Half the World Has a Clitoris. Why Don’t Doctors Study It? | Hacker News Reader

Half the World Has a Clitoris. Why Don’t Doctors Study It?

nytimes.com

15 pointsSirLJ17 comments

> So why don’t we know? To Dr. Rubin, the reason is simple: The clitoris is intimately bound up in female pleasure and orgasm. And until very recently, those themes have not been high on medicine’s priority list, nor considered appropriate areas of medical pursuit.

Oh for christ's sake. Why not apply occam's razor? Is the tip of the penis a deeply studied and understood structure? Has it been mapped and analyzed to the point medical science has a definitive reason for everything's existence?

No. It's a small piece of a much larger bit of machinery. The rest of machinery is well studied because problems are common. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that.

Should medical science study more things? Sure, but to suggest "science doesn't like it because female pleasure is taboo" is positively bonkers. I would be SHOCKED if a gynecologist didn't have enough knowledge to diagnose various illnesses related to it. The entire article seems hinged on a case where a doctor, not understanding the anatomy, did nerve damage. Please, point to the proof these injuries are so common that Occam's can't apply. Why are we allowing plastic surgeons (who aren't gynecologists) to operate like the article suggests?

Occam's razor would be right if we humans would be completely rational, but that is not the case. This is a pretty good publication about how the cultural perception of the clitoris affected it's science.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275695577_Clitoral_...

The funny thing is that the clitoris was ignored for a long time, not once, but many times. Everyone just danced around the subject, even if it is an obvious part of the anatomy. There was a time when it was a risky career move to even bring it up, and when it was brought up it was only discussed in a diminutive manner, accentuating it's non-importance, treating it as a non-functional side-effect of the evolution of the penis.

This is an interesting paper about dolphin genitalia that sheds a light on the evolution of clitoris. It really highlights how it's a fully functional organ that serves a purpose. In the dolphin's case they use it extensively for lesbian sex, and of course that serves a purpose too. They aren't just evolved to behave this way by accident, it's natural selection.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357847896_Evolution...

>even if it is an obvious part of the anatomy.

If it is so obvious then why is it common to hear that a significant portion of the other half of the population can't seem to find it? Maybe we need some sexual geography lessons in our schools. AIS, Anatomic Information Systems. Maybe some contoured maps of anatomically correct nudes for middle school and/or high school age kids so they don't get lost on the way to make the most of prom night.

Just kidding. I saw that sentence scrap and had to ask.

The nudes wouldn't be enough, it was a challenge for scientists to map it's entire structure in 3D, it's a large pyramidal-shaped organ, more or less a penis without an urethra, or you can say that a penis is a clitoris with an urethra, but pulled out of the body, though interestingly the penile urethra is the labia minora. The scrotum is the labia majora.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitoris#/media/File:Clitoris_...

So it's pretty crazy to disregard or diminish it. Anatomically it's the primary source of female sexual pleasure for the same reason the penis is the primary male one. The vagina is not especially rich in nerve endings to make childbirth pain more tolerable, however it forms a tissue cluster with the clitoris that is more expansive in some women than in others. There is also an erogenous area (G-spot) in the vagina that might also be an expansion of the clitoris.

I'm not a doctor nor do I play one on television but, being a happily married male for several decades and counting, I am going to claim that I already knew every bit of that.

I make this potentially dubious claim because, while in college, I had near perfect scores on all my exercises in Braille Anatomy instruction. Learning by doing actually works well for accumulation and retention of valuable knowledge like this.

Women are nearly as unaware of the invisible parts of their anatomy as men, which is fine. What's scary is that in any given country whenever there is a survey 60% of the men, and 50% of the women gets the visible parts wrong. They mostly get the clitoris right though, I guess subjectively that's the most important part, who cares about the rest. Don't even start asking people how their genitals work, or about health or anything. There is an entire douching industry built on women not knowing that their vagina is self-cleaning, or that cleaning it even with water can lead to many health problems. Almost one in five women douches regularly.

I don't get why we can't teach people about their bodies in school properly. There shouldn't be anything controversial about it.

I agree about the noncontroversial part especially. We all have something about us that we probably don't understand. This should be an integral part of every person's education so that there are no mysteries. Health class should cover this material as a natural part of a complete curriculum. Maybe show-and-tell time could be modified to include that instruction material. That might go too far in many localities though.

My thinking is that in hard to medium patriarchal cultures female sexual desire makes people really really anxious to the point they refuse to consider the idea that it exists at all.

I looked it up on ResearchGate and indeed most of the literature is about it's anatomy, but even then it took until 2005 to create a comprehensive model of it's structure, using MRI. In recent years however there were many papers about surgical procedures on the clitoris because of diseases, so doctors do study it.

Before 2000 there wasn't much attention on the female sexual circuitry, or at least not nearly as much as on the male one.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=clitoris

2,611 results

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=penis

53,782 results

ovary 177,395 results, testicle 114,480 results

My theory is that it is not a significant source of disease, death or disability.

What it is a significant source of, I hope has been studied well. If not, it should be.

It's PubMed, if you select everything health is the primary context, so your theory is automatically correct. A more interesting context would be evolution, sexual function or culture. There shouldn't be significant disparities between research on penis and clitoris there, but there are.

That's a very good point. From an evolutionary standpoint, a penis must work for male reproduction, or it is selected against very quickly. Neither a clitoris nor a female orgasm is required for female reproduction.

TL:DR; Nobody comes from a long line of eunuchs.

It is a common misunderstanding that in evolution everything is about reproduction, and not the survival of genes, which requires more than just reproduction. Parents would be so happy if reproduction is all it would take.

> Nobody comes from a long line of eunuchs.

Nobody comes from a long line of dumb breeders either, the survival of the species takes more work than just tapping ass. For example a homosexual uncle that's willing to pitch in can play an important part in survival by not creating more hungry mouths, by doing useful work and by creating useful bonds inside or outside of the community. The selection pressure in this case would be on women to have a certain amount of homosexual children. Groups that have such women would enjoy an advantage. Those helpful homosexual uncles just created an evolutionary change, even if they themselves are not reproducing.

> Neither a clitoris nor a female orgasm is required for female reproduction.

It can be however required for any number of advantageous functions playing secondary roles in the survival of genes. There is research to suggest that female orgasm evolved from something that played a primary role in reproduction in ancient mammals, but then it's evolution went in the direction of secondary roles.

How many hairstylists and interior decorators does a village really need though?

I kid I kid :)

The penis is the entire male sexual organ. The clitoris is a part of the female sexual organ.

It would be more appropriate to compare 'penis' and 'vagina', or 'clitoris' and maybe 'glans'(I don't remember my terms from college anatomy very well lol)

The clitoris is pretty much homologous to the penis, not just the glans, the visible part, but the clitoral body behind it that is continuous with the crura, and also the paired bulbs. The distal (closer to outside) parts of the vagina and urethra are the midline core of this pyramidal-shaped structure that's behind the labia minora and majora.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitoris#/media/File:Clitoris_...

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