By Sue O’Sullivan
In 2016 I was fed up with reports in the press about a revolutionary new discovery about the clitoris. I wrote the following newly edited article for the Older Feminist Newsletter.*
I recently read some stories in the media heralding breakthrough research on the physiology of the clitoris. The title in the Guardian article* even went so far as to say it was ‘The Start of a Sexual Revolution’. I harrumphed. We knew much of this back in the early days of the WLM. Yet Minna Salami, the author of the Guardian article in 2016, was excited by the information she said could usher in ‘a sexual revolution’.
Salami is referring to the anatomical model of a clitoris which French pupils, it was claimed, would now be shown in sex education classes. Although she admits that clitoral anatomy wasn’t completely obscure before, and also says that ‘feminists have been insisting that there was a lot more to the clitoris than popularly believed, especially since urologist Helen O’Toole mapped it out in 1998’ – she still maintains that this French model is revolutionary.
Salami and other enthusiasts of the ‘new’ clitoral information believe that it was only since the 1990s that any ‘new’ challenging scientific information about the clitoris appeared. Not true! But after a cursory search of the Internet, I was even more irritated. I found other ‘scientific’ and popular articles about these ‘new’ clitoral discoveries, not one with any reference to early feminist work.
Back in the 1970s I was part of the Women’s Health Movement in Britain. It was a meaningful period of my life and my memories are clear. In 1970 the first iteration of Our Bodies, Ourselves (Boston Women’s Health Collective) came out as a stapled-together manual called Women and Their Bodies – a Course. By 1973 a Simon and Schuster edition called Our Bodies Ourselves – A Book by and for Women was published. (A UK edition the size of a hefty telephone directory came later.*) There were other, smaller UK books and booklets dealing with women’s health, often focussing on women’s reproductive and sexual health. Spare Rib carried articles on these issues from the beginning.
In the Women’s Health Movement, we were learning about self-examination. We bought cheap plastic speculums (so much nicer than the cold metal ones) and gathering, sometimes in chilly church halls, we took turns to hop onto tables and insert the speculums into our vaginas. Then with torches and mirrors we looked at ourselves and invited our sisters to look as well. The aim was to demystify and educate ourselves. We took our speculums and lubricants home – to track changes in the vagina’s secretions and so on.
Did anyone carry on using them at home? I hardly ever did. That didn’t matter. What we did was initially a bit scary, but also exciting – learning, breaking down shame, ignorance and embarrassment. It felt revolutionary in a funny way, this claiming of our bodies in the name of women’s liberation. It was another illustration of the ‘personal is political’ – it was individual and collective liberation. It was part of a much larger attempt to gain control of our lives – to understand and accept our bodies, so long described as mysterious and disgusting. For far too long ‘Down There’ could have been a hidden continent, rather than part of our own selves.
Back then, besides our copies of OBOS, we were also fired up by the radical feminist exhortations of The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm and other feminist, often American, publications. In 1981 A New View of a Woman’s Body came out and copies managed to wing their way here. This was a guide edited by the American Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers and it featured mind-blowing information. This chunky handbook forced a feminist reappraisal of female orgasms and the role of the clitoris. So, back in 1981, truly new and revolutionary discoveries about the clitoris were explained, analysed and illustrated in meticulous detail and clarity.
By 1994, the authors of The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex (another American book) described how thirteen years earlier, ‘A New View of a Woman’s Body taught us that beneath the skin the clitoral shaft separates into two legs (or crura) which extend in a wishbone fashion for about three inches on either side of the vaginal opening. The entire clitoris consists of erectile tissue made up of blood vessels, spongy tissue and nerves, just like the erectile tissue of the penis.’
This information made it clear that the old clitoral vs vaginal orgasm competition was erroneous. They were interconnected, no matter where you experienced them.
If you read the so-called revolutionary descriptions of the clitoris proclaimed recently, it is amazing how close the women writing and drawing in 1981’s A New View were to what would be declared innovative so many years later. Even the word wishbone is used currently by some writers to describe one of the main structures of the clitoris.
This is galling. Because nowhere is there a mention, let alone a footnote, acknowledging the feminist work which uncovered so much of what is supposedly being newly discovered today. It’s as if the women’s self-help and health movement never existed. As if those women hadn’t already examined and critiqued (while absorbing what was useful) earlier writing about female sexual arousal and the physiology and role of the clitoris. As if women’s liberation publications hadn’t proclaimed this new knowledge in the early years of the WLM. Even Wikipedia’s entry on the clitoris in 2016, although comprehensive in some ways, didn’t list the most important and innovative book, A New View.
Resource pages in the Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers book, How to Stay OUT of the Gynecologist’s Office, which announces on it’s cover that it’s from the Women’s Health In Women’s Hands Series (Los Angeles 1981). The speculum illustrates information on how to order a plastic speculum for $4.00 from the publishers of this guide.
In the 1970s and into the 80s most of the early women’s liberation concerns were not led or initiated by academic or formal research. Feminists used their own lives, their own bodies, their own collective needs for knowledge and change. They asked for information and experiences from other women.
As the editors of A New View wrote, when referring to the deficiencies of previous ‘views’ of the clitoris. ‘We found that we did have all the parts of the clitoris shown, and more. Besides, not one of these drawings hinted at the wide variation in texture, size and color that we observed. We also observed the changes that occur during the sexual response cycle when some of the study participants masturbated to orgasm. Then we compared our life experiences to the textbook version. Using self-examination, personal observation and meticulous analysis, we arrived at a new view of the clitoris.’
This work is still a vivid example of early feminist scholarship, not attached to or dependent on previous experts like doctors or researchers.
So why has this wise material – and other areas of 70s and 80s feminist knowledge – disappeared (or been disappeared) from current studies and available information in the media? This at the same time as later research takes its place – often replicating much of the original work but devoid of any of the original feminist politics and inspiration.
Notes
Older Feminist Network
Guardian article
UK OBOS
https://olderfeminist.org.uk
Clitoral Truth
I have never had a climax
No! I swear!
It’s the clitoral truth.
By Margaret S. Chalmers
Spare Rib 39, September 1975
In Women’s Health, A Spare Rib Reader edited by Sue O’Sullivan
Pandora Press, London 1987