“The clitoris is 9 cm deep in the pelvis. Most of it scrunched & hidden. New studies show the shy curl to be longer than the penis, but like Africa, the continent, it is never drawn to size. Mapmakers, and others, who draw important things for a living, do not want us to knwo this. In some females, the clitoris stretches, unfurls, 8 in, with 2 to 3.5 in, shaft free, outside the body. The longest clitoris of record has been found in the blue whale. In water desire can rise, honor sea levels, ignore land-locked cartographers. In water, desire refuses retreat.”
—nikki finney, the clitoris.The Clitoris
is 9 cm deep
in the pelvis.
Most of it scrunched & hidden.
New studies show
the shy curl
to be longer
than the penis,
but like Africa,
the continent,
it is never drawn
to size.
Mapmakers, and others, who draw
important things for a living,
do not want us to know this.
In some females,
the clitoris stretches,
unfurls,
8 in,
with 2 to 3.5
in, shaft free,
outside the body.
The longest clitoris of record
has been found in the blue whale.
In water
desire can rise,
honor sea levels,
ignore land-locked
cartographers.
In water,
desire refuses retreat.
—Nikky Finney
I had the honor of hearing Nikky Finney speak at the Appalachian Writers Workshop earlier this month and she spoke about the power we have as writers, no matter where we’re from or our culture or background. I felt inspired, unafraid, and unashamed to take a stand for the people and place I love and know. I know what this poem is about, but right now I have another kind of desire and this poem struck a chord with me. Whether it’s sexual, spiritual, platonic, political, it doesn’t matter. Desire is a very powerful thing. So, with that said, if I could make Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri read one poem, I would make him read this one. And I would tell him he should be afraid because his words of hatred broke the dam and a flood is coming.
-S
“The clitoris is usually spoken of as the homologue of the penis, and embryonically that’s true: it arises from the same region of the fetal genital ridge as the shaft of the penis. But the comparison is not wholly accurate. A woman doesn’t pee or ejaculate through her clitoris, of course, No urethra runs through it. She does nothing practical at all with her clitoris. The clitoris is simply a bundle of nerves: 8,000 nerve fibers, to be precise. That’s a higher concentration of nerve fibers than is found anywhere else on the body, including the fingertips, lips, and tongue, and it is twice the number in the penis. In a sense, then, a woman’s little brain is bigger than a man’s. All this,and to no greater end than to subserve a woman’s pleasure. In the clitoris alone we see a sexual organ so pure of purpose that it needn’t moonlight as a secretory or excretory device. For this reason, maybe it’s best that the clitoris normally is hidden within the vulval cleft: it is, in its way, a private joke, a divine secret, a Pandora’s box packed not with sorrow but with laughter.”
- Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography
"Sex and social conflict: The Roaring Girl" Jean E. Howard
In texts that have survived, early modern English writers say less about sexual encounters between women than between men, though there are passages such as the report in Jane Sharp’s The Midwives Book of women whose clitorises were so enlarged they could be used as penis-substitutes in sexual relations with other women. Writing of the clitoris, Sharp says:
commonly it is but a small sprout, lying close hid under the wings, and not easily felt, yet sometimes it grows so long that it hangs forth at the slit like a Yard, and it will swell and stand stiff if it be provoked, and some lewd women have endeavored to use it as men do theirs. In the Indies and Egypt they are frequent, but I never heard but of one in this Country, if there be any they will do what they can form shame to keep it close (1671).
file under: not what i expected to find in this article.
