A Curious History of Sex

Looking for the Boy in the Boat ^{A History of the Clitoris}

Unless you’re a late social bloomer who still believes women are domesticated wombs with tits, who should restrict their activities to baking cakes and darning socks, I think we can all agree that feminism has done some pretty marvellous things. Women can now vote, open bank accounts and make cheese from our own breastmilk without being molested by the patriarchal dairy overlords. There’s no doubt, women have come a long way. But there’s still one area that feminism is failing in. One area where the almighty penis continues to reign over the vulva unchallenged – and that area is sexual slang. However many slang words you can think of for the clitoris, there will be a thousand more for the penis, testes or semen. Of course, there are many colloquialisms for the vulva, but they rarely delineate the various important pleasure points contained within that glorious goodie bag: the clitoris, the cervix, or the much mythologised Gräfenberg spot, for example. It’s just ‘gash’, ‘pussy’, ‘clunge’, etc. And I’m not even sure if there are any slang words for the womb or the ovaries (would ‘baby-cave’ or ‘lady baubles’ work?). The whole ‘locker-room banter’ register of bawdy sexual slang celebrates the vulva for the pleasure it brings to the mighty ‘rod’ (1591). The omission of the clit – whose only function is to pleasure its owner – is telling. In Western culture, the clitoris has been overlooked because female sexual pleasure has historically played second fiddle to male pleasure. Literally and metaphorically, the clitoris has never received enough attention.

Take, for example, that much beloved encyclopaedia of vulgarity, Roger’s Profanisaurus, first published in 1998. The work contains over 2,500 slang entries, cataloguing all manner of obscenities from ‘purple headed yoghurt warrior’ (penis) to ‘growling at the badger’ (cunnilingus). But there are only five clitoral colloquialisms to be found within the whole damn thing: ‘boy in the boat’, ‘bell’, ‘button’, ‘fanny flange’ and ‘sugared almond’.^{1} Even the latest reworking of the Profanisaurus series, Hail Sweary (2013), which advertises itself as containing ‘4,000 new rude words and blasphemies’, only manages a dismal five entries on the clitoris; ‘beanis’ (a large ‘bean’ that resembles a penis), ‘clock’ (again, a large clitoris and cock hybrid), and ‘panic button’ – under which is sub-referenced ‘wail switch’ and ‘clematis’. Which means that the clitoris accounts for less than 0.15 per cent of all the entries. But it’s not like the book is pussy light. In fact, while Hail Sweary only contains thirty-seven colloquialisms for the penis and/or testes, there are a whopping 104 entries for the vulva. While this might sound like a win for #TeamCunt, most of these terms are pejorative comments on what’s referred to throughout as ‘untidy’, ‘unkempt’ or ‘messy’ vulvas. References to the labia are multiple: ‘doner meat’, ‘pig’s ears’, ‘Biggles’ scarf’. Pubic hair also features heavily: ‘ZZ Mott’, ‘gruffalo’, ‘Terry Waite’s allotment’. Allusions to fish are tediously predictable: ‘fishmonger’s dustbin’, ‘trout pocket’, ‘haddock pasty’.^{2} And so on, and so on. Despite the book’s obvious obsession with the holiest of holies, the emphasis is clearly phallocentric and prioritises the pleasure the vulva gives, rather than that which it can receive. It might seem like I am picking on the Profanisaurus, but the colloquial drought around the clitoris is universal. Ignoring clitoral pleasure is woven into the very language of sex.

This chapter focuses on the Western fascination with the clitoris and the endless efforts by doctors to understand and ‘fix’ it. As female genital mutilation (FGM) continues to be a major concern across Africa, Asia and the Middle East today, it is important to remember the West’s own hand in this barbaric practice. Some of the earliest Western records describing the clitoris are Ancient Greek descriptions of FGM, allegedly carried out in Egypt.[4] The earliest extant evidence of FGM comes from the Greek historian and geographer Strabo (64 BC–AD 24), who claimed the Egyptians ‘raise every child that is born to circumcise the males and excise the females’.^{3} Though several Greek writers claimed the Egyptians circumcised women, there is very little surviving evidence from the Egyptians themselves to corroborate how they felt about the clit – they may have circumcised the clitoris, they may have left it well alone, or they may have dressed it up like a Mr Potato Head, we will just never know.[5]

Galen (AD 129–216), probably the most influential of the Greek physicians, called the clitoris the ‘nymph’ and thought its function was to help keep the womb warm, like a kind of clitoral bobble hat for your ‘chuff’ (1998).^{4} This made perfect sense to the Greeks as everyone knew that women were hot and wet and men were cold and dry. This was a belief shared by Galen’s contemporary, Soranus of Ephesus (yes, really – a gynaecologist called ‘Soranus’), who practised medicine in Alexandria in the first century. In his four-volume treatise on gynaecology, Soranus describes the anatomy of the vulva fairly accurately, and also calls the clitoris a ‘nymph… because it is hidden underneath the labia such as young brides hide under their veil’.^{5} Soranus’s work gives us one of the earliest descriptions of ‘oversized’ clitorises, and the ‘treatment’ this required. Brace yourselves.

