“What’s the difference between a bar and a clitoris? Most guys have no problem finding a bar. In the world of humor, the clitoris remains a mystery: it’s supposed to be small, and it’s always hard to find. “Which dinosaur will never be found? The Clitaurus.”
Sometimes medical science prefers the penis to the clitoris. Indeed, until now, the number of nerve endings considered to be in the female clitoris is only an estimate and this is based on research on cows.
But new research into the actual human clitoris has found more than 10,000 nerve fibers – 20% more than previously thought. The new study looked at tissue donated by trans people during female-to-male gender-affirming surgery. Tissues were stained and magnified 1,000 times under a microscope so that individual nerve fibers could be counted.
This follows the 2005 research of Australian urologist Helen O’Connell who became famous as the first person to map the clitoris, using MRI scans of women. And in fact it is not small, only 10% of the organs are visible.
O’Connell has described how his initial medical training used textbooks that never mentioned the clitoris, and that he considered female genitalia a “failure”. So, he made it his mission to better understand this part of the female body.
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Erotic place
Both the penis and the clitoris are erectile organs. Together with the “small” oblong of the visible part – the glans – the clitoris includes the erectile tissue. It engorges with blood in arousal and extends up to 9 cm, making it larger than the unaroused penis. This is important because, when aroused, the “bulbs” of the clitoris will extend to touch the vagina and urethra. The pleasure of traveling.
The history of the clitoris goes back more than a few decades. Indeed, in ancient Greek and Roman medicine, it was known as the “own erotic locus”. It is called the gate of the womb, the little tongue, the bean and the myrtle-berry. But most of the words used still suggest to be small.
Throughout its long history, studies of the clitoris have tended to be based on cadavers or animal dissections rather than real-life women. In 1844, the German anatomist, George Ludwig Kobelt, used a dissected clitoris to describe not only the visible part, but also the internal part, giving a better understanding of its true size.
Kobelt will inject blood vessels and lymphatic vessels so that he can better understand how the erectile organ is supplied with blood. They say that there are more nerves that supply the clitoris than the clitoris, and seeing it is more important for sexual pleasure.
‘New and useless parts’
Kobelt is not the first to realize that the clitoris is an important organ. In 1672, in his book, Treatise on the Generative Organs of Women, the Dutch physician and anatomist Regnier de Graaf stated that every differentiated female body has a visible body, “sufficient to be seen and touched”.
He then describes the “other parts” of the clitoris that are hidden in the pubic fat area, including the clitoral bulb. He commented: “We are more surprised that some anatomists do not mention this part than if it does not exist in the universe.”
Indeed, before de Graaf, some anatomists had argued that there was a clitoris. In 1543, Andreas Vesalius, an anatomist, physician, and author of one of the most influential books on human anatomy, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body), responded to rumors of its existence by dismissing the book as “the new. and useless part”.
Not everyone agreed, and in 1559 the Italian surgeon, Realdo Colombo, published De re anatomica (On Things Anatomical). What is remarkable about Colombo’s work is that, like O’Connell, it is based not only on dissection, but also on the living body of a woman – direct experience.
He described finding a beautiful object, “made with such art”, a place for women’s erotic pleasure: a small oblong that, if rubbed with the penis or even just touched “with the little finger”, causes pleasure and flows out. from “seed” in all directions, “quicker than the wind”. One of the words for the clitoris in Latin is “gaude mihi”, which translates as “please me”.
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Pleasure vs. procreation
But caution must be exercised here, because all previous historical attention to the clitoris was not because scientists were interested in women’s own pleasure. That’s because people believe that both sexes need to reach orgasm for it to happen. Pleasure is seen as necessary for procreation, not as an experience in itself.
This ancient claim was recently resurrected in a 2019 article in the journal Clinical Anatomy, where reproductive physiologist Roy Levin suggested that clitoral stimulation changes the lining of the reproductive tract to make conception more likely to occur.
For pleasure, procreation or both, although science now knows more about the clitoris than ever before, it is clear that there is still a way to go as new research shows that many women still cannot identify their genitals correctly.
Helen King, Professor Emerita, Classical Studies, The Open University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.