The Clitoral Truth: The Secret World at Your Fingertips

D
ismissed and misunderstood for hundreds of years, the clitoris is the one part of the female body shoe sole purpose is pleasure. The truth is out there, and internationally celebrated sex educator Rebecca Chalker has something to say about it. In the Clitoral Truth, Chalker offers the only mainstream, in-depth exploration devoted solely to women’s genital anatomy and sexual response. Her highly informative tour of the clitoris is a sexuality workshop in book form. Female readers—straight, lesbian, and bisexual—will learn new routes to sexual pleasure and new ways to enhance thir sexual response. Male reader s will discover a world they never dreamed of.

The clitoris and the penis once were considered equal and equivalent in all respects. After the 18
th

century, however, this knowledge was gradually suppressed and forgotten, along with the idea of the clitoris as an extensive organ system. In the early 1970s, the Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers did important work reviving awareness of the clitoris, publishing Sysanne Gage’s anatomically precise drawings of the female anatomy, and teaching self-examination through the use of a hand-held mirror and speculum. In the
The Clitoral Truth
Chalker, who worked at the Federation, honors their work and continues it. Here she also includes the most recent available studies to show how the clitoris’s many arts work together to produce orgasms, and investigates the veracity of reports of female ejaculation.

The Clitoral Truth describes how women have begun to transform the deeply entrenched male- centered model of sexuality by emphasizing full-body pleasure, and the ways women are increasing their pleasure through masturbation, sex toys, videos, books workshops, individual coaching sessions, and through the wealth of information on the Internet.

Here are vivid personal accounts, a savvy, in-depth survey of female sexuality resources, and the bold illustrations of San Francisco artist Fish.

For people who want to expand their sexual horizons: discover
The Clitoral Truth
.

REBECCA CHALKER
is an internationally renowned women’s health writer and activist. Her books include
The Complete Cervical Cap Guide
,
Overcoming Bladder Disorders
, and
A Women’s Book of Choices: Abortion, Menstrual Extraction, RU-486
. She edited
A New View of A Woman’s Body
and
How to Stay Out of the Gynecologist’s Office
. Her articles have appeared in
Ms
.,
The Village Voice
, and
Self
, as well as in peer review academic journals.

SEVEN STORIES PRESS

140 Watts Street

New York, NY 10013
www.sevenstories.com 2000

THE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

F

irst of all, eternal gratitude to my sisters and colleagues at the Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers, past and present, for their dramatic reinterpretation of how we define the “clitoris,” which began my own long and interesting journey to this book. I also thank them for their unflagging dedication to women’s reproductive health, and their long and mostly unacknowledged

stand on the front lines of the anti-abortion war. Sisters, salud!

Next, I’d like to thank many who helped me over the years shape this book into its final form: Lynn Rosen who did an incisive critique of an early book proposal; Shelby Lynn Brown, for her interest and help with an earlier version of this book; Mary Beth Caschetta, former editor of the SIECUS Report, who invited me to do an article, “Updating the Model of Female Sexuality” (June/July 1994), which led to my publisher Dan Simon’s interest in a book on women’s sexuality; Dan for his commitment to publishing socially significant work and for his extraordinary patience which allowed me to work at my own plodding pace; my editor, Kera Bolonik, for seeing the real

book inside of a larger manuscript and for her sophisticated insights into the often thorny issues of sexuality Jennifer Hengen, my agent, for believing in me and for her keen understanding of the shifting sands of the literary marketplaces my colleagues in the Lily Langtree Study Group, which explores and critiques sexuality issues—they kept me sane! I am also deeply grateful to the many women who so generously shared their personal experiences with me, as well as to the activists and sexologists who I interviewed. Special thanks to Amy Levine, librarian at the SIECUS Library for her generous assistance, and to the Lesbian Herstory Archives for making their resources available. Finally, I’d like to thank my family, which has supported me with unconditional love, even though they don’t always understand a-hat I have chosen to do.

The title, The Clitoral Truth, came to me one day while I was working on the manuscript and I knew it was perfect Later, while reading Linda Grant’s Sexing the Millennium, I found the phrase used as an epigram and was reminded that I had seen it in a porn by Margaret S. Chalmers in The Spore Rib Reader, which I bought in London in the summer of 1982.

INTRODUCTION

T

he women’s health movement emerged from abortion reform activism in the late 1960s, becoming an important component of

the second wave of feminism, and I am privileged to have been a part of it through my work at the Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers (FFWHCs), an association of more than a dozen women’s clinics based on the West Coast, with centers in Mama, Georgia, and Tallahassee, Florida, my hometown. The FFWHCs grew out of an abortion referral service in Los Angeles that was openly active before the Roe v. Wade decision was handed down in 1973. Two months after the decision, the group opened the first freestanding abortion clinic in the United States, opening others in the following five years. These clinics became part of a nationwide network of women-owned clinics and health information centers that flourished in the 1970s and 1980s. Carol Downer, founder and longtime CEO of the group, and Lorraine Rothman, founder of the Orange County FWHC in Santa Ana, California, true godmothers of the women’s health movement, promoted the concept of self-

empowerment and self-knowledge through the use of a personal plastic speculum, which made the vagina, previously a province solely of gynecologists, accessible to women themselves. I worked at the Tallahassee Feminist Women’s Health Center, co-founded by my friend Lynn Heidelberg in 1977, and later was hired to edit a book on women’s reproductive health, written by the FFWHCs. The project eventually yielded two books;
A New View of a Woman’s Body: An Illustrated Guide
and
How to Stay Out of the Gynecologist’s Office
, both published in 1981.