Evidently, Soranus’s work was highly influential as variations on this procedure start cropping up in various medical texts throughout the Classical world.[6] Sixth-century Byzantine Greek physician Aëtius of Amida builds on Soranus’s work, describing an ‘excessive’ clitoris as being both ‘a deformity and a source of shame’. His sixteen-volume medical encyclopaedia gives the most detailed and vivid account of this awful procedure (wince warning):

‘Excessively large’ clitorises were thought to be analogous to a mini penis, and therefore responsible for lesbianism and abnormal sexual appetites in women. This belief dominated cultural attitudes to the sweet spot right up until the twentieth century. In modern medical terms, this is known as ‘clitoral hypertrophy’, a ‘macroclitoris’ or ‘clitoromegaly’, and it is an extremely rare condition. But given the frequency with which hypertrophied clitorises turn up in historical medical texts, you’d be forgiven for thinking our matriarchal ancestors were packing endowments that would make a donkey blush. Obviously, this was not the case, so we have to conclude that this obsession with the clitoris and uncontrolled sexuality was cultural, rather than biological. Given the fascination with cutting out offending clitorises, perhaps it’s no wonder the poor thing has tried to keep its head down throughout history. There is not much mention of the ‘jellyroll gumdrop’ (1919) outside medical literature of Ancient Greece and Rome, but we can find it if we put the effort in.[7]

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}

The Romans went one better and actually considered the word clitoris (landīca) an obscenity, in much the same way as ‘cunt’ is obscene today.[8] 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.[9] 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…

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.

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:

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).[10] (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:

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, ladies.

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.[11] From here on out, ‘clitoris’ was on the rise.

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:

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.[12] 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!

The work of the Marquis de Sade is a predictable clitfest. Even though Sade does devote a considerable amount of time to clitoral torture, there is also cunnilingus, fingering and clit tips aplenty – such as always ‘insist your clitoris be frigged while you are being buggered’ and ‘Madame; don’t be content to suck her clitoris; make your voluptuous tongue penetrate into her womb’.^{40} Which is sound advice for all, really.

One genre of erotic texts known as the ‘Merryland Books’ were published throughout the eighteenth century. These texts write about the female body as if it were a landscape to be explored. There are many puns on rising hillocks, mossy valleys and fertile soil, and just occasionally the clitoris gets a look-in too. As you can see, despite a notable swell in clit appreciation, the medical obsession with large clitorises finds space in the dogeared pages of eighteenth-century pornography as well, where it was further fetishised as an indicator of sexual deviancy.

Whereas large clitorises had been thought to be analogous to a high libido and lesbianism, eighteenth-century anxieties around masturbation gave rise to new reasons for the Goose’s Neck – overuse through excessive ‘diddling’ (1938). In 1771, M. D. T. de Bienville, a little-known French doctor, published his treatise on the dangers of nymphomania. Bienville believed that masturbation was the cause of this unhappy state, and warned that women who masturbated would soon ‘throw off the restraining, honourable yoke of delicacy, and without blush, openly solicit in the most criminal, and abandoned language, the first comers to gratify their insatiable desires’. Well, who hasn’t? What’s more, Bienville was confident that in women afflicted with ‘uterine fury’, the clitoris would be considerably larger than in ‘discreet women’.^{42} Although many ridiculed Bienville’s work, he was one of several doctors around this time who medicalised masturbation and viewed the size of the clitoris as an indicator of whether or not a woman had been rubbing one out – a kind of clitmus test, if you will.

Despite the clitoris being thoroughly enjoyed in Victorian pornography, a small but vocal section of the medical community continued to have serious concerns about the clitorati and the clitmus test persisted into the nineteenth century.[13] French doctor Alexandre Parent du Châtelet (1790–1836), for example, studied the genitals of over five thousand Parisian sex workers and was surprised to find that, contrary to popular belief, ‘the genital parts of the prostitute… present no special alteration which is peculiar to them, and in this respect they do not differ from those of married women of unblemished character’.^{43} What’s more, ‘there is nothing remarkable either in the dimensions or the dispositions of the clitoris in the prostitutes of Paris, and that in them, as in all married women, there are variations, but nothing peculiar’.^{44} However, this study did little to dissuade other doctors from poking and prodding about women’s hoo-hahs searching for signs of sexual degeneracy. The 1854 editions of Medical Lexicon: A Dictionary of Medical Science included the word ‘clitorism’, which was defined as ‘a word invented to express the abuse made of the clitoris. Also, an unusually large clitoris.’^{45} Whereas the American Homeopathic Journal of Gynaecology and Obstetrics (1885) claimed that in ‘evidences of masturbation’ the ‘clitoris is much elongated, and the prepuce is hypertrophied and thrown into wrinkles’.^{46} Some doctors believed a hypertrophied clitoris was caused by masturbation, others that it was the other way around.

The most notorious English proponent of the anti-clit brigade was gynaecologist Dr Isaac Baker Brown (1811–1873). Brown was a widely respected physician. He was a founding member of St Mary’s Hospital, London, elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, and in 1865 he was elected president of the Medical Society of London. Everything was on the up for Brown until he published On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, Catalepsy, and Hysteria in Females in 1866. Here, Brown told of his success in performing clitorectomies as a cure for everything from hysteria to back pain, epilepsy, infertility, paralysis, blindness, insanity and much more. In one 1863 case, Brown cut the clitoris out of a thirty-year-old woman who had developed ‘a great distaste for her husband’. Brown declared the operation an ‘uninterrupted success’ and the patient returned to give her marriage another try.^{47} (Deep breath.)

