Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The History of the Clitoris

Episode Date: November 25, 2022

It’s so important that it’s been ‘discovered’ at least twice, but what is the clitoris and why has it previously been so hard to find?The clitoris is the human female’s most erogenous zone, and is responsible for 75% of women’s orgasms. So why has it been so overlooked and demonised, and how have people sought to control female pleasure through it?Kate is joined by Sarah Chadwick, author of ‘The Sweetness of Venus’ to discuss the stimulating history of the clitoris.Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Thomas Ntinas.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit To download, go to Android or Apple store.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Oh, my lovely reticters, it's Kate Lister. I am here with the fair do's warning, fair do's, lovely betwixters. This is an episode about the history of the clitoris. So we will be talking about smutty things, naughty things, extreme things, shocking things. Just generally adult content, not suitable for delicate ears. If you are of a delicate constitution, well, I have no idea what you're doing here.

But if you are, run. Run for the hills before we get going for the rest of you. Mucky pups, you are my people. I am ready if you are. Been discovered twice and continues to elude some people around the world.

What has been demonised and derided for as long as it has been discussed? And what finally plays a part in bringing its owner just pleasure. That's it. That's what it does. It's just there to feel nice. Today, Betwixt the Sheets, we are going to find out about the history of the clitorial.

What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect carpents of whatever my boss needs by just turning enough and pushing the Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal and society with me, Kate Lister. Little bald man, Myrtleberry, boy in the boat, tonguebag, funny flange.

Oh, let's just call it what it is, shall we? The clitoris. It's a hero for about 75% of women in the bedroom. And even though it is taking us an awfully long time to properly know what is going on biologically with the clit, it's got a very long and stimulating history. And to find out more, I spoke to say, Sarah Chadwick, author of the marvellous book, The Sweetness of Venus. Let's get into it.

And welcome to Sarah Chadwick. Thank you so much for joining me betwixt the sheets. Oh, Kate, my pleasure to be here. We had a great conversation at the Hong Kong Literary Festival, so I'm thrilled to be back with you. Oh, yes, we did. Yes, we did. And we're back with more of the same,

because you are the woman that wrote the book about the history of the clitoris. Yeah, you had a chapter two, though, didn't you, in the curious history of sex? I did. I had a little sneaky pitch. Should we get all of the jokes out of the way right now? We'll see if there's any that like you haven't heard before. Do men have a hard time finding your book? That's what? He heard that, yeah, of course. Do you know what? Men have a hard time allowing my book on the bookshelves actually. No. That actually when we were looking for a publisher, we had the response of, oh well, the topic is niche. It's kind of like on what level is this topic? The topic is niche.

The topic is niche. Or we had the other one which is, oh, well, we've already done a menopause book this year. Like anything to do with kind of female sexuality is just tick box under one thing. You've had your quota. Yeah. Yeah, we did perimenopausal vaginal dryness. The clitoris is just going to have to wait for next year. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, back to why is this important? Although, having said that, it was really important to me in writing my book that I cheer-led for pleasure all round and said, actually there is so much that women have been denied in terms of their knowledge around the clitoris that actually those are the obvious jokes to make about it about men not being able to find it, but actually men need all the encouragement they can get. But it's kind of like when you look into the history of it, it's almost no wonder that men don't really know where it is, because women, they know they can locate it on a map, obviously,

but when it comes to understanding what this organ is, what it does, fighting it free from the myths and nonsense, that surrounds it, it's almost like we're all pretty ignorant about this, actually. Yes, I mean, when so many women still don't know about the full structure of the clitoris, and it's not in school anatomy textbooks, it's not in sex ed books, it's not in galleries. I mean, I don't know if you're familiar with Sophia Wallace's work, which is the beautiful full structure of the clitoris. And she's not in mainstream galleries, and yet you go into any gallery, and the penis is

absolutely everywhere for all the world to see. So I think we have all been denied knowledge of the clitoris. And it's actually quite recently, isn't it, that we've had this full understanding of exactly, like the full structure of it. Like we actually knew what was going on how far back into, if people know where it is, they kind of think of it as this kind of like little button, they sort of know, and a lot of the slang that surrounds it sort of plays with that. It's a love button. It's the devil's doorbell. It's all these stupid things. But it's structurally, it's like a tree with roots. It goes right back, doesn't it?

