference between a bar and the clitoris? That most men don’t have a hard time finding a bar”.
In it world of humor, the clitoris remains a mystery: it is supposedly small and therefore inevitably difficult to locate. “What dinosaur will never be discovered? The clitaurus”.
Sometimes it seems that medical science has taken an interest much more for the penis that for the clitoris. In fact, until very recently, the number of nerve endings thought to be in a woman’s clitoris was only an estimate and was based on cow research.
But recent research on the real human clitoris has found that it has more than 10,000 nerve fibers20% more than previously thought. The new research studied tissue donated by trans men during a female-to-male sex reaffirmation operation. The tissues were stained and magnified 1,000 times under the microscope so that nerve fibers could be counted one by one.
This follows research in 2005 by Australian urologist Helen O’Connell, who became famous for being the first person to fully map the clitoris using MRI scans of women. And it turns out that it is not small at all. What happens is that only 10% of the organ is visible.
o’connell has counted how in his initial medical training he used textbooks that never mentioned the clitoris and considered female genitalia a “failure.” So she set out to better understand this part of the woman’s body.
an erotic place
Both the penis and the clitoris are erectile organs. Along with the “little” oblong of the visible part – the glans – the clitoris includes erectile tissue. This tissue fills with blood when aroused and extends up to 9 cm, making it larger than an unaroused penis. This is important because, once aroused, the clitoral “bulbs” extend to touch the vagina and urethra. Pleasure travels.
The history of the clitoris goes back much further than the last few decades. In fact, in the ancient greek and roman medicine was known as “a loci erotic (place) in its own right.” It was called the door of the belly, small tongue, chickpea and myrtle. Still, most of the words used still suggested that it was small.
Throughout its history, studies on the clitoris have been based more on the dissection of cadavers or animals than on real women. In 1844, the German anatomist George Ludwig Kobelt he used stuffed clits to illustrate not only the visible part, but also the internal parts, which gave him a much better idea of its true size.
Kobelt injected the blood and lymphatic vessels to better understand how blood was supplied to the erectile organs. He claimed that there were many more nerves in the clitoris than in the vagina, and considered it much more important for sexual pleasure.
A new and useless part
Kobelt wasn’t the first to realize that the clitoris was an important organ. In 1672, in his book Treatise on the reproductive organs of womenDutch physician and anatomist Regnier de Graaf he observed that all the female bodies he had dissected had one visible, “quite perceptible to sight and touch”.
He went on to describe “other parts” of the clitoris hidden in the fat area of the pubis, including the clitoral bulbs. commented: “We are greatly surprised that some anatomists do not make more mention of this part as if it did not exist at all in the universe of nature.”
Precisely, before de Graaf, some anatomists denied that the clitoris existed. In 1543, andreas vesaliusanatomist, physician and author of one of the most influential books on human anatomy, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the tissue of the human body), responded to rumors of its existence by dismissing it as “a new and useless part”.
Not everyone agreed, and in 1559 the Italian surgeon Realdo Colombo published his De re anatomical (about anatomical things). What is surprising about Colombo’s work is that, like O’Connell’s, it was based not only on dissection, but also on the living female body, on the practical experience of it.
He described finding a beautiful thing, “made with such art,” the very seat of a woman’s erotic pleasure: a small oblong that, if rubbed with the penis or even simply touched “with the little finger,” causes a great pleasure and the release of “seeds” in all directions, “faster than the wind”. One of the Latin words for clitoris was “gaude mihi,” which translates to “please me.”
Pleasure versus procreation
But be careful, and keep in mind that all this historical attention to the clitoris was not because scientists were interested in female pleasure in its own right. It was because it was believed that both sexes had to reach orgasm for conception to occur. Pleasure was considered necessary for procreation, not something that could be experienced for its own sake.
This ancient assertion was recently resurrected in a Article 2019 in the magazine Clinical Anatomywhere reproductive physiologist Roy Levin suggested that clitoral arousal changes the lining of the reproductive tract so that conception is more likely to occur.
For pleasure, procreation or both, although science now knows much more about the clitoris than ever before, it is clear that there is still a long way to go, given that recent research show that many women are still not able to correctly identify their genitalia.
Helen KingProfessor Emeritus, Classical Studies, The Open University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. read the original.