The early editions of
Our Bodies, Ourselves
opened a tsunami of hitherto unavailable information about basic physiology and self- care, and provided sophisticated critiques of medical studies that enabled women to make truly informed choices about the diagnosis and treatment of common conditions, from yeast infections to cancer. I benefited enormously from this information, and working as a lay health worker in the clinic in Los Angeles provided an even deeper level of knowledge and skills. Through my work on both the books and my work in the clinic, I gained new insights into abortion, birth control, vaginal health, sexuality, childbirth, donor insemination, hysterectomy, and the highly charged politics of women’s health. As I talked to women about their health concerns, it was not only enormously gratifying to he able to provide information that was often desperately needed, but to offer these clinical services on a woman-to-woman basis. In the clinic, we provided in-depth

information, and I noticed that clients were often relieved that we weren’t gynecologists. We did most of our health care in groups, teaching breast self-exam, showing women our cervixes before we helped them see their own, and giving nut plastic speculums as freely as other businesses distribute ballpoint pens. We taught our doctors how to perform abortions using the smallest possible instruments to minimize discomfort and allow the procedure to he done without anesthesia. We established a later abortion hospital program that served women from the western United States, Canada, and Mexico; taught ourselves to lit cervical caps; and started the first donor insemination program outside of a commercial sperm bank. We gave papers and workshops at conferences such as the National Women’s Studies Association, the American Public Health Association, Planned Parenthood, and the National Abortion Federation. Staff members traveled to Mexico, Central America, Europe, and the Middle lint to meet feminists who shared our concerns. And we published our books.

After leaving the FFWHCs, I moved to New York City and began writing books about women’s health, including
The Complete Cervical Cap Guide
, and collaborating on books like
Overcoming Bladder Disorders
, and
A Woman’s Book of Choices: Abortion, Menstrual Extraction, RU-486
. I also lectured at universities and women’s groups across the country and spoke at sexuality conferences around the globe, including the First International

Conference on Orgasm in New Delhi, and the World Congress of Sexology in Heidelberg, Yokohama, and Hong Kong.

After finishing
A Woman’s Book of Choices
, I began working on a proposal for a hook on women’s sexuality hook, as I envisioned it, would introduce the FFWHCs’ stunning reinterpretation of women’s genital anatomy to a wider audience, investigate how this information got lost, and explore why this information is so vital to our understanding of women’s sexuality. As my work progressed, I found out how the tiny glans came to he considered the clitoris and why women’s sexuality is defined by male standards, what I’ve come to call the “male-centered, heterosexual model of human sexuality.” Finally, I really understood what my colleagues at the FFWHCs and other feminist sexuality activists had discovered early mg sex was going to improve for women until they began exploring and defining their sexuality for themselves. We need more than contraception and a public discussion of sexuality that the limited sexual revolution of the 196th provided. a say “limited,” because the sexual revolution of the 1960s liberated men’s sexuality more than it did women’s.) What we need is a new vision of sexuality that encompasses women’s need, abilities, problems, and preferences.

I also started to read professional sexuality literature and sex advice books. One day, in preparation for a lecture on the history of sexuality. I made a list of the ways in which feminists had already begun to revise the male-centered, heterosexual model. To my

surprise, the list included well over a dozen specific areas in which major changes had already occurred. The feminist sexual revolution, I belatedly realized, had already started, and the theme of my hook suddenly became clear!

The Clitoral Truth
provides information about women’s sexual response that has long been dismissed, undervalued, unexplored, misunderstood. This in-depth exploration of women’s genital anatomy and sexual response is intended to help women understand sexual sensations and discover how to enhance their sexual response, in a more concrete way than has any other sexuality advice book. Many women and their partners, both male and female, want to learn as much as they can about sexual response in order to discover new and more rewarding ways of experiencing and sharing pleasure. I know that the detailed depiction of our genital anatomy in
A New View
, helped me to understand my own sexual response in a far more meaningful and useful way, and thousands of women and men who have attended lectures and workshops given by me and my former colleagues at the FFWHCs have agreed. The physiological information in this book is intended to render a more fully realized portrait of women’s sexual response, one that wig hopefully enable women to perceive the complexity, intensity, and rewards of their sexuality.

The Clitoral Truth
also explores ways women are seeking to enhance their sexual response through masturbation, sex toys,

videos, books, workshops. individual coaching sessions, and sexuality information available on the Internet.

The book is intended for a broad readership, from heterosexual women to lesbians, and anyone who has felt excluded from the male- centered, heterosexual model of sexuality. Without the groundbreaking work of feminists, many of whom worked unacknowledged for years, this model of sexuality would remain firmly in place, and this book could not have been written. One of the most exhilarating things my research has revealed is that many of the changes that have contributed to the genuine sexual revolution for women were driven by feminists, and I am proud to call myself one.

Most medical dictionaries and textbooks describe the penis in glorious and meticulous detail, usually with informative illustrations. The clitoris, portrayed as the glans and a few associated parts, typically merits a brief paragraph, and usually lacks illustrations. If an illustration of the clitoris is included, it is often suggested by a little bump or a squiggly line surrounded by unnamed parts and white space. Using such truncated definitions and sketches, it is impossible to explain how women experience sexual response and orgasm.