by Kate Lister
The work of the Marquis de Sade is a predictable clitfest. Even though Sade does devote a considerable amount of time to clitoral torture, there is also cunnilingus, fingering and clit tips aplenty – such as always ‘insist your clitoris be frigged while you are being buggered’ and ‘Madame; don’t be content to suck her clitoris; make your voluptuous tongue penetrate into her womb’.40 Which is sound advice for all, really.
One genre of erotic texts known as the ‘Merryland Books’ were published throughout the eighteenth century. These texts write about the female body as if it were a landscape to be explored. There are many puns on rising hillocks, mossy valleys and fertile soil, and just occasionally the clitoris gets a look-in too. As you can see, despite a notable swell in clit appreciation, the medical obsession with large clitorises finds space in the dogeared pages of eighteenth-century pornography as well, where it was further fetishised as an indicator of sexual deviancy.
Hubert François Bourguignon D’Anville and John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, 1766.
Near the Fort is the metropolis, called CLTRS [clitoris]; it is a pleasant place, much delighted in by the Queens of MERRYLAND, and is their chief Palace, or rather Pleasure Seat; it was at first but small, but the pleasure some of the Queens have found in it, has occasioned their extending its bounds considerably.41
Whereas large clitorises had been thought to be analogous to a high libido and lesbianism, eighteenth-century anxieties around masturbation gave rise to new reasons for the Goose’s Neck – overuse through excessive ‘diddling’ (1938). In 1771, M. D. T. de Bienville, a little-known French doctor, published his treatise on the dangers of nymphomania. Bienville believed that masturbation was the cause of this unhappy state, and warned that women who masturbated would soon ‘throw off the restraining, honourable yoke of delicacy, and without blush, openly solicit in the most criminal, and abandoned language, the first comers to gratify their insatiable desires’. Well, who hasn’t? What’s more, Bienville was confident that in women afflicted with ‘uterine fury’, the clitoris would be considerably larger than in ‘discreet women’.42 Although many ridiculed Bienville’s work, he was one of several doctors around this time who medicalised masturbation and viewed the size of the clitoris as an indicator of whether or not a woman had been rubbing one out – a kind of clitmus test, if you will.
Despite the clitoris being thoroughly enjoyed in Victorian pornography, a small but vocal section of the medical community continued to have serious concerns about the clitorati and the clitmus test persisted into the nineteenth century.******** French doctor Alexandre Parent du Châtelet (1790–1836), for example, studied the genitals of over five thousand Parisian sex workers and was surprised to find that, contrary to popular belief, ‘the genital parts of the prostitute … present no special alteration which is peculiar to them, and in this respect they do not differ from those of married women of unblemished character’.43 What’s more, ‘there is nothing remarkable either in the dimensions or the dispositions of the clitoris in the prostitutes of Paris, and that in them, as in all married women, there are variations, but nothing peculiar’.44 However, this study did little to dissuade other doctors from poking and prodding about women’s hoo-hahs searching for signs of sexual degeneracy. The 1854 editions of Medical Lexicon: A Dictionary of Medical Science included the word ‘clitorism’, which was defined as ‘a word invented to express the abuse made of the clitoris. Also, an unusually large clitoris.’45 Whereas the American Homeopathic Journal of Gynaecology and Obstetrics (1885) claimed that in ‘evidences of masturbation’ the ‘clitoris is much elongated, and the prepuce is hypertrophied and thrown into wrinkles’.46 Some doctors believed a hypertrophied clitoris was caused by masturbation, others that it was the other way around.
The most notorious English proponent of the anti-clit brigade was gynaecologist Dr Isaac Baker Brown (1811–1873). Brown was a widely respected physician. He was a founding member of St Mary’s Hospital, London, elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, and in 1865 he was elected president of the Medical Society of London. Everything was on the up for Brown until he published On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, Catalepsy, and Hysteria in Females in 1866. Here, Brown told of his success in performing clitorectomies as a cure for everything from hysteria to back pain, epilepsy, infertility, paralysis, blindness, insanity and much more. In one 1863 case, Brown cut the clitoris out of a thirty-year-old woman who had developed ‘a great distaste for her husband’. Brown declared the operation an ‘uninterrupted success’ and the patient returned to give her marriage another try.47 (Deep breath.)
