This short video (8’21″) by Scientific American – the Clitoris, is a fascinating history of the clitoris. The clitoris is the organ responsible for sexual pleasure in women. If you don’t know about this vital organ, it is worth taking a few minutes to watch this video. The clitoris can be the source of more diffuse pleasure than mere climax!
In it, the science and history are well explained. It is full of interesting facts.
The key finding is that science took 2000 years to find the clitoris. To arrive there, the narrator tells us of the positive and negative attitudes to the clitoris. She starts with Hippocrates 2000 years ago. She tells us of Galen, the very influential anatomist, and what he thought of it. Various figures across the centuries come into view. This includes one who called the clitoris, the “Amor Veneris”, the Love of Venus. She reveals how Sigmund Freud dealt with it. He is responsible for inventing the concept of the “vaginal orgasm”. We learn about the impact of his unscientific views too. The narrator then arrives at the all-important MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scan studies by Australian urologist Helen O’Connell.
In the 1990’s, O’Connell carried out MRI scans for the first time ever on living women, during a state of arousal. Previously, work had been done primarily on the corpses of old women. In 2005, she discovered that the clitoris is ten times bigger than previously thought. She also found that it linked to many other organs and functions in the female body. Accordingly, she gave this organ a new name, the “clitoral complex”.
