A Curious History of Sex

by Kate Lister

  The word ‘clitoris’ didn’t come into use until around the sixteenth century. The Ancient Greeks and Romans would call the ‘little bald man’ (1997) the ‘nymph’, ‘myrtle-berry’, ‘thorn’, ‘tongue-bag’, or just plain ‘bag’.8 Charming. But the compliments don’t stop there. Orally pleasuring the clitoris was considered obscene. When cunnilingus is spoken about in Classical literature it is generally regarded as something repugnant, indulged in only by lesbians and weak men whose erection had failed them. So much so that many Greek insults involved accusing someone of ‘dining at the Y’ (1963). The Greek playwright Aristophanes (446–386 BC) mentions cunnilingus several times to point to a character’s moral failings. His character Ariphrades appears in several plays as the ‘inventor’ of oral sex: ‘he gloats in vice, is not merely a dissolute man and utterly debauched, but he actually invented a new form of vice; for he pollutes his tongue with abominable pleasures’.9

  Roman fresco from the Terme Suburbane in Pompeii AD 79.

  The Romans went one better and actually considered the word clitoris (landīca) an obscenity, in much the same way as ‘cunt’ is obscene today.** Cicero referred to it as ‘the forbidden word’.10 It was regarded as so naughty, it really only appears in street graffiti: ‘Fulviae landicam peto’ (‘Seek the clitoris of Fulvia’), and ‘Eupla laxa landicosa’ (‘Eupla, a loose, large clitoris’).11 Poet and satirist Martial (AD 41–104) mocks the clitoris as a ‘monstrous blemish’ and a ‘protuberance’.12 All this big-clit bashing may be disheartening, but, as Melissa Mohr argues, ‘people swear about what they care about’, and it seems that the Greeks and Romans really did care about the clitoris and its stimulating effects.13 And at least they were talking about the clitoris, because the conversation stalls somewhat when we hit the Middle Ages.

  It’s not really fair to say the medieval world forgot about the clitoris – they knew it was there and what it was (sort of), but they didn’t really move the discussion on from the big boys of Greek and Roman gynaecology.†† Today, we understand scientific research to have a ‘half-life’, meaning that information is being updated at such a rate that by the time medical students leave university, half of what they have learned will be obsolete.14 However, European medieval doctors believed in vintage medicine and continued to trot out gynaecology’s greatest hits for hundreds of years. One of the pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1400) is a physician, who we are told is well educated because he has studied the work of…

  … old Esculapius,

  And Deiscorides, and also Rufus,

  Old Hippocrates, Hali, and Galen,

  Serapion, Rhazes, and Avicen,

  Averroes, Gilbertus, and Constantine,

  Bernard and Gatisden, and John Damascene.15

  Meaning that even by the late Middle Ages, the most up-to-date research Chaucer’s physician is reading is over two hundred years old. Imagine your surgeon looming over you with a meat cleaver and a medical manual from the eighteenth century and you start to get a sense of just how bizarre that is. So, it’s little wonder that medieval understanding of the clitoris circled the same conclusions drawn in the Ancient World: namely, big ones are bad, and lesbians like them. However, new Arabic medical texts were also published and translated throughout the Middle Ages and proved highly influential. The work of Islamic physicians such as Avicenna (AD 980–1037) and Albucasis (AD 936–1013) were translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona ( AD 1114–1187) and were still in use across the West until the seventeenth century.

  A woman caresses another woman who uses a root vegetable as a dildo, 1900.

  Medieval Arabic texts continued to fret about large clitorises, recommending they be trimmed back to curb all manner of naughty behaviour, including promiscuity and lesbianism. Albucasis, often called ‘the father of surgery’, wrote:

  The clitoris may grow in size above the order of nature so that it gets a horrible deformed appearance; in some women it becomes erect like the male organ and attains to coitus ... this too you should cut away.16

  Avicenna threw his hat in the ring and claimed that a large clitoris ‘occurs to [a woman] to perform with women a coitus similar to what is done to them with men’.17 But at least Avicenna recognised the clitoris’s function in pleasure and advises men to the rub ‘area between the anus and the vulva. For this is the seat of pleasure.’18 Thankfully, Avicenna’s work was highly influential throughout medieval Europe and advice on stimulating ‘the seat of pleasure’ is found in a number of later texts, such as William of Saliceto’s Summa Conservationis et Curationis (1285) and Arnold of Villanova’s De Regimen Santitatis (c.1311).19

