In a recent review of Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex I read that Renaldus Columbus discovered the clitoris in 1559. I can’t make sense of this. Wasn’t it right under his nose the whole time, so to speak? Who discovered the penis? And who was Renaldus Columbus, anyway? Any relation to Chris? –Mark Lutton, Malden, Massachusetts
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But seriously. According to Thomas Laqueur, Columbus, aka Matteo Realdo Colombo, was a lecturer in surgery at the University of Padua, Italy. (Whether he was related to Christopher Columbus I don’t know.) In 1559 he published a book called De re anatomica in which he described the “seat of woman’s delight.” He concluded, “Since no one has discerned these projections and their workings, if it is permissible to give names to things discovered by me, it should be called the love or sweetness of Venus.”
Lest you think such foolishness was confined to the 16th century, recall Freud’s bizarre claim that women had two kinds of orgasms, clitoral and vaginal–an idea not fully put to rest until the work of Masters and Johnson. More recently there was the hubbub about the Grafenberg spot, which briefly threatened to replace the clitoris as the seat of female sexual excitement. In some ways we know more about what happened in the universe’s first tenth of a second than we do about what goes on in the indefinite interval between “Your place or mine?” and deciding who sleeps on the wet spot.
Now for questions from the class.
