November 26, 2022 • 48 mins
The clitoris has been one of the most misunderstood and maligned female features in medical history. In this classic episode, Cristen and Caroline uncover the incredible geography of clitoral complex and why it took so long for doctors to figure it out.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha, and welcome to stuff
one never told you, but actually I heart radio and
today I come with new Samantha. Oh my god, I'm
ready give me that. Yes, so we might come back
(00:29):
and do a whole episode on this. But you probably
saw recently there were headlines about a news study around
the clutterest, yes, and some updates, and it was kind
of it started a conversation which you and I have
a lot on this show about how a lot of
medicine and a lot of science is still sexist because
(00:51):
there's so much we don't know about the clutterest. In
a lot of ways, it is still misunderstood, um, a
mysterious thing. Meanwhile, we have like untold studies on the penis,
like so many penis. Yes, there is a huge scientific
gap on studies on scientific studies when it comes to
(01:12):
the penis versus the clitterest, and there's a huge knowledge
gap between it. Um that I think I I can
speak from personal experience. I still I didn't know a
lot until I started working on this show, and I'm
still learning. So uh yeah, we're still learning more about
(01:33):
the clitter ist. And I just want to briefly run
through what they found in the study. But like I said,
we'll probably come back and talk about it more in
depth later. But more than ten thousand nerve fibers enabled
the pleasurable sensations created by the human clitterest And this
is according to new um research from the Oregon Health
(01:54):
and Science University. So this was the first known count
of human culatoral nerve tiss you and that's I thought
I had heard eight thousand previously, I believe. Yeah, it's
often quoted as eight thousand nerd fibers and claris, but
this is even more. I've just heard thousands, and I
never knew the range because that's a difference between a
(02:14):
thousand to ten thousand for sure. Yes, and it's way
more than the penis. Everybody. Yeah, And just again to
to drive this point home, that eight thousand number came
from studies on livestock animals, not people. It is just
(02:38):
to reiterate this as well. The only known organ where
the whole point is pleasure. Uh again, take that penis
and you all know, because I won't shut up about it,
that's primarily when I masturbate, it's all clatoral because that's
where it's happening. Why am I not recording those because that?
(03:02):
Oh my god. I was like, we're just gonna do
an update. We don't need to record this sorr. I'm
always like, should I give me content? Worry? I don't
feel feel like the episodes is about the clitterest. You
should know anyway. Oh my god, it's amazing. Yes, that's
always with the T and mine from me on that one.
(03:22):
But this is really fascinating, interesting news. I'm glad we're
we're looking into this. I'm excited interested to see what
else we can learn. Uh and yeah, well we'll come
back and revisit it in the future, but in the meantime,
please enjoy this classic episode. Welcome to Stuff Mom Never
Told You from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and
(03:49):
welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline, and
we are going to talk all about the Clitterest today,
Ladies and gentlemen, Everything you never knew that you wanted
to know about the clitterest will be revealed in this podcast.
That's right, in a safer work format, very safe for work. Yeah,
Caroline and I learned lots of stuff along the way,
(04:12):
and I think it's important for everybody to learn more
about the clitterest, which, by the way, can we just
start off with one fascinating fact please? The clitterest itself,
just just the visible part of it outside of our bodies,
contains eight thousand nerve endings. That's more than twice on
(04:34):
the head of a penis s guys, not to not
to make you jealous, but not to toot our own horn.
I feel like this podcast is going to be full
of euphemisms. It might be. It might be, but let's uh,
we got a long way to go before we get
up to those eight thousand nerve endings. Let's go back
in time, Caroline, shall do? Yeah? We we first want
(04:59):
to talk about where this word came from, what does
it mean? And it actually didn't originate until the seventeenth century,
which is interesting. This word has not been around forever,
but it was coined from the Late Greek word clay torris.
And I assume that we will get some correction letters
if we mispronounced the following Greek words that were about
(05:19):
to say, because you might not know this, but I
am not Greek, yes, and nor am I Caroline uh,
and that's clear us with a K and there's a
word clayenne in Greek which means to sheath, also to shut,
so something it might come from that because of the
reference to the clitterest being covered by the laby a menorah.
(05:40):
And then there's also though a related Greek noun form plice,
which has a meaning of a key, latch or hook
to close a door. And then there's another Greek word
that it could come from that is a variant of
the word meaning side of a hill. It's related to
the verb to slope, from the same a root word
(06:00):
as climax caroline. I think that one is my favorite,
although there are some ancient medical sources that also say
that there is a Greek verb clyde ri izing that
means to touch or to late lasciviously, to tickle well kristen.
Speaking of tickling, the Germans have my favorite slang word
(06:26):
for the clitterest, which is der kitzler, which means the tickler, yes,
indeed yeah. And even just the slang clit originated in
the nineteen fifties, although I have a feeling that whoever
was in the nineteen fifties saying the word clit was
probably just scandalizing everyone. So scandalous. So there there's a
(06:47):
little background on the word clitter iss why we call
it the clitterest. But let's go back in time as
well and cover some CLIs story. How did we even
figure out what this terrist is all about? I mean,
obviously women were probably figuring out what this clitterest was
all about for a long time, but women weren't exactly
(07:09):
prominent members of the medical field until more recent history.
So let's start in fifteen fifty nine with with one
of my favorite characters in this episode, an Italian anatomist,
Roaldo Columbo. Yeah, so of course a man would claim
to have discovered the clitterest. And I like that his
(07:30):
last name is Columbo Kristin because if his name were
in English texts around that time, it would have been Columbus.
And so I just liked the idea of the parallel
between like Christopher Columbus claiming to have discovered the New
World when really there were already people there, and then
you have Rialdo Columbus claiming to have discovered the Clitterest
when plenty of women were already there. So he's the
(07:53):
Christopher Columbus of the glitters Clistopher Columbus. Yes, God, I
wish we had art to accompany this episode of these
explorers and these scientists. But anyway, so, yeah, he's this
anatomist who says that he discovered it, and there were
some researchers at a New Zealand university who were like, no,
it was already quite known to Greek, Persian and Arabic
(08:15):
writers on medicine and surgery all about, albeit with misconceptions
about its function, which I also think is funny because
it's like, why are we talking about a body part
in terms of who knew it first. But that's not
to say that Colombo slash Columbus didn't actually make some
sort of contribution to the understanding of what it was. Yeah,
(08:36):
he was an anatomist, and he did provide these really
detailed drawings based on human dissection of the clitterists, and
he was one of the first to describe its physiological properties.
And although he did think that it produced a type
of female sperm, and he did, he wasn't really a
(08:59):
big fan of the literas he called it, the more venerous,
meaning like the mound of love. So he was also
very much focused on the pleasurable aspects of the Clitterest. So,
although Colombo did mistakenly claim that he was the first
one there, at least he liked it. Yes, not everybody
(09:22):
can say that he liked it, but I mean, I
think his whole person well, he was far from the
only person who thought or positive that the clators produced
some type of female sperm or or played some role
in procreation. Um, but I think he's unique in the
fact that he also really dug it. Yeah, other other
medical or scientific writers at the time we're like, well,
(09:43):
we think that it could produce sperm and contribute to procreation,
but we don't like it. Well, if you go way
back before Colombo to say Aristotle, they I mean, he
wasn't really talking all that much about the clitterest. But really,
this is when you have the idea of women being
(10:06):
just mutilated men are clitterest is really just a vestige
of what should be a penis. Yeah, it makes me
think of that song from a Little Mermaid, Poor Unfortunate Souls,
Like that's kind of how Aristotle and Hippocrates saw women.
So yeah, Aristotle just thought that there were adverse uterine
conditions that basically turned what should have become a beautiful
(10:27):
functional penis into an underdeveloped and sterile stump of a clitterest.
And Hippocrates, the old Greek father of medicine, described women's
genitalia on the whole as just our shameful parts. So
thanks a lot. And he acknowledged that the clitterest existed,
but he just thought it was a random protrusion. He
(10:51):
referred to it as the colamela or the uvula, possibly
because it resembles the uvula in our threat. It's a
little punching bag and you see if you open open
your mouth. Well obviously, I mean, the uvula definitely doesn't
contribute to sex or procreation, so why would this tiny
protrusion have anything to do with it either. Um. Greek
(11:14):
physicians Serranos of Ephesus also does acknowledge the clitterists exists. Um.
He has a different description for it, other than the
shameful parts, thank god. Uh. He says. The small formation
is called the nymph because it is hidden underneath the labia,
such as young brides under their veils. Well, isn't that precious?
