I found this article in The Guardian this week, and if you have been struggling with how to work with your wife’s body during sex and foreplay, read carefully.
And if you are a proponent of Female Genital Mutilation, I hope this makes you understand how barbaric the practice is. Almost 30 years after the intricate web of nerves inside the penis was plotted out, the same mapping has finally been completed for one of the least-studied organs in the human body – the clitoris.
As well as revealing the extent of the nerves that are crucial to orgasms, the work shows that some of what medics are learning about the anatomy of the clitoris is wrong, and could help prevent women who have pelvic operations from ending up with poorer sexual function.
The clitoris, responsible for sexual pleasure, is one of the least studied organs of the human body. Cultural taboo around female sexuality has held back scientific investigations and the clitoris did not even make it into standard anatomy textbooks until the 20th century.
And in the 38th edition of Gray’s Anatomy in 1995 it was introduced as just “a small version of the penis”.
A Melbourne urologist, Helen O’Connell, says: “[The clitoris] has been deleted intellectually by the medical and scientific community, presumably aligning attitude to a societal ignorance.”
To get a better idea of the inner workings of this key pleasure-related organ, Ju Young Lee, a research associate at Amsterdam University Medical Center in the Netherlands, and her colleagues used high-energy X-rays to create 3D scans of two female pelvises that had been donated through a body donor organ programme.
The scans revealed in 3D the trajectory of the five complex tree-like branching nerves running through the clitoris in unprecedented detail.
“This is the first ever 3D map of the nerves within the glans of the clitoris,” said Lee.
She is amazed it has taken so long, considering a similar level of knowledge regarding the penile glans was reached 28 years ago. Lee and her colleagues show that some branches of clitoral nerves reach the mons pubis, the rounded mound of tissue over the pubic bone.
Others go to the clitoral hood, which sits over the small, sensitive, external part of the clitoris – the glans clitoris – which is just 10 per cent of the total organ. Other nerves reach the folds of skin of the vulva, the labial structures.
“I was especially fascinated by the high-resolution images within the glans, the most sensitive part of the clitoris, as these terminal nerve branches are impossible to see during dissection,” said Georga Longhurst, the head of anatomical sciences at St George’s, University of London.
O’Connell, who published the first comprehensive anatomical study of the clitoris in 1998, said the findings were crucial to understanding the female sensory mechanism underlying arousal and orgasm via stimulating the clitoris.
“Orgasm is a brain function that leads to improved health and wellbeing as well as having positive implications for human relationships and possibly fertility,” she said.
The mapping of clitoral nerves is likely to inform reconstructive surgery after female genital mutilation, one of the most extreme examples of cultural misogyny.
According to the World Health Organization, more than 230 million girls and women alive today in 30 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia have undergone FGM, in which the visible part of the clitoris may be removed, along with parts of the labia.
O’Connell said the work could also inform surgery to treat vulvar cancer, gender reassignment surgery and genital cosmetic surgeries, such as labiaplasty, which increased in popularity by 70 per cent from 2015 to 2020.
Lee is hoping to open a clitoris exhibition within the Amsterdam University Medical Center to help expand knowledge about the clitoris, inspired by the Vagina Museum in London.
Edited from The Guardian, UK