I see it's very beautiful and three-dimensional, and the majority of it extends into the pelvic cavity with the bulbs and the cura. It looks like a lovely orchid or a dragonfly, and it can be up to five to seven centimeters. And it's made of erectile tissue. I mean, the fact that I love finding out is during arousal, it swells with eight to 11 times it's blood flow. And the blood flow is really. with the pelvic contractions, clitorisona's experience with orgasm. It's a huge and important structure. And as science has known this for a long, long time, you've talked in previous

podcasts I know about kind of, you know, Colombo in 1559, proudly discovering quotation amounts of clitoris. But actually as early as 1672, they were talking about the internal structure and the bulbs and the cure. So people knew then. They've known for a long time. I love the fact that it can be five centimetres long and it gets bigger when you're aroused. Do we know how big it can get when it's erect? The research that I read, it said five to seven, but I think the clitoris is going to be like penises and breasts, isn't it? It's going to be where it sits within the pelvic cavity and its exact shape is going to be as variable as all other body parts. And I think that defines so much about the way women experience sexual pleasure and desire.

You know, the internal location of the clitoris around the vagina is going to explain the huge disparity that people have in terms of how sexual pleasure is experienced and where the penetration is orgasmic. But also you could have a blue clit. You know, there's all this fuss that, you know, teenage boys make about having blue balls. It's kind of like, oh, for goodness sake, get over it. I've got blue bulbs. You know, yeah, exactly. You think you've got a problem. Go and look at the heterosexual orgasm gap and talk to women about.

That is such a thing, isn't it? The orgasm gap. Tell me about that because it's really important that we talk about this, and the clitoris definitely plays a part in this. Yes. Within heterosexual relationships, there is a huge disparity between the percentage of men experiencing orgasm as part of their sexual encounter and women. And the statistics, if you look at college hookups,

it's kind of somewhere between 3 to 8% of college girls having an orgasm, but even amongst longstanding established relationships, it's 67% of women frequently experiencing orgasm and men 95% of the time. Wow. I mean, never mind the pay gap. How have we got to that point where that is just become kind of, because we're all part of that script and I'm definitely, it wasn't until it was pointed out. I was like, actually, that is kind of weird.

Why aren't I insisting, well, I want my. now. How do we get to this point where it's, we know that the guy's going to have an orgasm, but if you do, it's just a kind of like a perk that we don't feel entitled to it. We don't feel entitled to it. And I think that goes back into kind of the history of attitudes towards female sexual desire and agency that actually it's not that these women don't know how to experience orgasm, in fact, under their own steam. They will get there as quickly as men on the whole. but it's this idea that a woman with sexual agency is in some way threatening or dangerous. And in preparation for today, I was kind of going back through my book and reminding myself of how we got here.

And there were, you know, as late as the 1970s, there were sex advice manuals saying that orgasm was not essential for women, that women were not sexually wired in the same way. But, you know, it goes back so much further than that. and you're very familiar with this, the fact that actually a lot of the 16th and 17th century had a very lusty, robust attitude to sex and pleasure. I mean, look at the language of Chaucer and Shakespeare. There was a really kind of,

it's an incredibly vibrant and healthy respect for it. And I think that's why looking back and understanding how culturally attitudes towards pleasure and desire have moved within the West. And I suppose indeed the influence of the Westers colonises how it then spread into so many other cultures as well to erase the kind of sense of joy from sex and to stigmatize female pleasure. One of my favourite clitoris facts is when I was researching the history of the clit for curious history, I wanted to try and give a little bit of space to non-Western cultures. I thought the Kama Sutra, that's the one I'm going to look through this. And then it actually turns out that the clitoris doesn't feel.

very heavily in it. I was reading a translation and that kept using the word clitoris and I suddenly thought I better check actually because the translation might be translating it as clear but it might not be in the original and I emailed a professor, Professor Wendy, she was amazing and very generous with a time and she had translated the karmus sutra and she got back to me and she went no it's not actually mentioned in the kama sutra that translation has kind of you know played a bit fast and loose and then she just finished off the email with this tiny fact that stayed with me she was like actually the word that they would have used was I think it was championing And that translates to umbrella of the love gods, which is the...