Brown’s theories were not well received, and in 1867 he was expelled from the Obstetrical Society of London. His hearing was widely reported, and Brown was clearly at a loss as to why he had been singled out when so many of his peers had themselves performed clitorectomies. ‘I maintain my late colleagues in this room have all performed this operation… not my operation, recollect gentlemen, but an operation, as Dr Haden has showed, that has been practised from the time of Hippocrates.’^{49} And he may have had a point. Brown is very much the pantomime villain of Victorian gynaecology, but his butchery did not exist in a vacuum. I have no doubt that many of the good doctors who presided over Brown’s expulsion were equally guilty, if just a bit quieter about it. But none of this saved Brown, whose career never recovered, and he died in poverty in 1873 – possibly the only man in history to regret his success in finding the clit.

Sigmund Freud once described female sexuality as the ‘dark continent’ of psychology.^{50} Given the amount of time he seemed to spend wandering around it, clearly lost and terrified of the natives, I am inclined to agree with him. One of Freud’s less than gold-star brilliant theories was that clitoral orgasms are sexually immature. In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud argued that the female child’s sexuality is entirely clitoral and masculine until she reaches puberty, when she must transfer her ‘erotogenic susceptibility to stimulation… from the clitoris to the vaginal orifice’ for her to become mature and feminine.^{51} Freud might not have been circumcising the clitoris, but his ideas had the effect of metaphorically cutting the clitoris out of ‘healthy’ sexuality nonetheless. And although Freud wasn’t the only doctor distinguishing between ‘vaginal’ and ‘clitoral’ orgasms, he was certainly the most influential.[14]

One of Freud’s most famous patients was Princess Marie Bonaparte (1882–1962), great-grandniece to Emperor Napoleon I. Princess Marie married Prince George of Greece and Denmark in 1907 and she had several lovers on the go as well, but she was never able to achieve an orgasm through vaginal penetration. Heavily influenced by Freud’s theories and being a scientifically minded kind of woman, Marie began to research her own sexual ‘frigidity’ and arrived at the conclusion she couldn’t achieve the almighty vaginal orgasm because her clitoris was too far away from her vaginal opening. She confirmed this by conducting a survey of 243 women and published her results in the 1924 edition of the Bruxelles-Médical, under the name A. E. Narjani. Marie identified women with a short distance between the clitoris and the vaginal opening, who orgasm easily, as ‘paraclitoridiennes’, and those with a difference of more than two and a half centimetres, who struggle to orgasm, like Marie, as ‘téleclitoridiennes’ (with the ‘mesoclitoriennes’ being somewhere between the two).^{52} Marie became Freud’s patient in 1925, which further reinforced her belief that she would only be satisfied if she came through penile penetration (listen carefully and you can hear the lesbians laughing). The upshot of Princess Marie’s obsession with mature and immature orgasms was that in 1927 she employed surgeon Josef Halban to operate and reposition her clitoris closer to the vaginal opening. When this operation did not achieve the desired result, Halban operated again in 1930 and yet again in 1931. Poor Princess Marie never got her vaginal orgasm and wound up with a clit that must have been left dangling like a loose button. Poor, poor Marie.

And not just poor Marie. As Freud’s theories about the difference between vaginal and clitoral orgasms took hold across the medical world, women were routinely told that they were sexual failures if they could only orgasm through clitoral stimulation. In 1936, Eduard Hitschmann and Edmund Bergler published their highly influential Frigidity in Women, where they claimed that the ‘sole criterion of frigidity is the absence of the vaginal orgasm’.^{53} In 1950, Dr William S. Kroger claimed that women for ‘whom sexual response occurs only after clitoral stimulation’ were ‘frigid’. He went on to explain that the vaginal orgasm was the ‘optimum type of sexual response’.^{54} In America, this led to numerous gynaecologists operating to ‘free’ the clitoris from its hood, which would supposedly allow a frigid wife to climax with her husband. Even Alfred Kinsey recommended this ‘very simple’ procedure; ‘with a tool the physician can strip the clitoris, allowing the foreskin to roll back and may make a distinct difference in the response of the female’.^{55} Bizarrely, there are still plastic surgeons today who offer clitoral hood reduction surgery to improve orgasm, despite partial or total hoodectomy being classed as female genital mutilation by the World Health Organisation.^{56}

But what is particularly galling about all this vaginal versus clitoral orgasm nonsense is that as we have learned more about the structure of the clitoris, it has become glaringly obvious that ALL orgasms are clitoral. The structure of the clitoris is as complex as it is extensive, comprising clitoral glans, prepuce, body (or corpora), crura, bulbs, suspensory ligaments and the root – the only visible parts being the glans and the hood.^{57} The structure descends downwards from the pubic bone into the adiposity of the mons pubis. It was only in 2009 that Pierre Foldes and Odile Buisson used 3-D sonography to get a complete picture of a stimulated clitoris, and we finally started to understand what the hell is going on down there. They found that when the clitoris was engorged, it swelled to touch the anterior walls of the vagina.^{58} Then, in 2010, Buisson and Foldes joined forces with Emmanuele Jannini and Sylvain Mimoun and scanned the vagina and clitoris of a volunteer woman during sex in the missionary position. The results showed that the penis stretched the clitoral root and during the (ahem) thrusting, the now stretched root crashed repeatedly into the anterior vagina wall – offering clear evidence that the much lauded G-spot has actually been the C-spot all along.^{59} A kind of clitoral Scooby-Doo ending to a debate that has raged throughout medicine for centuries.[15]

