5 ms·

> the clitoris did not even make it into standard anatomy textbooks until the 38th edition of Gray’s Anatomy was published in 1995. This seemed surprising, as

by wahern 7mo ago

> the clitoris did not even make it into standard anatomy textbooks until the 38th edition of Gray’s Anatomy was published in 1995. This seemed surprising, as it hews too close to an annoying meme in feminism and history generally, that people in prior eras were idiots. And it turns out to be wrong. The clitoris was in Gray's Anatomy until 1947, when it was removed by the editor Charles Goss for the 25th edition. See https://projects.huffingtonpost.com/projects/cliteracy/embed/history https://projects.huffingtonpost.com/projects/cliteracy/embed... Indeed, the clitoris had been depicted in Classical medical books. Why it was removed--and stayed removed for nearly 50 years--would make for an interesting story about mid-century culture, if not for a cynical throwaway comment, though it seems nobody knows Goss' actual motivations.

Fraterkes 7mo ago
I don’t know about “idiots” but bias towards women was obviously real and prevalent. Treating the idea that that might have influenced medical literature as a “meme” is slightly bizarre to me.
- wahern 7mo ago
  The meme is that before [insert your contemporary period] people were so backwards that they would miss something like the clitoris entirely. The meme isn't that people and cultures were prejudiced or biased, but that they were prejudiced in an idiotic way. If you believe that's how prejudice works, then you'll be utterly blind to much contemporary prejudice. EDIT: Relatedly, The Guardian article sites the statistics about female genital mutilation. And you might think, how could people in this day be so cruel? Well, in some (but not all) of those cultures, such as parts of West Africa, female sexual pleasure is highly valued, a clitoral circumcision involves removing the clitoral hood only, similar to circumcision for men, and is viewed as enhancing female sexual pleasure, specifically for oral sex, an act that lacks any negative connotations. Now, embedded in that narrative might be a deeper, more subtle bias against women, but by not appreciating and grappling with that dynamic you're ignoring and diminishing how many women in those cultures understand feminism, which is its own anti-feminine and culturally centric (i.e. "colonial") bias.
  - hombre_fatal 7mo ago
    What’s your best source that African FGM is about enhancing female sexual pleasure, specifically for oral sex?
    - wahern 7mo ago
      This was several years ago and unfortunately I didn't archive my research. Every year it becomes so difficult to dig up stuff, and I don't have time today to go back down that rabbit hole. (These days I'm much better at archiving stuff.) Here's a couple of articles by one of most vocal supporters of FGM in West Africa: * https://www.thepatrioticvanguard.com/hurray-for-bondo-women-in-kailahun https://www.thepatrioticvanguard.com/hurray-for-bondo-women-... * http://www.fuambaisiaahmadu.com/blogs/my-response-to-fuambais-strength http://www.fuambaisiaahmadu.com/blogs/my-response-to-fuambai... And some skeptical but engaging discussions about her views: * https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/TMR/article/view/5510 https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/TMR/article/... * https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.14318/hau6.3.011 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.14318/hau6.3.011 The second link of the four is a response to the last. I was sloppy in being too specific in saying removing the clitoral hood was sometimes justified as enhancing oral sex. Now that I think about it, that might be one of the views regarding labial extension, which is often lumped in with FGM but obviously quite different from cutting the clitoral hood. The claims about enhancing sexual pleasure I think largely came from more polemical literature, as well as some English-language African feminist blogs and bulletin boards, and I would suspect those views may be, at least to