Taboo the clit?
Photo DR Marie Docher Modeling Clitoris painting gouache
In the Middle Ages, the clitoris was not yet taboo. Women were even encouraged by the church to masturbate to promote procreation, even fidelity ... It was not until the nineteenth century and advances in technology as the microscope (in the scientific observation of ovulation) to highlight that these two acts are not correlated! The masks fall: the clitoris is only for fun! It is now outlawed by the well-meaning society, predominantly male.
Thus, the first exact description of the clitoris dates only from 1998 and coincides with the date of the arrival of Viagra treating disorders of male erection.
Paradoxically, if the orgasm called "clitoral" is unknown, the mechanisms of male erection have been much more studied ... The main reason for this "disparity" is that the female enjoyment is still taboo, and that she is at the origin of many clichés about women, including hysteria, an entirely invented disease.
Freud himself had decreed that clitoral sexuality was infantile and that only vaginal penetration ...
We must liberate the female body and it is probably inevitable to start with the genitals, which have been at the heart of the misogynistic speeches,
explains the artist, Sophia Wallace.
According to the artist, whose artistic project called Cliteracy was a first step forward in the understanding of the clitoris: "we can not consider the empowerment of women as long as this part of the body is defined by shame, weakness and pornography . "
Educational tool of sexuality
Absent SVT textbooks, unlike the male organ, it will now be easier to study women and free them from "clitoral taboos" with the work of Odile Fillod, an independent researcher in sociology and popular science. the latter has designed a 3D model of real size clitoris that wants to be as realistic as possible.
In February 2016, she spoke at the Digital Crossroads, the fablab of the Cité des Sciences. With the photographer Marie Docher, who participates in the documentation of the project, they have advanced by asking questions that are not only technical: "Must we represent all parties? Should we also design and print in 3D a penis, to be able to compare? "
Their model will ultimately be female only, full size and full, with cavernous bodies and spongy bodies that accompany it, called "vestibule bulbs".
A step forward for feminists
In 2011, the Osez la féminisme association launched a campaign against the "taboo" that surrounds the female organ. A website osezleclito.fr and posters "Dare the clitoris" were intended to talk about female sexuality but also to fight against her mutilation in some parts of the world, with excision that has not disappeared.
The clitoris in a few figures
More than one in two women (53%, according to some studies) is clitoral and needs stimulation of this erogenous zone to reach orgasm.
The clitoris is much more sensitive than the penis. It has 8,000 nerve endings, twice as much as the penis, which averages 4,000.
