Text By Sarah Chadwick
Black & White Photography Julian Lucas

Today most sex that occurs is for pleasure rather than reproduction otherwise why would two thirds of American women between the ages of 15 – 49 be using contraception? (Source: National Survey of Family Growth) If the objective is pleasure, and not a baby, then male pleasure is no more necessary in sexual encounters than female pleasure, yet the orgasm gap is as real as the pay gap. It is not happening for heterosexual women in casual hook ups, many women still fake it sometimes and even a third of women in long term relationships are not having them.

I have a trompe d’oeil rug painted onto my back deck. The red and orange design incorporates a clitoris motif, although most people don’t realise that this is what they are looking at. Earlier this summer I overheard my twenty-one-year-old daughter explaining the design to a group of male friends. It was 3am in the morning and they were the other side of a bottle of vodka. She explained that the clitoris was not purely an external part of the female anatomy, but was like an iceberg, with the bulbs nestling either side of the vagina and cura stretching into the internal pelvic area. “In most women, the bulbs aren’t close enough to the vaginal walls for penetration to be orgasmic” she said. I admired her clarity given the vodka and her audience. How many women have you ever heard explain how sex works so effectively? But instead of hearing the proverbial penny drop with her listeners, I heard a chorus of protest, “But not with my dick.”

“You’re not listening” she persisted. But the guys couldn’t get beyond the model of female sexual pleasure that they had imbibed through school sex-ed, the media and probably porn. Needless to say, none of the candidates got through the onsite small group interview that night. With a recruiter’s clarity she dismissed them to me the following morning as “not teachable.”

They need to meet the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, who reported in 1953 that the vagina has very few nerve endings - which is lucky when you think about it as otherwise birth would be nigh impossible and Tampax would be the brand name of a sex toy. And this is why we need this book. Contrary to expectation and much that we have been told over the centuries, the clitoris is central to female pleasure and in 2021 it’s time for it to come out of the closet and be celebrated.

The first anatomist to identify the complete structure was Georg Kobelt in 1844. Yes, 1844. Why did it take so long in the history of mankind for the female anatomy to be fully explored? But why, when we knew about it so long ago, is it not more widely known? We can draw a heart, and lungs and a liver, and yes, as many school textbooks testify with their marginalia, even school kids can draw the male member. But how many people can draw a clit?

For millenia, scientists thought women were inside-out versions of men, and male anxiety about female sexuality generated ludicrous ideas and perpetuated inaccurate information. Even when it was fully understood, the establishment went into overdrive to hide it, with punitive censorship laws banning the distribution of such material to anyone who was not a medic or a judge on the grounds it would “corrupt” the morals of the people. Famously it was left out of the gold standard medical textbook, “Gray’s Anatomy” in 1948 and it didn’t feature in the 8thgrade sex-ed booklet that my son bought home from school. We are beyond the days, surely, of the Victorian men who were so consumed with worry that if it was widely known that their penises were not central to female pleasure then women would suffer “marital aversion”?

The Sweetness of Venus. A History of the Clitoris by Sarah Chadwick isavailable in book shops now. It is a funCancelny, informed book that takes you on a journey through the history of anatomy, religion, philosophy, psychology and evolutionary theory to answer the question, how come we are still so anxious about the clit. It challenges Western culture’s definition of female sexuality, will have you laughing out loud, shouting “Clitoris!” with abandon and championing sex equality and pleasure for all.

This feature first appeared http://www.fetelifestylemag.com, February 2021
Sarah also runs the Instagram account @its.personalgirls