some extent and in their specificity, recent revisionist justifications. In African discourse there's a reactionary vein that pushes against Western criticisms of traditional African practices, and one of the ways to do that would be to subvert the paternalistic disgust about FGM by explicitly arguing the practice promotes one of the West's other ideals, sex positivity. To be clear, I'm not trying to defend any of this. Just trying to point out that the West's exceedingly simplistic and categorical perspective hides a very strong cultural prejudice, as well other problematic assumptions about how and why these practices persist.
      - IAmBroom 7mo ago
- b800h 7mo ago
  Bias towards women would be understood by most readers as favouring them. I would have written bias against women here.
  - JKCalhoun 7mo ago
    > Bias towards women would be understood by most readers as favouring them. We run in different circles I guess.
    - amenhotep 7mo ago
      It's a word that's commonly used incorrectly, yes.
      - JKCalhoun 7mo ago
        Ahhh, I see. I suck at grammar.
bobthepanda 7mo ago
There's a fair amount of modern/modernist-era thinking about bending the chaos of humanity to meet rigid ideal social structures, from about the late nineteenth to late twentieth century. And to be clear, the chaos of the early industrial period led to marked declines in public health, sanitation and the like. Some of these innovations worked reasonably well (the standardization of healthcare and schooling), some of them had unforeseen side effects (replacing horses and their large amounts of fecal matter with cars and invisible pollution), and some straight up did not work (much of the social engineering that went into low-income public housing in the West)
- TheOtherHobbes 7mo ago
  The left are accused of this far more often than the right are, even though the right own think tanks like Heritage, mega churches,mega news channels like Fox, large parts of academia (esp. economics and MBA culture), most of the lobbying machinery, and most of the bot farms. While I think the suggestion - popular with left wing academics - that society can be engineered towards perfect fairness from a blank slate is obvious nonsense, it's also true there have been decades of active social engineering towards other ends which were deliberate, organised, and generously funded, and have become so pervasive they're experienced as constant background noise.
  - bobthepanda 7mo ago
    I specifically didn’t mention left vs right because I agree. At least in the postwar era this was mostly done via Rockefeller Republicans in the US, who were okay with popular big spending programs but used them as a means to an end. Think highway building clearing out poor and minority neighborhoods, or making sure that public housing isn’t too comfortable.
AlecSchueler 7mo ago
> annoying meme in feminism...that people in prior eras were idiots. Do you have examples of this? I read a lot of feminist literature and it's not something that's ever jumped out to me.
jychang 7mo ago
Being removed for versions 25 to 38… honestly confirms the feminist narrative of some people being idiots, though. Like, imagine documentation on object oriented programming being removed because it offended some functional programming folks.
- mhh__ 7mo ago
  There is obviously truth to it but it does not confirm the whig interpretation i.e. it was supposedly _removed_ rather than never present
  - pfannkuchen 7mo ago
    This might be the first casual reference I've seen to whig history, is that memeplex picking up steam?
- voxl 7mo ago
  I think it communicates maliciousness not idiocy
  - cheschire 7mo ago
    "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
    - Applejinx 7mo ago
      This gets complicated when the malicious have also read the saying and intentionally feign stupidity, but that's just chaos politics.
    - voxl 7mo ago
      Keep word: adequately. This is not adequately explained by stupidity.
    - chris_wot 7mo ago
mahogany 7mo ago
