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Woman

Page 9

by Natalie Angier


  The clitoris is usually spoken of as the homologue of the penis, and embryonically that's true: it arises from the same region of the fetal genital ridge as the shaft of the penis. But the comparison is not wholly accurate. A woman doesn't pee or ejaculate through her clitoris, of course. No urethra runs through it. She does nothing practical at all with her clitoris. The clitoris is simply a bundle of nerves: 8,000 nerve fibers, to be precise. That's a higher concentration of nerve fibers than is found anywhere else on the body, including the fingertips, lips, and tongue, and it is twice the number in the penis. In a sense, then, a woman's little brain is bigger than a man's. All this, and to no greater end than to subserve a woman's pleasure. In the clitoris alone we see a sexual organ so pure of purpose that it needn't moonlight as a secretory or excretory device. For this reason, maybe it's best that the clitoris normally is hidden within the vulval cleft: it is, in its way, a private joke, a divine secret, a Pandora's box packed not with sorrow but with laughter.

  The clitoris is a good package, and so it is small, and best thought of metrically. Its fetal growth is complete by the twenty-seventh week of gestation, at which point it looks like what it will look like on the girl once she's born. Like the classic Greek column, the clitoris is a cylindrical structure with three sections—base, shaft, and crown. But it is an archaeologist's column, for the lower two sections of it are largely subterranean, hidden beneath the skin of the vulva. The part that is most easily visible when you spread open the vulva is the glans of the clitoris, the equivalent of the column's capital. The glans sits proudly, maybe a bit smugly, beneath its A-lined roof, a hood formed by the junction of the inner labia. Glans is an annoying word, similar enough to gland to make you wonder if there is something glandular—that is, secretory—about this magic button. There isn't. Glans means "a small, round mass or body" or "tissue that can swell and harden," both of which apply to the glans clitoris. If you looked closely, you'd see that the glans clitoris resembles the glans, or head, of the penis, with the same deco bulbousness bordering on heart-shaped, though because it has no opening it does not stare back with a Cyclopean eye, as the penis does. The clitoral glans surmounts the shaft, or body, of the clitoris, which is partly visible and then extends under the muscle tissue of the vulva, up toward the joint where the plates of the pubic bone meet, the pubic symphysis. The shaft is surrounded by a capsule of fibroelastic tissue, a kind of latex jacket that you might slip into to go for a skin-dive. It is the meat of the clitoris, the tube that you feel dancing under flesh if you take an onanistic moment and rub the meadow of the mons. The shaft is attached to twin crura, or roots, which arc subcutaneously like the two halves of a wishbone out toward the thighs and obliquely toward the vagina. The crura anchor the clitoris to the pubic symphysis. Glans, shaft, crura: a tripartite Greek column whose order changes depending on mood, from the stately Doric of a working day through the volute, unwinding Ionic and cresting in the extravagant, midsummer foliage of Corinthian, when leaves and flowers are as fat as fists and life is drunk on its gorgeous, fleeting infinity.

  Considering its largely veiled configuration, the clitoris is hard to measure—it is, in fact, more easily felt than seen—but doctors have done their calipered best to be systematic about it and to offer up "normative values." Mostly they are concerned with the head and body of the clitoris, as these are the components that give the organ its heft, and hence its perceptibility to anybody inspecting it. The average infant clitoris, when measured from the base of the shaft to the top of the glans, is about 4 or 5 millimeters, the height of a pencil eraser. Grow, and your clitoris grows with you, to an average adult length from base to glans of 16 millimeters, the diameter of a dime. About a third of that span is the glans, two thirds the shaft. Despite published standards, the clitoris, like any other body part, rejoices in deviance. Masters and Johnson noted that some women have a long thin shaft surmounted by a petite glans, others a fat glans on a short thick shaft, and so on through any number of variations and combinations. After reaching maturity, the clitoris stays pretty much the same into old age. It can get bigger during pregnancy, possibly as a result of mechanical and vascular changes, and often it stays enlarged forever after. But the nice thing about the clitoris is that it is not particularly responsive to estrogen and thus does not care whether you are taking birth control pills or estrogen replacement therapy. It will not atrophy after menopause, the way the vagina can. It will always be there for you.