The patient having been placed completely under the influence of chloroform, the clitoris is freely excised either by scissors or knife – I always prefer the scissors. The wound is then firmly plugged with graduated compress of lint, and a pad, well secured by a T bandage.48
Brown’s theories were not well received, and in 1867 he was expelled from the Obstetrical Society of London. His hearing was widely reported, and Brown was clearly at a loss as to why he had been singled out when so many of his peers had themselves performed clitorectomies. ‘I maintain my late colleagues in this room have all performed this operation … not my operation, recollect gentlemen, but an operation, as Dr Haden has showed, that has been practised from the time of Hippocrates.’49 And he may have had a point. Brown is very much the pantomime villain of Victorian gynaecology, but his butchery did not exist in a vacuum. I have no doubt that many of the good doctors who presided over Brown’s expulsion were equally guilty, if just a bit quieter about it. But none of this saved Brown, whose career never recovered, and he died in poverty in 1873 – possibly the only man in history to regret his success in finding the clit.
Sigmund Freud once described female sexuality as the ‘dark continent’ of psychology.50 Given the amount of time he seemed to spend wandering around it, clearly lost and terrified of the natives, I am inclined to agree with him. One of Freud’s less than gold-star brilliant theories was that clitoral orgasms are sexually immature. In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud argued that the female child’s sexuality is entirely clitoral and masculine until she reaches puberty, when she must transfer her ‘erotogenic susceptibility to stimulation … from the clitoris to the vaginal orifice’ for her to become mature and feminine.51 Freud might not have been circumcising the clitoris, but his ideas had the effect of metaphorically cutting the clitoris out of ‘healthy’ sexuality nonetheless. And although Freud wasn’t the only doctor distinguishing between ‘vaginal’ and ‘clitoral’ orgasms, he was certainly the most influential.*********
‘Dissected Clitoris’ from Georg Ludwig Kobelt’s, The Male and Female Organs of Sexual Arousal in Man and Some Other Mammals, 1844.
One of Freud’s most famous patients was Princess Marie Bonaparte (1882–1962), great-grandniece to Emperor Napoleon I. Princess Marie married Prince George of Greece and Denmark in 1907 and she had several lovers on the go as well, but she was never able to achieve an orgasm through vaginal penetration. Heavily influenced by Freud’s theories and being a scientifically minded kind of woman, Marie began to research her own sexual ‘frigidity’ and arrived at the conclusion she couldn’t achieve the almighty vaginal orgasm because her clitoris was too far away from her vaginal opening. She confirmed this by conducting a survey of 243 women and published her results in the 1924 edition of the Bruxelles-Médical, under the name A. E. Narjani. Marie identified women with a short distance between the clitoris and the vaginal opening, who orgasm easily, as ‘paraclitoridiennes’, and those with a difference of more than two and a half centimetres, who struggle to orgasm, like Marie, as ‘téleclitoridiennes’ (with the ‘mesoclitoriennes’ being somewhere between the two).52 Marie became Freud’s patient in 1925, which further reinforced her belief that she would only be satisfied if she came through penile penetration (listen carefully and you can hear the lesbians laughing). The upshot of Princess Marie’s obsession w
ith mature and immature orgasms was that in 1927 she employed surgeon Josef Halban to operate and reposition her clitoris closer to the vaginal opening. When this operation did not achieve the desired result, Halban operated again in 1930 and yet again in 1931. Poor Princess Marie never got her vaginal orgasm and wound up with a clit that must have been left dangling like a loose button. Poor, poor Marie.
Princess Marie Bonaparte (1882–1962).
