These days, when you can Google pretty much anything, it's hard to imagine just how challenging it was back then to get information about women's health. There just wasn't much out there when it came to gynecological well-being, and even less about women's sexual pleasure.
And what was available was often simply wrong. Nobody's high school sex education classes even mentioned that women possess an organ called a clitoris. You couldn't find it on the pull-down drawings of genitalia we boys and girls were shown in our separate "health" classes either. I remember having to look the word up in the dictionary at about 14, while reading the "racy" novel Candy. ("Oh, that's what that is!")
In college, my friends' therapists were giving out copies of The Power of Sexual Surrender, a pernicious little book which claimed that "the problem of sexual frigidity in women is one of the gravest problems of our times." Its chapter on "The Normal Orgasm" assured them that real women achieve orgasm through vaginal penetration alone and that, "in the fully mature female, this sensitivity [of the clitoris] often diminishes, giving way to the vagina as the primary source of the greatest sexual pleasure." (Just to be clear: this is a lie.) All a woman needed to do to achieve a "mature" orgasm, we were assured, was to recognize that "the sexual act in its purest form expresses the essential passivity associated with women and the aggressiveness of the male, the actor and the acted-upon."
Imagine, then, the life-changing revelation in Anne Koedt's 1970 essay, "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm." She confirmed what some of us had figured out for ourselves: "Actually the vagina is not a highly sensitive area and is not constructed to achieve orgasm." (Not that many women don't enjoy penetration, but the vast majority of us need something more.) Maybe, it finally occurred to us, we weren't immature, frigid women; maybe we were just having bad sex.
Information about our bodies was hard to come by in the 1970s. When it was my turn to give a talk at my monthly lesbian support group meeting, I chose to research the physiology of women's orgasms. This required a trip to my local library and rooting around in some pretty obscure medical textbooks, where I learned about the pubococcygeus muscle, which stretches between the pubic bone and the coccyx, and whose contractions are responsible for the wave-like experience of orgasm. You wouldn't discover that, even today, simply by Googling the term.
Now You See It, Now You Don't
Nor would you encounter a fact that students of human anatomy have discovered, then forgotten, then rediscovered over the centuries: that the clitoris is much bigger than that bump above the vagina. That's just its top. The rest of it is inside and it's huge -- as much as four inches across -- shaped like a double wishbone, with two inner bulbs and two outer wings. Who knew? Well, the Dutch anatomist Reinier de Graaf got part of the story. In 1672, he produced the most complete depiction to date of the thing but missed its internal workings. The curtains of ignorance were then redrawn until 1844 when the German scientist George Ludwig Kobe produced the first known drawings of the external and internal clitoris.
And yet, more than a century later, the whole organ had disappeared again. In the 1947 twenty-fifth edition of Gray's Anatomy, that primary text and medical student's bible on the human body, it was missing in action . For reasons now lost to history, that edition's editor, Charles Mayo Goss, simply left it out. (It's back in the current forty-first edition, even if with half as many index entries as "penis.")
It took another 50 years, but in 1998 Australian urologist Helen O'Connell published a definitive description of the clitoris, with an accurate drawing, including all of its internal and external structures, revealing that it has three times the nerve endings of the homologous structure in men, the penis. That's right; it was only a couple of decades ago that the true structure of the clitoris was finally known.
So perhaps I shouldn't have been so surprised by a conversation I had sometime around 2010. It was early in my university teaching career and my students were sitting in small groups, discussing an article when the four young women in one group all raised their hands.
"Professor Gordon, Professor Gordon!"
"Yes?" I looked into those four earnest faces.
"Professor Gordon, there's a word here we don't understand," exclaimed one of them, pointing to a spot on the page.
"Oh," I replied. "Clitoridectomy. That's a surgical procedure practiced in some cultures. It involves cutting the clitoris, sometimes just a little bit, and sometimes removing the whole thing." (The cultures mentioned in the article didn't happen to include our own, even though as recently as the 1960s, some girls underwent clitoridectomies to "cure" masturbation.)
"Oh," they said. An awkward silence followed. Then, once again, "Professor Gordon!"
"Yes?"
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