  The clitoral glans is the wick of Eros, the site where the 8,000 nerve fibers are threshed together into a proper little brain. For many women, the glans is so sensitive that touching it directly is almost painful, and they prefer circuitous stimulation of the shaft or the entire mons. The shaft has relatively few nerves, but it is threaded through with thousands of blood vessels, allowing it to swell during arousal and push the head ever higher. Further facilitating the great clitoral expansion are two bundles of erectile tissue wrapped in muscle called the bulbs of the vestibule, which help impel blood headward. Thus insanguinated, the passionate clitoris inflates to twice the size of the clitoris supine.

  Yet, again, let us not think of the clitoris as a literal counterpart to the penis. An aroused clitoris is swollen and springy, but it does not become rigid like a prepenetrant penis. We know that. Anybody with an intact sensory cortex and the right opportunities can affirm that an erect clitoris does not feel quite as stiff as a hard-on. What's surprising is that the reason for the difference only lately has come to light. In 1996, a team of Italian scientists exploring the microarchitecture of the clitoral shaft reported that, textbooks be damned, the clitoris does not have a venous plexus. In men, this tight-knit group of veins serves as the major conduit through which blood leaves the organ. During arousal, muscles in the shaft of the penis temporarily compress the venous plexus, with the result that blood flows in but then cannot depart, and lo, it is risen. The clitoris does not seem to have a distinct, compressible plexus; the vascularization of the organ is more diffuse. On sexual kindling, arterial flow into the clitoris increases, but the venous outflow is not clamped shut, so the organ does not become a rigid little pole. Why should it? It has no need to go spelunking or intromitting. And it may be that the comparatively subtle nature of its blood trafficking allows the clitoris to distend and relax with ease and speed, giving rise to a woman's blessed gift, the multiple orgasm.

  During the feminist movement of the 1970s, activists may not have burned their bras, as the cliché has it (the phrase bra-burner was a sloppy conflation of the burning of draft cards, which did occur during antiwar protests, and a demonstration against the Miss America competition, when a group of feminists threw their brassieres into a trash can in a symbolic rejection of constructed femininity). They did, however, hoist a metaphorical flag to the clitoris. They spoke like explorers who had stumbled on a lost land, the Garden of Eden, perhaps, as Lilith had known it. Even the 1990s edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves proclaims that "until the mid-1960s, most women didn't know how crucial the clitoris was." Such ignorance was blamed on Freud, who came up with the theory that a clitoral orgasm is an "infantile" orgasm, a vaginal one a "mature" orgasm, and that only by shifting her focus from her vestigial phallus to her unmistakably feminine vagina would a woman find psychosexual fulfillment.

  Yet while indignation over this theory may have been justified, the clitoris did not always suffer from neglect, nor are women who live in the last gasp of the twentieth century the first to exult in it. To the contrary, Freud's proposal was an anomaly, a blot on history's understanding of female sexuality. For thousands of years, experts and amateurs alike recognized the centrality of the clitoris to a woman's pleasure and climactic faculty. The origins of the word clitoris are unclear. It is found in all modern European languages and comes from the Greek, but how the Greeks got it is subject to dispute. No matter. Nearly all proposed roots carry libidinous connotations. One second-century source suggests the word is a derivation of the verb kleitoriazein, meanin
g to titillate lasciviously, to seek pleasure. Some etymologists have proposed that clitoris stems from the Greek word for key, as in the key to female sexuality, while others link it to the root that means "to be inclined" and that also gave rise to the word proclivity. (In non-European languages, the word for clitoris may refer to its appearance rather than its function. For example, in Chinese, the ideogram combines yin, for female, and tee, for stem, as the stem of an eggplant resembles a clitoris.)

