The Clitoral Truth: The Secret World at Your Fingertips (7 page)

Over the years, I’ve explained the clitoris in self-help groups, class rooms, and at conferences and public forums. The reception has been overwhelmingly positive. These presentations always generate lively discussions, set off the proverbial light bulbs, and in many cases transform the way that women think about sexual response and, ultimately, their sexuality. I asked a few women who have attended these sessions to describe the impact that this information has had on their thinking.

Tamara found an alternative to vigorous stroking: “After seeing the picture of a woman feeling the clitoral shaft, I experimented with rolling my finger slowly back and forth over it as I get lost in a fantasy. Now `rolling the shaft’ is one of my favorite sensations during sex.” Kimeka discovered a new area where stimulation was uniquely effective: “Those visual images from
A New View of a Woman’s Body
helped me focus stimulation in areas, such as the perineum, that I hadn’t paid much attention to before. When my girlfriend applies slow, rhythmic pressure with her fingers or knuckles, I can feel it all the way up to my uterus. It really enlarged the area in which I feel sensations.”

Cynthia found that something she thought was a problem wasn’t really a problem after all: “I was already pretty self-aware, but seeing pictures of the whole clitoris made it crystal clear to me how my sexual arousal developed and why I was feeling things in certain places. Also it cleared up one really perplexing question. I had

always had trouble urinating after orgasm, and I would try to force the urine out, but learning that the urethra is surrounded by erectile tissue helped me to see why you wouldn’t he able to urinate right away and why that’s all right.”

Unlike Anne Frank’s mother—and millions of other girls’ mothers—Cynthia is able to give clear, useful answers to her daughter’s questions about what’s “down there”: “Knowing the names and functions of all of the clitoral parts has allowed me to feel so comfortable helping my five-year-old learn about her genitals. I can give concrete answers with assurance and I feel very joyous about being able to pass this information on.”

Andrea, who had never had an orgasm until she was in her mid thirties, started masturbating and finally discovered what wasn’t happening, became orgasmic, and then multi-orgasmic:

No matter how attracted I was to men, I never had an orgasm. I got lots out of affection, skin contact, fun, some times achieving a choice “conquest,” but never orgasms. When I started having sex with women, I found out how much you could do to your partner with your hands, and sex reached a new level for me, but still... no orgasms. Then I started experimenting on myself. I found A New View of a Woman’s Body and seeing how all those parts worked together gave me the necessary clues, Here’s how I had my

first orgasm: I planned what I was going to do all day and sort of talked myself into being excited. After dinner, I took a nice hot bath, put on my favorite opera CD, lit some candles, and got into bed. As I was masturbating (I had not graduated to vibrators yet), I thought about every single part of my clitoris. I slowly massaged the parts I could touch one at a time, thinking how it was changing and how it was connected to the next one. I could feel when things became engorged. My vulva puffed out, my lips were all tingly, my glans was very hard, and I could feel the shaft quite easily. Feeling with my hands what was going on was new to me. I experimented with different kinds of strokes on different parts; then quite by accident I found the one that worked. I put my index and middle fingers into my vagina curving them around under the pubic hone and used hard, fast strokes pulling the glans down and the inner lips in. I visualized the clitoral muscles and could feel them getting tighter. Then I had my first orgasm! I didn’t feel spasms, but I felt this sort of golden glow in the clitoris that spread through my pelvis and down my legs like warm honey. My legs felt weightless and for maybe twenty seconds—who can tell time in this situation—my feet sort of went spastic. Then without warning, I burst into tears. I guess they were tears of relief. I kept masturbating and after a while I was able to have an orgasm with a partner. After a couple of

years, I got more confident and started having up to a dozen orgasms during masturbation, but during sex with partners, I have to have help or give them to myself.

These are only a few of the personal experiences that women have related to me. They reveal the usefulness of clitoral literacy and suggest ways this information can be put to use in your own life.

