1981 Scientific Breakthrough! First Pictures of Mars? Saturn? Mercury?
No. First Pictures of a Woman’s Clitoris!
1981 Drawings of the Vulva with Clitoris
Though pictures of a male penis were anatomically drawn in the 15th century, drawings of the female vulva and clitoris didn’t show up until the late 20th.
Somewhere between 1480 and 1492, Leonardo da Vinci drew the first anatomical representation of the male penis and made corrections to this drawing in 1508.
“Leonardo da Vinci and the origin of semen” by Denis Noble and Dario DiFrancesco and Diego Zancani, Published: 20 August 2014 https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2014.0021 (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2014.0021
It would take five more centuries—not until 1981—for science to produce the first anatomically correct drawings of a woman’s vulva that included her clitoris. Men went to the moon and back six times, and we had pictures of Mars, Saturn, and Mercury before we had drawings of the clitoris.
All the anatomy texts that followed starting in 1543 with the first publication of Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius’ anatomical work, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, included drawings of the penis, but not the clitoris. All anatomy texts used in medical schools omitted this all-important organ of woman’s pleasure.
The first photos of the surface of Mars were captured in July 1965 by Mariner 4.
The first photos of Saturn were taken in September 1979 in a flyby by Pioneer 11.
The first photos of Mercury were taken in March 1974 during in three passes by Mariner 10.
Though we have felt great national urgency to see up close the planets in our celestial solar system, we were in no hurry to see in graphic detail the center of man’s solar system right on this earth—woman—and her power center.
The history of correct information on the clitoris (or mostly lack of it) is bleak and has sometimes resulted in violence to woman. According to a 2017 article in The Atlantic (“The Still Misunderstood Shape of the Clitoris”), “Historical accounts of the clitoris are plagued by disparagement or ignorance. Though Magnus, a renowned scholar in the Middle Ages, considered the clitoris as homologous to the penis, not all who succeeded him agreed. In the 16th century, Vesalius argued the clitoris did not appear in “healthy women.” The Malleus Maleficarum, a 1486 guide for finding witches, suggested the clitoris was the “devil’s teat”; if the tissue were to be found on a woman it would prove her status as a witch. And in the 1800s, women seen as suffering from “hysteria” were sometimes subject to clitoridectomies.
It wasn’t until 1981 that the Federation of Feminist Women's Health Clinics created anatomically correct images of the clitoris. Published in A New View of a Woman’s Body, the images were part of a wider attempt to provide thorough, accurate information to women to support their health. Decades later, in 2009, the first 3-D sonography of the stimulated clitoris was completed by French Researchers.”
The Real Clitoris Looks Like This!
Make the wish for anatomically-correct
sex education classes come true.
The same article by Naomi Russo reveals “Ignorance persists today. As the University of Western Sydney clinician and physiotherapy researcher Jane Chalmers explains, the subject of the clitoris is still avoided or ignored. ‘Several major medical textbooks omit the clitoris, or label it on diagrams but have no description of it as an organ,’ she says. ‘This is in great contrast to the penis that is always covered in-depth in these texts.’”
Chalmers is a researcher who studies the vulva and pelvis, and she gets a lot of flak online. As she puts it, “I frequently face questions of ‘Why would you want to study that?’ and snide comments along the lines of, ‘She must be a lesbian.’”
The article goes on to say that in France lack of correct information on the clitoris is bad and sex education is sexist. The clitoris is either pictured incorrectly or not at all. Fillod, an engineer at the École Centrale Paris who is a researcher and has been studying sex and gender issues since 2013, wanted to change that. In the course of partnering with another firm to make a documentary film showing a medically correct view of a woman’s sexual organs, she decided to make a 3-D model of the clitoris. She describes her model in The Atlantic: “It is ‘anatomically correct, life-size, and in 3-D, which is far superior to the drawings that are generally available.’ The life-size clitoris model she made is 10 centimeters long and in the shape of a wishbone.
Sex education classes where they exist at all in the U.S. do not talk about woman’s pleasure center—the vulva—only about woman’s reproductive organs. Why? Because a woman’s sexual pleasure is not to be taught in school! Why not? Through all these decades, the far reaching psychological and emotional implications of this lapse—this discounting of a woman’s sexual pleasure—in the lives of women is unfathomable. Moreover, discounting woman’s sexual pleasure underpins the overall message that women who seek any kind of pleasure without putting others first are selfish.
Perhaps there is an additional reason for not showing a woman’s sexually pleasurable zones. The vagina, the clitoris, the glands, have long been deemed “disgusting” by men in print and in film. Consider this passage cited in Peggy Orenstein’s landmark book Girls and Sex (2016):
“[A] female character, in the trailer for the Adam Sandler flop That’s My Boy, heckles an ineffectual Andy Samberg with “Throw [the ball] you big vagina!” Off-screen, an essay on the website Thought Catalog titled “I’m a Feminist, but I Don’t Eat Pussy” went viral in 2013. Among its pithy observations: that while vaginas “feel really good when your penis is inside of them” they are “objectively gross…covered in hair. They ooze and slime…” They are dirty, the male writer continues, and taste bad, and for women to expect oral sex “when you know the strain it puts on men, is selfish and frankly, discriminatory.” If that weren’t enough to plunge the average young woman into shame, spiral heartthrob actor Robert Pattinson, whose fame and fortune were forged from the erotic fantasies of teenage girls, breezily confessed to Details magazine. “I really hate vaginas. I’m allergic to vagina.” (pp. 64-65)
1978 Hal Ashby Film Coming Home
This remark about vaginas reminds me of a remark etched in my mind from the 1978 Hal Ashby film Coming Home written by Waldo Salt. In it Jane Fonda is an army nurse stationed stateside. She is married to Bruce Dern a Marine in Vietnam. In one of the last scenes of the film, when Dern returns from the war for good, he is seen drinking and acting very macho with his buddies in the living room. Jane goes into the bedroom. Dern remarks that a woman’s vagina smells like a dead fish. He and his buddies laugh.