  "Authorities in French, German and English during Freud's time, and stretching back to the early seventeenth century, were unanimous in holding that female sexual pleasure originated in the structures of the vulva generally and in the clitoris specifically," Thomas Laqueur says. "No alternative sites were proposed." In tones that united prurience and primness, early anatomists referred to the clitoris as an "obscene organ of brute pleasure" or "an instrument of venery." In 1612, Jacques Duval wrote of the clitoris: "In French it is called temptation, the spur to sensual pleasure, the female rod and the scorner of men; and women who will admit their lewdness call it their gaude mihi [great joy]." Duval did not explain why he construed the female rod as a "scorner of men." Was it because he thought a woman's capacity to feel sensual pleasure was threatening to the larger social and sexual order? Or was he saying what we gals want to hear: that he, and presumably other men, are jealous of the gaude mihis monomania? "All our late discoveries in anatomy," Geoffrey de Mandeville concluded in 1724, "can find no other use for the clitoris but to whet the female desire by its frequent erections."

  With the exception of the great eighteenth-century taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus, who inexplicably argued that human females alone had a clitoris, most of the early anatomists and naturalists correctly recognized that other female mammals also possess the venerable instrument. How venerable a particular example might be judged was subject to delicious embellishment. The Dutch naturalist Johann Blumenbach wrote that the clitoris of a beached baleen whale he examined in 1791 measured fifty-two feet long—quite an accomplishment when you consider that the total body length of an adult baleen whale averages only forty to fifty feet.

  Blumenbach's appraisal skills may be open to question, but of the superior clitoral dimensions found on a number of nonhuman primates there is no doubt. Queen among the clitoral nobility is the bonobo, sometimes called the pygmy chimpanzee. The bonobo is a close cousin of the common chimpanzee, and the two species together are our closest living relatives. The bonobo is a sexual Olympian. Males, females, old, callow, no matter—it's sex, grope, hump, genito-genital rub-a-dub-dubbing, all the day long. Most of this sex has nothing to do with reproduction. It serves as the code of ethics by which bonobos survive group living. It is their therapy, their social lubricant and postquarrel salve, a way of expressing feelings, and it is often quick to the point of perfunctory. In a species in which sexuality is so important, and in which females engage in frequent homosexual as well as heterosexual and pangenerational trysts, it is no surprise that the clitoris assumes considerable stature. As a young adolescent, a female bonobo is maybe half the weight of a human teenager, but her clitoris is three times bigger than the human equivalent, and visible enough to waggle unmistakably as she walks. Only later, when the bonobo matures and her entire labial area swells, does it become difficult to descry the organ. But the clitoris is still there, and is drafted into service by its owner several times an hour.

  Female spider monkeys and lemurs also have exceptionally large clitorises. The spotted hyena of Africa has a clitoris so large that it looks exactly like the male hyena's penis. The organ is nothing like the typical mammalian clitoris but is a vagina and clitoris in one elongated package. A female hyena has intercourse through this phallic projection. She gives birth through her clitoris, and if that thought makes you want to wince, go ahead and wince, because she sure does. Unlike the bonobo, the spotted hyena does not use her prodigious clitoris for quotidian sensuality, her interest in sex being confined to periods of estrus. Instead, the organ appears to be enlarged incidentally, as a result of the female's having been exposed prenatally to large concentrations of testosterone, which masculinizes the external genitals. (The hormonal status of the spotted hyena is of interest to us for reasons apart from genital anatomy, as I discuss at length in the chapter on female aggression.)

  The bizarre clitorivagina works well enough for the hyena, which is one of the most abundant of the big carnivores in Africa, but it is not appealing enough for evolution to have tried it more than once. As a rule, the clitoris of a female mammal is a thing apart, with no through traffic in either direction. And for many species, the clitoris probably works—that is, has orgasmic capacity. I say "probably" because while you may think it's easy to know if an animal has climaxed or not, solid proof is hard to come by. Researchers have watched primates copulate and have seen the female forming the same enraptured O with her mouth, the same shark-style lifting of the eyes toward the back of the head, that the male displays while he ejaculates. But does the female experience the spasming and muscle contractions that we of the sexual cognoscenti consider a requisite sign of orgasm? Scientists have gone the experimental distance for only a handful of species, inserting a transmitter into the vagina and then measuring uterine activity while the female engages in a few romps (of a homosexual nature, so as not to disturb the equipment). For every monkey tested, the needle of the EEG did its little jig, indieating neuromuscular vibrato, at just the moment when the monkeys were telling the story of O.

