Nicci Gerrard
First Person
Things aren’t just discovered. They have to be needed as well. The Vikings reached America long before Columbus. But the Vikings had no use for America, the way that the Spanish Empire did.
And there are other more intimate kinds of discovery. When John Donne wrote of:
O my America, my new found land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man
manned,
My mine of precious stones
he was not talking about imperialism, but the hidden pleasures of the female body. But as with many ”discoveries”, the explorations were partial and the discoverers saw only what they wanted to see.
The clitoris – hidden site of female pleasure – has been discovered several times down the centuries, but we never seem entirely ready for it. Even its name (derived from the Greek, kleitoris, meaning ”little hill”) is indicative of our uncertainty: it sounds medical or botanical.
Women always knew about it, of course. But it has been largely a secret knowledge – hidden in the landscape of our bodies, unmapped.
Christopher Columbus planted his flag on his new-found land. The hero of Federico Andahazi’s fact-based novel, The Anatomist (published by Doubleday next month), is also called Columbus. But this hero explores the topography of the body and there discovers the clitoris. He is cast into prison for his scandalous new knowledge. Female pleasure is a sacrilegious subject for the late 16th century when the novel is set.
It seems to be so still: the book won Argentina’s Fortabat prize, but when the award’s sponsor discovered the novel’s subject, she cancelled the ceremony and took out advertisements saying The Anatomist ”did not contribute to the exaltation of the highest values of the human spirit”. Ignorance is still bliss.
And ignorant we are still. This month, the New Scientist reported new studies showing the clitoris is twice as large as most textbooks show, 10 times larger than the average person realises, and containing as many sensory nerves as the penis. Previous medical knowledge of the clitoris depended on a few autopsies performed, by men, on 80- and 90-year-old women.
At the same time, analysis into the way text- books have portrayed the clitoris also reveals a male refusal to see: it is sometimes not there at all, or there in a simplified form, but unlabelled.
In the range of children’s books about the body on my shelves, only one (The Human Body, co-written by Jonathan Miller) includes it. It is a surreal vanishing act, a collaborative denial. What makes it more surreal is how this has all been said before.
In 1953, the Kinsey Report stated the clitoris was the anatomical site of the female orgasm. In 1976, Shere Hite came into the debate: not to have an orgasm from intercourse is, she said, the most common experience for women.
Over the years, Hite researched the clitoris and interviewed hundreds of men. Where is it? she asked them. Many didn’t know and didn’t seem to care: what should they do with it if they found it anyway? Most treated her question as a sniggery joke. She remained indefatigable.
But why is it so problematic for us – why when I mention it to people, do they giggle nervously?
The clitoris is that scariest thing, a part of the body that has no function but to give pleasure to its possessor. Its furtive geography is even separate from the site of intercourse, so that it doesn’t require extraneous sex aids, such as men. It offends a holy trinity of God, Charles Darwin and male vanity. It certainly offended Sigmund Freud. For him, the clitoral orgasm was infantile; only the biologically impossible vaginal orgasm was mature. At least Freud knew it was there. Most men have simply ignored it.
John Cleland’s Fanny Hill was radical in its advanced recognition of female desire. Everything is there – ”abysses of joy”, ”instruments of pleasure” – but the clitoris isn’t. Cleland didn’t seem to know about it. Neither did DH Lawrence. It was left to Terry Southern in his gleeful Candy to first speak of it.
Of course, it is named now, but a mountain of ignorance remains. The history of female desire is a secret history.
The woman in The Anatomist who first yields up the mystery of sexual pleasure to Columbus cuts off her clitoris in an attempt to free herself from the tyranny of male knowledge. Conversely, when clitoridectomies are performed in African tribes, it is a symbol of women being denied their own bodies.
The hermaphrodite Tiresias, who in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land ”sees it all”, was blinded in Greek myth because he overheard Zeus and Hera arguing over who enjoyed sex more, men or women: the answer was women enjoyed it much more.
However, recent studies of sexual relationships suggest women regularly get less pleasure than men. The studies also suggest many men aren’t very good at it. But women are also out of touch with themselves.
One of the paradoxes in the sad non- history of the clitoris is that men didn’t see it, and women couldn’t see it. In a liberating act in the 1970s, feminists encouraged women to put a mirror between their legs to see what remained hidden from themselves. But shame, prudery and fear still pervades our attitude towards sex. Perhaps this latest rediscovery of the anatomy of desire will free us to name the unspeakable, touch the untouchable, and maybe even be a bit happier behind our lives’ closed doors.