The question remaining is surely ‘why?’ Why has the ‘pussy pearl’ (2007) been so horribly victimised throughout history, and indeed continues to be abused throughout much of the world, when all it wants to do is bring pleasure? The World Health Organisation cites numerous reasons why FGM is carried out today, including to ‘reduce a woman’s libido and therefore… to help her resist extramarital sexual acts’.^{60} Looking back throughout history, this certainly rings true here. Although the clit was recognised as the ‘seat of pleasure’ very early on, it was not regarded as a very stable seat. Rather, it was thought the clitoris could provoke an excessive libido in women, which had all manner of health problems attached – both somatic and psychosomatic. But attacking the clit is about more than just curbing female desire, it’s about protecting the primacy of the penis. The clitoris brings pleasure without penetration, and it doesn’t need a man operating the controls to do so. The fears that an overused clitoris would morph into a penis, which could be used to penetrate other women, speaks to an anxiety that the penis is redundant or that the man is being replaced. Freud’s insistence that the only orgasm it was worth a woman having required a penis also speaks to a need to pay deference to the mighty rod. Likewise, the ridiculing of men who performed cunnilingus in the Ancient World, the clitoral association with lesbianism and ‘clitorism’ caused by masturbation all tacitly accuse the clitoris of ignoring the penis.

We will never know how many clitorises have been cut, cauterised and circumcised throughout history, but we do know that virtually none of these procedures were necessary. The clitoris is a truly magnificent organ, and one that is still mysterious – why can some women orgasm through penetration and others can’t? Exactly how does all the equipment work together to produce an orgasm? But here is what we do know: the clitoris is the only organ on the human body that has no other purpose than to bring pleasure. It has 8,000 nerve endings, double the amount in the glands of the penis, and almost 75 per cent of women need to have their glans clitoris (the external part) stimulated to orgasm. It has taken us a long time to get here, and there is still work to be done, but we are finally beginning to see just how important the clitoris is in sexual fulfilment.

Colonising the Cunt ^{A History of Racial Fetishization}

Sir Mix-a-Lot’s 1992 smash-hit ‘Baby Got Back’ hit the airwaves as a tongue-in-cheek celebration of black women’s bodies – an auditory fuck you to the super-thin, white women that dominated Western beauty narratives. The video opens with two white girls criticising a black woman’s appearance and likening her to a ‘prostitute’.^{1} Although ‘Baby Got Back’ has often been dismissed as novelty rap, it succeeded in raising numerous issues around race, sexuality and women that remain unresolved twenty-six years later: the whitewashing of the beauty industry, the marginalisation of the black voice and the hyper-sexualisation of women of colour, particularly black women.

The main focus of this chapter is on the historic sexualisation of black women by white colonisers. I am a white woman and I am in no position to speak for the black woman’s experience. I do not know what it is like to be a black woman in a world that fetishises black bodies. But I am a historian, and I see parallels in the language white colonisers historically used to talk about – and disempower – women of colour, and modern ‘bootylicious’ narratives. This is not a chapter that further fetishises women of colour, or offers any kind of comment on black culture. This is a history of how white people have viewed, talked about and claimed ownership over black women’s bodies, specifically their genitals.

When Europeans first arrived in Africa, they encountered a culture vastly different from their own in almost every single way. But something that immediately struck the sexually repressed Roman Catholic explorers was that Africans did not share their doctrine of ‘thou shalt not’.

When Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460) arrived at the coast of West Africa from Portugal in 1441, he came from a deeply repressive culture where women could be put to death if their husbands accused them of adultery.^{2} By comparison, African women danced, wore clothes that exposed their bodies and were not shamed sexually. To the buttoned-down Europeans, this could only mean that they were highly sexed. Black women were not only heavily eroticised, but also held up as sexually savage and therefore in need of controlling – presumably by white men. In A New Voyage to Guinea (1744), William Smith described African women as being ‘hot constitution’d Ladies’: ‘They miss no Opportunity and are continually contriving Stratagems how to gain a Lover. If they meet with a Man they immediately strip his lower Parts, and throw themselves upon him, protesting if he will not gratify their desires they will accuse him to their husbands’.^{3} A British report on the African slave trade dated 1789 blamed the poor fertility rates of black women on the ‘prostitution of all the women in the young part of their lives, going from one estate to another during the night, and thereby contracting disorders…’^{4} Such texts understood black women as being promiscuous by nature, and their very bodies seemed to offer all the evidence that was required for white colonisers to accept this as a scientific fact.

The sad case of Sarah (Sara, or Saartje) Baartman (1789–1815) has come to represent the epitome of the white West’s obsession with, and ultimate commodification of, the black female erotic body.^{5} Baartman was a South African Khoikhoi woman who was taken to London in 1810 by William Dunlop, a Scottish military surgeon, and her employer Hendrik Cesars, and exhibited in sideshows as a ‘Hottentot Venus’.[16] Baartman was one of several Khoikhoi women put on display around Europe for white audiences to gawk at, though she would become the most well known. As late as 1840 a black Englishwoman by the name of Elizabeth Magnas was exhibited at Leeds as a ‘Hottentot Venus’ for six years before she died of chronic alcoholism.

What was it that white Europeans found so fascinating about these women? It was their bodies, specifically their buttocks and genitals. Steatopygia is a genetic characteristic frequently found among the Khoisan of southern Africa, whereby substantial levels of fat build around the buttocks and thighs. To white European eyes, women like Sarah Baartman and Elizabeth Magnas had excessively large buttocks, and this was enough to warrant placing them in a freakshow.