(11:35):
So precious little nymph is. But I think it should
be noted though, that while these guys essentially we're seeing
women as sort of the mutilated men. We we should
we could have had gorgeous penises, but instead we ended
up with tiny nymph siding under veils. Because it wasn't
until in fact, the eighteenth century the European scientists started
(11:57):
seeing men and women as distinct sexes. This was really
just the line of thought that like, Okay, we have
a guy here, so we're going to figure out women
based on what she doesn't have, based on his body.
But then, I mean, things also got pretty intense in
the Middle Ages, understandably because it is the Middle Ages, right,
(12:21):
a lot of superstition flying around, and you know, despite
the relative and and minor advances and understanding what this
nymph is during the preceding centuries, the physicians in the
Middle Ages relied more on fear and superstition. Uh. They
did also think that it was responsible for creating female sperm.
(12:43):
But in fourteen eighties six, the Malleus Maleficarum, which was
a guide to finding and detecting witches, called the clitterest
quote the Devil's teet, through which the devil sucked out
his victim's soul. So yeah, we are women are just
no matter what we do of just being aligned with
witchcraft and evil and the devil's teet. I don't even
(13:06):
I When I read that, Caroline, and preparing for this episode,
I just had to stop for a moment because the
images coming to my mind were quite intense. But moving
out of the Middle Ages and into the nineteenth century,
we were in one of the history books that we
read focusing on the history of the Clitterest. The author wrote,
(13:29):
the nineteenth century really should have been the Clitterests century,
and that the Clitterest century. I'm not making that up
that as a direct quote, because in eighteen forty four
we have this German guy G. L co Belt draw
a detailed Clitterests, not just the external clitterest but also
(13:49):
the internal structure of well as well, which included the
erectile tissues that we'll talk about more in a little bit.
And this was probably the very first accurate depiction of
what the clitterest in total looks like. But it turns
out that the nineteenth century and moving into the Victorian
(14:10):
era was not such a great time for the clitters well.
I mean, you also had to grapple with the general
fear that people had about women in general, specifically and
especially women's sexuality, because God forbid a woman actually want, crave,
or enjoy any type of sexual behavior. So it was
also kind of just assumed that in general, women were passionless,
(14:33):
they didn't have a sex drive, they were just basically
sperm vessels, um, and that if a woman did have
a sex drive, she was considered hysterical and she didn't
have to go to see a doctor and get treatment,
and that treatment was a vibrator. Yeah. The the vibrator
technology started to take off in the eighteen fifties, and
(14:54):
in extreme cases of nymphamania, wherein you have a woman
who actually enjoys sex and might even masturbate from time
to time, you would have doctors cauterizing or removing the
clitterest entirely. There were a lot of methods out there
for curing in quotes, hysteria through clar ectomy. Ees. Yeah,
(15:17):
I mean, I think that's such a scary but very
clear illustration of how women's sexuality was viewed. The fact
that it's like it's so abnormal for a woman to
like or want sex that it's like if she does, oh,
we better take off the parts that make or enjoy
it well, and there are still there's still cliarorectomies that
(15:38):
are going on as well in different parts of the world.
You hear about this when people talk about female genital
mutilation or female circumcision. This was also we we we
usually today probably in the US, think about it happening
in far away countries such as Sedan, but this was
happening also in Victorian era America, right. But during this
(15:58):
period some people were all about the clatorus. They understood
that it served a great purpose. In eighteen fifty two,
for instance, Dr Jules Guillot wrote a book about sexuality
that wasn't actually published until eighteen eighty eight, ten years
after his death, because it was so scandalous, and he
wrote that there exists an immense number of ignorant, egoistic,
(16:19):
brutal men who do not bother to study the instrument
that God has entrusted to them well. And one of
those arguably egoistic and brutal men was likely Dr Isaac
Baker Brown, who was president of the Medical Society of
London in the eighteen sixties, and in eighteen sixty five
(16:42):
he published what became a widely circulated medical book that
put forth his ideas for curing insanity, epilepsy, hysteria, and
catalepsy all through clitter ectomy. Ees. Yeah, And it's interesting
too to read about people's views from this time period
(17:03):
because we have Dr Pierre Garnier, who was definitely not
a fan uh and didn't believe that the clitterest could
or should contribute to any type of like sex life
between people or solo sex lives at that He said
that to claim that this minuscule apparatus, which is most
(17:25):
often an insensitive little button so long as it has
not been touched or artificially manipulated, is the most active
erogenous center is to implicitly accuse all girls of once
having resorted to masturbation or of one day becoming debauched.
So I mean, right there, you have this doctor who's
(17:45):
basically saying, like the fact that you were even insinuating
that it is part of sex, part of sexual activity
can make someone enjoy sex. That's implying that our beautiful, fragile,
angelic nymph like women that they're debauched. Well, it's telling
to that that quote came in eighteen ninety one, which
(18:07):
is a few years after something really important happened in
the history the medical history of the clitter ist because
in eighteen eighty four doctors were able to see procreation
the sperm fertilizing the egg on a microscopic level for
the very first time, and they realized that, okay, there's
(18:31):
no such thing as female sperm, Like the lubricant in
a woman's vaginal canal has nothing to do really with uh,
it doesn't have any kind of fertilizing qualities, and it
doesn't come from the clitterest. And oh my god, the
clitterest has absolutely nothing active lead to do with reproduction.
(18:55):
So why should we even care about it? Well, why
should we care about it? But also, oh god, you
mean women have something on their bodies that is just
for sexual pleasure exactly. And so not only did they
demonize it because that means if you're messing around with
your clarteris that is because it gives you sexual pleasure.
(19:17):
Therefore you are debauched, as Guardier wrote, and then also
medically they were like, oh, well, we don't really even
need to study it because it is it's useless. It's
like the appendix of the vagina. Thank god, it can't explode.
Um ideas about women's sexuality, though it's not like they
were so much better. When we get into the twentieth
(19:39):
century um around World War One, there was this case
of a dancer named maud Allen who was essentially attacked
for existing outside social norms sexual norms, and of course
by that I just mean, you know, she had sexuality
and danced. She was an exotic dancer who attracted a
(20:00):
lot of attention because during this period that was very scandalous.
It also so happened that she was a lesbian, and
this sensational libel trial in Britain exploded around maud Allen
when she brought a libel suit against this guy named
Noel Pemberton Billing, who was an editor of a right
(20:21):
wing journal, The Imperialist, and the Imperialist was claiming that
there was this black book of forty seven thousand World
War One British turn coats who had been turned gay
by the Germans. And since maud Allen was a lesbian
(20:44):
and was also performing in Oscar Wilde salam Ay, there
was this item in The Imperialist about if you went
to see maud Allen, dancer highly erotic at the time,
dances in this production of salamy that you would be
among some of those British turncoats. And he headlined this
(21:06):
little news item the cult of the clitteris Yeah, which
is funny to see this anxiety, this deep, deep anxiety
which I get social norms, gender norms wore all of
this good stuff going on. It's quite a melting pot
of of you know, all these things getting stirred up.
But she maud Allen was so popular that they had
(21:27):
to continue adding shows. And she was so popular, and
not just with gentlemen who were coming to watch her
dance in such a seductive fashion. I mean women, socialites,
mothers were bringing their daughters to see this woman perform
with their own set of binoculars to further examine her dances. So,
I mean, that's got to be anxiety inducing for a
(21:48):
guy like Pemberton Billing, who you know, he's like, oh
my gosh, society, it's changing. Women are going to see
women dance. Well. It's interesting too that in this five
day t aile that ensues a lot of Britain's didn't
even know what clitterests meant, right, because he assumed that
when he made that headline the cult of the clitterest,
(22:10):
and he was right. You know, not a lot of
people would know what it meant, but if you did
know what clitterists meant, then that meant he would deviant, right,
And so Billings actually cited Alan's familiarity with the term
clitterest as evidence that she was a deviant. He said
that it's an organ that, when unduly excited, possessed the
(22:30):
most dreadful influence on any woman. And so just this
combination in his mind of her being a lesbian, an
exotic dancer, and someone with knowledge of such an esoteric
term as glitterest, she's got to be a sexual deviant,
and she's got to be somehow in cahoots with the Germans. Well,
and if we step back a little bit to nineteen
(22:52):
o five, we have Sigmund Freud coming in dealing yet
another blow to the litteralists, because this is when he
puts forth the idea that if you are a woman
who is having clitteral as opposed to vaginal orgasms, then
(23:12):
that means that you are not developed, that you're like
stuck in adolescence. Yeah, he was one of many physicians
and clinicians and psychologists who didn't deny the existence of
the clitteral orgasm, but said that that is something that
adolescence do. Children do adult mature women only have vaginal orgasms,
(23:37):
and um, a woman who could not orgasm through vaginal
intercourse was obviously frigid. And that frigid was a term.
