No More Anti-Lady Parts Bullshit!
Remember hearing how a clitoral climax was immature and that a vaginal orgasm was how a true woman got there? …because an orgasm that didn’t necessarily include male involvement and penetration — one where a male didn’t necessarily get off, couldn’t possibly be legitimate or truly valid…?
In an article by Calla Wahlquist for the London Guardian (titled ‘The sole function of the clitoris is female orgasm. Is that why it’s ignored by medical science?’), she discusses how “medical textbooks are full of anatomical pictures of the penis, but the clitoris barely rates a mention. Many medical professionals are uncomfortable even talking about it.”
Professor Caroline de Costa, editor of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, discussed the professional blackout on clitoris studies, mapping, analysis or even mention by her professional colleagues. “It is not discussed,” says De Costa, who is also a professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at James Cook University. “I go to conferences, I go to workshops, I edit the journal, I read other journals. I read papers all the time, and never do I find mention of the clitoris.” De Costa points out that artists have “undeniably” done a better job at incorporating clitorial anatomy into their work than the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.
Renowned urologist, Professor Helen O’Connell, published the first comprehensive anatomical study of the clitoris in 1998. A subsequent study in 2005 examined it under MRI. ‘It was not, O’Connell discovered, just a small nub of erectile tissue, described in some texts as the “poor homologue” of the penis. Instead it was an otherworldly shape, with the nerve-rich glans merely the external protrusion of an organ that extended beneath the pubic bone and wrapped around the vaginal opening, with bulbs that become engorged when aroused. It looked like an orchid. It was beautiful.’
From the article:
In the 20 years since that groundbreaking study was released, clitoral anatomy remains largely absent from the medical curriculum and from medical research. A literature review conducted by O’Connell’s team for her editorial in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology found just 11 articles on anatomical dissection of the clitoris had been published worldwide since 1947. Hundreds more mentioned clitoral anatomy only as it related to procedures to restore sensation following a cliteradectomy, or female genital mutilation. Despite that work, O’Connell wrote, “we see literature doubting the importance of female orgasm, entertaining the argument that from an evolutionary standpoint, female orgasm could merely be a byproduct of selection on male orgasm”. Speaking to Guardian Australia from her consulting rooms in East Melbourne, O’Connell says the view that the clitoris was at best unimportant and at worst shameful remained pervasive. She recalls a conversation at an awards night, in which one of her students won a prize for a study of the suspensory ligaments that hold the clitoris in place.
“The very senior figure directly across from me thought that her work was — and I was her supervisor, I don’t think he knew that — he thought it was voyeurism,” she says.
“She’s doing scientific research about anatomy, and that, in his world … ”
She pauses. “What happened to him, that he sees a young woman doing a project like that and thinks of it with a sexual innuendo? That is just, to me, unfathomably unrelated to the way my brain works.”
(Calla Wahlquist, The London Guardian, ‘The sole function of the clitoris is female orgasm. Is that why it’s ignored by medical science?’, October 31, 2020.)
Dr. O’Connell was a medical student in the 1980s and was infuriated by her anatomy textbooks, containing extensive anatomical drawings of the penis but registering the clitoris as a mere footnote. “There’s the norm that’s the male, and then we’ve got kind of this subset over here who are not male,” she says. “And their unique characteristics are differences … there was a feeling that they were not whole people in the way that these other people are whole people and deserving of having their body parts having a full description.”
There are so many biases to set straight. It sometimes seems endless. But all of them can really be reduced to one, single purity and pollution discourse, one that positions menstruation as the ‘enemy’ of masculine ‘purity’ and ‘light.’ As an organized patriarchal value system, it goes back to around 1,500 BCE, was codified in the Avestan/Vedic warrior purity code, flowed (no pun) into Zoroastrianism and thence informed Mosaic purity laws, which informed both Christian and Sharia Law, and here we fucking are — with that canard still just sitting there, unexamined, un-refuted and stinking in the ‘Holy Books’ and codas of the Three Main Orthodoxies of Abrahamic Tradition like misogynist ordure.
It has underwritten the male biases in Western science, medicine, philosophy, literature and theology since Plato’s characterizations of the errant womb, and his student’s (Aristotle’s) construction of the Theory of Feminine Defect. It’s all about the womb blood, the original magic and source of feminine preeminence in prehistory and the creation of civilization out of fertility sacrality and agriculture — the original religion/culture of nurture.
When you look at it that way, you see that all of them share a common source, had an identifiable beginning as masculinized, male-exclusive warrior ideology/theology, and can have a similar end in the transformation of the ideologies and theologies that lionize hierarchical patriarchal values over egalitarian, gender-fluid collectivism. This value system formed our original human societal values, still perpetuated by many authentic, uncontaminated or restored Indigenous societies the world over, and that are making a slow but steady comeback.
Not to be reductionist, but it’s a manageable way to look at it.
[The above was composed with help and input from Elizabeth Dailey and Jessica North O’Connell on the women-only Facebook page, ‘Woman Nation’]
