locate the clitoris

i do not hate men (i do). i just think they are bad at finding things. and i think that, after five hundred years of losing the clitoris, they should be a little more humble. i think that they should maybe ask a woman for directions. i think that they should admit that the map was wrong and that the territory is not what they thought it was.

but here is the thing. the clitoris is not just an organ. it is not just a bundle of nerves. it is not just the seat of woman's delight or the amor veneris or whatever the fuck colombo and fallopio were fighting over in the sixteenth century while women sat there wondering why nobody had asked them. the clitoris is a metaphor. it is the metaphor. it is the thing that men have been losing for centuries and the thing that women have always known. it is the thing that is right there, in plain sight, and yet men cannot find it. it is the thing that men have erased from textbooks and called the devil's teat and removed from women's bodies to cure them of hysteria. it is the thing that men have been afraid of since the beginning of time because it represents the terrifying possibility that women do not need men for anything, least of all orgasm.

i have been thinking about the clitoris a lot lately. not in a weird way. well, in a weird way, but i am a weird person and i think about everything in a weird way. i think about the clitoris the same way i think about heidegger and hamsters named baudelaire and the unbearable thermodynamics of human connection. i think about it as a metaphor for everything men have failed to understand. i think about it as a metaphor for the way men have spent centuries telling women what their bodies are and what they want and what they should feel, all while being spectacularly, embarrassingly wrong.

the clitoris was not a secret. women knew about it. women have always known about it. but men, the people who wrote the anatomy books, the people who decided what was worth knowing and what was not, the people who spent centuries carving up cadavers and publishing treatises and establishing the foundations of western medicine, could not find it. they lost it. for five hundred years.

five hundred years. let that sink the fuck in.

the clitoris, the only organ in the human body whose sole purpose is pleasure, the most erogenous zone in the human body, an organ with over ten thousand nerve endings, was not properly mapped until 1998. that is not a typo. that is not the middle ages. that is the same year that google was founded. the same year that the first ipod was released. while men were inventing the internet and listening to the barenaked ladies, helen o'connell, an australian urologist, was doing unfunded after-hours research to figure out what the clitoris actually looked like. she discovered that it is not a pea-sized button. it is an expansive wishbone-shaped organ with bulbs and nerves and blood vessels that had been hiding in plain sight for centuries because nobody had bothered to look properly.

this is not a joke. this is not hyperbole. this is literally what happened.

the history of the clitoris is the history of men being confidently wrong. hippocrates mentioned it in 400 bc. rufus of ephesus described it in 110 ad and noted its link to female pleasure. avicenna wrote about it in the eleventh century. and then, somehow, it disappeared. in the sixteenth century, the anatomist andreas vesalius, considered the father of anatomy for his 1543 book fabric of the human body, thought the clitoris only existed in hermaphrodites. he was wrong. he was spectacularly wrong. but he was vesalius, so his wrongness became canon.

in 1559, realdo colombo claimed to have "discovered" the clitoris, calling it "the seat of woman's delight" and "the amor veneris". gabriele fallopio, who gave his name to the fallopian tubes, immediately accused the dead colombo of plagiarism, claiming that he, fallopio, was the true discoverer. they fought over the "discovery" of something that women had known about since the dawn of time. it was like two men arguing over who found a key while the person who owned the door was standing right there, holding the lock, wondering why nobody had asked her.

colombo and fallopio are a perfect metaphor for the entire history of male-female relations. men fighting over credit for something that women have always known. men claiming ownership of knowledge that was never theirs to claim. men arguing about the nature of female pleasure without ever once asking a woman what she actually wanted.

the clitoris kept disappearing and reappearing in medical texts like a bad penny or a ghost that did not want to be seen. a witch-hunting manual in 1487 called it "the devil's teat". a french anatomist called it a "shameful member." women diagnosed with "hysteria" were subjected to clitoridectomies, the surgical removal of the clitoral glans, because obviously the problem was too much pleasure. one surgeon, isaac baker brown, performed clitoridectomies as a cure for epilepsy, hysteria, and insanity. he removed women's clitorises and called it "neither more nor less than circumcision". he was expelled from the obstetrical society in 1867, not because the operation was cruel or violating, but because he had communicated to lay audiences and embarrassed the profession.

by 1948, the clitoris had been entirely scrubbed from gray's anatomy, the most authoritative medical textbook in the english-speaking world. not just minimized. not just misrepresented. erased. it was as if the clitoris had never existed. as if an entire organ had been declared non-canonical and struck from the records.

this is not just about anatomy. this is about epistemology. this is about who gets to decide what is real and what is not. the clitoris did not stop existing when men forgot about it. but men's forgetting meant that women's pleasure was delegitimized. it meant that women were told that their orgasms were somehow less valid than the ones that happened during penetration. it meant that women spent decades faking it. it meant that women's bodies were defined by their relationship to men's bodies, as inversions or absences or mutilations.

aristotle, in the fourth century bc, described the female body as an inverse of the male body, with its genitalia "turn'd outside in". a mutilated male. this is the founding assumption of western medicine. the male body is the default. the female body is a deviation. a failure. a mistake.

this is the metaphor. this is what the clitoris represents. the thing that has been there the whole time but that men could not see because they were too busy looking at themselves. the thing that men erased because it made them uncomfortable. the thing that men removed from women's bodies because it was too powerful, too dangerous, too much.