> annoying meme in feminism and history generally, that people in prior eras were idiots This sounds like a strawman to me but I’m not well versed in feminism. Do you have examples? On the topic of science, isn’t the criticism more that women were largely ignored or misrepresented in scientific studies? This doesn’t have to be because the authors were “idiots”.
lkey 7mo ago
They weren't idiots. And one doesn't have to give Goss the benefit of the doubt, nor his successors. The ensuing 50 years of omission are a clear admission of what the goal was and is. It is the year of our Lord 2026, men proximate to power are openly speculating about the removal of the vote from all women, the end of no-fault divorce, and laws to enforce a birth rate that increases the prevalence of white skin. None of these policy goals are interested in the clit, or indeed, any health care that doesn't directly contribute to the production of heirs. So as you pointed out, this omission was done deliberately. If one points this kind of thing out in a vacuum, you are labelled 'hysterical' or 'doing the annoying meme'. Your reaction of instant scepticism is the kind of thing I'm talking about. Everything is uphill and 'in doubt' until you find a source that's 'credible'. If no one 'legitimate' ever bothered to write it in a way you, a man, will hear it, then it's yet another harpy shrilling about imagined oppression. You can imagine how exhausting such reactions are the nth time you have to delicately handle them.
- pembrook 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - pfych 7mo ago
    > What the hell has happened to HN? Am I speaking with some Russian bot farm trying to breed political radicalization? Sadly not - check sentiment on X around these topics, heritage foundation etc are pushing all these topics right now
    - TheOtherHobbes 7mo ago
      Hegseth has blocked the creation of four one star generals because the unfortunate candidates happen to be women and/or black. This isn't a hypothetical or imaginary problem. At all.
- IAmBroom 7mo ago
  pembrook has replied that the deletion of the clitoris from Gray's Anatomy is "an internet myth" (but I can't reply to their message, as it has been flagged). They then cited a published paper (Hear Read This), which I scoured to find a reference claiming the size of the clitoris was diminished in some editions (!), but never deleted entirely. This put enough fire under me to look it up, hoping to prove pembrook wrong. I admit I wanted this feminist-persecution "fact" to be true. The Internet Archive has one copy in the suspect period (post-1943), the 1944 28th edition by T. B. Johnston. It contains an entry for 'Clitoris' in the index, with 5-6 subheadings about the structure. Clearly, not deleted. Screenshot of the index in question: https://imgur.com/a/qFfn9gr https://imgur.com/a/qFfn9gr
pembrook 7mo ago
> The clitoris was in Gray's Anatomy until 1947, when it was removed by the editor Charles Gross for the 25th edition. This is also false [1]. One guy didn't wake up one day in 1947 and decide to remove all references to the clitoris in Gray's anatomy. It's yet another version of the same internet myth, the goal being to caricature people in the past as cartoonishly evil and misogynistic. Please never use Huffington Post articles as a primary source. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9541205/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9541205/
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- IAmBroom 7mo ago
  Please also don't ask people to Here, Read This on a lengthy citation with no direction. The item I presume you are intending them to notice is the green-shaded Table 1, 3rd and 4th instances of the word "clitoris" in that paper. It basically supports your claim: HuffPost posted a false "fact".
nonce42 7mo ago
This is nonsense, as one can easily verify by looking at Gray's Anatomy (30th edition, 1985) on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/anatomy-of-the-human-body/page/498/mode/2up?q=clitoris https://archive.org/details/anatomy-of-the-human-body/page/4...
pseudohadamard 7mo ago
Well duh, Gray's had male editors and none of them could find it.

