Do you know what the clitoris actually looks like?

I don’t know about you, but I didn’t know what a clitoris looked like until I was 22. Let’s talk about why, even as a clitoris owner, I didn’t know what this organ looked like for over two decades of my life, until I read this book, The Organ Education Forgot. So, here’s what this book taught me.  

So majority of the clitoris is actually inside the body, with only the tip visible on the outside.  

We’ve known what the clitoris looks like, in its full form, for hundreds of years - since the 1600’s, to be precise. But when we started making more scientific discoveries about how reproduction works, and realised that a person can get pregnant without orgasming, well, it was decided that the clitoris was no longer relevant. After this, it wasn’t shown in books illustrating the body, and if it was, only the external part was shown. 

It got a little worse when Freud came along, who was a super influential psychiatrist in the 20th century, and pretty much said that the clitoral orgasm was ‘wrong,’ and that if you wanted to have sex the ‘right’ way, you should be having a vaginal orgasm (we now know that the clitoris can actually aid conception, but if you want to find out more, you’ll have to read about that in the book).  

So, where we left off - in 1947, which, keep in mind, was less than 100 years ago, the clitoris was taken out completely from diagrams of the body in the most popular anatomical textbook at the time. And so, we forgot about this incredible organ, until 1998. This is when urologist Dr. Helen O’Connell carried out the first extensive anatomical research about the clitoris using MRI.   

We are slowly re-educating ourselves about the clitoris, and so it’s important to recognise that there’s no shame in not knowing. If you want to know more about this topic, check out The Organ Education Forgot here.