As if to justify claims that black women were promiscuous, travel writers such as François Le Vaillant (1753–1824) and Sir John Barrow (1764–1848) described African women as having large buttocks and hypertrophied, protruding labia, which they called ‘the Hottentot apron’. François Le Vaillant wrote at length about his efforts to persuade South African women to show him their genitals: ‘confused, abashed and trembling, she covered her face with both her hands, suffered her apron [tablier] to be untied, and permitted me to contemplate at leisure what my readers will see themselves in the exact representation which I drew of it’.^{6} In his Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa (1806), Barrow described a Khoisan woman’s buttocks and thighs as being a ‘protuberance consist[ing] of fat, and, when the woman walked, had the most ridiculous appearance imaginable, every step being accompanied with a quivering and tremulous motion as if two masses of jelly were attached behind’.^{7}

It was to audiences like this that Sarah Baartman was exhibited. Onstage, Sarah wore tight, flesh-coloured clothing, necklaces of beads and feathers, and smoked a pipe. In 1810, The Times recorded that ‘she is dressed in a colour as nearly resembling her skin as possible. The dress is contrived to exhibit the entire frame of her body, and the spectators are even invited to examine the peculiarities of her form.’^{8} Even at the time, the prospect of a woman being exhibited for her buttocks caused an outrage, and many petitioned for Sarah’s freedom. Anti-slavery activist Zachary Macaulay (1768–1838) and the African Association succeeded in taking Sarah’s case to court in 1810, where she was cross-examined for several hours by an attorney to ascertain if she consented to her treatment. William Dunlop was allowed to remain in the court as Sarah testified, and even produced a contract signed by himself and Sarah agreeing to her working conditions.^{9} We will never know if his presence prohibited Sarah from saying otherwise, but she told the court she was ‘under no restraint’ and was ‘happy in England’.^{10} The case was dismissed.

Sarah was never exhibited naked, nor did she allow French surgeons to examine her genitals when she was sold to be shown at the Palais Royal, in 1814. But after she died of alcoholism in 1816, aged just twenty-six, Georges-Frédéric Cuvier (1773–1838) dissected Sarah’s body and published a detailed account of her anatomy. His report is well known, as is his lengthy, voyeuristic description of Sarah’s vulva, buttocks and brain – which he likened to that of a monkey.^{11}

Cuvier preserved her brain and skeleton, and put her genitalia in a specimen jar. Several body casts of Sarah were made, as was a wax mould of her vulva, which were put on display at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle until 1974. In 2002, the president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, secured the repatriation of Baartman’s body and the various plaster casts from France to South Africa, and she was finally laid to rest in Hankey, in the Eastern Cape province.

The nineteenth century was the golden age of physiognomy, a thankfully debunked practice of ‘reading’ a person’s character through their physical appearance. Early criminologists such as Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) theorised criminal tendencies could be predicted by studying physical features. One ‘criminal’ trait that physiognomists believed they could read in a person’s body was prostitution. Considerable research was undertaken by scientists such as Adrian Charpy (1848–1902) to examine the genitals of sex workers, which were directly compared to those of black women to deduce a highly sexed woman.^{12} Charpy claimed that both the prostitute and the ‘Hottentot’ had hypertrophied labia, which signified a base sexuality. In his 1893 book La donna Delinquente, Lombroso directly compared images of the body of the black woman with that of the prostitute in order to ‘prove’ the deviant, animalistic nature of both.^{13}

Although this chapter is primarily concerned with the colonising of black women’s genitals, it’s important to acknowledge that Europeans were equally fascinated with, and threatened by, black men’s genitals. The mythology of the ‘big black cock’, or ‘BBC’ as it is categorised on porn sites today, also finds its roots in earliest colonial propaganda that black men are sexually savage, animalistic and dangerous.[17] Just as the black woman’s genitals and buttocks were read as ‘evidence’ of her promiscuity, the black man’s penis was also considered proof of a hypersexual, bestial nature. In 1904, Dr William Lee Howard published ‘The Negro as a Distinct Ethnic Factor in Civilization’ in the journal Medicine. Here, Howard claimed that the ‘large size of the African’s penis’ would prevent him from ever being ‘civilised’ or ‘moral’ like the white man. Howard suggested that the black man’s cerebral development stopped at puberty, and that ‘genetic instincts [become] the controlling factor of his life… He will walk the alleys late at night with a penis swollen from disease, and infects his bride-to-be with the same nonchalance that he will an hour later exhibit when cohabiting with the lowest of his race.’^{14}

The effect of this pseudoscientific racism was far reaching and served to justify the brutalisation and sexual exploitation of black men and women well into the twentieth century. Military propaganda campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s actively drew on entrenched sexual stereotypes of women in the colonies in an attempt to lure European men into the colonial armies.

The colonial postcards of the time emphasised the breasts, exaggerated buttocks and nakedness of women of colour in order to signify their sexual availability to European men. The women in these postcards are simply window dressing – props to affirm colonial power. They are reduced to their physicality, just as Sarah Baartman was: consumables for a white audience. And it was not just black bodies the Europeans sexualised. As Africa, Asia and the Americas were colonised by Europeans the same process of sexually othering non-white women as ‘exotic’ took place.