Wait, what a word for clitoris. Except I wonder about that. In terms of the umbrella structure, it does imply something opening up and something larger. I'd never thought of that. And actually the internal structure. And Dr. Tanaya Coutarus, who have spoken with before, and actually some of the Indian sex educators that I follow on Instagram. And I think in the Kama Sutra, no, there is.

a word, but we haven't had the word for clitoris that long. Very true, very true. In culture, you know, when was it formally given the word clitoris? Was it de Graf who insisted on that? Maybe it was DeGraff or was it Cobbilt? I can't remember. But actually the idea that there was a structure, and I think in the Carma Sutra there was an incredibly strong emphasis on the responsibility of a partner to pleasure women and women having the right to seek pleasure elsewhere. And a lot of the translations that we read were Victorian men translating the Karma Sutra, and they erased all those references to pleasure. So I think language can be a very slippery thing in terms of, just because they don't use the word clitoris doesn't mean that it's there, because the emphasis on female pleasure is.

Very true. I've got to get Professor Wendy's name, right. Her name was Professor Wendy Donagip, and she was absolutely amazing and very generous to tell me about what the language would have been used and all these things. But I love that umbrella of the love gods. And I'd never thought of it as being something that, yeah, that opens up. Yeah. I have a real issue. You talked about the limitations of terms we have for the clitoris.

Yes. There's a fabulous poem I was looking at this morning. I don't know if you're familiar with it. But actually, it's from the 1400s. Do you have heard of Guirphal, Miss Shane? And how incredible poem, which is all about kind of the female pleasure centre, but it gets translated as ode to the vagina. And actually, it's really an ode to the vulva. And actually, when you look at the language that she uses, actually it's an ode to the cund.

And she does it beautifully and richly. But why do we insist on, you know, if we just talk about the vagina, this is also part of the erasure of the clitoris. We focus back on that bit about menopause and periods and reproduction. And we move away from having. if you use the word vagina, you don't have any reference points for any other parts of the vulva or the clitoris. You know, it's like you don't have a map. You can't put it in. And I think that becomes incredibly hard when you're having conversations about, again, female pleasure and sex education. I'm always fascinated by the language that we use and not just for vaginas, clitoris, labies, vulva, but like any kind of genitals.

Because like what, if you don't have the words to talk about it, that really limits. any kind of conversations that you can have, doesn't it? And clitoris, I was fascinated by, if you can think, I think there's so many slang words for the penis or for the vulva in its entirety, but actual slang words for the clit are quite light on the ground. I mean, you know, the little bald man in a boat, perennial favourite. Like I said, devil's doorbell, button, but that really is dwarfed by the amount of slang words there are for the penis. There are, and I researched this for my book, and it's incredible. incredibly limiting. You can maybe come up with a list of kind of 10 or 11. And then I think,

obviously, individual couples have their own kind of pet names, maybe. But even slang terms for the vulva. I mean, again, I heard this in one of your other podcasts talking about actually the word vagina is sheath. And actually, it's just a holding, it's a container for the penis. And if you look at slang words for the vagina, we still get things like, I googled it. I just thought, okay, what is somebody going to get if they Google these slam words for vulva and vagina and clitoris? And you get things like, you know, cockpocket, you know, a sausage mitten. That's not empowering, is it? No, it's not.

And they're not loving and affectionate. I mean, I think slang terms for the penis are like slam terms that we have for breasts. You know, they're incredibly affectionate. They're like your kind of best friend next door. they're very kind of cozy, comforting, warm. We don't have quite the same violence within the language that we use for those parts of the anatomy. And I think that comes back to the stigmatisation that we have around female sexuality and that it is in some way threatening and dirty and not to be encouraged.

And I'm really interested in how this move away from a way. a robust attitude towards sex that we see in some of the 16th and 17th century move towards this much more denying culture. Yeah, we're just going to erase it, erase it from the language, erase it from works, erase it from the kind of complete removal and ignoring of it. So in your research, what are some of the earliest references to the clitorist that you've found? I did with my research, decide to stick with Western culture, because that's what I was most familiar with.