It wasn't just like an insult thrown around. I mean,
that was a term used to describe a whole slew
of women. Yeah. And there is a paper that we
were looking at called Waking Sleeping Beauty the pre Marital
(23:58):
Pelvic Exam and had her sexuality during the Cold War,
and it talked a lot about how doctors at this time,
i mean leading all the way up to you know,
and during the Cold War, as the title of the
paper implies, vaginal orgasms were considered to be the hallmark
in the bedroom of a stable marriage and thus of
(24:21):
a secure community. Yeah. So more, you know, just more norms,
norms everywhere, Kristen. So, now that we are into the
(24:42):
Cold War, by way of this paper that Kristen decided,
we obviously have to bring up famed sex researcher Alfred Kinsey,
who in nine publishes Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,
in which he dismissed the vaginal orgasm and pointed to
the clitterest as the source of pleasure. He wrote that
the vagina walls are quite insensitive to the great majority
(25:05):
of females. There is no evidence that the vagina is
ever the sole source of arousal, or even the primary
source of erotic arousal in any female, which was groundbreaking. Yeah,
and then masters of sex fans might be aware of
William Masters and Virginia Johnson's research that happens in the
(25:25):
mid to late nineteen sixties. And it's in sixties six
that they published their work on the phases of sexual stimulation,
and they observed that both vaginal and clitteral orgasms had
the same stages of physical response and argued that clteral
stimulation was the primary source of both kinds of orgasms.
(25:46):
So finally, finally we have people saying, you know what,
the clitter is ist is not so bad. In fact,
it is in many ways good. It is in many
ways good. And then two years later, in nineteen radical
feminist and Coat writes the myth of the vaginal orgasm
(26:09):
and say, what right does the main Caroline She basically
attacked as fraudulent the idea that women could only orgasm
through vaginal intercourse. She said that the idea that idea
created psychological problems for women, and it served as a
critique of heterosexuality in general. And she said that sex
(26:32):
had been defined for so long from purely a male
fellow centric perspective. And it's not that she's necessarily wrong,
but I think Masters and Johnson were way more on
the nose as far as how orgasms work, because so
Code is writing that, you know, the vaginal orgasm is
a total myth that never happens, whereas before people like
(26:55):
Freud were saying vaginal orgasms are the only way to go,
when in reality, if we start talking about anatomy, which
we will hear in a second, there is a whole, beautiful, complicated,
wonderful internal c literal structure that is stimulated by a
vaginal intercourse. So it's really not either or, and you guys,
(27:15):
we don't have to fight about it. We don't have
to fight about it. But I will say that it
is worth considering. And I think that this is a
lot of what Coats theory is getting at in terms
of the fallow centrism that for so long and even today,
just the word sex. When you think of sex, it
is implied that it is a penis going into a vagina,
(27:36):
and so, in say Freudian terms, in order for a
woman to be you know, a healthy and adjusted in
the correct psychoanalytic phase or whatever of her adulthood, that
requires her achieving orgasm through vaginal penetration with a penis
with a penis. So then things are coming around to say, oh, well,
(28:00):
penis not necessarily required, but there are, like Caroline said,
there is a lot more to it on the inside,
which we're going to talk about in glorious, glorious detail
when we come right back from a quick break. Kristen,
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the show. Alright, So Kristen and I hinted at the well,
didn't hint, We told you flat out, but there is
(29:29):
there's a fabulous internal structure going on with your clitterest.
And you know, I my my whole attitude reading about this,
the history of the of the study of the clitterest,
in the in the history of the science of it,
I just I'm like this, this poor this poor body part.
It gets no attention. And it's really not until the
(29:50):
late twentieth century that people even start going should should
we look inside there? Should we should we figure out
what's going on up in there, because it turns out
that all we see on the outside with the hood
and the glands, that's gland, not gland with a d is,
(30:12):
but the tip of an iceberg inside of us. Although
iceberg might not be iceberg kind of lends itself to frigid,
so that might not be the best analogy. It's the
tip of something fabulous about that, that's right. So in
the nineteen nineties researchers performed an m R I that
(30:33):
revealed a very elaborate structure to the clearest, most of
which is internal, and urologist Helen O'Connell described the quote
clteral complex, the important internal clteral structures and their dimensions
in a groundbreaking Journal of Urology paper. And it should
be noted too that there had already been m R
(30:56):
s of the internal structures of penises that had been
done in the seventies. And finally O'Connell's like, oh, can
we please apply the same technology to look inside the
vaginal structures to see what's in there? Because oh surprise,
there's all of this stuff. Yeah, And in a two
(31:17):
thousand five paper, O'Connell criticized typical textbook descriptions and illustrations,
saying that there is no way that you can give
an accurate portrayal of all of the amazing things that
are going inside going on inside a woman in their
c literal structures by just showing a single plane. You know,
you've seen this in textbooks. It's just like the side
(31:37):
cut of like here's the uterusm here in the overason,
there's the vagina in the butthole. But there's I mean,
there's a whole like amazing sculptural structure going on inside us.
Who knew? And to give you an idea of the
scope of this clteral complex that Caroline and I are
about to jump out of our seats with excitement discussing
(31:58):
it contains at least eight teen distinct interacting functional parts
comprised of muscular, erectile, and sensitive tissues. And this is
what in eight eight four g l co Belt had drawn.
But it took from then until the late nineties, in
(32:19):
the early two thousands for us to come back around
to it and really give it its due right and
adding to this modern science of the clitter ist. In
two thousand nine, surgeons O'Dell Boissan and Pierre full days
produced the first complete three dimensional scenography of a stimulated
clutters Because this is important too, because there's different stages
(32:43):
of our genitalia, if we are aroused or not, or
having intercourse or not. Things don't always look the same
in one stage or another. So they actually did this
research over a couple of years without any major funding.
So that should tell you about how people view the
clutter ists in women's sexuality and genitalia today as well.
Any who. They were actually going in search of this
(33:06):
G spot you might have heard of, and they ended
up just finding all of this other beautiful stuff during
the search. Yeah. And it turns out, based on what
we now know about the structure of the clitteral complex,
which will go into more detail in just a second,
but the G spot might simply be where the anterior
(33:26):
vaginal wall makes contact with the internal clitterists. It's not
necessarily this magical spot to one spot and and and
and that's it, sort of in that two dimensional way
that we often think of, but rather it's the convergence
of all of this stuff. I wish I had a
(33:47):
more elegant word than stuff to describe it going on
inside of us. Yeah, So let's talk a little bit
about that stuff. So you have we have the glands
s glands S, which is what you see on the outside.
It's what people call a button, but which is really
like an iceberg, but not an iceberg because we're not frigid.
It's our little hill. It's our little hill. That's right,
(34:09):
the ticula. But so okay, here's here's basically a rundown.
We're going to do our best to describe this with words,
but I recommend that you look it up for an image.
Go to stuff Mom Never Told You dot com. There
is a blog post up called a Brief History of
the Clitterest and it contains a picture of exactly what
we're talking about, and it is safe for work. Excellent. Yes, Well,
(34:30):
because the structure kind of looks like an awesome little
inner tube with some shoots coming off of it that's
around the vaginal canal. It reminds me of an airplane
neck pillow. Perfect when you blow it up. Yeah, it's inflatable. Yeah.
So the glands, which is what you see on the outside,
is attached to that internal structure which we're just crazy about.
(34:52):
And that internal structure is made up of two corpora cavernosa,
which is a rectile tissue that encircles the vaginal canal.
The corpora cavernosa then splits to form to what are
called crura or it's more erectile tissue that forms a
wishbone shape, and at rest they point toward woman's thighs,
(35:15):
and when erect they stretch back toward the spine. And
then near each of the crura on either side of
the vaginal opening are the clitteral vestibules, and they're actually
up under the labia majora, so inside the labia majora,
and when engorged, they cause the vulva to expand outward. Yeah,
(35:38):
and so you know, this is all a bunch of
erectile tissue that does swell when you get aroused, and
that basically cuffs the vagina so that a vaginal orgasm
is more like an internal clitteral orgasm. And then we
can all join hands and be friends and no longer
debate a clitteral orgasm versus a vaginal one, because they're
(36:00):
all sort of different types of the same thing. It's
just different methods to stimulate the same structure. And I
do really like how this wrapping around of the structure
is often described when it becomes engorged as it giving
us a hug. And what a hug. It's a very
(36:20):
giving hug. Such a hug. I love that and a
lot of people, Uh, there are a lot of artists, activists,
people out there talking about the clitterests and women's genitalia
in general to sort of bring awareness that hey, we're
sexual beings to your genitals, aren't gross, get in touch
with your sexuality and that The whole reason behind this
(36:42):
push to sort of make more women aware of their
anatomy is that so many women report having trouble orgasm ng. Yeah,
about one in three women on average has trouble reaching
orgasm with a partner. About one in ten has never
reached orgasm, whether a own or with a partner. And
(37:02):
what often makes it a challenge is this shame often
associated with our bodies and with our genitals. There are
women that I have known, in fact, who are adults
who have never masturbated. Um. There are women who have
never looked at their own vaginas, or they looked once
and they were so weirded out by what they saw
(37:24):
because they didn't know what to expect, or it didn't
look like what they saw in pornography that they assumed
that it is wrong and it's not the way it's
supposed to look, and that's that's not the case at all. Right.
