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!
…towards the upper part of the cunt, is a thing they call clitoris, which is a little like man’s prick, for it will swell, and stand like his; and being rubbed gently, by his member will, with excessive pleasure, send forth a liquor, which when it comes away, leaves us in a trance, as if we were dying, all our senses being lost, and it were summed up in that one place, and our eyes shut, our hearts languishing on one side, our limbs extended, and in a word, there follows a dissolving of our whole person and melting in such inexpressible joys, as none but those who can feel them can express or comprehend.{39}
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.
Near the Fort is the metropolis, called CLTRS [clitoris]; it is a pleasant place, much delighted in by the Queens of MERRYLAND, and is their chief Palace, or rather Pleasure Seat; it was at first but small, but the pleasure some of the Queens have found in it, has occasioned their extending its bounds considerably.{41}
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.)
The patient having been placed completely under the influence of chloroform, the clitoris is freely excised either by scissors or knife – I always prefer the scissors. The wound is then firmly plugged with graduated compress of lint, and a pad, well secured by a T bandage.{48}
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.
12
A really great source to read about eighteenth-century pornography is Julie Peakman
13
Despite vocal medical opinion, the anti-clit agenda had limited influence as Victorian erotica shows no such concerns.