And I know that, again, you've written about kind of certainly there were scientists in other cultures using, again, other words, words like tentago or colomella that kind of referred to the clitoris. And again, quite like that, colomella. Colomella recognizing the erectile structure of the clitoris. We find this in Jane Sharp's midwife's manual. And this is something I think would be really interesting to talk about is the mismatch that we have in the. the West and the dominant culture, which is led by the church anatomists, male medical men, philosophers, which increasingly sought to deny the clitoris. And even if a scientist did come along and say, hey, I've discovered this thing that kind

of silenced it, that actually there's a vernacular culture. And if we look at kind of literature, the rib-old jokes that we get in literature, if you look at the books that were being sold under the table that were increasingly being banned by the obscenity laws, there is a different discourse happening. That's interesting. And that makes unraveling the history of the clitoris very complicated because you are hoping to find some kind of linear explanation for this is when it was discovered.

And actually you find yourself going round and round in circles being sent down rabbit holes, which is what happened when Colombo announced his discovery, you know, his boss, Vassalius. We've got to talk about him. Yeah. I mean, the name is amazing. Like, the fact that the guy who thinks he discovered the clitoris is named Colombo. It may as well been called Sherlock Holmes.

I love that. Yeah, and I love that mismatch between people sometimes confusing with Columbus who discovered America. I love that. The jokes. All right. Let's talk about him. The jokes that can be made are endless, aren't there? Oh, that's amazing.

That's so good. Yes. But what I like to see, he did at least acknowledge, he wrote, This Dearest Reader is the Principal Seat of Women. enjoyment in intercourse. I mean, he acknowledged it as the pleasure centre, but it was his boss that kind of came back and put him down with, and I've got a quote here, saying that actually what he had discovered was, and this is, quote, some sport of nature you have observed in some women, and you can hardly ascribe this new and useless part as if it were an organ to healthy

women. And that was Vasilius. He was the master anatomist, and Versaerius. He was the master anatomist, and Vosalius worked under him. And that was how Colombo's great discovery got lost, meaning that DeCraft could come back in 1672 and discover it again. Re-re-discovered it. And then he made a big deal, didn't he? He was all, oh, I can't believe no one's ever written about this before ever. Yeah, I've got the quote.

We are extremely surprised that some anatomists make no more mention of this part than if it did not exist at all in the universe of nature. But he actually found it. He did anatomical dissections. Also, he's got this great quote that I love. And although the arrogance of these men, I mean, what did they think women have been doing? However, he said,

if these parts of the pudendum had not been endowed with such an exquisite sensitivity to pleasure and passion, no woman would be willing to take upon herself the irksome nine months long business of gestation, the painful and often fatal process of expelling the fetus and the worrisome and care-ridden tar. of raising children. My God, I'm not going to lie.

I don't think you can fight that logic, but that's quite a claim, isn't it? But they did. These anatomists did get the role that it played. And that's what's really interesting. I mean, those were scientists who were working in the dominant culture, and they put it out there, but they were time and time again, found that their work was kind of silence. Nobody really took it up.

Nobody sponsored. Nobody was interested. But actually, interestingly, there were. on other parts like blood vessels and heart valves did remain in the culture. So whatever it was, the mainstream dominant culture was just not interested in female sexuality. But when you look at the vernacular culture, have you heard of that incredible book, Aristotle's masterpiece? Please tell us all about it.

Yes, so it came out in 1684 and was really a mishmash of all of the learning and a ton of old wives tales that anybody had. And there's a copy in the British Museum and the curator there said it was a book quote for the everyday people that would have been cheaply printed and sold under the table. And when you go back and look at this book, there's a huge emphasis in it on female pleasure and the importance of female pleasure. And what I found strikingly absent from it were any descriptions of the vagina as a sight of pleasure. Wow. So in the book you get descriptions of the female anatomy.

It includes the paragraphs on the labia, the cervix, the womb, but just no mention of the vagina. It's purely presented as a sheath for the penis. And, yeah, I mean, it's fascinating. Aristotle's masterpiece in his chapter, the external and integral organs of generation in women, he wrote, it is absolutely necessary that they should be known for the public good.