  Early anatomists and other interested parties may have appreciated the significance of the clitoris, but that doesn't mean the organ has been the subject of exhaustive research, then or now. Nancy Friday has complained about the silence in which the clitoris is cloaked and the fact that girls aren't taught the details of their sexual anatomy in the same way that boys are, which results, she says, in girls' being subjected to a "mental clitoridectomy." Matriphobe that she is, Friday blames mothers and their thin-lipped repressive ways for performing the psychosurgery, but the scientific and medical literature is hardly more garrulous on the subject of the clitoris. A search of Medline, the world's largest medical computer database, pulled up only sixty or so references to clitoris over a five-year span (compared to thirty times that number for the term penis). Only two academic volumes are devoted to the clitoris, one called The Clitoris, the other The Classic Clitoris, and both are decades old. Even gynecology textbooks give the clitoris short shrift, a mere page or two. Some of the professional disregard may be attributed to the fact that medicine focuses on illness and the clitoris, thankfully, is not a common site of disease. But at least in this country, the inattentiveness also reflects ordinary prudishness and the difficulty of winning a federal grant to study the morphology of small Greek keys. The clitoris obviously needs more Italian researchers.

  In one aspect only has the clitoris piqued contemporary scientific interest, and that is the question of whether we are supposed to have it in the first place. Maybe you've pondered along these lines yourself. Maybe you've idly rolled the old sexual chestnuts around in your mind and wondered why it is that women are the ones with the organ dedicated exclusively to sexual pleasure, when men are the ones who are supposed to be dedicated exclusively to sexual pleasure. Men are portrayed as wanting to go at it all the time, women as preferring a good cuddle; yet a man feels preposterously peacockish if he climaxes three or four times in a night, compared to the fifty or hundred orgasms that a sexually athletic woman can have in an hour or two. Maybe you thought it was some sort of cosmic joke, in the same category of sexual dissonance as the fact that a man is at his libidinous peak before he is quite a man, by age eighteen or twenty, while a woman doesn't reach full flower until her thirties or even forties (about the time, a female comedian once put it, that her husband is discovering he has a favorite chair). Or maybe you've thought the clitoris is a kind of accident, barely there, more Ariel than anatomical. The clitoris is small, after all, and hardly distinct from the surrounding f
olds and crevasses of the vulva. For women who are anorgasmic, who cannot climax no matter how they thrash and struggle, the clitoris may seem the most overhyped and misleading knob of flesh this side of Pinocchio's nose. Sure, it works for some, but for others it is notoriously undependable. Marilyn Monroe, the most elaborated sexual icon of the twentieth century and surely the source of autoeruptive glee for thousands of fans, confessed to a friend that despite her three husbands and a parade of lovers, she had never had an orgasm. Could even Immanuel Kant, said to have died a virgin, be considered such a sorry sexual naif?

  As it happens, evolutionary thinkers are engaged in a vigorous debate over the point, or pointlessness, of the clitoris and its bosom buddy, the female orgasm. They are asking whether the capacity for orgasm does a woman any good and thus can be counted an adaptation that has been selected over the wash of time, or whether it is, to borrow a phrase from Stephen Jay Gould, a glorious accident. The debate is good clean dirty cortical fun, so much more amusing than being adjured, as we were in the 1970s, to get a mirror and inspect our genitals for ourselves. It gives the clitoris a jaunty new consequence; a brush with Darwinism can do that. But it is also an unnerving debate. Some researchers have argued, in print, that the female climax may be so unnecessary as to be on its way out. One unlucky lurch of the evolutionary wheel, and those fibers may fire no more. But let's not get ahead of the game. Let us take a look at the clitoral balance sheet with a dispassionate eye and consider the theories behind its provenance. You can then decide independently whether you can relax in confidence of the organ's enduring purpose or whether it's time to break out the offerings to the goddess Klitoris and her earthly ecclesiastic, Bonobo-á-go-go.

 

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