The penis, naturally, has been studied in exhaustive detail and there is no dissension about which parts belong to it. In fact, anatomists typically agree on the definitions of all other bodily structures and organs: a knee is a knee, an eye is an eye, and so forth, they have yet to agree on the definition of women’s pleasure system.
Rebecca Chalker (The Clitoral Truth, 2018)
We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.
Audre Lorde
Women want sex, they just don’t want the sex they can have.
Esther Perel
On Valentine’s Day I visit a sex worker and it’s not what I expect. Having said that, my understanding of the industry till now comes from Friday Night Lights, those photos of Hugh Grant in the nineties, and watching a sex show in Amsterdam that was set to the music from Batman, so my expectations may be skewed. I knock on the apartment door and she greets me warmly, shaking my hand and smiling.
‘I’m Robyn,’ she says.
Robyn is small, with red hair tied back in a ponytail. She’s dressed comfortably in a black top and black pants, like she’s working backstage at the theatre.
While I unravel myself from a coat, scarf and boots, I become this absurd babbling person, exclaiming about weather and the Winter Olympics, and complimenting her on anything that comes to mind. ‘That winter sun is so lovely!’ ‘How lovely are Tess & Scott? That ice-skating couple?’ ‘This is such a lovely space!’ I say ‘lovely’ about twenty-seven times in the space of three minutes.
If Robyn notices she doesn’t let on and instead sits me down at the kitchenette table and boils the kettle. It’s a small studio apartment, filled with the friendly clutter of a life. The kitchen and living area is one room, there’s a closed door I assume is a bedroom, and a bathroom off to the left. A massage table looms in the centre of the living space. It’s covered in white sheets, with a yoni egg and crystal placed neatly on top. It feels sacrificial, or reverential.
It’s a crisp, bright day, and Toronto’s winter sun is lovely, dammit. I’ve just walked for two hours, through dirty puddles, past mounds of snow, past school playgrounds with kids throwing actual snowballs, like I’ve only really seen on The Simpsons.
Robyn hands me a steaming mug of tea and pulls up a chair. I’m so curious about this woman, who I read about in Closer: Notes from the Orgasmic Frontier of Female Sexuality by Sarah Barmak. Robyn has a degree in English literature and sexuality studies, has worked for years as an escort, and now works in the field of Sensual Bodywork, a field that focuses on the way touch and sex can heal. I already love her calm movements, the way she seems to be taking everything in, the spark and readiness in her eyes.
‘Why are you here, Brooke?’ she says, blowing on the top of her tea and leaning back in her chair. ‘What do you want out of today?’
The thing is, I’ve been knocking around in this body of mine for close to forty years and for a lot of that time I’ve known where the baby grows, where the penis goes, and what parts the heterosexual men will look at, but I haven’t always known the way it could be played with for my own joy. I’ve understood my reproductive system as this clean-lined diagram, this sea-creature thing, something you might find in a long white robe in the Cantina Bar in Star Wars. I’ve always liked the dancer’s posture of it, the open arms, the arching back, as if it’s breathing in, readying itself for war, for love, for both, maybe. Something like fireballs in each hand, winding up to throw. I’ve always liked knowing it’s inside of me. How surprised I was when I saw bodies cut open on educational videos and hospital shows – when I discovered the brutal inelegance of our insides, the honest mess of what we are.
But before my thirties, I barely even heard a human being say ‘clitoris’, except perhaps in that dopey dad sitcom way (‘Your keys are harder to find than the clitoris! Ha ha! Womens don’t even like the sex anyway! So! Let’s just not worry about it! Amirite! Beer! Etc!’). It wasn’t till my thirties that I found out that the bean on the outside of my body is only a small part of the clitoris, that it’s a bit like the tip of a snorkel rising up out of the ocean. That there’s at least eighteen distinct parts to it that are hiding out under my skin. I now know the language of it: glans, hood, shaft, arms, bulbs. I now know it’s a whole network of pleasure, that nerves branch out from it in unique ways and connect to the brain. I now know it engorges with blood when aroused. I now know it is the only human organ that exists purely for pleasure. I now know I can pleasure the shit out of it, and that I love doing that very much, whether someone else is there or not.
I believe I’m the kind of person who is uncomfortable talking about herself and yet, it turns out that I love talking about myself to Robyn. Turns out I can’t get enough of talking about myself to Robyn, that I should be in the Winter Olympics for talking about myself to Robyn. We sit with our tea in the gentle afternoon light. We laugh a lot – she has this gorgeous dorky laugh that reminds me of a friend back home – and she is challenging, hopeful, encouraging, sharp, non-judgemental. I tell her things I’ve not told anybody, things I don’t even really know about myself. I share a pretty ungraceful story about me having sex in a hostel shower. My mum had just died, I was in Europe, and I was drinking with a much younger person whose idea of seduction was to go into great detail about every single drinking-induced vomit he’d experienced (a particular favourite of his being a ‘helicopter spew’). By 3 a.m. we were cohabiting the shower and at one point he said, ‘What do you like?’ and because it took me a few moments to realise what he meant, he repeated it: ‘Tell me what you like.’