He writes... Yes. Yeah. Hard degree. The clitoris is a substance in the upper part of the division where the two wings meet, the seat of pleasure, being like a man's penis in situation, substance,

composition and power of erection, growing sometimes to the length of two inches, but that never happens except through extreme lustfulness. So yes, people knew about the clitoris. goodness, don't we wish that we had this in Sex Ed today? I'll be back with Sarah after this short break. Did Edison really take credit for things he didn't invent? Were treadmills originally a form of corporal punishment? And would man have ever got to the moon without the bra? You can expect

answers to all these questions and more in the brand new podcast from History Hit, Patented History of Inventions. Join me, Dallas Campbell. as I uncover what really sparked history's most impactful ideas. Each episode, I'll be recruiting the help of experts, scientists, historians, and even a few real-life inventors. Subscribe to patented history of inventions wherever you listen to your podcasts. I love the fact that the label is called Wings. I like that.

It makes me feel like it's a superhero. Yeah. I love Katie. But he just finished off there by saying something that I think that I want to talk about a little bit here. So like we find text and it's clear that people knew what this was, or at least Anatimus did. And it's easy to look at stuff like Colombo and DeGraff and think, oh, brilliant, yeah, like they clearly know this is a good thing for pleasure. But just then in the Aristotle's masterpiece, it started to go into, it only gets really big in cases of extreme lustfulness because there is quite a lot of clit bashing and anti-clit and this kind of weird fear that it's going to turn into a penis and make its owner a lesbian and just be unleashed on the world. absolute scenes, wasn't there?

This kind of weird idea that it could grow and become enormous. That meant you were really lustful. It meant you were really lustful, but also I think it meant you were a threat to men. And that actually this idea that a sexualised woman was a dangerous and threatening to society, I think you see throughout. And that's what drove a lot of the obscenity laws was the idea that it wasn't good for the public good, that actually I found a quote. And I mean, understanding why the obscenity laws came into place are really important.

And it was this idea. This is a quote from the law of libel published on both sides of the Atlantic. In the 18th century, arguing furthermore, that obscene writing, speakings and exhibitions had the tendency to, quote, disturb the peace and economy of the realm. And the idea that if women were empowered to have pleasure, well, they might then go off and be doing it with themselves. But actually also women were not supposed to be independent thinkers.

So women who took matters into their own hands, who became fully sexualized, who became fully self-realized, were going to disturb the piece of the realm. I mean, it was all very neat and tidy. Women had a role. They needed to being procreative, having children, being married, keeping home,

and that actually an independent woman was a dangerous thing because women were lesser and inadequate. Goodness knows what would happen if women had an independent thought and independent action. And I think therefore this idea that the clitoris could grow and be like a penis threatened

all of that thinking. Very Freudian before Freud. Well, we're going to get to him because we can't talk about the clit and not talk about him. But I do remember reading one, it was like a 16th century medical text that said that it found a clitoris

as long as a goose's neck. Oh, totally. He's just really going, no, you didn't. That didn't happen. I was reading about Le Frank, who was actually wrote about sexuality, and I think he was the 1200s, so really, really old. But he was writing about the state of intersex. And the idea that if you had large clitoris, it would be unattractive to men, and therefore it should be cut. And they really didn't like any ambiguity in Jenna Taylor. But in his writing, he was also very clear that if it got to a certain size and rigidity,

it was a penis and therefore it was sacrosanct and should not be cut at all. Wow. But actually if it was smaller than and large and ugly, then it should be, it was very easily sliced out with a knife. Oh. And shockingly, you can fast forward to the injustices on intersex surgeries that have happened. While I was writing this book, the Children's Lorry Hospital in Chicago, finally put a moratorium on intersex surgery.

on infants. And this idea to tidy everything up and create a kind of binary of gender, but also then this notion of what is normal and what is acceptable and what is attractive. And are you familiar, I think, with Jamie McCartney's work, The Great Wall of Vagina? And he acknowledges that it should be called the Great Wall of Vulva. And actually, from the majority of women, labor extends beneath the neat lines of the pudendor and actually clitorises come in all shapes and sizes and this obsession within some way kind of tidying it away and and what isn't tidying it up so we look like Barbie dolls with just nothing there whatsoever just completely smooth surface yeah and there are plastic surgeons in