  The Middle Ages may not have significantly advanced the field of gynaecology, but the translation of Arabic texts into Latin led to several new terms for the love button. ‘Nymph’, ‘myrtle’ and ‘landīca’ were still popular, but ‘tentigo’ and ‘virga’ (both alluding to an erection) came into medical parlance. ‘Bobrelle’ pops up in fifteenth-century Britain, which sounds delightfully like ‘bobble’ and probably means something that’s raised (to ‘bob’ up and down).20 ‘Kekir’ is another fifteenth-century term that is cited alongside bobrelle in Wright’s Anglo-Saxon and Old English Vocabularies as meaning ‘tentigo’ (or erection).21 But despite all this medieval bobbling, the clitoris was not widely discussed in surviving medieval sources. Even when it was, most medieval physicians were simply repeating much earlier medical opinion and threatening to cut the poor thing out. But things really start to get going when we hit the Renaissance.

  In possibly the most champion act of mansplaining in the whole of human history, two Renaissance anatomists proudly claimed to have ‘discovered’ the clitoris in 1559. (Cue slow-clapping.) Italian anatomist Realdo Colombo (1515–1559) was Chair of Anatomy at the University of Pisa and claimed the ‘quimberry’ (2008) was his discovery in De re Anatomica (1559).***** (Note this discovery belongs to Colombo, and not Columbo, the man in the mac.) The runner-up in this gynaecological game of ‘Where’s Wally’ is Gabriele Falloppio (1523–1562), of Fallopian tube fame. Falloppio published Observations Anatomicae in 1561, but maintained he wrote it in 1550. He claimed that he was the first to plant his flag in Mount Clit and that ‘if others have spoken of it, know that they have taken it from me or my students’.22 Of course, both men are talking utter nonsense as not only had doctors been aware of the clit for some time, but women had long had an inkling of its whereabouts as well.

  Colombo and Falloppio ‘discovered’ the clitoris in much the same way Columbus ‘discovered’ America to the bemusement of the natives some sixty-nine years previously. But they were both so proud of their discovery! Colombo wrote excitedly:

  Since no one else has discerned these processes and their working; if it is permissible to give a name to things discovered by me, it should be called the love or sweetness of Venus. It cannot be said how much I am astonished by so many remarkable anatomists, that they not even have detected [it] on account of so great advantage this so beautiful thing formed by so great art.23

  Falloppio was adamant that ‘it is so hidden that I was the first to discover it’.24 To be fair, their claim that this was new terrain speaks more to the lack of medical information available than to arrogance on their part. And as Colombo and Falloppio based their work on extensive cadaver dissections, they did finally provide new anatomical information about this ‘sweetness of Venus’. True, Colombo thought that the mighty ‘bean’ (1997) produced a kind of lady sperm he called ‘Amor Veneris’, but at least he wasn’t trying to cut it off. They also understood the clitoris was an organ and not just a sweet spot to be rubbed, and this was brand new information. And more than this, the Renaissance anatomists emphasised the clitoris’s role in sex and pleasure. Colombo wrote that his discovery ‘is the principal seat of women’s enjoyment in intercourse; so that if you not only rub it with your penis, but even touch it with your little finger, the pleasure causes their seed to flow forth in all directions, swifter than the wind’.25 Swipe right, l
adies.

  To confuse things even more, in 1672 Dutch anatomist Regnier De Graaf re-rediscovered the clitoris in his landmark Treatise on the Generative Organs of Women, where he chastised his fellow physicians for ignoring it: ‘We are extremely surprised that some anatomists make no more mention of this part than if it did not exist at all in the universe of nature … In every cadaver we have so far dissected we have found it quite perceptible to sight and touch.’26 But crucially De Graaf did away with all this ‘tentigo’, ‘sweetness of Venus’, ‘bobrelle’ and ‘nymph’ nonsense and insisted on using ‘clitoris’ throughout his work. The word itself is something of an etymological mystery, but most likely derives from the Greek ‘kleiein’, meaning ‘to shut’, which may be a reference to its being covered by the labia minora, or possibly to much earlier theories that the clitoris was a kind of door for keeping the womb warm. The first recorded use of the word ‘clitoris’ is in Helkiah Crooke’s Mikrokosmographia (1615), an encyclopaedia of human anatomy where he correctly identifies the location, structure and muscle make-up of the clitoris.****** From here on out, ‘clitoris’ was on the rise.