‘It was the most simple thing to say to someone when you’re naked with them,’ I say to Robyn. ‘The most common of courtesies. But it was the first time anybody had ever said that to me.’ I pause. ‘And it was genuinely the first time I’d thought to ask that of myself.’
I tell her I want to know what ego-less attention to my body feels like. I want to feel free to prioritise my own pleasure. I don’t know how to do that, I say. I add that I’m not convinced the script of heterosexual sex is truly satisfying for people with vaginas. That I find the whole linear, goal-oriented, prioritising his pleasure, centring of penetration, ending at his orgasm script a bit boring. I tell her about some disconnected, unkind sex I’ve had, and some connected, kind sex I’ve also had.
‘I’m asking myself why I have sex,’ I say.
‘That’s a good question,’ she says. ‘Why do you?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘A hope for connection, I think. I want it to be about really knowing someone, and inviting them to really know me.’ I check myself. ‘I sound like a bit of a dick, don’t I?’
She laughs, shakes her head, no, so I add: ‘People often think I mean I need emotionality and deep love to enjoy sex – in that way women are told is “natural” for them. But I don’t mean that. I mean something like tenderness and mutual respect while with another human being. Even if I only know them for one night.’
She nods. ‘Do you masturbate?’ she asks.
I tell her I come easily alone, that I find it distracting when there’s someone else’s brain in the room. ‘I’m in their heads, wondering what they want.’ I look over at the massage table. ‘You must have so many people cry as soon as they get on that table,’ I say, feeling a new, unrecognisable grief rising in me.
‘So many people cry as soon as they sit in that chair,’ Robyn nods. ‘As soon as they walk in the door. They’ve spent all that energy making the appointment and now they’re here and they’re just like—’ she breathes out. ‘Everyone thinks they’re abnormal. I want to scream at them on the street: you’re all normal!’
Here’s a question: why the fuck didn’t I know anything about the clitoris till I was in my thirties?
It has to have something to do with not ever seeing a picture of a clitoris, or hearing the word in the mainstream. Nothing from my doctor, or gynaecologist or health teacher. Nothing from my parents, or partners or friends. Maybe – maybe – the magazines mentioned it (Dolly was all we really had back then), but my memory is of being rallied for when sex happened at our bodies – all the plucking and ab-curling and spots for perfume, all the witty ways to combat a claim of ‘blue balls’.
Also, it probably has something to do with the whole of (western) history, which has a confusing relationship to the clitoris. Dr Laurie Mintz in Becoming Cliterate and Rebecca Chalker in The Clitoral Truth make it clear that this is because the people writing and drawing and studying the clitoris have historically not been the people who actually have clitorises, and so clitoral history becomes like the shittiest most drawn-out game of hide and seek you can think of.
A very, very, very short history would go something like this: the Greeks and Romans know about the external and internal parts of the clitoris but see it as a ‘failed attempt at a penis’, and in the Dark and Middle Ages it is ‘the Devil’s teat’.19 The clitoris makes a comeback in the Renaissance era when anatomists start including the full clitoris on drawings of the female body, but we lose it again in the Victorian era, on account of doctors working out that it has nothing to do with pregnancy.20 This is around the time that the clitoris goes from ‘being depicted as an extensive organ system to a meaningless bump’ and ‘female orgasms [are] considered unnecessary, inappropriate and unhealthy’.21 This is also around the time that the vibrator is invented (for doctors to use on ‘hysterical’ women), and the time Freud fucks us all up by declaring that ‘clitoral orgasms’ are for babies and ‘vaginal orgasms’ are for grown-ups (current research states that all orgasms are from the clitoral network). ‘In essence,’ Mintz says, ‘he said that grown women who need clitoral stimulation to reach orgasm are defective’.22 This probably leads to Princess Marie Bonaparte, a psychoanalyst and grand-niece of Napoleon, studying the relationship between female orgasm and penetration, discovering that women whose clitorises are further from their vagina find it more difficult to orgasm during vaginal penetration, and having an operation to move her clitoris closer to her vagina (it doesn’t work). In 1947, we lose the clitoris again, because Dr Charles Mayo Goss, the editor of the 25th edition of Gray’s Anatomy, widely considered to be the authority on anatomy, erases the clitoris entirely. In 1953 Alfred Kinsey finds it again, publishing a book that reminds us that the clitoris is the centre of female orgasm, and that ‘intercourse is not the best means of pleasure for women’.23
In 1998 – I was nineteen – Australian urologist Dr Helen O’Connell ‘discovers’ the full clitoris, publishing a paper about the ‘clitoral complex’ that is often larger than the penis. In 2005 – I was 26 – Dr O’Connell and her colleagues ‘did the first mapping of women’s genitals using MRIs’,24 and in 2009 – I was thirty – French surgeons Pierre Foldès and Odile Buisson publish the first 3D ultrasound of the clitoris (Foldès also invents the first successful Female Genital Mutilation reversal surgery).25 ‘With perhaps up to or more than eight thousand nerve endings,’ Chalker writes in 2018, ‘it is the most densely innervated and, hence, most sensitive part of the human body, female or male. Almost no research has been done on the innervation of this extremely key anatomical feature, so this figure is only a guestimation’.26
It’s clear that throughout the whole of western history, the clitoris gets lost and found, erased and discovered, revered and despised.