by wahern 7mo ago

Fraterkes 7mo ago

I don’t know about “idiots” but bias towards women was obviously real and prevalent. Treating the idea that that might have influenced medical literature as a “meme” is slightly bizarre to me.

wahern 7mo ago
The meme is that before [insert your contemporary period] people were so backwards that they would miss something like the clitoris entirely. The meme isn't that people and cultures were prejudiced or biased, but that they were prejudiced in an idiotic way. If you believe that's how prejudice works, then you'll be utterly blind to much contemporary prejudice. EDIT: Relatedly, The Guardian article sites the statistics about female genital mutilation. And you might think, how could people in this day be so cruel? Well, in some (but not all) of those cultures, such as parts of West Africa, female sexual pleasure is highly valued, a clitoral circumcision involves removing the clitoral hood only, similar to circumcision for men, and is viewed as enhancing female sexual pleasure, specifically for oral sex, an act that lacks any negative connotations. Now, embedded in that narrative might be a deeper, more subtle bias against women, but by not appreciating and grappling with that dynamic you're ignoring and diminishing how many women in those cultures understand feminism, which is its own anti-feminine and culturally centric (i.e. "colonial") bias.
- hombre_fatal 7mo ago
  What’s your best source that African FGM is about enhancing female sexual pleasure, specifically for oral sex?
  - wahern 7mo ago
    This was several years ago and unfortunately I didn't archive my research. Every year it becomes so difficult to dig up stuff, and I don't have time today to go back down that rabbit hole. (These days I'm much better at archiving stuff.) Here's a couple of articles by one of most vocal supporters of FGM in West Africa: * https://www.thepatrioticvanguard.com/hurray-for-bondo-women-in-kailahun https://www.thepatrioticvanguard.com/hurray-for-bondo-women-... * http://www.fuambaisiaahmadu.com/blogs/my-response-to-fuambais-strength http://www.fuambaisiaahmadu.com/blogs/my-response-to-fuambai... And some skeptical but engaging discussions about her views: * https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/TMR/article/view/5510 https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/TMR/article/... * https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.14318/hau6.3.011 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.14318/hau6.3.011 The second link of the four is a response to the last. I was sloppy in being too specific in saying removing the clitoral hood was sometimes justified as enhancing oral sex. Now that I think about it, that might be one of the views regarding labial extension, which is often lumped in with FGM but obviously quite different from cutting the clitoral hood. The claims about enhancing sexual pleasure I think largely came from more polemical literature, as well as some English-language African feminist blogs and bulletin boards, and I would suspect those views may be, at least to some extent and in their specificity, recent revisionist justifications. In African discourse there's a reactionary vein that pushes against Western criticisms of traditional African practices, and one of the ways to do that would be to subvert the paternalistic disgust about FGM by explicitly arguing the practice promotes one of the West's other ideals, sex positivity. To be clear, I'm not trying to defend any of this. Just trying to point out that the West's exceedingly simplistic and categorical perspective hides a very strong cultural prejudice, as well other problematic assumptions about how and why these practices persist.
    - IAmBroom 7mo ago
b800h 7mo ago
Bias towards women would be understood by most readers as favouring them. I would have written bias against women here.
- JKCalhoun 7mo ago
  > Bias towards women would be understood by most readers as favouring them. We run in different circles I guess.
  - amenhotep 7mo ago
    It's a word that's commonly used incorrectly, yes.
    - JKCalhoun 7mo ago
      Ahhh, I see. I suck at grammar.

bobthepanda 7mo ago

There's a fair amount of modern/modernist-era thinking about bending the chaos of humanity to meet rigid ideal social structures, from about the late nineteenth to late twentieth century. And to be clear, the chaos of the early industrial period led to marked declines in public health, sanitation and the like. Some of these innovations worked reasonably well (the standardization of healthcare and schooling), some of them had unforeseen side effects (replacing horses and their large amounts of fecal matter with cars and invisible pollution), and some straight up did not work (much of the social engineering that went into low-income public housing in the West)

TheOtherHobbes 7mo ago
The left are accused of this far more often than the right are, even though the right own think tanks like Heritage, mega churches,mega news channels like Fox, large parts of academia (esp. economics and MBA culture), most of the lobbying machinery, and most of the bot farms. While I think the suggestion - popular with left wing academics - that society can be engineered towards perfect fairness from a blank slate is obvious nonsense, it's also true there have been decades of active social engineering towards other ends which were deliberate, organised, and generously funded, and have become so pervasive they're experienced as constant background noise.
- bobthepanda 7mo ago
  I specifically didn’t mention left vs right because I agree. At least in the postwar era this was mostly done via Rockefeller Republicans in the US, who were okay with popular big spending programs but used them as a means to an end. Think highway building clearing out poor and minority neighborhoods, or making sure that public housing isn’t too comfortable.

AlecSchueler 7mo ago

> annoying meme in feminism...that people in prior eras were idiots. Do you have examples of this? I read a lot of feminist literature and it's not something that's ever jumped out to me.

jychang 7mo ago

Being removed for versions 25 to 38… honestly confirms the feminist narrative of some people being idiots, though. Like, imagine documentation on object oriented programming being removed because it offended some functional programming folks.