We have no record of Sarah Baartman’s own voice. Many people spoke for her, or about her, but her own voice has been lost to us completely. We will never know her thoughts on her life, her body and her treatment. Sadly, all the evidence we have is mediated through white writers. Her experience may be shocking, but it is part of a wider history of sexualising women of colour – and of using women’s bodies to justify their oppression. We will never know what Sarah’s choices were, but women today can at least choose to be part of a narrative that fetishises them. Many women find reclaiming sexuality on their own terms empowering and work to redefine their stories on their own terms. But it is important to fully understand the history that frames such choices today.

‘As Easily Made as a Pudding’ ^{A History of Virginity Tests}

In 2017, researchers at the University of Minnesota published a systematic review of all available, peer-reviewed research into the reliability of so called ‘virginity tests’ where the hymen is examined, as well as the impact on the person being examined. The team identified 1,269 studies. The evidence was summarised and assessed, and this was the conclusion:

The following year in 2018, the World Health Organisation, the United Nations Human Rights and the United Nations Women issued a statement calling for the elimination of virginity testing; stating that ‘“Virginity testing” is a violation of the human rights of girls and women, and can be detrimental to women’s and girls’ physical, psychological and social well-being. “Virginity testing” reinforces stereotyped notions of female sexuality and gender inequality.’^{2} There is no reliable virginity test. You can no more tell if someone has had sex by looking between their legs than you can tell if someone is a vegetarian by looking at their belly button. However, the fact that virginity cannot be proven, tested or located on the body has not deterred people from claiming otherwise.

Sadly, a woman’s virginity is still highly prized around the world today, a fact which has, in turn, led to the creation of numerous damaging rituals around keeping and proving a woman’s sexual purity that are still in force today. These tests usually involve searching for an intact hymen, or what’s known as the ‘two-finger test’, which checks for vaginal tightness. Countries where this practice has been reported include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Jordan, Palestine, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Turkey and Uganda. The FGM National Clinic Group states that female genital mutilation is valued ‘as a means of preserving a girl’s virginity until marriage (for example, in Sudan, Egypt, and Somalia). In many of these countries FGM has been seen as a prerequisite to marriage and marriage is vital to a woman’s social and economic survival.’^{3} The World Health Organisation estimates that 200 million girls globally have been subjected to female genital mutilation, in no small part to preserve their virginities until marriage.^{4}

The idea of female sexual purity being a prerequisite for marriage underpins many cultures and religions around the world. In Indonesia, virginity testing remains a requirement for women wanting to join the army or police force. So-called ‘Purity Balls’ are held all over America, where fathers take their teenage daughters on a ‘date’; she pledges to stay a virgin until marriage and he, in turn, pledges to protect his daughter’s virginity until she is married (presumably with a shotgun and some kind of alarm system). Women can now pay to have their hymens rebuilt for the marriage market, and the hymenoplasty business is booming. In 2016, a South African KwaZulu-Natal municipality introduced an academic bursary for young women who can prove that they are virgins.^{5} And in 2017, the Russian Investigative Committee and the health minister, Vladimir Shuldyakov, caused outrage by ordering doctors to carry out ‘virginity tests’ on schoolgirls and to report any found without a hymen to the authorities.^{6}

Not only is virginity impossible to prove, it’s also quite difficult to define. We might think that virginity is a very simple thing to understand, but it doesn’t hold together all that well when we start to poke it a little. Precisely what we count as sex for the first time can be more complicated than we might initially think. If two girls have sex, does that count as losing their virginity? What if they used a strap-on? If a heterosexual couple hit first, second and third base, but strike out at fourth in a sweaty, satisfied mess, are they still virgins? Can you lose your virginity to yourself? Does it have to involve penile–vaginal penetration? If so, does that preclude same-sex sex? Is gay pride really a mass virgin rally? How about if a heterosexual couple just have anal sex? Does he lose his, but she keeps hers on a technicality?

Despite considerable research into hymens, many myths still surround them. People still believe exercise and horse-riding can rupture the hymen (they don’t), and Tampax were still reassuring young women that they couldn’t ‘pop their cherries’ (1988) on a tampon as late as the 1990s.

Even the language surrounding virginity is loaded. The concept of ‘losing’ or ‘keeping’ your virginity suggests that once lost, we are all lacking something and no longer whole. It also suggests that virginity is something tangible that we had in the first place. You can metaphorically ‘give’ someone your V-card, but it’s not like they can hang it above their fireplace, or resell it on eBay (although several women have tried).

The concept of virginity is undeniably gendered, and the reason we think we know what we mean when we discuss ‘losing’ said ‘cherry’ (1933) is because we subconsciously understand virginity as belonging to penis-in-vagina sex. This is what is meant by ‘compulsory heterosexuality’. This doesn’t mean that heterosexuality is literally compulsory, but that our cultural scripts around sexuality focus more on heterosexual sex than any other kind: it has become our ‘normal’. Now, this is undeniably cis-gendered privilege, but it is the product of thousands of years of cultural conditioning. It is only with the tremendous work done by LGBTQ activists over the last fifty years that we have begun to create space to discuss alternatives to boy–girl sex at all. But there is still a long way to go.