There was a study a study in the Psychology of
Women quarterly that looked at undergrad college women's attitudes towards
(37:45):
their bodies and their genitals that found that greater dissatisfaction
with genital appearance was associated with things like higher genital image,
self consciousness during physical intimacy, which in turn was associated
with lower sexual self esteem, sexual satisfaction, and motivation to
avoid risky sexual behavior. So basically, if you think that
(38:07):
this important part of yourself is awful, ugly, dirty, shameful,
or you're afraid of it, then how can you possibly
enjoy sex? And not surprisingly, the researchers concluded that there
is a strong relationship between in enhancing the satisfaction with
the natural appearance of genitalia with the development of a
(38:30):
healthy self concept and long term benefits of sexual safety
and satisfaction, because a lot of times when that sort
of insecurity over your genitalia happens, or you don't think
it looks right like, it usually tends to affect you
in the bedroom in the sense of putting the other
(38:52):
person's sexual needs and desires over your own. And so
not surprisingly there is Urchers and concluded that if you
enhance that satisfaction, if women are more comfortable and accepting
of what their vaginas and volvas and clitterestas look like,
(39:12):
then it usually relates to a more satisfying sex life
and also just a healthier sexual self esteem right exactly.
And one person who's pushing what she calls cultural cliteracy
is Susan Ekberg Spirits, who wrote a paper in ten
for the Berkeley Journal of Gender Law and Justice, and
(39:33):
she talks about how cultural cliteracy is this thing that
denotes what an adequately educated person should know about the clitterest,
which we hope we're contributing to right now. But she
talks about how the clitterest is quote a despised body
part because it is an obdurate reminder of women's independence
and power and supports women's liberation. And she talks about
(39:54):
how society's shape versions of what is proper adult sexual
reality conforming with values that exist in that society, and
she says, quote, unfortunately for women, Western culture equates being
human with being male. Accordingly, Western culture considers sex proper
when it is confined to actions needed to produce children. Yeah,
(40:16):
and I mean, I just think that there is a
basic gap and understanding, I mean, clearly, as we've talked
about in this podcast between simply how female sexual pleasure
even works and how girls are educated in that regard
versus boys, and how a lot of times our concept
of what sex is and what sexual pleasure is usually
(40:40):
is based around the model of vaginal intercourse. Not that
there's anything wrong with vaginal intercourse, it's just also important
for girls and women to understand that we have this
part of our bodies that has, like you said, nothing
to do with reproduction whatsoever. It is there purely to
(41:01):
facilitate pleasure and that's nothing to be ashamed of. And
being curious about it is nothing to be ashamed of,
and exploring it is nothing to be ashamed of either.
And if you want to check out the ways that
maybe other women are trying to raise cultural cliteracy awareness, uh,
(41:21):
you should check out New York artist Sophia Wallace who
in launched a multimedia project called Cliteracy, and it includes
all sorts of art installations and even a clip rodeo
where you can ride like like a bucking bull at
some sort of honky tonk bar, you can ride a
giant golden clitter iss. Yeah. And so I do wonder
(41:44):
if anybody's actually seen that, like gone to it and
participated in this art movement to ride the clitter well.
And also, I mean that looking at that, this might
sound crass thinking of oh, riding the clitteress, what of that,
But the sculpture that she created for this, of that
engorged internal structure, will give you a sense of the
(42:07):
extent of the size of it as well. Um, I mean,
I mean it's not the the external glands is so
diminutive compared to it's a nymph. Yeah, it is rather
a nymph compared to the powerhouse that is inside of us. So,
I mean, if we sound like we're super high on
(42:28):
clitter clitterest knowledge, we are because it's incredible to learn
about these things inside of us that really it's taken
us this long to really begin to figure out. Right, Well,
I feel like there's just such a general societal fear
of and always has been, of women's sexuality and and
(42:49):
independent sexuality and a desire to want to have sex
and enjoy it um And I feel like that it's
definitely contributed to sort of men being a for aid
of learning more or knowing more or caring about women's
both both their physical structures and their their sexual excitement.
(43:09):
But it's also contributed to plenty of women being afraid
to learn more about it, And so I definitely I'm
glad we could talk about it. Yeah, And I just
(43:29):
wanted to add one final note about that surgeon Peerful
Days that we mentioned who in two thousand nine, along
with his research partner Odeal Bissan, producer's first three D
ultrasounds of the clitterest, he pioneered a surgery using this
research to treat women who had undergone female genital circumcision,
(43:54):
and by understanding this internal structure of the clitterest, he's
been able to perform more than three thousand restorative surgeries
to give these patients back sexual pleasure that had been
taken from them through the clitter ectomys or other kinds
of female circumcision techniques. So it's it's it's about female
(44:19):
pleasure and us knowing more about our bodies, but it's
also about this kind of healing as well, very real
physical healing for women around the world too. So with that,
let us know your thoughts. I'm curious to know what
people are thinking. Do you love your clitterests? Guys? What
do you think about the glitter is? There were a
(44:40):
lot of letters that we ran across in the process
of researching this too, from guys asking sex educators about
how to find the clitterest when what do you do?
And that's not a question that you should be ashamed of.
That's a great question for a straight guy to want
to know about his female partner. Oh and also side
(45:01):
note to um when it comes to statistics about women
reaching orgasm, there was a recent study that found that
lesbians tend to achieve orgasm more regularly than straight women,
possibly because women might be a little more acquainted imagine that.
So with that, I have finally no more final thoughts.
(45:23):
Email us mom Stuff at hollow stuff works dot com.
You can also tweet us at mom Stuff podcast and
messages on Facebook and we have a couple of messages
to share with you right now. So we've got a
couple of letters here in response to our episode Mama's Boys.
(45:44):
This one is from Alex and she writes, I thought
I would chime in with some comments about dating someone
who is very close to their mother as someone who
is friends with his parents, I understand and support being
close to your parents. However, there does come a point
where it goes too far. My best example of this
going too far would be after we had been dating
(46:06):
for well over a year. At this point, he was
still spending more of his free time and weekends with
his mother than he was with me. Yes, I know,
great relationship. So this one week, he was only going
to be free for one night on Friday, So, after
getting off work four hours late, he finally makes it
to my house. Not more than five minutes after getting there,
(46:27):
he gets a call from his mother, so going into
another room to talk to her for fifteen minutes, he
comes out and says he has to go to his
mom's house. Concerned, I asked, what's wrong this being the
one night we will see each other for a week.
Apparently his mother had a bad date and his feeling insecure.
I could probably dredge up more stories on the same
(46:48):
threat as this one, but this is definitely a gem
of a story, especially since it hits both of your
request for stories about dating Mama's boys, bad stories about
dating Mama's boys and the stereotypical game Mama's Boys. Definitely
enjoying the podcast and keep up the good work, So
thanks Alex. All Right, I have a letter here from Rachel.
(47:08):
She says my primary partner I'm polyamorous, is definitely a
mama's boy, and even though his mom and I don't
really see eye to eye, I'm really glad for his
less macho leanings. My partner's mom fled Europe to get
away from his dad and raise my partner and his
brother as a single mom and immigrant. As should be expected,
both my partner and his brother have a lot of
(47:30):
love and respect for their mom. One thing I've found
to be much more present in my partner and his
brother is a willingness to listen to women and an
openness to femininity. And they both tend to date strong
willed women, which is a part of why I butt
heads with my mother and thin she calls her anyway.
I've never had my partner's relationship with his mom get
(47:52):
in the way of his relationship with me, but his
dad being back in the picture has caused a little
drama because his dad does and appreciate the avoidance of
machismo as much as everyone else does. Of Course, true
to form, my mother and Sin has managed to keep
her husband in line, and that makes me cackle a bit.
So thanks Rachel, and thanks to everybody who's written to us.