America who talk about the Barbie vagina and that actually they market surgery and Australia they have pornography laws in which I think the quote is that the vulva should be quote healed to a single crease and that actually... No. Yeah, yeah. I did not know that. Oh my God. This fear of looking at the vulva that actually... Why does it still scare people? It does. I mean, when did we ever see an artwork? We see penises all over the place. When did we ever see an artwork? I know, wall-to-wall cocks, absolutely. But I want to jump back a little bit because I need to talk to you about the Victorians and what they were doing to the clitoris

because you've just touched on, we're still doing genital surgery now to tidy everything up. And the Victorians weren't interested in tidying up vulvas for pornography, but there were people operating on vaginas and in particular clitorises, weren't there? Yeah, they were. And in fact, the term clitorism entered the medical lexicon in a dictionary of medical science in 1854 being defined as an unusually large clitoris. And they started advocating clitoridectomy. not as a religious ritual, but as a minor fix for women who masturbated were frigid, lesbian, insane, or diagnosed with lymphomania, depression, epilepsy, catalypsy or hysteria.

And I was really interested in understanding this word frigid. And I had always thought that frigid just men were not that keen on sex and maybe were a little bit kind of cold to warm up. But actually, frigid very definitely means does not orgasm with penetration. And yes, and I've got a quote in fact, Isaac Baker Brown, who wrote about, I'm sure you're familiar with him, his surgical techniques that he pioneered at London surgical home for women, claiming that epilepsy and nervous disorders were caused by unnatural irritation of the clitoris. And his cure for which he claimed a 70% success rate was described as a harmless operative procedure. And I'm going to quote what he wrote about that procedure. All right. Just give me a sec. Are you ready? Brace yourself. Yep. I'm braced. Let's do it.

The clitoris is freely excised either by scissors or a knife. I always prefer the scissors. I mean, it's absolutely chilling. That's, he's cutting it out with scissors. Yes. I mean, like it can be snipped off like a piece of excess fat on meat. I mean, it's shocking. But then I came across 100 years later, James Burt of Ohio. In 1975, his book, The Surgery of Love, he wrote, Women are structurally inadequate for intercourse. This is a pathological condition amenable by surgery.

And his surgery often include removing the hood of the patient's clitoris as well as other vulva alterations. I mean, structurally inadequate, this comes back down to this debate around penetrative sex being the definitive sex. The be-all and end-all? Yeah. That's somebody who doesn't like his penis and his shit in bed and has decided that it's the woman that needs to be operated on.

That's just, I think you can still get, actually. You can still find surgeons advertising to, sort of like snip the head of the clitoris to sort of like open it up and apparently it makes it more sensitive. It doesn't, it's ballocks, but there you go. Yeah, I mean, and back to your question about the Victorians. I mean, the Victorians were just appalled at the idea that women could experience sexual pleasure through the clitoris

and on their own. I mean, this really threatened the stability of their society. I found a paper that somebody wrote and he talked about that if women masturbated they would experience, quote, marital aversion. Oh, it's true. I mean, it was a really serious published article. Baker Smith in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease in 1892.

Wow. A paper titled The Neurophysical Element in Conjugable Aversion. I mean, these were not jokes. These are really serious. No, no, they're not. They're not. It's so ridiculous. It made me burst out laughing. But that was published in a journal by people with brains.

But that's the whole point. They were not jokes at the time. They were published by very serious men of science and men of philosophy. And yeah, the Victorians were obsessed with what would happen if women experienced pleasure. And we should say that Dr. Isaac Baker Brown, the man who was happily snipping out the clitorises of any woman who presented with anything as much as an ingrownail. He was eventually struck off, wasn't he? But he wasn't the only one doing this, not by a long shot. No, and he was part of a culture that was writing about female sexuality that was

presenting it as flawed, as dangerous, as threatening. We've got to talk about Freud because he did a lot of damage to the clitoris, didn't he? He really did. But I suppose he's born out of this culture. What you've kind of got is this idea that the clitorisies. is almost like a rogue agent that needs to be got rid of. And this obsession develops with pleasure only through vaginal penetration. And the key understanding around that, as far as I can work out, is that you need a penis for it.