  Vaginal Speculum, 1678.

  Despite the giant medical leaps forward in sixteenth-century lady-lump appreciation, the obsession with the hypertrophied clitoris continued. In 1653, Dutch anatomist Thomas Bartholin called the clitoris ‘contemptus viorum’, or ‘the contempt of mankind’ because he believed women who overused theirs would become ‘confricatrices’ (‘rubsters’) or lesbians. He even claimed that he knew of one woman who had so abused her ‘contempt of mankind’ that it had grown the length ‘of a goose’s neck’. (Repeat: a GOOSE’S NECK.) Bartholin wrote:

  Its size is commonly small; it lies hid for the most part under the Nymphs (labia) in its beginning, and afterwards sticks out a little. For in Lasses that begin to be amorous, the Clitoris does first discover itself. It is in several persons greater or lesser: in some it hangs out like a man’s yard, namely when young wenches do frequently and continually handle and rub the same, as examples testify. But that it should grow as big as a goose’s neck, as Platerus relates of one, is altogether preternatural and monstrous. Tulpius hath a like story of one that had it as long as half a man’s finger, and as thick as a boy’s prick, which made her willing to have to do with women in a carnal way. But the more this part increases, the more does it hinder a man in his business. For in the time of copulation it swells like a man’s yard, and being erected, provokes to lust.27

  It would be nice to think that Bartholin was a lone, crank voice, but this was far from the case. In his enduring popular sex manual, Conjugal Love; or, the Pleasures of the Marriage Bed (1686), Nicolas Venette warns of some clitorises that swell ‘to such a bigness, as to prevent entrance to the yard’ and of labia that are ‘so long and flouting that there is a necessity in cutting them in maids before they marry’.28 In ‘A Faithful Catalogue of Our Most Eminent Ninnies’ (1688), the Earl of Dorset attacks Lady Harvey as a predatory lesbian, writing that her ‘clitoris will mount in open day’ – meaning it was so big she could use it as a penis.29

  Even women got in on the act. Jane Sharp was a seventeenth-century midwife who published a landmark text on pregnancy and childbirth in 1671: The Midwives Book. Here, Sharp gives detailed anatomical descriptions of the vulva and the function of the clitoris. She writes that the clitoris ‘makes women lustfull [sic] and take delight in copulation, and were it not for this they would have no desire nor delight, nor would they ever conceive’.30 While this might seem like something of a win for the ‘love-nub’ (2008), Sharp also warns about large clitorises that ‘shew like a man’s yard’. She goes on to compound this with a hefty dollop of racism, writing that ‘lewd women’ in India and Egypt frequently use their large clitorises ‘as men do theirs’, though she has never heard of a single English woman behaving like this.31 She continues:

  In some countries they [clitorises] grow so long that the chirurgion [surgeon] cuts them off to avoid trouble and shame, chiefly in Egypt; they bleed much when they are cut … Some sea-men say that they have seen negro women go stark naked, and these wings hanging out.32

  This marks the beginning of a Western obsession with the genitals and sexuality of women of colour that persists to this very day.

  We don’t know if any of this medical ‘advice’ around clitorectomy was actually followed, or what your everyday women on the street made of all of this because (sadly) their voices are lost to us. We know that some doctors fretted about big clitorises, but how much of this filtered down to the consciousness of the general populace is anyone’s guess.

  But there may be one controversial body of evidence available for us to examine just how medical theories of hypertrophied clitorises impacted outside the medical community in the early modern period: the witch trial records. It has long been hinted at by various historians that the fabled ‘witch’s teat’ may have in fact been the clitoris.33 Various online articles have got a bit carried away with this idea and claimed that the clitoris was referred to as ‘the witch’s teat’ in the early modern period, but this isn’t true. The witch’s mark was left by Satan to symbolise his ownership of the witch (think the ‘dark mark’ in Harry Potter), whereas the witch’s teat was a kind of nipple where the witch suckled Satan in the guise of a familiar. The difference between the two is academic, as both were used to condemn a witch to death. Absolutely anything could be identified as a teat or mark: boils, burns, warts, moles, scars, haemorrhoids, or any kind of lump or bump. Although this mark could be found anywhere on the body, it was regularly found on the genitals.