(48:14):
Mom stuff at how stuff works dot com is our
email address and for links to all of our social
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(48:35):
and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot
com
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha, and welcome to stuff
one never told you, but actually I heart radio and
today I come with new Samantha. Oh my god, I'm
ready give me that. Yes, so we might come back
(00:29):
and do a whole episode on this. But you probably
saw recently there were headlines about a news study around
the clutterest, yes, and some updates, and it was kind
of it started a conversation which you and I have
a lot on this show about how a lot of
medicine and a lot of science is still sexist because
(00:51):
there's so much we don't know about the clutterest. In
a lot of ways, it is still misunderstood, um, a
mysterious thing. Meanwhile, we have like untold studies on the penis,
like so many penis. Yes, there is a huge scientific
gap on studies on scientific studies when it comes to
(01:12):
the penis versus the clitterest, and there's a huge knowledge
gap between it. Um that I think I I can
speak from personal experience. I still I didn't know a
lot until I started working on this show, and I'm
still learning. So uh yeah, we're still learning more about
(01:33):
the clitter ist. And I just want to briefly run
through what they found in the study. But like I said,
we'll probably come back and talk about it more in
depth later. But more than ten thousand nerve fibers enabled
the pleasurable sensations created by the human clitterest And this
is according to new um research from the Oregon Health
(01:54):
and Science University. So this was the first known count
of human culatoral nerve tiss you and that's I thought
I had heard eight thousand previously, I believe. Yeah, it's
often quoted as eight thousand nerd fibers and claris, but
this is even more. I've just heard thousands, and I
never knew the range because that's a difference between a
(02:14):
thousand to ten thousand for sure. Yes, and it's way
more than the penis. Everybody. Yeah, And just again to
to drive this point home, that eight thousand number came
from studies on livestock animals, not people. It is just
(02:38):
to reiterate this as well. The only known organ where
the whole point is pleasure. Uh again, take that penis
and you all know, because I won't shut up about it,
that's primarily when I masturbate, it's all clatoral because that's
where it's happening. Why am I not recording those because that?
(03:02):
Oh my god. I was like, we're just gonna do
an update. We don't need to record this sorr. I'm
always like, should I give me content? Worry? I don't
feel feel like the episodes is about the clitterest. You
should know anyway. Oh my god, it's amazing. Yes, that's
always with the T and mine from me on that one.
(03:22):
But this is really fascinating, interesting news. I'm glad we're
we're looking into this. I'm excited interested to see what
else we can learn. Uh and yeah, well we'll come
back and revisit it in the future, but in the meantime,
please enjoy this classic episode. Welcome to Stuff Mom Never
Told You from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and
(03:49):
welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline, and
we are going to talk all about the Clitterest today,
Ladies and gentlemen, Everything you never knew that you wanted
to know about the clitterest will be revealed in this podcast.
That's right, in a safer work format, very safe for work. Yeah,
Caroline and I learned lots of stuff along the way,
(04:12):
and I think it's important for everybody to learn more
about the clitterest, which, by the way, can we just
start off with one fascinating fact please? The clitterest itself,
just just the visible part of it outside of our bodies,
contains eight thousand nerve endings. That's more than twice on
(04:34):
the head of a penis s guys, not to not
to make you jealous, but not to toot our own horn.
I feel like this podcast is going to be full
of euphemisms. It might be. It might be, but let's uh,
we got a long way to go before we get
up to those eight thousand nerve endings. Let's go back
in time, Caroline, shall do? Yeah? We we first want
(04:59):
to talk about where this word came from, what does
it mean? And it actually didn't originate until the seventeenth century,
which is interesting. This word has not been around forever,
but it was coined from the Late Greek word clay torris.
And I assume that we will get some correction letters
if we mispronounced the following Greek words that were about
(05:19):
to say, because you might not know this, but I
am not Greek, yes, and nor am I Caroline uh,
and that's clear us with a K and there's a
word clayenne in Greek which means to sheath, also to shut,
so something it might come from that because of the
reference to the clitterest being covered by the laby a menorah.
(05:40):
And then there's also though a related Greek noun form plice,
which has a meaning of a key, latch or hook
to close a door. And then there's another Greek word
that it could come from that is a variant of
the word meaning side of a hill. It's related to
the verb to slope, from the same a root word
(06:00):
as climax caroline. I think that one is my favorite,
although there are some ancient medical sources that also say
that there is a Greek verb clyde ri izing that
means to touch or to late lasciviously, to tickle well kristen.
Speaking of tickling, the Germans have my favorite slang word
(06:26):
for the clitterest, which is der kitzler, which means the tickler, yes,
indeed yeah. And even just the slang clit originated in
the nineteen fifties, although I have a feeling that whoever
was in the nineteen fifties saying the word clit was
probably just scandalizing everyone. So scandalous. So there there's a
(06:47):
little background on the word clitter iss why we call
it the clitterest. But let's go back in time as
well and cover some CLIs story. How did we even
figure out what this terrist is all about? I mean,
obviously women were probably figuring out what this clitterest was
all about for a long time, but women weren't exactly
(07:09):
prominent members of the medical field until more recent history.
So let's start in fifteen fifty nine with with one
of my favorite characters in this episode, an Italian anatomist,
Roaldo Columbo. Yeah, so of course a man would claim
to have discovered the clitterest. And I like that his
(07:30):
last name is Columbo Kristin because if his name were
in English texts around that time, it would have been Columbus.
And so I just liked the idea of the parallel
between like Christopher Columbus claiming to have discovered the New
World when really there were already people there, and then
you have Rialdo Columbus claiming to have discovered the Clitterest
when plenty of women were already there. So he's the
(07:53):
Christopher Columbus of the glitters Clistopher Columbus. Yes, God, I
wish we had art to accompany this episode of these
explorers and these scientists. But anyway, so, yeah, he's this
anatomist who says that he discovered it, and there were
some researchers at a New Zealand university who were like, no,
it was already quite known to Greek, Persian and Arabic
(08:15):
writers on medicine and surgery all about, albeit with misconceptions
about its function, which I also think is funny because
it's like, why are we talking about a body part
in terms of who knew it first. But that's not
to say that Colombo slash Columbus didn't actually make some
sort of contribution to the understanding of what it was. Yeah,
(08:36):
he was an anatomist, and he did provide these really
detailed drawings based on human dissection of the clitterists, and
he was one of the first to describe its physiological properties.
And although he did think that it produced a type
of female sperm, and he did, he wasn't really a
(08:59):
big fan of the literas he called it, the more venerous,
meaning like the mound of love. So he was also
very much focused on the pleasurable aspects of the Clitterest. So,
although Colombo did mistakenly claim that he was the first
one there, at least he liked it. Yes, not everybody
(09:22):
can say that he liked it, but I mean, I
think his whole person well, he was far from the
only person who thought or positive that the clators produced
some type of female sperm or or played some role
in procreation. Um, but I think he's unique in the
fact that he also really dug it. Yeah, other other
medical or scientific writers at the time we're like, well,
(09:43):
we think that it could produce sperm and contribute to procreation,
but we don't like it. Well, if you go way
back before Colombo to say Aristotle, they I mean, he
wasn't really talking all that much about the clitterest. But really,
this is when you have the idea of women being
(10:06):
just mutilated men are clitterest is really just a vestige
of what should be a penis. Yeah, it makes me
think of that song from a Little Mermaid, Poor Unfortunate Souls,
Like that's kind of how Aristotle and Hippocrates saw women.
So yeah, Aristotle just thought that there were adverse uterine
conditions that basically turned what should have become a beautiful
(10:27):
functional penis into an underdeveloped and sterile stump of a clitterest.
And Hippocrates, the old Greek father of medicine, described women's
genitalia on the whole as just our shameful parts. So
thanks a lot. And he acknowledged that the clitterest existed,
but he just thought it was a random protrusion. He
(10:51):
referred to it as the colamela or the uvula, possibly
because it resembles the uvula in our threat. It's a
little punching bag and you see if you open open
your mouth. Well obviously, I mean, the uvula definitely doesn't
contribute to sex or procreation, so why would this tiny
protrusion have anything to do with it either. Um. Greek
(11:14):
physicians Serranos of Ephesus also does acknowledge the clitterists exists. Um.
He has a different description for it, other than the
shameful parts, thank god. Uh. He says. The small formation
is called the nymph because it is hidden underneath the labia,
such as young brides under their veils. Well, isn't that precious?
(11:35):
So precious little nymph is. But I think it should
be noted though, that while these guys essentially we're seeing
women as sort of the mutilated men. We we should
we could have had gorgeous penises, but instead we ended
up with tiny nymph siding under veils. Because it wasn't
until in fact, the eighteenth century the European scientists started
(11:57):
seeing men and women as distinct sexes. This was really
just the line of thought that like, Okay, we have
a guy here, so we're going to figure out women
based on what she doesn't have, based on his body.