If we allow the clitoris to the party, then that means that you can get off on your own. And you don't need a man. You don't need a penis. But what did Freud say about it? What did Freud have to say about their clitoris? He claimed that the elimination of clitorial sexuality is the, quote, necessary precondition for the development of femininity since it is immature and masculine in nature. Back to this idea again that actually a strong clitoris threatens men and the penis in some way.

But the other thing that I really despise Freud for was his argument that because women didn't have a penis, that their super ego was not fully developed. And the super ego is that in Freudian structure of the brain, it's the part that moderates women's ability to participate in society as civil and just beings. And he suggested that a woman's lack of a penis and the fact that she only has a clitoris makes her lesser. Is this where we see this kind of weird distinction growing up that you still see today that there are clitoral orgasms and vaginal orgasms and that they are like, they're mates,

but they're not of the same thing, which we now, because we know the structure of the clitoris, they're all clitoral orgasms, aren't they? Like it might feel like it. It's kind of deep inside the vagina, but that's actually the clitoral roots that are reaching back. Yes. I mean, there is so much that we don't understand about female sexuality. Is it, but question my, is it all orgasms are clitoral orgasms or also is some of it? I mean, some women experience orgasm through stimulation of the nipples. And there's been some fabulous research on women who are paralysed and kind of beneath the lower half of their bodies and they are still able to experience orgasms. the relationship between orgasm as it's experienced in the brain and the pleasure site. But yes, you're right. If it's a genital orgasm, then actually where the clitoris is placed in the pelvic cavity will dictate how pleasure is experienced. And 75% of women, this is research studies done over the

last 100 years consistently say that they do not achieve orgasm without clitoral stimulation. And so therefore for women, penetration is not the default orgasm mechanism. But that doesn't mean that women want to choose. But it's this idea that it has to be penetration for it to counter sex. And for goodness sake, why can't women have it multiple ways? You know? Yeah. And it's still rooted into how we understand sex.

We understand it very heteronormatively. We understand it as being penis and vagina. Like maybe not even consciously, but when it comes to something like, how do you lose your virginity? What we all think that is, is someone puts a penis in your vagina, and then it leads to all kind of weird small print where people are like, no, I'm still a virgin, I've only had anal sex. Look at the purity culture in America where, and in fact,

Peggy Ornstein has done fantastic research on this. And actually, within purity culture, teens are four times more likely to have had anal sex in the name of not having had sex. Wow. Because it's not sex, right? It's not sex. No, it's not safe. It doesn't count.

That doesn't count. It's not penis and vagina. Oh, my God. So what was Freud's legacy, do you think, when it comes to the clitoris? Because it'd be nice to think that this was just the kind of ravens of just someone who was shit in bed and it didn't have any impact. But do you think that his work and his writing did have a legacy on how we understood the clitoris? I think it was incredibly formative because he was a product of the culture that he came from, but he spoke with such authority and was such a big thinker in our time,

the way that he finally put the lid on the clitorial pleasure as being unfeminine and immature. And maybe it would have been different if thinking had not been interrupted by the First and Second World Wars, but certainly in Western culture, an awful lot of kind of scientific research, discovery and thinking was inevitably, ended incredibly abruptly because of those ruptures. And then post-war, there were indeed other really huge issues to grapple with. And I don't think the world returns to exploring female sexuality until after that. The refusal to acknowledge the clitoris as being a good and positive thing or that it doesn't have a role in sex. That ultimately sort of erases lesbian sexuality as well, doesn't it?

It just writes them out of the conversation entirely. Yes. And I think this is interesting. When you look at history is that actually lesbians kind of slipped under the radar because people couldn't imagine. I mean, there wasn't a penis. So what could they be doing? So the assumption... What were they doing? So you've got, again, this kind of mismatch

that women under their own steam might be experiencing pleasure and that was rather frightening that came with the Victorians, but also, well, there wasn't really a penis, so yeah, it didn't really count. And actually in terms of prosecution of gay men, which was vile, lesbian women slipped under the radar.