When anyone is concerned about virginity it is almost always a woman’s virginity. Even the word ‘virgin’ comes from the Latin virgo, meaning a girl or a woman who is not married. Men and boys have never been valued by their virgin status in the same way women have. At various points in history, women have been disowned, imprisoned, fined, mutilated, whipped and even killed as punishment for losing their virginity outside of marriage, whereas funny films are made about forty-year-old male virgins.[18]

Quite why it is female rather than male virginity that has been so rigorously sanctioned is a matter of some dispute, but it is likely all down to paternal legacies. It’s unfair, but in the pre-Pill world, pregnancy out of wedlock was a far more immediate physical and financial concern for the mother than the father; consequently, it was her shenanigans that were scrutinised rather than his. But more than this, in a paternalistic society where wealth and power are passed down the male line, female chastity is heavily policed to ensure legitimate offspring, and that your worldly goods pass to your children (and not the milkman’s). This theory holds some weight when we consider that in the few matriarchal societies around the world, wealth is passed down the female line. In these cultures, female sexuality is regarded very differently.[19]

Today, the most well-known ‘proof’ of virginity test is blood produced from a ruptured hymen. But our ancestors didn’t even use the word ‘hymen’, and certainly didn’t go rooting around inside vaginas like they were digging for buried treasure to find one. In fact, medical texts don’t start talking about a hymen until the fifteenth century.^{7} None of the Classical physicians make mention of it (Galen and Aristotle, for example). Greek physician Soranus suggests that any post-coital vaginal bleeding was the result of burst blood vessels, and categorically denied any kind of membrane inside the vagina.^{8} Many early texts acknowledge that virgins may bleed when they have sex for the first time, but this wasn’t linked to the hymen. Rather, it was thought that the bleeding was caused by the trauma of penile penetration and was not proof enough of virginity. It was the Italian physician Michael Savonarola who first used the word ‘hymen’ in 1498, describing it as a membrane that ‘is broken at the time of deflowering, so that the blood flows’.^{9} After this, references to the hymen and its links to virginity become increasingly common. But just because our ancestors didn’t search for intact hymens does not mean that virginity was not subject to rigorous tests before the hymen became the benchmark for proof of tampering.

The most famous virgins in the Ancient World were Rome’s Vestal Virgins. The Vestal Virgins were priestesses, dedicated to the goddess of hearth and family, Vesta. They were chosen at a young age and had to dedicate thirty years of worship and chastity to the city of Rome and tend the temple flame of Vesta; the punishment for a Vestal having sex was to be entombed alive and left to starve to death.

So, how do you test a Vestal’s virginity? Well, some praying is involved. The priestesses were believed to have a special connection with the gods, so when the Vestal Tuccia was accused, she was given the opportunity to conjure a miracle and prove she was still a virgin. According to Valerius Maximus, Tuccia proved her virginity by carrying water in a sieve. Tuccia called out, ‘O Vesta, if I have always brought pure hands to your secret services, make it so now that with this sieve I shall be able to draw water from the Tiber and bring it to Your temple.’^{10} The sieve has since become a symbol of virginity and Queen Elizabeth I was often painted holding one to symbolise that no one had taken a bite of her cherry bun. But if you did not happen to have a sieve to hand there were other virginity tests available to you – as long as you had a snake, some ants and a cake. The Roman writer Aelian (AD 175–235) describes a ritual for testing virginity that took place on holy days:

Quite what this ‘punishment’ was is not elaborated upon, and given that snakes are not widely known for their love of Battenberg, this test seems rather unfair.

But to really confirm the seal had not been broken, you needed a bottle of wee. The thirteenth-century text De Secretis Mulierum explains that the urine of virgins is ‘clear and lucid, sometimes white, sometimes sparkling’. The reason that ‘corrupted women’ have ‘muddy urine’ is because of the ‘rupture’ of skin and ‘male sperm appear on the bottom’.^{12} Pissing Perrier is a neat party trick, but there are other signs to look for. William of Saliceto (1210–1277) wrote that ‘a virgin urinates with a more subtle hiss’, and if you had a stopwatch handy, it ‘indeed takes longer than a small boy’.^{13}

Medieval virginity tests are quite urine-focused, and fifteenth-century Italian physician Niccolo Falcucci was also a piss prophet, but he had a few other tricks up his sleeve.

The anonymous, thirteenth-century Hebrew text Book of Women’s Love says, ‘The girl must urinate over marshmallows in the evening, and bring them in the morning; if they are still fresh she is modest and good, if not she is not.’^{15} Before you start pissing into a bag of flumps, the marshmallow referred to here is a medicinal plant.

But perhaps you are struggling to inspect, listen to or time your intended’s waterworks. In which case, you will need to study her general appearance for the tell-tale clues that her flower has been plucked. Before explaining that a virgin’s piss sparkles, Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’s De Secretis Mulierum explains what to look out for. ‘The signs of chastity are as follows: shame, modesty, fear, a faultless gait and speech, casting eyes down before men and the acts of men.’ (FYI, these are also signs she ordered and ate the Pizza Hut family feast on her own and is praying you don’t find the evidence in the bin.) Magnus continues:

Of course, once the hymen became the go-to virginity test, checking for sparkling wee that whistled, perky boobs and the ability to smell coal without wetting oneself largely fell out of favour. Virginity testing became all about tightness and blood.