No wonder girls are insecure. A few years ago, there was much talk of high school girls being asked to give boy students blow jobs, but these girls typically never asked for oral sex in return.
Women are continually on guard about smelling badly.
Women have used everything from powders to douches as a remedy despite warnings of their dangers to a woman’s health. Consider just two examples: “Over 19,000 women have joined lawsuits against Johnson & Johnson. An appellate court in Missouri upheld more than $2.1 billion in damages against the company, saying they knew there was asbestos in its baby powder. J & J have known for more than 40 years that there is a connection between the use of talcum powder and ovarian cancer. Yet, they did not warn women that the talcum powder could cause ovarian cancer after being applied for personal hygiene, and especially after use on the genital areas.”
https://selectjustice.com/ovarian-cancer/talc3?cid=987&afid=99&sid=GoogleSearch&usid=TalcumPowder_Search&msid=+cancer%20+talc%7Cb%7Cc&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=9776265116&utm_content=112116176104&utm_term=453740360791&st-t=Google&vt-mt=b&vt-p=&vt-n=g&vt-d=c&vt-dm=&vt-c=453740360791&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIyOP5tOnr6wIVu_DjBx2bbAIrEAAYAiAAEgJjLvD_BwE
“Douching has been associated with many adverse outcomes including pelvic inflammatory disease, bacterial vaginosis, cervical cancer, low birth weight, preterm birth, human immunodeficiency virus transmission, sexually transmitted diseases, ectopic pregnancy, recurrent vulvovaginal candidiasis, and infertility.”
What should a vulva look like?
Many, many women have never used a mirror to look at their vulvas.
“Why I photographed 100 vulvas. Most women have no idea what’s down there—there’s no such thing as ‘normal’” as told to Lisa Harvey, Feb. 2019, BBC.
In Italian, the word pudenda, which means shame, is used for a woman’s vulva. We have at least 50 other words for a woman’s vagina. The vagina is considered the female partner of the penis (because that’s what men are interested in), but it’s not the complement of the penis, the clitoris is, and that sits in the vulva. Is it any wonder we don’t like our vulva or want to change the look of it?
“Can We Please Just Say ‘Vagina Instead of These 50 Other Slang Words?”by Krissy Brady, May 28, 2020. sheknows.
” https://www.sheknows.com/health-and-wellness/articles/1086904/slang-words-for-vagina/
Why do women undergo labiaplasty to make their vaginal lips smaller?
Women’s insecurity about the look of their labia has caused increasing numbers of them to undergo labiaplasty—a surgical procedure that reduces the size of the labia outside the vagina. Plastic surgeons boast the procedure is completely safe and does not decrease sexual sensitivity and pleasure of the labia. One article I read that was verifiable talked of several cases where surgeons botched these surgeries and the woman ended up with complete clitoridectomy with no sensation in the clitoris at all. These may be rare cases, but any surgery risks infection and scarring. The question is in this age when women are supposed to feel more confident sexually, why they feel they need to alter the size of their labia to begin with.
In 2013, ABC aired “The Vagina Diaries,” a documentary about why increasing numbers of women in Australia were undergoing this procedure. An article in the online publication The Conversation, “Vagina Diaries draws attention to hidden costs of labiaplasty,”(November 26,2013) states that documentary presenter Natalie Harris interviewed doctors, sex industry professionals—even men on the street to try their answer this question. They found women were insecure about how their vulva would look to their sex partner even though they had few if any vulvas to compare it to
According to the article, it’s not surprising Australian women do not know what a vulva should look like. “And interestingly, Australian censorship laws prohibit the publication of illustrations of the labia minora and the clitoris. So vulvas are invariably made to resemble that of prepubescent girls, with pubic hair removed and a single crease placed between the labia major (external lips of the vagina).
This contributes to the general lack of knowledge and understanding about female genital diversity.
The consequences of this are distorted views of genital normality, leading to insecurities in women whose genitals don’t mirror this idealised image.”
One woman interviewed in the article said she didn’t regret her labiaplasty but later when she was older considered it completely unnecessary.
“What we do know is that women experience sensation from labia minora that contributes to sexual function. In fact, after the clitoris, the labia minora are regarded the most sensitive part of the female genitalia, helping stimulation and lubrication during sex.
Cutting and burning this delicate tissue causes scar tissue, and interferes with the blood and nerve supply making the labia less sensitive to touch. This may have a negative impact on sexual sensation.”
My feeling is that women have a right to plastic surgery, but I wish more visually accurate sex education could convince women and men that their sex organs are fine as is.
What are your feelings about labiaplasty?