And in fact, indeed, even in lockdown with a ton of videos on TikTok, with everyone's sign of suddenly working out that they were TikTok, lesbians because actually there was this whole like oh my goodness lesbians are having amazing sex and when we go back to your first questions about the orgasm gap is that actually within lesbian couples there isn't that orgasm gap I mean of course one woman knows exactly how to get another woman off they're having great sex they're having amazing sex and it was a via TikTok that i found out

that lesbians bring snacks to hookups quite often that's incredible they bring baked goods and like dips and things. I've been wasting my time with these losers. You just have a mattress on the floor for fuck sake. I was going to say, I love that. Fuck me and feed me. That's it, it's because you can find the clitoris and you can make a good sandwich and that's really. What is do you need? Oh, I would talk to you about this forever and ever, but I'm not allowed to. But I suppose I have to finish this by saying, what do you think the future of the clitoris is? Because it's still such like an undiscovered, like we know it's there, obviously, but we've only just discovered how big it is, how far it goes back, how many nerve endings it has, there's still

so much myth to unpick about it. Where do you think we're going to this? What do you think the future of the clitoris is? I'm optimistic in that I think, I think young men and young women today are much better versed in sexuality, in pleasure. I don't think they necessarily have the information, but I think they know that there's something wrong with it and something broken. And I feel incredibly encouraged that I think our battle is still with the dominant culture, but I think we have many, many more allies. And I don't know if you followed on Instagram last week, the presentation from somebody I follow on Instagram called, I think, the queer surgeon, but he specialises in transsexual surgical procedures. I'm not too sure I've got the

vocabulary right there. But actually, he needs. He, is the person who's worked out that the clitoris has 10,000 plus nerve endings. And he has studied the clitoris because of the role that it plays in phalloplasty or any kind of gender reassignment surgery. And I think the clitoris will find champions in many, many places. And as we open up a discussion around what sex and sexuality really means and how important it is, I'm optimistic. I don't know what are your thoughts on it.

I think that the generations that are coming through now are going to save us all. I think it's going to take some time, but you can see the shift around the discussions already. Like, even when I was a teenager, I remember there was this kind of weird narrative that if a guy went down on a woman, it was somehow like weak. Like, you know, only pussies did it, that it was something that he wasn't manly to do it. And now we've got Harry Stiles, God love him, singing about watermelon. I don't have you seen that video, but it's quite clearly like he's, you know, eating this watermelon. and it's all sexual pleasure. And there was a DJ a couple of years ago

who said something stupid about how he wouldn't give his woman oral pleasure. And then the rock, Dwayne Johnson, like, tweeted about it. And he was like, I always bring my A game. So I think there is a narrative that has shifted around it, that it's not, if a woman doesn't come, that's not like, she didn't just have a lovely time anyway. She didn't just come along for the scenery. Like, you have to do something about it.

So I think that things are changing and hopefully for the better. And I hope that historians, hundreds of years from now, will just be like, yeah, they'll be in a completely clip-friendly world. And I think the comedy world will help us. I mean, look at shows like Netflix. And increasingly we begin to see representations of sex in the movies and on TV that isn't purely driven by kind of, you know, that hands-free missionary position for thrusts and we're all done. And that actually you get, oh, God love him, Jamie Fraser and Outlander. And, you know, we are increasingly seeing representations of heterosexual sex that isn't all about penetration. Absolutely.

So you have been incredible to talk to. And if people want to find you, where can they find you? Oh, thank you. I love being followed on Instagram and it is at its dot personal girls. And I post there about the history of sexuality and any other quirky things that take my fancy. And that's the best place to find me. and my book, The Sweetness of Venus, History of the Clitoris, is available in bookshops in North America and on Amazon and the rest of the world. But it's also read by the fabulous Esther McVane as an

audiobook if you love to consume your literature that way. Amazing. You have been wonderful to talk to, Sarah. Thank you so much for joining me between the sheets. Anytime, Kate. I love it. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Sarah for coming on and talking to me. I had so much fun talking to her. And if you had fun, if you liked what you heard, if we've enlightened you, if we've rocked your world, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Join me again betwixt the sheets, the history of sex, scandal and society. A podcast by History Clit. Hit! Sorry, history hit! This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.