WHY THE VULVA ISN’T THE CLITORIS

When most people think of women’s genitals, they typically think of the vulva, the outer and inner lips, and the clitoral glans. In Latin, vulva means “wrapping” or “covering,” and these definitions are certainly better terms than pudendum. The Romans used pudendum to refer to both the male and female genitals, and it is still used today in medicine to refer to the visible genitals of women. Traditionally, the vulva includes the hairy pubic mound and outer lips as well as the inner lips, and the introitus, or vestibule, the space around the vaginal and urethral openings. Some definitions of “vulva” include most of the visible structures. One I found also includes the clitoral bulbs. “We chose to exclude the outer lips from our definition because they are not particularly sensitive compared to clitoral structures which are richly endowed with nerve endings, and they do not undergo much change during sexual response,” Carol Downer explains. “We also excluded the vestibule, the area around the

WOMEN CONCEPTUALIZE AND CHARACTERIZE THEIR ORGASMS VERY

DIFFERENTLY
. As well as anybody. and better than most, British poet Alison Fell captures the poignant diversity of the perception of women who shared their orgasmic experiences in consciousness

raising groups in the 1970s:

An orgasm is like an anchovy

she says,

little, long, and very salty,

No, its a caterpillar undulating, fat and sweet.

Or else it snarls and shrinks

to the corner of its cage while your mind, consenting

whips in and out, out in the open

and so free.

vaginal opening encompassed by the inner lips, because it’s really a space created by anatomical arrangement—it’s not an anatomical structure.” She also notes that the outer lips do not arise from clitoral tissue in the embryo, but from the “labio-scrotal swelling,” which also produces the scrotal sac, which is an important reproductive structure in the male.

As for me,

A sunburst, says a third, says the last,

an exploding watermelon: if I have them brazen I had one at Christmas. with birthday candles,

with water faucets

Your body betrays, she says, or the handles of Toby jugs, one way or another. I don’t care who knows it. Rash and wriggling, it comes But how few I have—

and comes, while your mind keep that in the dark. “

says lie low. or go.

There is no male equivalent of the vulva. Classifying most of the clitoris as the vulva is like taking the male pubic mound and scrotum, adding the penile foreskin and glans, and calling it a “mulva,” or “pulva,” or something like that. It leaves out many crucial parts. Anatomists—and men—don’t quibble about which parts belong to the penis. They know. The penis has an inviolable anatomic integrity that has not been accorded the clitoris—at least not since the Renaissance. Why do we tolerate such anatomic equivocation of women’s genitals? In addition, defining the clitoris as “wrapping,” “covering,” or “vulva” implies passivity to women’s genitals. This is not to say that the vulva is nonsexual. It’s what a woman and her sexual partner see when they look at her genitals, what she first feels when she masturbates. Vulval structures—the pubic mound with its coarse pubic hair, and hairy outer lips—do have sensory receptors, but not in the dense quantity that clitoral structures have. As one woman told me, “When I’m turned on, even

my pubic hair is sensitive. I like my partner to run his hand or beard over it for a while before he touches anything else

Betty Dodson’s video Viva la Vulva documents a group of women ages twenty-five to fifty-five sharing their feelings, exploring, and learning new things about both the vulva and the clitoris. This video, listed in Resources, is an essential primer for any woman who wants to become more intimately acquainted with the visible parts of her sexual anatomy.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE VAGINA?

If you accept the definition of the clitoris described in this chapter, then you know that the vagina is not a part of it. Instead, the vagina is a major component of a woman’s reproductive system. It provides an outlet for menstrual blood. The vagina also serves as a well- constructed receptacle for sperm, assuring perpetuation of the species. In addition, as the final portion of the birth canal, the vagina expands to at least ten times its normal size to allow for the passage of a baby.