Producing bloodied bedsheets as proof of a wife’s virginity does still occur around the world today, although it’s rare. In certain regions of Georgia, brides have a ‘Yenge’, usually an older family member, who will instruct her in what to expect on her wedding night. Traditionally, it was the Yenge’s responsibility to take the bloodied sheets from the marital bed and show them to both families to ‘prove’ the bride was a nookie newbie. Although the Yenge’s role is largely ceremonial today, in some areas the practice of showing bloodied sheets still goes on.^{17}

The bloody sheet test also has a long pedigree. It is found in the Bible, old medieval romances, and it’s even said that Catharine of Aragon was able to produce blood-stained sheets to prove she married Henry VIII as a virgin.^{18} Of course, as long as people have subscribed to this deeply flawed test, there have been ways of faking it. Given what was at stake should the gift of a bride’s virginity be unwrapped by someone else before the ‘I dos’, you can understand why a girl might tell a fanny fib on her wedding night, and for as long as medical texts have been telling us how to prove virginity, they’ve also been giving advice on how to restore it. The Trotula is the name given to three twelfth-century Italian texts on women’s health. At least one of the three was authored by a woman, Trota of Salerno, who practised medicine in the southern Italian coastal town of Salerno. The Trotula has this exceptionally devious advice for a girl whose cherry is on the blink:

The Book of Women’s Love recommends the following to restore virginity: ‘take myrtle leaves and boil them well with water until only a third part remains; then, take nettles without prickles and boil them in this water until a third remains. She must wash her secret parts with this water in the morning and at bedtime, up to nine days.’ However, if you’re in a real hurry you can ‘take nutmeg and grind to a powder; put it in that place and her virginity will be restored immediately’.^{20} Nicolas Venette (1633–1698), the French author of the seventeenth-century L’amour Conjugal, gave this advice to fake a maidenhead:

As Hanne Blank argued in her marvellous Virgin: The Untouched History, many of the ingredients listed here are astringents or anti-inflammatories that were thought to tighten the vagina. Although Venette doesn’t list it here, one of the most well-known twinkle tighteners was alum water. In Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) he cites ‘pucker water’ as ‘Water impregnated with alum, or other astringents, used by old experienced traders to counterfeit virginity’.^{22} Alum is a class of chemical compound that is used widely today in food preservatives and industry. Insanely, there are numerous websites out there that still recommend alum for tightening the vagina. I will just take this moment to say, dear God, please do not do that to your poor chuff; do your Kegels and keep the faith.

Other than wishing to fake it on their wedding night, another reason a girl would want to pass as a novice is that maidenheads came at a premium. By the eighteenth century, virgins were a lucrative business, and any working girl or madam would know how to fake a hymen for maximum profit. Nocturnal Revels (1779) provides explicit details about women selling their virginity several times over, and quotes the famous madam Charlotte Hayes as saying a virginity is ‘as easily made as a pudding’. Charlotte goes on to say that she sold her own ‘thousands of times’.^{23} The eponymous heroine of the original bonkbuster Fanny Hill (1749) tells the reader precisely how virginity is faked in the sex industry.

Other sneaky tips include having sex during menstruation to ensure blood, and placing a bird’s heart, or a pig’s bladder stitched up and containing blood, into the vaginal cavity so it will ‘bleed’ on cue.^{25}

Despite a deeply engrained historical belief in the bleeding virgin, this has never been unanimously accepted by the scientific community. There have always been lone voices of reason who recognised this as a load of cobblers. Physicians such as Ambroise Paré not only denied that virginity could be proven with a hymen, he claimed there was no such a thing as a hymen back in 1573. Since then there have been occasional whispers that the hymen is not quite the certificate of authenticity it is touted to be. By the nineteenth century, these whispers had become an audible grumble. Dr Blundell questioned the value of this ‘mystic membrane’, and Erasmus Wilson stated that the hymen ‘must not be considered a necessary accompaniment to virginity’ in 1831.^{26} Edward Foote wrote that ‘the hymen is a cruel and unreliable test of virginity’ and that ‘physicians know it is a very fallible test of virginity’.^{27} By the twentieth century, the grumble had become a deafening shout and by the twenty-first century the shouting had been replaced by dramatic eye rolls and exasperated cries of ‘for fuck’s sake! Not this bollocks again!’ The research I referred to at the beginning of this chapter identified some 1,269 studies in electronic databases that research the validity of virginity testing and hymen reliability, and they overwhelmingly reach the conclusion that you cannot ‘prove’ someone is a virgin and hymens tell you naff all about the owner’s sexual past.^{28} And yet the myth persists, and women are routinely subjected to pointless and invasive examinations to try and establish their sexual experience.

Today virginity examinations are largely carried out on unmarried females, often without consent or in situations where individuals are unable to give consent.^{29} Virginity testing on schoolgirls has been reported in South Africa and Swaziland to deter pre-marital sexual activity. In India, the test has been part of the sexual assault assessment of female rape victims. In Indonesia, the exam has been part of the application process for women to join the police force.^{30} But even if you could prove someone’s virginity, the issue isn’t really the examination itself (although it’s bad enough) – it’s cultural attitudes that value women based primarily on whether they are sexually active that are the issue. There is no way of ‘proving’ if someone has had sex by examining their genitals, because ‘virginity’ is not something tangible. The hymen is simply a stretchy tissue inside the vagina, but it doesn’t seal it up like a Tupperware lid. Hymens come in many different shapes and thickness – some bleed when torn and others do not. The hymen absolutely does not ‘pop’ when broken and cannot prove anyone’s sexual history any more than your elbow can. You cannot ‘lose’ your virginity because virginity is an invention, not a physical fact – no matter how sparkly your piss may be.