one
anatomy NO TWO ALIKE
Olivia likes to watch herself in the mirror when she masturbates.
Like many women, Olivia masturbates lying on her back and rubbing her clitoris with her hand. Unlike many women, she props herself up on one elbow in front of a full-length mirror and watches her fingers moving in the folds of her vulva.
“I started when I was a teenager,” she told me. “I had seen porn on the Internet, and I was curious about what I looked like, so I got a mirror and started pulling apart my labia so I could see my clit, and what can I say? It felt good, so I started masturbating.”
It’s not the only way she masturbates. She also enjoys the “pulse” spray on her showerhead, she has a small army of vibrators at her command, and she spent several months teaching herself to have “breath” orgasms, coming without touching her body at all.
This is the kind of thing women tell you when you’re a sex educator.
She also told me that looking at her vulva convinced her that her sexuality was more like a man’s, because her clitoris is comparatively large—“like a baby carrot, almost”—which, she concluded, made her more masculine; it must be bigger because she had more testosterone, which in turn made her a horny lady.
I told her, “Actually there’s no evidence of a relationship between an adult woman’s hormone levels, genital shape or size, and sexual
desire or response.”
“Are you sure about that?” she asked.
“Well, some women have ‘testosterone-dependent’ desire,” I said, pondering, “which means they need a certain very low minimum of T, but that’s not the same as ‘high testosterone.’ And the distance between the clitoris and the urethra predicts how reliably orgasmic a woman is during intercourse, but that’s a whole other thing. I’d be fascinated to see a study that directly asked the question, but the
available evidence suggests that variation in women’s genital shapes, sizes, and colors doesn’t predict anything in particular about her level of sexual interest.”
“Oh,” she said. And that single syllable said to me: “Emily, you have missed the point.”
Olivia is a psychology grad student—a former student of mine, an activist around women’s reproductive health issues, and now doing her own research, which is how we got started on this conversation—so I got excited about the opportunity to talk about the science. But with that quiet, “Oh,” I realized that this wasn’t about the science for Olivia. It was about her struggle to embrace her body and her sexuality just as it is, when so much of her culture was trying to convince her there is something wrong with her.
So I said, “You know, your clitoris is totally normal. Everyone’s genitals are made of all the same parts, just organized in different ways. The differences don’t necessarily mean anything, they’re just varieties of beautiful and healthy. Actually,” I continued, “that could be the most important thing you’ll ever learn about human sexuality.”
“Really?” she asked. “Why?”
This chapter is the answer to that question.
Medieval anatomists called women’s external genitals the “pudendum,” a word derived from the Latin pudere, meaning “to make ashamed.” Our genitalia were thus named “from the shamefacedness that is in women to
1have them seen.”
Wait: what?
The reasoning went like this: Women’s genitals are tucked away between their legs, as if they wanted to be hidden, whereas male genitals face forward, for all to see. And why would men’s and women’s genitals be different in this way? If you’re a medieval anatomist, steeped in a sexual ethic of purity, it’s because: shame.
Now, if we assume “shame” isn’t really why women’s genitals are under the body—and I hope it’s eye-rollingly obvious that it’s not—why, biologically, are male genitals in front and female genitals underneath?
The answer is, they’re actually not! The female equivalent to the penis —the clitoris—is positioned right up front, in the equivalent location to the penis. It’s less obvious than the penis because it’s smaller—and it’s smaller not because it’s shy or ashamed, but because females don’t have to transport