  T. Norris, The History of Witches and Wizards, 1720.

  When James VI of Scotland (later James I of England) published his witch-hunting guide Daemonologie in 1597, he advised people where to look for this secret mark and why.

  The Devil doth generally mark them with a private mark, by reason the Witches have confessed themselves, that the Devil doth lick them with his tongue in some privy part of their body, before he doth receive them to be his servants, which mark commonly is given them under the hair in some part of their body, whereby it may not easily be found out or scene, although they be searched.34

  There are recorded incidents of the teat turning up in the throat, on the belly, the breast, and on men, so it is clear in these cases the teat is not the clitoris. But there is no denying the similarity between the hypertrophied clitorises fretted over in medical texts and sexualised descriptions of the witch’s teat, raising the possibility that the clitoris itself was interpreted as the witch’s teat by overzealous witch hunters.

  After seventy-six-year-old Alice Samuel was executed as a witch in 1593, the gaoler examined her body and found irrefutable proof she was guilty.

  [H]e found upon the body of the old woman Alice Samuel a little lump of flesh, in manner sticking out as if it had been a teat, to the length of half an inch; which both he and his wife perceiving, at the first sight thereof meant not to disclose because it was adjoining so secret a place which was not decent to be seen.35

  In a final act of indignity, poor Alice’s body was put on display for the public to inspect her genitals for themselves. In 1619, Margaret Flowers confessed to having a black rat that sucked upon the teat on her ‘inward parts of her secrets’.36 In 1645, Margaret Moone was interrogated by the self-styled ‘Witch-Finder General’, Matthew Hopkins. Poor Margaret was one of several victims that Hopkins found to have ‘long teats or bigges in her secret parts, which seemed to have been lately sucked’.37 In Bury St Edmunds, 1665, elderly widow Rose Cullender was found to have three teats in her vulva. One ‘it appeared unto them as if it had lately been sucked, and upon the straining of it there issued out white milkie matter’.38 All the women were executed for witchcraft. We will never know precisely what these teats were, but the descriptions of them as long, fleshy protrusions from the vulva that were sucked by demons to pleasure the witch certainly has echoes of the irrational fears over long clitorises we have seen.


  Richard Boulton, The Witches of Warboyse, 1720.

  By the end of the sixteenth century, the clitoris was well and truly out of the bag (so to speak), and not just in medical texts, or the ravings of witch hunters. It was recognised as an organ and one that provided pleasure. It was even a source of humour. Our favourite potty-mouthed aristocrat, John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, names one of the characters in his The Farce of Sodom, or The Quintessence of Debauchery (1689) ‘Clitoris’. Clitoris is a maid of honour and she regularly brings her queen, Cuntigratia, to orgasm. And the notoriously naughty libertine Sir Francis Fane made jokes about ‘cunt bay’ and ‘pier clitoris’ in the city of Bath.

  The eighteenth century was a boom time for the print industry. Production and distribution methods improved, costs dropped and literacy rates rose, bringing newspapers, magazines, almanacs and cheap broadsides to the masses. Where technology leads, sex soon follows, and the trade in erotic literature similarly flourished. Eighteenth-century pornographic literature offers a very welcome second opinion on the clit to that of the scalpel-wielding physicians.******* Nicolas Chorier’s A Dialogue Between A Married Lady and A Maid (1740) is fictionalised erotic exchange between a MILF and her maid where the older woman teaches the younger all about sex. Part of this lesson covers clitoral pleasure. Hurrah!

  … towards the upper part of the cunt, is a thing they call clitoris, which is a little like man’s prick, for it will swell, and stand like his; and being rubbed gently, by his member will, with excessive pleasure, send forth a liquor, which when it comes away, leaves us in a trance, as if we were dying, all our senses being lost, and it were summed up in that one place, and our eyes shut, our hearts languishing on one side, our limbs extended, and in a word, there follows a dissolving of our whole person and melting in such inexpressible joys, as none but those who can feel them can express or comprehend.39