here is the thing about misandry: it is a response. it is a reaction. it is what happens when you spend your entire existence being told that your body is wrong, that your pleasure is unimportant, that your experiences are not worth documenting or understanding or even believing. it is what happens when you realize that men spent five hundred years losing an organ that you have had the entire time. it is what happens when you read about the clitoris being called "the devil's teat" and you understand that this is not about anatomy at all. this is about power. this is about the fear of female pleasure. this is about the terror of a world where women do not need men for anything, least of all orgasm.

misandry is not hatred. well, sometimes it is. sometimes it is pure, unfiltered, righteous hatred for the confidence of men who have never once questioned their own competence. sometimes it is the fury of a woman who has spent her entire life being told that she is too much, that she is too emotional, that she is too complicated, while watching men fail at the most basic fucking tasks and being celebrated for it. sometimes it is the exhaustion of a woman who has read about the clitoris being called "the contempt of mankind" in seventeenth-century anatomy texts and realized that men have always been afraid of female pleasure, have always tried to control it, have always tried to erase it.

i do not hate men (i do). but i am so fucking tired. i am tired of the confidence of men who cannot find an organ that has been right there the whole time. i am tired of the history of men erasing women's bodies from textbooks and then claiming to be experts on them. i am tired of the fact that women are still told that their pleasure is secondary, that their bodies are complicated and mysterious and not worth understanding, that they should be grateful for whatever they get. i am tired of the fact that in the 1860s, a surgeon removed women's clitorises to cure them of "hysteria," and in the 2020s, we are still arguing about whether the clitoris even matters. i am tired of the fact that in the trial of the century in 1918, a woman was deemed to have "inappropriate sexological knowledge" simply because she knew the word "clitoris". i am tired of the fact that a witch-hunting manual in 1487 called it "the devil's teat" and we have not fully recovered from that. i am tired of the fact that in some parts of the world, more than 230 million girls and women have undergone female genital mutilation, a practice that is fundamentally about controlling female pleasure. i am tired of the fact that i have to write an essay about an organ that men have been losing for five hundred years and pretend that this is not absolutely fucking insane.

the female orgasm is a political act. i know this because i have read anne koedt's "the myth of the vaginal orgasm," which was published in 1970 and which made clear what masters and johnson had already proven in the lab in 1966: that orgasms are only clitoral, that vaginal contractions are a side-effect, that penetration is not the height of female pleasure. koedt called an end to the myth of the liberated woman and her vaginal orgasm and rallied women to reject non-satisfying standard positions and insist on new techniques. she said that women should define sexuality in terms of mutual sexual enjoyment and throw out the old practices that had left them unsatisfied for centuries. she said that women should take the matter in hand.

i love that phrase. take the matter in hand. it is so practical. it is so unromantic. it is so exactly what feminism is: women realizing that they have been waiting for men to figure something out and deciding to do it themselves.

shere hite, in 1976, published her report on female sexuality, which found that stimulation of the clitoris, not intercourse, was the surest route to female orgasm. it was a landmark moment for feminism. and then hite was discredited, smeared, mocked. her work was called unscientific and misandristic. she was accused of hating men, which is always the accusation, the trump card, the thing that gets pulled out whenever a woman says anything that makes men uncomfortable. hite, who had written an entire book on men and male sexuality, whose findings her editor called among the saddest things he had ever read, was destroyed by the very men whose feelings she had tried to understand. she renounced her us citizenship in 1995 and lived in exile until her death in 2020. she died in relative obscurity, erased from the history she had helped to write.

this is what happens to women who talk about the clitoris. this is what happens to women who talk about female pleasure. this is what happens to women who say, "actually, we do not need you for this." they get called man-haters. they get discredited. they get erased.

i am a misandrist. not because i hate men (omg, i definitely do), but because i am exhausted. because i have read the history of the clitoris and i cannot unread it. because i have seen how men have spent centuries losing, erasing, and mutilating the one thing that women have always known. because i have seen how men react when women tell them the truth: with defensiveness, with anger, with the accusation of man-hating.

so yes, i am a misandrist. but misandry is not the point. the point is the clitoris. the point is that it has always been there. the point is that women have always known where it was. the point is that men have spent centuries erasing it because they were afraid of what it meant. the point is that the female orgasm is not a reward for good behaviour. it is not a gift that men give women. it is not a prize for getting through penetration. it is a right. it is a biological fact. it is the most basic thing in the world, and yet men have managed to make it a political act simply by refusing to acknowledge it.

so locate the clitoris. i mean this literally and metaphorically. locate it in the textbooks. locate it in the anatomy diagrams. locate it in the beds where women have been faking it for centuries. locate it in the medical research that has ignored it for too long. locate it in the cultural imagination that has treated it as a joke or a secret or a problem.

locate it. admit that you lost it. and then, maybe, we can talk about equality. maybe we can talk about feminism. maybe we can talk about misandry, which is not hatred (it is) but the refusal to pretend anymore. maybe we can talk about the female orgasm as a political act, which it is, and which it will continue to be until men stop treating it as an afterthought.

i do not hate men (i definitely do). i just think they are bad at finding things.

and i am not sorry for saying it.