But then, I mean, things also got pretty intense in
the Middle Ages, understandably because it is the Middle Ages, right,
(12:21):
a lot of superstition flying around, and you know, despite
the relative and and minor advances and understanding what this
nymph is during the preceding centuries, the physicians in the
Middle Ages relied more on fear and superstition. Uh. They
did also think that it was responsible for creating female sperm.
(12:43):
But in fourteen eighties six, the Malleus Maleficarum, which was
a guide to finding and detecting witches, called the clitterest
quote the Devil's teet, through which the devil sucked out
his victim's soul. So yeah, we are women are just
no matter what we do of just being aligned with
witchcraft and evil and the devil's teet. I don't even
(13:06):
I When I read that, Caroline, and preparing for this episode,
I just had to stop for a moment because the
images coming to my mind were quite intense. But moving
out of the Middle Ages and into the nineteenth century,
we were in one of the history books that we
read focusing on the history of the Clitterest. The author wrote,
(13:29):
the nineteenth century really should have been the Clitterests century,
and that the Clitterest century. I'm not making that up
that as a direct quote, because in eighteen forty four
we have this German guy G. L co Belt draw
a detailed Clitterests, not just the external clitterest but also
(13:49):
the internal structure of well as well, which included the
erectile tissues that we'll talk about more in a little bit.
And this was probably the very first accurate depiction of
what the clitterest in total looks like. But it turns
out that the nineteenth century and moving into the Victorian
(14:10):
era was not such a great time for the clitters well.
I mean, you also had to grapple with the general
fear that people had about women in general, specifically and
especially women's sexuality, because God forbid a woman actually want, crave,
or enjoy any type of sexual behavior. So it was
also kind of just assumed that in general, women were passionless,
(14:33):
they didn't have a sex drive, they were just basically
sperm vessels, um, and that if a woman did have
a sex drive, she was considered hysterical and she didn't
have to go to see a doctor and get treatment,
and that treatment was a vibrator. Yeah. The the vibrator
technology started to take off in the eighteen fifties, and
(14:54):
in extreme cases of nymphamania, wherein you have a woman
who actually enjoys sex and might even masturbate from time
to time, you would have doctors cauterizing or removing the
clitterest entirely. There were a lot of methods out there
for curing in quotes, hysteria through clar ectomy. Ees. Yeah,
(15:17):
I mean, I think that's such a scary but very
clear illustration of how women's sexuality was viewed. The fact
that it's like it's so abnormal for a woman to
like or want sex that it's like if she does, oh,
we better take off the parts that make or enjoy
it well, and there are still there's still cliarorectomies that
(15:38):
are going on as well in different parts of the world.
You hear about this when people talk about female genital
mutilation or female circumcision. This was also we we we
usually today probably in the US, think about it happening
in far away countries such as Sedan, but this was
happening also in Victorian era America, right. But during this
(15:58):
period some people were all about the clatorus. They understood
that it served a great purpose. In eighteen fifty two,
for instance, Dr Jules Guillot wrote a book about sexuality
that wasn't actually published until eighteen eighty eight, ten years
after his death, because it was so scandalous, and he
wrote that there exists an immense number of ignorant, egoistic,
(16:19):
brutal men who do not bother to study the instrument
that God has entrusted to them well. And one of
those arguably egoistic and brutal men was likely Dr Isaac
Baker Brown, who was president of the Medical Society of
London in the eighteen sixties, and in eighteen sixty five
(16:42):
he published what became a widely circulated medical book that
put forth his ideas for curing insanity, epilepsy, hysteria, and
catalepsy all through clitter ectomy. Ees. Yeah, And it's interesting
too to read about people's views from this time period
(17:03):
because we have Dr Pierre Garnier, who was definitely not
a fan uh and didn't believe that the clitterest could
or should contribute to any type of like sex life
between people or solo sex lives at that He said
that to claim that this minuscule apparatus, which is most
(17:25):
often an insensitive little button so long as it has
not been touched or artificially manipulated, is the most active
erogenous center is to implicitly accuse all girls of once
having resorted to masturbation or of one day becoming debauched.
So I mean, right there, you have this doctor who's
(17:45):
basically saying, like the fact that you were even insinuating
that it is part of sex, part of sexual activity
can make someone enjoy sex. That's implying that our beautiful, fragile,
angelic nymph like women that they're debauched. Well, it's telling
to that that quote came in eighteen ninety one, which
(18:07):
is a few years after something really important happened in
the history the medical history of the clitter ist because
in eighteen eighty four doctors were able to see procreation
the sperm fertilizing the egg on a microscopic level for
the very first time, and they realized that, okay, there's
(18:31):
no such thing as female sperm, Like the lubricant in
a woman's vaginal canal has nothing to do really with uh,
it doesn't have any kind of fertilizing qualities, and it
doesn't come from the clitterest. And oh my god, the
clitterest has absolutely nothing active lead to do with reproduction.
(18:55):
So why should we even care about it? Well, why
should we care about it? But also, oh god, you
mean women have something on their bodies that is just
for sexual pleasure exactly. And so not only did they
demonize it because that means if you're messing around with
your clarteris that is because it gives you sexual pleasure.
(19:17):
Therefore you are debauched, as Guardier wrote, and then also
medically they were like, oh, well, we don't really even
need to study it because it is it's useless. It's
like the appendix of the vagina. Thank god, it can't explode.
Um ideas about women's sexuality, though it's not like they
were so much better. When we get into the twentieth
(19:39):
century um around World War One, there was this case
of a dancer named maud Allen who was essentially attacked
for existing outside social norms sexual norms, and of course
by that I just mean, you know, she had sexuality
and danced. She was an exotic dancer who attracted a
(20:00):
lot of attention because during this period that was very scandalous.
It also so happened that she was a lesbian, and
this sensational libel trial in Britain exploded around maud Allen
when she brought a libel suit against this guy named
Noel Pemberton Billing, who was an editor of a right
(20:21):
wing journal, The Imperialist, and the Imperialist was claiming that
there was this black book of forty seven thousand World
War One British turn coats who had been turned gay
by the Germans. And since maud Allen was a lesbian
(20:44):
and was also performing in Oscar Wilde salam Ay, there
was this item in The Imperialist about if you went
to see maud Allen, dancer highly erotic at the time,
dances in this production of salamy that you would be
among some of those British turncoats. And he headlined this
(21:06):
little news item the cult of the clitteris Yeah, which
is funny to see this anxiety, this deep, deep anxiety
which I get social norms, gender norms wore all of
this good stuff going on. It's quite a melting pot
of of you know, all these things getting stirred up.
But she maud Allen was so popular that they had
(21:27):
to continue adding shows. And she was so popular, and
not just with gentlemen who were coming to watch her
dance in such a seductive fashion. I mean women, socialites,
mothers were bringing their daughters to see this woman perform
with their own set of binoculars to further examine her dances. So,
I mean, that's got to be anxiety inducing for a
(21:48):
guy like Pemberton Billing, who you know, he's like, oh
my gosh, society, it's changing. Women are going to see
women dance. Well. It's interesting too that in this five
day t aile that ensues a lot of Britain's didn't
even know what clitterests meant, right, because he assumed that
when he made that headline the cult of the clitterest,
(22:10):
and he was right. You know, not a lot of
people would know what it meant, but if you did
know what clitterists meant, then that meant he would deviant, right,
And so Billings actually cited Alan's familiarity with the term
clitterest as evidence that she was a deviant. He said
that it's an organ that, when unduly excited, possessed the
(22:30):
most dreadful influence on any woman. And so just this
combination in his mind of her being a lesbian, an
exotic dancer, and someone with knowledge of such an esoteric
term as glitterest, she's got to be a sexual deviant,
and she's got to be somehow in cahoots with the Germans. Well,
and if we step back a little bit to nineteen
(22:52):
o five, we have Sigmund Freud coming in dealing yet
another blow to the litteralists, because this is when he
puts forth the idea that if you are a woman
who is having clitteral as opposed to vaginal orgasms, then
(23:12):
that means that you are not developed, that you're like
stuck in adolescence. Yeah, he was one of many physicians
and clinicians and psychologists who didn't deny the existence of
the clitteral orgasm, but said that that is something that
adolescence do. Children do adult mature women only have vaginal orgasms,
(23:37):
and um, a woman who could not orgasm through vaginal
intercourse was obviously frigid. And that frigid was a term.