In addition to its reproductive roles, the vagina does have specific sexual functions, but they are essentially passive. During the initial phases of sexual excitement, due to the pressure of increased blood volume, a colorless fluid filtered from the blood is pressed through the vagina’s mucous membrane walls, creating the sensation of wetness, and providing lubrication that facilitates the insertion of the

penis, fingers, vibrator, or other objects into the vaginal canal. This fluid, which is produced within one to two minutes of sexual stimulation, is known as “vaginal sweat—the sexual secretion that is most familiar to us. The vagina provides access for direct stimulation of the urethral sponge, which runs along the top of the vagina. Many women do find vaginal penetration exquisitely pleasurable, and erroneously ascribe these sensations to the vagina. In reality, the sensations stimulated by penetration, whether with the penis, fingers, sex toys, or what have you, are caused by pressure on the parts of the clitoris that surround the vaginal opening—the clitoral bulbs; the wishbone-shaped legs, which encompass the bulbs like parentheses; the muscles through which the vagina and urethra pass; and the urethral sponge. When engorged with blood, these clitoral structures form a fat horseshoe-shaped cuff around the vaginal opening and are highly sensitive to touch, pressure, and vibration. The vagina does contain nerves that are responsive to pressure, so you may feel these sensations when something is pushed through the vaginal opening. The pressure of penetration may also cause pleasurable sensations in the perineal sponge, which is located just beneath the forward floor of the vagina. This “clitoral cuff” also provides the exact type of stimulation—friction and pressure—that men need to have an orgasm. As heretical as it sounds, in terms of sexuality, the vagina is more useful to men than it is to women!

SO WHAT TO CALL IT?

Many women have trouble saying “clitoris,” as if it’s a word in a foreign language. Well, in a way, it is. Its origin comes from the Greek word “kleitoris,” meaning the female genitals. The preferred English pronunciation is KLIT-er-iss, but the secondary kli-TOR-iss is heard fairly often and is not incorrect. It’s rather depressing to note that the clitoris is far better known by a host of derogatory euphemisms such as “pussy,” “cunt,” “twat,” “snatch,” or “beaver,” among the hundreds of negative terms that have been commonly used over the years.
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Even though the Greeks believed in the essential similarity of the male and female genitals, that does not mean that they had equal respect for them. The female genitals were the butt of jokes in countless plays, and “cunnus” or “cunt” appeared repeatedly in abusive graffiti. In recent years, feminists have sought to defuse the negative imagery conveyed by “pussy” and “cunt,” recasting them with positive meaning, much as lesbians and gays have with the word “queer.”

In contrast, the ancient Tantric and Taoist reverence for women’s sexuality in general, and their genitals in particular, is illustrated by a host of lyrical euphemisms such as “Jade Gate” or “Jade Chamber,” “Golden Furrow,” “Anemone,” “Pearl,” “Oyster,” “Lotus,” “Lyre,” and “Phoenix.” The ancient Hindu term yoni has achieved some currency today, and has respectful, even worshipful connotations. Taken literally, yoni refers only to the vulva or the visible parts of

the clitoris, and has never been used to encompass the greater, hidden parts of the female genitals. Because it is a foreign word, it serves as yet another euphemism for that word that is so hard for us to say. So what should we call “it”? I think it would be nice—to say nothing of anatomically correct—if see look at the female genitals and say in a strong clear voice: “clitoris.”

Certainly there is far more to sex than erectile tissue, exotic hormones, and orgasms. There are also thorny, often intensely controversial social issues—and deeply complicated psychological ones—reproductive concerns, constantly shifting definitions of gender, and powerful, contradictory religious and spiritual constructs, all of which hinder our comfort with and enjoyment of sex. Yet, as I think this chapter reveals, the physical part of sexuality, especially of women’s sexuality, has been profoundly misconstrued, misunderstood, and sadly neglected. At least we now know the clitoral truth: that women have a complex and powerful genital system that is designed for one specific purpose—
pleasure
. This knowledge should encourage us to explore our capacity for sexual response, and help us to do it with confidence and assurance.