Inspired by Ladypants McGee
Written by H. Sabet
I don’t think I knew what the clit was until after I started having sex. Even now, much remains a mystery. Imagine realizing what your penis is after you’ve already been using it. Or smoking weed without ever inhaling and knowing what it feels like to get high. Before masturbating or having sex for the first time, I didn’t realize that the clit is the only organ that is dedicated solely to sexual pleasure. That it rivals the penis in size and has erectile tissue. With over 8,000 nerve endings, it contains more than double the number of nerves penises do. Best of all, the clit continues to grow. Not only during arousal, but also 4x its size by the age of 32. And 7x by menopause! (Tina C., “A Whole New Reason to Love Your Clit”)
It’s no coincidence that rad and glorious information about the clitoris is obscured in our society. For thousands of years, thanks to medical inaccuracies, moral objections, and the fact that most scientists, research subjects, and anatomists have historically had penises, precise charting and understanding of the clitoris remains tragically deficient. The significance of the clitoris has also been minimized because it does not have specific reproductive function. Its size is unrecognized because it’s inside.
Can people accept that people with clits not only have essentially the same size sex organs as cis-men, but they can also feel more, have the capability of reproducing, and of getting aroused discreetly without exposing ourselves or blowing our loads? My guess is that some people can’t—por ejemplo, our president/notmypresident.
Is it any coincidence that a man who endorses grabbing women by the pussy has a childlike, pathetically unhinged obsession with size, of always having the biggest and the best—My button is bigger than your button. Not. Even. Possible. The desire to control others’ bodies by asserting non-consensual and feigned dominance is one symptom of repressed envy, “a feeling of discontented or resentful longing aroused by someone else’s possessions, qualities, or luck.”(dictionary.com)
What happens when this longing cannot be fulfilled? This inability to accept truth, inadequacies and verguenza leads to a funny thing called clit/pussy envy. And feeling green is the number one ingredient for making green. If he wants what they have but “bigger” and “better”, and will stop at nothing to gain the leverage he will never have, capitalism is working.
In our redhot sexist, heavily militarized cesspool of a society, nuclear weapons and gender have undisputable connections. Dr. Carol Cohn, who is the founding director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights, built her career in the world of nuclear security policy, having worked at Rand, a US institution for nuclear strategy. In her research, she discovered two key things: that “nuclear strategic discourse is weirdly sexualized in a dominantly masculine way, and that the technical jargon of nuclear strategic discourse is a gendered discourse that leverages masculinized and feminized concepts to police what can be thought in nuclear policy.” Some terrifying examples of this include an ad for a “special bunker busting bomb, called a Kinetic Energy Penetrator, which included statements like ‘designed to maximize runway cratering by optimizing penetration dynamics and utilizing the most efficient warhead yet designed.’ Of this, Cohn says, “In case the symbolism of ‘cratering’; seems far-fetched, I must point out that I am not the first to see it. The French use the Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific for their nuclear tests and assign a woman’s name to each of the craters they gouge out of the earth.” (Aaron Johnson, “Missile envy”)
Overcompensating for their lack of clitoral depth, the government continues to repress female and gender nonconforming sexuality, taking many steps to remove access to information as well as resources for reproductive and sexual health. Trump/#notmypresident has been trying to “cut Medicaid funding, which 13 million American women of reproductive age rely on for family planning, STI testing and treatment and pregnancy-related care. According to the Guttmacher Institute, Medicaid accounts for 75% of all public dollars spent on family planning in the U.S., which helped women avoid nearly two million unintended pregnancies in 2014.” (Maureen Shaw, “Trump’s budget is an unmitigated disaster for abortion rights and reproductive health”)
Not only is this lack of information disempowering sexual health for those with clits, it is empowering a systemic bully to repress female/gender nonconforming sexuality. Even Wikipedia tells us that cultural perceptions of the clit are significantly impacted by the lack of knowledge of the organ. Clits make people feel uncomfortable. Under ‘Weird News’ on Huffpost in 2013, an article titled “‘International Clitoris Awareness Week’ Takes Place May 6-12 (NSFW)” reveals a lot about our social psyche—‘NSFW’=Not Safe For Work. But you ask any teacher K-12 what they find drawn on desks and lockers more than anything else, I guarantee they will say penises. There’s even a comically popularized motion for jerking off a penis, used to mean an array of things. What’s the sign for getting off with a clit? Where’s all the whimsical clit graffiti? One’s relationship to the clit is not meant to even exist and especially not be glorified outside the realm of penis control. It’s a matter of power, of insecurity, of fear and fear-mongering.
So what can we do? For starters, I’d like to bring back International Clitoris Awareness Week, initially started by Clitoraid in 2013, as the first week of May. (This year would be May 6 – May 12th.) Clitoraid, a nonprofit that aims to offer free medical services for the physical restoration of Female Genital Mutilation victims, found that whenever something has an ‘awareness day,’ it makes it more comfortable to talk about. Take a week to celebrate the only organ designed purely for pleasure. Make a giant glittery clit to take to festivals and concerts for people to hug and call it a Glitoris (an artist named Amanda Palmer already did that for real). Draw your own clit and make a clit collage with your friends. Visit your local sex shop and get ideas for creatively treating yourself. Continue to serve your clit communities by supporting proactive sex education. Study a diagram of the clit and learn the names of all its parts to impress your coworkers or your special person [; Knowledge is power. And pussies are meant to riot.