The Clitoris Erased: How Patriarchy Hid Female Anatomy Until 1998

There is an elephant in the room, and it has been there for thousands of years. We live in societies that celebrate knowledge, yet the complete anatomy of the clitoris—an organ that exists solely for female pleasure, untethered to reproduction or penetration—remained unknown until June 1, 1998. That was the year Australian doctor Helen O'Connell published her findings in The Journal of Urology. By contrast, Hippocrates had mapped the penis by 35 A.D. The gap between these two moments is not an accident of history. It is a symptom.

The clitoris poses a problem to patriarchal order. As writer Paula Bennett observed in 1993, clitoral pleasure is "an orgasm that ceases to be married to the penis, to the law." An organ of pure sensation, disconnected from reproduction or male penetration, undermines the entire architecture of male dominance. Feminist researcher Shere Hite made this explicit in 1977 on ABC television: sex had been framed, always, as preparation for penetration—nothing more. Throughout the twentieth century, scholars like Anne Koedt and Carla Lonzi recognized the clitoris as a symbol of female independence. Today, transfeminist thinkers are returning to the question with fresh urgency. Yet the history of this organ is one of desolation and terror. It has been physically removed through direct excision in many African countries and parts of the Middle East, and historically in Europe as well. It has been symbolically erased from medicine, psychology, and culture itself.

The erasure was systematic. In the Victorian era, physicians like Isaac Baker Brown, president of the London Medical Society, proposed clitoridectomy as a cure for women's "mental problems." Though Brown was eventually forced to resign, his ideas persisted. The United Nations has documented therapeutic clitoridectomies performed in Europe and the United States well into the twentieth century. Sigmund Freud, one of Western culture's most influential thinkers, declared that women possessed a kind of "damaged penis" and that those who could not achieve orgasm through penetration alone were infantile, dysfunctional, frigid—sick. Freud did not physically mutilate the clitoris, but his theories had the symbolic effect of severing healthy sexuality. His student, psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte, believed she suffered from frigidity and underwent three surgical procedures to move her clitoris closer to her vagina in hopes of achieving vaginal orgasm. It did not work.

The consequences rippled outward. Throughout the twentieth century, information about the clitoris contracted. In 1948, the organ was removed entirely from Gray's Anatomy, one of the world's most authoritative anatomical texts. Knowledge became ignorance by design. As historian of science Robert N. Proctor has shown, ignorance is not merely the absence of information—it is often constructed, maintained, defended. Psychiatrist Mary Jane Sherfey, confronted in the 1960s with women reporting ease of clitoral orgasm and difficulty with vaginal orgasm, began to wonder whether "female sexual neurosis" was a disease at all. Her research revealed that across human history, sexual relationships had taken many forms, and that female sexuality had often been generous and varied—until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries imposed heterosexual penetration as the only legitimate form of sex, and vaginal orgasm as the only legitimate pleasure.

Today, the old order is trembling but not yet fallen. Mainstream pornography still depicts the female body as a mere instrument for another's pleasure. Knowledge of the clitoris remains scarce. In the 2019 documentary "My Name Is Clitoris," two young women learn that the internal portion of the clitoris extends more than ten centimeters. They are stunned. "It's crazy," one says. Journalist Adaia Teruel, in her 2023 book "Women Who Fuck," documents contemporary female sexuality and notes that the clitoris is being rediscovered now, as if for the first time. One woman she interviewed asked: "How is it that we know there is water on the Moon but we don't know where the fluid comes from when many of us orgasm?" Philosopher Catherine Malabou argues that the clitoris has been erased because its very existence "interrupts the logic of command and obedience." It disturbs the order. As Malabou and historian Thomas Laqueur have both observed, every anatomy lesson depends on the cultural politics of its moment. For nearly two centuries, female pleasure and its primary organ have been a history of ghosts and the disappeared. The question now is whether that history is finally ending, or whether the work of reclamation has only just begun.