And not just poor Marie. As Freud’s theories about the difference between vaginal and clitoral orgasms took hold across the medical world, women were routinely told that they were sexual failures if they could only orgasm through clitoral stimulation. In 1936, Eduard Hitschmann and Edmund Bergler published their highly influential Frigidity in Women, where they claimed that the ‘sole criterion of frigidity is the absence of the vaginal orgasm’.53 In 1950, Dr William S. Kroger claimed that women for ‘whom sexual response occurs only after clitoral stimulation’ were ‘frigid’. He went on to explain that the vaginal orgasm was the ‘optimum type of sexual response’.54 In America, this led to numerous gynaecologists operating to ‘free’ the clitoris from its hood, which would supposedly allow a frigid wife to climax with her husband. Even Alfred Kinsey recommended this ‘very simple’ procedure; ‘with a tool the physician can strip the clitoris, allowing the foreskin to roll back and may make a distinct difference in the response of the female’.55 Bizarrely, there are still plastic surgeons today who offer clitoral hood reduction surgery to improve orgasm, despite partial or total hoodectomy being classed as female genital mutilation by the World Health Organisation.56
But what is particularly galling about all this vaginal versus clitoral orgasm nonsense is that as we have learned more about the structure of the clitoris, it has become glaringly obvious that ALL orgasms are clitoral. The structure of the clitoris is as complex as it is extensive, comprising clitoral glans, prepuce, body (or corpora), crura, bulbs, suspensory ligaments and the root – the only visible parts being the glans and the hood.57 The structure descends downwards from the pubic bone into the adiposity of the mons pubis. It was only in 2009 that Pierre Foldes and Odile Buisson used 3-D sonography to get a complete picture of a stimulated clitoris, and we finally started to understand what the hell is going on down there. They found that when the clitoris was engorged, it swelled to touch the anterior walls of the vagina.58 Then, in 2010, Buisson and Foldes joined forces with Emmanuele Jannini and Sylvain Mimoun and scanned the vagina and clitoris of a volunteer woman during sex in the missionary position. The results showed that the penis stretched the clitoral root and during the (ahem) thrusting, the now stretched root crashed repeatedly into the anterior vagina wall – offering clear evidence that the much lauded G-spot has actually been the C-spot all along.59 A kind of clitoral Scooby-Doo ending to a debate that has raged throughout medicine for centuries.**********
Anatomy of the clitoris.
The question remaining is surely ‘why?’ Why has the ‘pussy pearl’ (2007) been so horribly victimised throughout history, and indeed continues to be abused throughout much of the world, when all it wants to do is bring pleasure? The World Health Organisation cites numerous reasons why FGM is carried out today, including to ‘reduce a woman’s libido and therefore... to help her resist extramarital sexual acts’.60 Looking back throughout history, this certainly rings true here. Although the clit was recognised as the ‘seat of pleasure’ very early on, it was not regarded as a very stable seat. Rather, it was thought the clitoris could provoke an excessive libido in women, which had all manner of health problems attached – both somatic and psychosomatic. But attacking the clit is about more than just curbing female desire, it’s about protecting the primacy of the penis. The clitoris brings pleasure without penetration, and it doesn’t need a man operating the controls to do so. The fears that an overused clitoris would morph into a penis, which could be used to penetrate other women, speaks to an anxiety that the penis is redundant or that the man is being replaced. Freud’s insistence that the only orgasm it was worth a woman having required a penis also speaks to a need to pay deference to the mighty rod. Likewise, the ridiculing of men who performed cunnilingus in the Ancient World, the clitoral association with lesbianism and ‘clitorism’ caused by masturbation all tacitly accuse the clitoris of ignoring the penis.
We will never know how many clitorises have been cut, cauterised and circumcised throughout history, but we do know that virtually none of these procedures were necessary. The clitoris is a truly magnificent organ, and one that is still mysterious – why can some women orgasm through penetration and others can’t? Exactly how does all the equipment work together to produce an orgasm? But here is what we do know: the clitoris is the only organ on the human body that has no other purpose than to bring pleasure. It has 8,000 nerve endings, double the amount in the glands of the penis, and almost 75 per cent of women need to have their glans clitoris (the external part) stimulated to orgasm. It has taken us a long time to get here, and there is still work to be done, but we are finally beginning to see just how important the clitoris is in sexual fulfilment.
* * *
* Early writers such as Hippocrates and Aristotle write at some considerable length about the function of the vulva, but it’s unclear if they are describing the clitoris. Vincent Di Marino and Hubert Lepidi, Anatomic Study of the Clitoris and the Bulbo-Clitoral Organ (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2014), p. 2.