mhh__ 7mo ago
There is obviously truth to it but it does not confirm the whig interpretation i.e. it was supposedly _removed_ rather than never present
- pfannkuchen 7mo ago
  This might be the first casual reference I've seen to whig history, is that memeplex picking up steam?
voxl 7mo ago
I think it communicates maliciousness not idiocy
- cheschire 7mo ago
  "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
  - Applejinx 7mo ago
    This gets complicated when the malicious have also read the saying and intentionally feign stupidity, but that's just chaos politics.
  - voxl 7mo ago
    Keep word: adequately. This is not adequately explained by stupidity.
  - chris_wot 7mo ago

mahogany 7mo ago

> annoying meme in feminism and history generally, that people in prior eras were idiots This sounds like a strawman to me but I’m not well versed in feminism. Do you have examples? On the topic of science, isn’t the criticism more that women were largely ignored or misrepresented in scientific studies? This doesn’t have to be because the authors were “idiots”.

lkey 7mo ago

They weren't idiots. And one doesn't have to give Goss the benefit of the doubt, nor his successors. The ensuing 50 years of omission are a clear admission of what the goal was and is. It is the year of our Lord 2026, men proximate to power are openly speculating about the removal of the vote from all women, the end of no-fault divorce, and laws to enforce a birth rate that increases the prevalence of white skin. None of these policy goals are interested in the clit, or indeed, any health care that doesn't directly contribute to the production of heirs. So as you pointed out, this omission was done deliberately. If one points this kind of thing out in a vacuum, you are labelled 'hysterical' or 'doing the annoying meme'. Your reaction of instant scepticism is the kind of thing I'm talking about. Everything is uphill and 'in doubt' until you find a source that's 'credible'. If no one 'legitimate' ever bothered to write it in a way you, a man, will hear it, then it's yet another harpy shrilling about imagined oppression. You can imagine how exhausting such reactions are the nth time you have to delicately handle them.

pembrook 7mo ago
[flagged]
- pfych 7mo ago
  > What the hell has happened to HN? Am I speaking with some Russian bot farm trying to breed political radicalization? Sadly not - check sentiment on X around these topics, heritage foundation etc are pushing all these topics right now
  - TheOtherHobbes 7mo ago
    Hegseth has blocked the creation of four one star generals because the unfortunate candidates happen to be women and/or black. This isn't a hypothetical or imaginary problem. At all.
IAmBroom 7mo ago
pembrook has replied that the deletion of the clitoris from Gray's Anatomy is "an internet myth" (but I can't reply to their message, as it has been flagged). They then cited a published paper (Hear Read This), which I scoured to find a reference claiming the size of the clitoris was diminished in some editions (!), but never deleted entirely. This put enough fire under me to look it up, hoping to prove pembrook wrong. I admit I wanted this feminist-persecution "fact" to be true. The Internet Archive has one copy in the suspect period (post-1943), the 1944 28th edition by T. B. Johnston. It contains an entry for 'Clitoris' in the index, with 5-6 subheadings about the structure. Clearly, not deleted. Screenshot of the index in question: https://imgur.com/a/qFfn9gr https://imgur.com/a/qFfn9gr

pembrook 7mo ago

> The clitoris was in Gray's Anatomy until 1947, when it was removed by the editor Charles Gross for the 25th edition. This is also false [1]. One guy didn't wake up one day in 1947 and decide to remove all references to the clitoris in Gray's anatomy. It's yet another version of the same internet myth, the goal being to caricature people in the past as cartoonishly evil and misogynistic. Please never use Huffington Post articles as a primary source. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9541205/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9541205/

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
IAmBroom 7mo ago
Please also don't ask people to Here, Read This on a lengthy citation with no direction. The item I presume you are intending them to notice is the green-shaded Table 1, 3rd and 4th instances of the word "clitoris" in that paper. It basically supports your claim: HuffPost posted a false "fact".

nonce42 7mo ago

This is nonsense, as one can easily verify by looking at Gray's Anatomy (30th edition, 1985) on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/anatomy-of-the-human-body/page/498/mode/2up?q=clitoris https://archive.org/details/anatomy-of-the-human-body/page/4...

pseudohadamard 7mo ago

Well duh, Gray's had male editors and none of them could find it.