It wasn't just like an insult thrown around. I mean,
that was a term used to describe a whole slew
of women. Yeah. And there is a paper that we
were looking at called Waking Sleeping Beauty the pre Marital
(23:58):
Pelvic Exam and had her sexuality during the Cold War,
and it talked a lot about how doctors at this time,
i mean leading all the way up to you know,
and during the Cold War, as the title of the
paper implies, vaginal orgasms were considered to be the hallmark
in the bedroom of a stable marriage and thus of
(24:21):
a secure community. Yeah. So more, you know, just more norms,
norms everywhere, Kristen. So, now that we are into the
(24:42):
Cold War, by way of this paper that Kristen decided,
we obviously have to bring up famed sex researcher Alfred Kinsey,
who in nine publishes Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,
in which he dismissed the vaginal orgasm and pointed to
the clitterest as the source of pleasure. He wrote that
the vagina walls are quite insensitive to the great majority
(25:05):
of females. There is no evidence that the vagina is
ever the sole source of arousal, or even the primary
source of erotic arousal in any female, which was groundbreaking. Yeah,
and then masters of sex fans might be aware of
William Masters and Virginia Johnson's research that happens in the
(25:25):
mid to late nineteen sixties. And it's in sixties six
that they published their work on the phases of sexual stimulation,
and they observed that both vaginal and clitteral orgasms had
the same stages of physical response and argued that clteral
stimulation was the primary source of both kinds of orgasms.
(25:46):
So finally, finally we have people saying, you know what,
the clitter is ist is not so bad. In fact,
it is in many ways good. It is in many
ways good. And then two years later, in nineteen radical
feminist and Coat writes the myth of the vaginal orgasm
(26:09):
and say, what right does the main Caroline She basically
attacked as fraudulent the idea that women could only orgasm
through vaginal intercourse. She said that the idea that idea
created psychological problems for women, and it served as a
critique of heterosexuality in general. And she said that sex
(26:32):
had been defined for so long from purely a male
fellow centric perspective. And it's not that she's necessarily wrong,
but I think Masters and Johnson were way more on
the nose as far as how orgasms work, because so
Code is writing that, you know, the vaginal orgasm is
a total myth that never happens, whereas before people like
(26:55):
Freud were saying vaginal orgasms are the only way to go,
when in reality, if we start talking about anatomy, which
we will hear in a second, there is a whole, beautiful, complicated,
wonderful internal c literal structure that is stimulated by a
vaginal intercourse. So it's really not either or, and you guys,
(27:15):
we don't have to fight about it. We don't have
to fight about it. But I will say that it
is worth considering. And I think that this is a
lot of what Coats theory is getting at in terms
of the fallow centrism that for so long and even today,
just the word sex. When you think of sex, it
is implied that it is a penis going into a vagina,
(27:36):
and so, in say Freudian terms, in order for a
woman to be you know, a healthy and adjusted in
the correct psychoanalytic phase or whatever of her adulthood, that
requires her achieving orgasm through vaginal penetration with a penis
with a penis. So then things are coming around to say, oh, well,
(28:00):
penis not necessarily required, but there are, like Caroline said,
there is a lot more to it on the inside,
which we're going to talk about in glorious, glorious detail
when we come right back from a quick break. Kristen,
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(28:21):
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stamps dot com and enter stuff. And now back to
the show. Alright, So Kristen and I hinted at the well,
didn't hint, We told you flat out, but there is
(29:29):
there's a fabulous internal structure going on with your clitterest.
And you know, I my my whole attitude reading about this,
the history of the of the study of the clitterest,
in the in the history of the science of it,
I just I'm like this, this poor this poor body part.
It gets no attention. And it's really not until the
(29:50):
late twentieth century that people even start going should should
we look inside there? Should we should we figure out
what's going on up in there, because it turns out
that all we see on the outside with the hood
and the glands, that's gland, not gland with a d is,
(30:12):
but the tip of an iceberg inside of us. Although
iceberg might not be iceberg kind of lends itself to frigid,
so that might not be the best analogy. It's the
tip of something fabulous about that, that's right. So in
the nineteen nineties researchers performed an m R I that
(30:33):
revealed a very elaborate structure to the clearest, most of
which is internal, and urologist Helen O'Connell described the quote
clteral complex, the important internal clteral structures and their dimensions
in a groundbreaking Journal of Urology paper. And it should
be noted too that there had already been m R
(30:56):
s of the internal structures of penises that had been
done in the seventies. And finally O'Connell's like, oh, can
we please apply the same technology to look inside the
vaginal structures to see what's in there? Because oh surprise,
there's all of this stuff. Yeah, And in a two
(31:17):
thousand five paper, O'Connell criticized typical textbook descriptions and illustrations,
saying that there is no way that you can give
an accurate portrayal of all of the amazing things that
are going inside going on inside a woman in their
c literal structures by just showing a single plane. You know,
you've seen this in textbooks. It's just like the side
(31:37):
cut of like here's the uterusm here in the overason,
there's the vagina in the butthole. But there's I mean,
there's a whole like amazing sculptural structure going on inside us.
Who knew? And to give you an idea of the
scope of this clteral complex that Caroline and I are
about to jump out of our seats with excitement discussing
(31:58):
it contains at least eight teen distinct interacting functional parts
comprised of muscular, erectile, and sensitive tissues. And this is
what in eight eight four g l co Belt had drawn.
But it took from then until the late nineties, in
(32:19):
the early two thousands for us to come back around
to it and really give it its due right and
adding to this modern science of the clitter ist. In
two thousand nine, surgeons O'Dell Boissan and Pierre full days
produced the first complete three dimensional scenography of a stimulated
clutters Because this is important too, because there's different stages
(32:43):
of our genitalia, if we are aroused or not, or
having intercourse or not. Things don't always look the same
in one stage or another. So they actually did this
research over a couple of years without any major funding.
So that should tell you about how people view the
clutter ists in women's sexuality and genitalia today as well.
Any who. They were actually going in search of this
(33:06):
G spot you might have heard of, and they ended
up just finding all of this other beautiful stuff during
the search. Yeah. And it turns out, based on what
we now know about the structure of the clitteral complex,
which will go into more detail in just a second,
but the G spot might simply be where the anterior
(33:26):
vaginal wall makes contact with the internal clitterists. It's not
necessarily this magical spot to one spot and and and
and that's it, sort of in that two dimensional way
that we often think of, but rather it's the convergence
of all of this stuff. I wish I had a
(33:47):
more elegant word than stuff to describe it going on
inside of us. Yeah, So let's talk a little bit
about that stuff. So you have we have the glands
s glands S, which is what you see on the outside.
It's what people call a button, but which is really
like an iceberg, but not an iceberg because we're not frigid.
It's our little hill. It's our little hill. That's right,
(34:09):
the ticula. But so okay, here's here's basically a rundown.
We're going to do our best to describe this with words,
but I recommend that you look it up for an image.
Go to stuff Mom Never Told You dot com. There
is a blog post up called a Brief History of
the Clitterest and it contains a picture of exactly what
we're talking about, and it is safe for work. Excellent. Yes, Well,
(34:30):
because the structure kind of looks like an awesome little
inner tube with some shoots coming off of it that's
around the vaginal canal. It reminds me of an airplane
neck pillow. Perfect when you blow it up. Yeah, it's inflatable. Yeah.
So the glands, which is what you see on the outside,
is attached to that internal structure which we're just crazy about.
(34:52):
And that internal structure is made up of two corpora cavernosa,
which is a rectile tissue that encircles the vaginal canal.
The corpora cavernosa then splits to form to what are
called crura or it's more erectile tissue that forms a
wishbone shape, and at rest they point toward woman's thighs,
(35:15):
and when erect they stretch back toward the spine. And
then near each of the crura on either side of
the vaginal opening are the clitteral vestibules, and they're actually
up under the labia majora, so inside the labia majora,
and when engorged, they cause the vulva to expand outward. Yeah,
(35:38):
and so you know, this is all a bunch of
erectile tissue that does swell when you get aroused, and
that basically cuffs the vagina so that a vaginal orgasm
is more like an internal clitteral orgasm. And then we
can all join hands and be friends and no longer
debate a clitteral orgasm versus a vaginal one, because they're
(36:00):
all sort of different types of the same thing. It's
just different methods to stimulate the same structure. And I
do really like how this wrapping around of the structure
is often described when it becomes engorged as it giving
us a hug. And what a hug. It's a very
(36:20):
giving hug. Such a hug. I love that and a
lot of people, Uh, there are a lot of artists, activists,
people out there talking about the clitterests and women's genitalia
in general to sort of bring awareness that hey, we're
sexual beings to your genitals, aren't gross, get in touch
with your sexuality and that The whole reason behind this
(36:42):
push to sort of make more women aware of their
anatomy is that so many women report having trouble orgasm ng. Yeah,
about one in three women on average has trouble reaching
orgasm with a partner. About one in ten has never
reached orgasm, whether a own or with a partner. And
(37:02):
what often makes it a challenge is this shame often
associated with our bodies and with our genitals. There are
women that I have known, in fact, who are adults
who have never masturbated. Um. There are women who have
never looked at their own vaginas, or they looked once
and they were so weirded out by what they saw
(37:24):
because they didn't know what to expect, or it didn't
look like what they saw in pornography that they assumed
that it is wrong and it's not the way it's
supposed to look, and that's that's not the case at all. Right.