You guys: it’s not fucking Where’s Wally. IT’S BEEN HERE THE WHOLE TIME. You just had to ask.
As a vagina-owner, I’m accustomed to having the hands of strangers in and on my body – doctors and their metal scrapers, beauticians, strange men. But I do love (consensual) touch, and I cannot wait for this session with Robyn. As I lay myself down on the massage table, that thrilling winter sun on my skin through the curtains, Robyn says, ‘Would you like to focus on presence of mind today, Brooke?’ I don’t really know how to do that but I say yes, and she starts slowly on my feet, and I think about a James Baldwin quote I found in Robert Jensen’s The End of Patriarchy: ‘If you can’t be touched, you can’t be changed. And if you can’t be changed, you can’t be alive.’
I loved the feel of things when I was a kid. The feeling of getting dirty and then clean again. Of getting cold and then hot. Hot and then cold. When I was six years old on sports day I took off my shoes at the last minute to run my race – even though we were specifically told not to – because I loved the feeling of the cool grass under my hot feet, and the way moving my body in this way turned air into wind. I was always so surprised by my own body. That I could use it to somersault in water, climb up sand dunes, lie on long grass, flip on trampolines. That I could close my eyelids and make it dark in my brain and my body would knock itself unconscious, for hours. That I could cut my hair and it would grow right back or nick my skin and it would heal itself. That the circles on my fingertips had their own art, that my eyelashes could grant a wish, that the lines on my palms knew my future.
For two hours Robyn touches me. It’s calming, and peaceful, and safe. Fun. I don’t have to perform for anybody else, and it’s slow, unexplosive, and just, well. Lovely. It’s lovely.
Later, after I’ve showered and we’ve chatted a bit, I’m piling on my winter clothes in whirls around me, and I say, ‘I want sex to be like that. Not all the time. But more often than not, I want that to be how sex happens with my body.’
Robyn smiles, nodding patiently. ‘It can be,’ she says.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Okay.’ As I tie up my shoelaces I say, ‘I want to live in your utopia. I want you to be the president of this utopia, and I’m living there.’
‘I’m working on it,’ she says.
I say goodbye to Robyn and on my way back to the Airbnb I wander into a secondhand bookshop. I start talking to the lady working there – Joan, she tells me eventually – small, short grey hair, eager to please. She says she’s always wanted to write but life has gotten in the way.
‘A lot of women do that, don’t they?’ I say. ‘Put everyone else first and never do the thing they really want to do.’
‘Oh, yes, hon,’ she nods emphatically. ‘It’s what we do.’ I think about my mum, how I didn’t know till she was dead that she’d always wanted to do aid work in far-away countries. I never once heard her say that and only found out through a friend of hers. She had us instead, myself and my two brothers, while my dad got his doctorate and practised as a sports psychologist with some of the best athletes in the country.
I ask Joan what she likes to read and she says she once loved Mills and Boon, then moved onto crime, and now reads whatever catches her eye. ‘I tried to read a Mills and Boon recently,’ she says, ‘And I thought, what a load of garbage!’
I smile. I’ve always wondered what they’re like. ‘It’s funny how your tastes change,’ I say.
‘I now buy them for my mum,’ she says. ‘She’s eighty-nine years old.’
‘Oh, I love that!’ I say. ‘So your mum likes them?’
‘Honey, she loves them. Calls them her “old lady pornography”.’ Joan winks, I laugh, and we chat a bit more.
Eventually, I head back out into the night. As I walk under neon lights, breathing in cold air, I think: There is a part of my body that is there to make me feel good.
I think about how I’m probably not going to use my body in the way I was told I would. That fire-ball-throwing, breathing-in Uterus Queen built for baby-housing. I probably won’t ever know if she truly works, what noises I make during childbirth, what it feels like to grow a human from scratch in there.
I think about the diagrams I now know of the clitoris: huggable, sometimes swan-like, or even ferocious – a little like those terrifying Wheelers from Return to Oz. I think about the easy joy I had for and in my body as a kid. I think about all the people who have clitorises, and those who feel like they should – the complexity of experiences with this organ, particularly those outside of my own white-cis, able-bodied experience.
There is a part of my body that is there to make me feel good. That’s the point of it. It doesn’t make a baby. It’s not a sheath for a penis. We don’t bleed out of it. It’s not the thing men are looking at. No one’s really looking at it – including us. But it is just for us, if we want it to be.
I think: It’s mine, if I want it to be.