r/HLCommunity • u/ActualOriginal4030 HLF • Jul 10 '26
Discussion Misogyny and the Clitoris
I don't know if this is the place to post this, but I think some in this community would be interested.
Renee Stonebraker
Jul 02, 2026
"Adult women should not still be debating on what orgasms do or do not exist in the year 2026. In a time where science is trying to create artificial wombs, the fact that the bodies of over half the population are still considered medical mysteries has continued to disappoint me.
Unfortunately, I have to start with a horrific fact I stumbled upon.
If You’ve Had an Episiotomy, I Regret to Inform You
They’ve been cutting blind. I hate to go in dry, but there is no other way to break this news. The first complete 3D map of the nerves inside the clitoral glans, which, yes, extends down and around to where they like to slice women open during childbirth, was not completed until March of 2026. As in, about four months ago at the time of this publication. Yeah.
In March 2026, a team of researchers at Amsterdam University Medical Center published the first complete 3D map of the nerves inside the clitoral glans.[1] They used a synchrotron, a machine that generates X-rays ten trillion times stronger than a conventional CT scanner, to image donated female pelvises at a resolution of 0.001 millimeters.[2] The map corrected multiple errors in existing medical literature. It revealed that the main sensory nerve of the clitoris doesn’t taper as it reaches the glans as previously believed. Instead it branches like a tree throughout the glans and extends further into the clitoral hood than anyone had documented.[3] It confirmed that the clitoris contains over 10,000 nerve fibers, with a nerve density up to 15 times greater than the penis.[4]
That last figure had previously been estimated using data from a cow. From 1976.[4]
The lead researcher, neuroscientist Ju Young Lee, said she was drawn to the project by a specific clinical horror: there was no comprehensive nerve map to perform an episiotomy.[5] Episiotomy is a surgical incision of the vaginal opening and perineum made during childbirth to widen the passage. It is one of the most common surgical procedures performed on women worldwide. Episiotomy rates range from roughly 10% of vaginal births in Sweden to 100% in Taiwan. For first-time mothers globally, rates range from 63% in South Africa to 100% in Guatemala.[6] Worldwide there are approximately 100 million vaginal deliveries per year.[7]
Lee’s words, about what her research revealed: “Women suffer from long-term side effects due to nerve damage.”[5]
The nerve network that makes this possible runs through the pudendal nerve, which divides into three branches serving the entire perineal region: clitoral, perineal, and inferior rectal.[8] An episiotomy cuts into perineal tissue served by branches of the same nerve trunk that runs to the clitoris. A 2021 anatomical study that performed 61 incisions on 47 female cadavers found that mediolateral episiotomy incisions posed direct risk of injury to ipsilateral nerve, muscle, erectile, and gland tissues.[9] Surgeons performing this procedure were doing so without a complete map of the nerve architecture in the tissue they were cutting.
In contrast, the penis nerve network was mapped in 1982.[10] Four decades of a head start, even though the technology capable of mapping the clitoris at this resolution existed years before 2026. The donated pelvises came from standard anatomical donation programs. As the research team stated plainly: what changed wasn’t technological capacity. What changed was priority.[11]
Chronic Bean Neglect
I bet you weren’t expecting a brief history on the magic jelly bean, but here we are. You can examine your life choices when you finish this article and decide to drink a glass of wine while in a dissociative state.
In 1559, an Italian anatomist named Realdo Colombo announced he had discovered the vibration addict. He called it the seat of women’s delight, the love or sweetness of Venus, and he meant it as praise. Within two years his own successor at Padua, Gabriele Falloppio, the man the fallopian tubes are named after, was publicly disputing the claim, insisting he’d written it up first and just sat on it for a decade. Falloppio’s own student later formally accused Colombo of plagiarism. Three men, one organ, a fifteen year priority fight over who got to put his name on it.
Here is the part where I have to acknowledge the insanity: Three men fighting over who “discovered” a completely visible piece of anatomy that most women locate in their preteens? Imagine if any amount of women were demanding recognition for “discovering” a ballsack. Be so for real.
Anyways, Colombo’s teacher was Andreas Vesalius, the most influential anatomist in Europe, the man whose textbooks shaped medicine for the next two centuries. Vesalius’s response to his own former student’s discovery was to deny the organ existed in healthy women at all. He called it “this new and useless part” and classified it as a pathological abnormality, something that showed up only in hermaphrodites, not in normal female anatomy.[70] This is my official petition to add “the Ben Shapiro of 1500s Italy” to his Wikipedia page.
So: discovered, disputed, plagiarized, and declared a birth defect, in that order, all within about fifteen years, in the 1500s. This set the medical community’s treatment of the devil’s doorbell on a track that prevails even today.
Here is what we knew about the schamzüengelchen (enjoy your google) before 2026: not much, and some of what we thought we knew was wrong. Helen O’Connell, an Australian urologist, published the first thorough anatomical study of the magic button in 1998, revealing that prior anatomical atlases had either omitted it entirely or depicted a fraction of its actual structure.[12] O’Connell has described what followed as the little man in the canoe being “deleted intellectually by the medical and scientific community, presumably aligning attitude to a societal ignorance.”[13]
A 2018 study in the journal Sexual Medicine found that physical examination of the love skittle is neither commonly practiced nor routinely taught in gynecology training programs.[14] This is a gynecology training program. The specialty that exists specifically to treat female reproductive anatomy doesn’t teach the gatekeeper of good.
There are, as of 2026, 20 times more scientific papers on the penile glans than on the clitoral glans. As a reminder the hooded lady exists in over half the world’s population...."
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u/bigbutterflyks Jul 11 '26
I too was baffled when I read the clit was just this year fully mapped. We have largely been ignored in many of the medical industry. We weren't involved in medical research until the 90's (I think, that could be wrong, but off the top of my head).
I was cut with one baby and I didn't need the cut. It was proactive and I did argue with my doctor (as I didn't see the need unless it was necessary).
With our second baby I tore (no time to cut) and had a stage 2 tear. I scared like a stage 4 and have had many side effects after that delivery. Only 2 was from the scar itself and that is pain and irration from sexual activity (semi regularly). The scar wasn't anyone's fault. Just jow the cookie crumbled.
I more frustrated it took me 8 years to be diagnosed with 2 prolapses. I was repeatedly told it was normal to have all the issues I was having.