There was a study a study in the Psychology of
Women quarterly that looked at undergrad college women's attitudes towards
(37:45):
their bodies and their genitals that found that greater dissatisfaction
with genital appearance was associated with things like higher genital image,
self consciousness during physical intimacy, which in turn was associated
with lower sexual self esteem, sexual satisfaction, and motivation to
avoid risky sexual behavior. So basically, if you think that
(38:07):
this important part of yourself is awful, ugly, dirty, shameful,
or you're afraid of it, then how can you possibly
enjoy sex? And not surprisingly, the researchers concluded that there
is a strong relationship between in enhancing the satisfaction with
the natural appearance of genitalia with the development of a
(38:30):
healthy self concept and long term benefits of sexual safety
and satisfaction, because a lot of times when that sort
of insecurity over your genitalia happens, or you don't think
it looks right like, it usually tends to affect you
in the bedroom in the sense of putting the other
(38:52):
person's sexual needs and desires over your own. And so
not surprisingly there is Urchers and concluded that if you
enhance that satisfaction, if women are more comfortable and accepting
of what their vaginas and volvas and clitterestas look like,
(39:12):
then it usually relates to a more satisfying sex life
and also just a healthier sexual self esteem right exactly.
And one person who's pushing what she calls cultural cliteracy
is Susan Ekberg Spirits, who wrote a paper in ten
for the Berkeley Journal of Gender Law and Justice, and
(39:33):
she talks about how cultural cliteracy is this thing that
denotes what an adequately educated person should know about the clitterest,
which we hope we're contributing to right now. But she
talks about how the clitterest is quote a despised body
part because it is an obdurate reminder of women's independence
and power and supports women's liberation. And she talks about
(39:54):
how society's shape versions of what is proper adult sexual
reality conforming with values that exist in that society, and
she says, quote, unfortunately for women, Western culture equates being
human with being male. Accordingly, Western culture considers sex proper
when it is confined to actions needed to produce children. Yeah,
(40:16):
and I mean, I just think that there is a
basic gap and understanding, I mean, clearly, as we've talked
about in this podcast between simply how female sexual pleasure
even works and how girls are educated in that regard
versus boys, and how a lot of times our concept
of what sex is and what sexual pleasure is usually
(40:40):
is based around the model of vaginal intercourse. Not that
there's anything wrong with vaginal intercourse, it's just also important
for girls and women to understand that we have this
part of our bodies that has, like you said, nothing
to do with reproduction whatsoever. It is there purely to
(41:01):
facilitate pleasure and that's nothing to be ashamed of. And
being curious about it is nothing to be ashamed of,
and exploring it is nothing to be ashamed of either.
And if you want to check out the ways that
maybe other women are trying to raise cultural cliteracy awareness, uh,
(41:21):
you should check out New York artist Sophia Wallace who
in launched a multimedia project called Cliteracy, and it includes
all sorts of art installations and even a clip rodeo
where you can ride like like a bucking bull at
some sort of honky tonk bar, you can ride a
giant golden clitter iss. Yeah. And so I do wonder
(41:44):
if anybody's actually seen that, like gone to it and
participated in this art movement to ride the clitter well.
And also, I mean that looking at that, this might
sound crass thinking of oh, riding the clitteress, what of that,
But the sculpture that she created for this, of that
engorged internal structure, will give you a sense of the
(42:07):
extent of the size of it as well. Um, I mean,
I mean it's not the the external glands is so
diminutive compared to it's a nymph. Yeah, it is rather
a nymph compared to the powerhouse that is inside of us. So,
I mean, if we sound like we're super high on
(42:28):
clitter clitterest knowledge, we are because it's incredible to learn
about these things inside of us that really it's taken
us this long to really begin to figure out. Right, Well,
I feel like there's just such a general societal fear
of and always has been, of women's sexuality and and
(42:49):
independent sexuality and a desire to want to have sex
and enjoy it um And I feel like that it's
definitely contributed to sort of men being a for aid
of learning more or knowing more or caring about women's
both both their physical structures and their their sexual excitement.
(43:09):
But it's also contributed to plenty of women being afraid
to learn more about it, And so I definitely I'm
glad we could talk about it. Yeah, And I just
(43:29):
wanted to add one final note about that surgeon Peerful
Days that we mentioned who in two thousand nine, along
with his research partner Odeal Bissan, producer's first three D
ultrasounds of the clitterest, he pioneered a surgery using this
research to treat women who had undergone female genital circumcision,
(43:54):
and by understanding this internal structure of the clitterest, he's
been able to perform more than three thousand restorative surgeries
to give these patients back sexual pleasure that had been
taken from them through the clitter ectomys or other kinds
of female circumcision techniques. So it's it's it's about female
(44:19):
pleasure and us knowing more about our bodies, but it's
also about this kind of healing as well, very real
physical healing for women around the world too. So with that,
let us know your thoughts. I'm curious to know what
people are thinking. Do you love your clitterests? Guys? What
do you think about the glitter is? There were a
(44:40):
lot of letters that we ran across in the process
of researching this too, from guys asking sex educators about
how to find the clitterest when what do you do?
And that's not a question that you should be ashamed of.
That's a great question for a straight guy to want
to know about his female partner. Oh and also side
(45:01):
note to um when it comes to statistics about women
reaching orgasm, there was a recent study that found that
lesbians tend to achieve orgasm more regularly than straight women,
possibly because women might be a little more acquainted imagine that.
So with that, I have finally no more final thoughts.
(45:23):
Email us mom Stuff at hollow stuff works dot com.
You can also tweet us at mom Stuff podcast and
messages on Facebook and we have a couple of messages
to share with you right now. So we've got a
couple of letters here in response to our episode Mama's Boys.
(45:44):
This one is from Alex and she writes, I thought
I would chime in with some comments about dating someone
who is very close to their mother as someone who
is friends with his parents, I understand and support being
close to your parents. However, there does come a point
where it goes too far. My best example of this
going too far would be after we had been dating
(46:06):
for well over a year. At this point, he was
still spending more of his free time and weekends with
his mother than he was with me. Yes, I know,
great relationship. So this one week, he was only going
to be free for one night on Friday, So, after
getting off work four hours late, he finally makes it
to my house. Not more than five minutes after getting there,
(46:27):
he gets a call from his mother, so going into
another room to talk to her for fifteen minutes, he
comes out and says he has to go to his
mom's house. Concerned, I asked, what's wrong this being the
one night we will see each other for a week.
Apparently his mother had a bad date and his feeling insecure.
I could probably dredge up more stories on the same
(46:48):
threat as this one, but this is definitely a gem
of a story, especially since it hits both of your
request for stories about dating Mama's boys, bad stories about
dating Mama's boys and the stereotypical game Mama's Boys. Definitely
enjoying the podcast and keep up the good work, So
thanks Alex. All Right, I have a letter here from Rachel.
(47:08):
She says my primary partner I'm polyamorous, is definitely a
mama's boy, and even though his mom and I don't
really see eye to eye, I'm really glad for his
less macho leanings. My partner's mom fled Europe to get
away from his dad and raise my partner and his
brother as a single mom and immigrant. As should be expected,
both my partner and his brother have a lot of
(47:30):
love and respect for their mom. One thing I've found
to be much more present in my partner and his
brother is a willingness to listen to women and an
openness to femininity. And they both tend to date strong
willed women, which is a part of why I butt
heads with my mother and thin she calls her anyway.
I've never had my partner's relationship with his mom get
(47:52):
in the way of his relationship with me, but his
dad being back in the picture has caused a little
drama because his dad does and appreciate the avoidance of
machismo as much as everyone else does. Of Course, true
to form, my mother and Sin has managed to keep
her husband in line, and that makes me cackle a bit.
So thanks Rachel, and thanks to everybody who's written to us.
(48:14):
Mom stuff at how stuff works dot com is our
email address and for links to all of our social
media as well as all of our blogs, videos, and podcasts,
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so you can follow along with us, go to stuff
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(48:35):
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