On women’s anatomy and the power of paying attention

Pretend you are me – the nicest, cutest, sweetest person who deserves a relaxing little Sunday, where she just goofs and maybe reads a ghost book ever. Nice right? Well, I also will have to imagine it as well because unfortunately my Sunday was irrevocably disfigured by the rantings of an idiot on the internet, and I was forced to think about my job. Yes, that’s correct no one has suffered in the way that I do. Thank you for noticing. What can you do to help? Well you are going to have to look at this right here:

Now I am very sorry indeed to introduce you to the phrase ‘”clitoral deniers” are treated worse than holocaust deniers because the clitoris is essentially the holocaust of feminism’ but here we are, OK? I am just working with what I was given. And yes, this is some random racist weirdo, but also, come on, this is funny and you have to let me talk about it and its bad conceptions of history.

I cannot even with the holocaust denial thing, and that’s one for my sainted modern history colleagues to sort out. (Frankly, they won’t be able to, because the sort of people who deny the holocaust cannot be reasoned with and should simply be excluded from polite society, your esteem, and public more generally.) What I can do is talk about the whole ‘It is well known in ancient literature that the “clitoris” didn’t exist’ part. Because, buddy. Oh little man. Wow.

So, first of all let’s just start off with the fact that ancient people are usually pretty fucking stupid about, kinda frightened of, and totally disinterested in women’s bodies. So just jot that down.

Basically, the issue that Hippocrates and his followers had with the ladies was that they had all this stuff that men did not, and it was inside of them where it was difficult to observe. As a result, a lot of the relationship that Hippocratic scholars had with women’s issues was specifically about the uterus and what it was up to inside of the shadowy world of women’s bodies. In their infinite wisdom, they decided that that the uterus was a kind of weird little creature that was spending its time taking a little walk around inside of women. They felt that if a uterus wasn’t pregnant it would get bored and decide it was gonna climb on to wetter organs, which he designated were the liver, heart, and brain. When that happened, women would start acting all wild and, for example, thinking they knew things about their own genitals that guys online did not.[1]

This, again, is charming a delightful. The uterus as a little guy? Love that. However, I am very sorry to say that it is also not correct and therefore we probably don’t need to look to the guy who thinks that the uterus is a creature to ask about whether the clitoris exists.

Of course, Hippocrates isn’t the only ancient medieval thinker positing on women’s bodies. There was also Galen of Pergamon (129-216 CE) who you probably know by his first name. Galen is even more relevant to this conversation because he did, actually, write more specifically on the genitals of women, as opposed to just their reproductive organs more widely, and he had a really traditional way of thinking about them. See, he thought, like Aristotle (384-322 BCE), and pretty much every peripatetic thinker after him, that you had to consider women as inside out men, and that this also applied to their genitals. When writing about these correspondences he, however, noticed that women have something kinda interesting which he calls the nympha. According to him the nympha “gives the same sort of protection to the uteri that the uvula gives to the pharynx; for it covers the orifice of their neck by coming down into the female pudendum and keeps it from being chilled”.[3]

Guess what we think the nympha is. Yeah, we’re pretty sure he means clitoris. Does he mean it in conjunction with the labia more generally? Probably yeah! Is he right about what it does? Absolutely not! But he is certainly noticing some stuff about women’s junk and we will take it. Thanks. So, the idea that women have ‘their own “penis”’ that this idiot talks about is actually an ancient one, and has precisely nothing to do with feminism. It’s not exactly right, but it’s not bad for a guy working on dissected pigs who believes in humoral theory. We take what we can get.

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Now by the time we get to the medieval period we still don’t have anyone specifically naming the clitoris. This is largely because medieval people, much like the weirdo whose tweets I am mocking, had a huge reverence for the classical thinkers whose work came before theirs. They weren’t here to remake the humoral system, or consider women as their own thing rather than inside out men. They did, however, have some new notes on ladies and their junk.

Particularly interesting for our purposes here is the work of Guy de Chauliac (c. 1300 – 1368), a famous surgeon. In his massively influential work Chirurgia he once again got around to describing women’s junk, and noted that “[The womb] is large … as the penis turned around or put within … It has … above two walled arms with prive stones [ovaries], as it were the purse [scrotum] of the prive stones [testicles]. It has a common womb in the middle … it has a neck, hollow within as the penis. …It has also a prive point [tentigo] as the hole in the penis.”[4] Guess what the “prive point” is. Yes, congrats that is the clitoris. The little bit at the end of a neck that vulvas have. You know. Like a penis.