† Finding Egyptian references to the ‘lullo-bump’ (1995) is particularly difficult. In Studies in Ancient Egyptian Anatomical Terminology (1997), James Walker lists ‘šd’ as a term for the vulva, and ‘sp.ty šd’ for ‘labia’ (meaning ‘two lips of the vulva’). He also cites the word ‘h˙nn-k3t’ in his list of anatomical terms, which he tentatively translates as ‘clitoris (?)’. (James H. Walker, Studies in Ancient Egyptian Anatomical Terminology (Wiltshire: Aris and Phillips, 1997), p. 272.) Egyptologist Dimitri Meeks cites ‘Hnn’ to mean ‘phallus’, but within his entry he makes note of ‘h˙nn-k3t’, which again is hesitatingly translated as ‘clitoris (?)’. (Dimitri Meeks, Année Lexicographique (Paris): Cybèle, 1998), p. 250.) The reason for the uncertainty and question marks is that ‘h˙nn-k3t’ could just as easily mean the head of the penis. (Erik Hornung, [The Litany of Re.] Das Buch der Anbetung des Re Im Westen, Sonnenlitanei. Nach Den Versionen des Neuen Reiches Herausgegeben Von Erik Hornung (Genève, 1975), p. 144, entry 483.) Frustrating, isn’t it? Of course, none of this means the Ancient Egyptians weren’t clit-literate, it just means the surviving evidence can’t confirm it. I would like to thank Sonja Greer for her invaluable help in finding the clitoris in Ancient Egyptian texts. She conducted detailed searches and provided numerous translations for this book. I would have been lost without her.
** For a full discussion on FGM in the Ancient World, see Mary Knight, ‘Curing Cut or Ritual Mutilation? Some Remarks on the Practice of Female and Male Circumcision in Graeco-Roman Egypt’, Isis, 92.2 (2001), pp. 317–38.
*** Even the Kama Sutra, composed sometime around the third century AD, doesn’t directly reference the clitoris, referring instead to the ‘mons veneris’, but it is one of the earliest texts to fully explore the female orgasm. However, ancient Sanskrit does contain a number of terms for the clitoris: yoni-lingam (vulva-penis), bhagankura (sprout of the vulva), and my personal favourite, smara-chatra (umbrella of the God of Love). Thank you to Professor Wendy Doniger, who was kind enough to talk me through the original Ancient Sanskrit language used for the vulva in the Kama Sutra.
**** For further reading about the clitoris being used as an obscenity in the Ancient World, read Melissa Mohr, Holy Sh*T: A Brief History of Swearing (Corby: Oxford Academic Publishing Ltd, 2013).
†† For a really excellent overview of the medieval medical understanding of the clitoris, read Karma Lochrie, Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), pp. 71–102.
***** For further reading,
see Mark D. Stringer and Ines Becker, ‘Colombo and the Clitoris’, European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology and Reproductive Biology, 151.2 (2010), pp. 130–3
****** Antecedents to ‘clitoris’ had been in circulation in Latin and Greek since Rufus of Ephesus (first century AD) used both κλειτορίς (clitoris) and κλειτοριάζειν (clitorising) in his anatomical works. Rufus uses ‘clitorising’ as a verb to mean stimulating the clitoris. See Carolyn J. Gersh, ‘Naming the Body: A Translation with Commentary and Interpretive Essays of Three Anatomical Works Attributed to Rufus of Ephesus’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2012); Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia (London: Printed by William Iaggard, 1615), p. 129.
******* A really great source to read about eighteenth-century pornography is Julie Peakman, Mighty Lewd Books (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
******** Despite vocal medical opinion, the anti-clit agenda had limited influence as Victorian erotica shows no such concerns. The Pearl Magazine (1879–80) regularly includes clitoral pleasure. The anonymous Romance of Lust (1873) contains no fewer than 166 instances of the word ‘clitoris’, all of which are positive and pleasurable depictions. Even that homage to gay love, Sin of the City of the Plain (1881), details bringing women to orgasm through clitoral pleasure.
********* An excellent source of nineteenth- and twentieth-century medical practices of clitorectomy is Sarah B. Rodriguez, Female Circumcision and Clitoridectomy In the United States (New York: University of Rochester Press, 2014).
********** Not everyone was happy with this theory, most notably Vincenzo Puppo, who was adamant that there was no such thing as an internal clitoris (Vincenzo Puppo, ‘Anatomy of the Clitoris: Revision and Clarifications About the Anatomical Terms for the Clitoris Proposed (Without Scientific Bases) by Helen O’Connell, Emmanuele Jannini, and Odile Buisson’, ISRN Obstetrics and Gynecology, 2011, pp. 1–5.) However, although others debate how the vagina, clitoris and urethra all work together in orgasm, the concept of the G-spot as a distinct anatomic sensory entity has now been widely debunked (e.g. Kilchevsky et al., 2012). Various Neotantra groups (such as ‘The New Tantra’) continue to teach that clitoral orgasms are inferior to vaginal ones, claiming that a clitoral orgasm is a ‘peak orgasm’ that causes a crash of various neurochemicals in the brain. There is no evidence to support this. It is nonsense.