And you know what? This is not so terribly far off from our current understandings of genitals which are incredibly similar. Ovaries are pretty much analogous to testicles. They have that right! What they get wrong is the identification of the womb as the inside out penis, and vagina as the “neck hollow within as the penis”. The thing is, as mad as it makes that dude on twitter it is, in fact, the clitoris which is analogous to the penis. They both have a glans, are made of spongy tissue, get hard during arousal using trapped blood, and have a protective skin around them. Your biggest difference there is that clitorises don’t have urethras and that most penises protrude further than most clitorises do. There is, of course, huge difference among all genitals and I am just giving you some hard and fast examples here. If you want a better anatomical discussion about genitals, please just go to BISH. I am not retraining as a sex educator just to own some dweeb online. Thank you.

Of course, the dweeb in question might wish to make some sort of stupid remark that even if the nympha or privy point is the clitoris it’s not like all of these esteemed surgeons and physicians were talking about it as an instrument of pleasure like modern people do. He would, of course, be wrong.  At the celebrated medieval medival school of Padua, for example, professor of medicine Pietro d’Abano (c. 1257-c.1315) had, in fact used his big brain to notice what women seemed to have a preference in sexual practice. In his work, called Conciliator, he noted that a lot of women seemed to get turned on “…by having the upper orifice near their pubis rubbed; in this way the indiscreet bring them to orgasm. For the pleasure that can be obtained from this part of the body is comparable to that obtained from the tip of the penis.”[6] You know. That entirely modern feminist position that the clitoris is like a penis. Happening sometime in the late thirteenth century.

And he wasn’t the only one! Friend of the blog Avicenna, or Ibn Sinna, (980-1037) had also noticed that chicks seemed to get really into having the upper part of their vulvas rubbed and he advised that “[m]en …. Should caress [women’s] breasts and pubis, and enfold their partners in their arms, without really performing the act. And when their desire is fully roused, they should unite with the woman”. [7]   

So funnily enough, it turns out that if you stop jacking it to ancient thinkers and pay attention to what actual women are doing, you might make figure out what they are into once in a while. Ground-breaking.

Of course, Avicenna and d’Abano were also products of their time, and their observations about sexual arousal are still made in the context of discussing procreative PIV sex. D’Abano calling the people who use pubic stimulation to achieve orgasm as “indiscrete” is probably an insult, which the sad twitter man would probably endorse. Avicenna, meanwhile thinks that clitoral stimulation is something you do on the way to PIV. But keep in mind these are men, writing probably for an audience of men, and in the context of trying to discuss what they see as medical problems. It is, therefore, understandable that they make it about procreative sex because that’s the sort of medical questions you would get.

Now, haters will say that I didn’t have to write a fully footnoted response to a holocaust denier who is trying to defend being terrible in the sack online. They would be correct. However, because my New Year’s resolution was to be a more specific hater, I did it anyway, because I am in it for the love of the craft, baby. Further, I have written an entire book about this (out now in paperback!), so when some idiot online says something stupid about historical sexuality that is my own personal bat signal. I will, thereofore, be there to explain why he is stupid and wrong. You are welcome.

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[1] JP Catonné, ‘L’hystérie hippocratique [Hippocratic concept of hysteria]’. Ann Med Psychol (Paris). 1992 Dec;150(10):705-719.
[2] Galen, On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body 14.6-7, exc. Tr. M.T. May. G, https://diotima-doctafemina.org/translations/anthologies/womens-life-in-greece-and-rome-selections/ix-medicine-and-anatomy/351-comparison-of-male-and-female-anatomy/ <Accessed 4 March 2024>.
[3] Galen, On the Usefulness of the parts of the Body, trans. Margaret Tallmadge May, 2 vols. (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), Book XV, Chapter 3, pp. 660-661.
[4] Margaret S. Ogden, The Cyrurgie of Guy de Chauliac, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 67. Translation from the Middle English my own.
[5] E. Nicaise, La Grande Chirugie de Guy de Chauliac (Paris: F. Alcan, 1890), p. 75. Following the translation in Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine, p. 45.
[6] Pietro d’Abano, Conciliator (Venice: O. Scoti, 1521). Following the translation in Ibid.
[7] Avicenna, Canon, Book III, fen 21, tr. 1, ch. 9,quoted in Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine, pp. 130-131. Interestingly, Avicenna also identifies the “seat of pleasure” in women as “between the anus and the vulva”, which, OK homie!

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For more on medieval women and sex, see:
On nobility, courtship, moral justification, and sexy tapestries
On conflating drag, (and femininity), with sexuality
On women, pleasure, and semen
On women having sex with themselves
On medieval kink, part I, and part II

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My book, The Once And Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society, is out now.

© Eleanor Janega, 2024