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... 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.
Like, imagine documentation on object oriented programming being removed because it offended some functional programming folks.
I am not stating any opinion for or against any words or terms in this context.
Let's not pretend we are fundamentally different from people living in other epochs, just biases change. We literally changed branch names of git repos because some people in one big country felt the naming could be offensive to another group of people.
"A Beka Book" (now styled "Abeka") was not just the province of homeschoolers, but made its way into the educational and academic curricula in many higher learning institutions.
Unlike "modern math" theorists who believe mathematics is a creation of man and thus arbitrary and relative, A Beka Book teaches that the laws of mathematics are a creation of God and thus absolute, and that A Beka Book provides texts that are not burdened with modern ideas such as Set Theory.
It would have made a great deal less fuss if it didn't turn out that Abeka books were being bought in their thousands with tax dollars. I suppose this sort of thing would barely raise an eyebrow these days. I've been seeing far more avante garde ideas flowing forth in the public-funded wells of the former Confederacy of late.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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".
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”.
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.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.18.712572v1
>>> PDF with the images
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.18.712572v1...
[0]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.18.712572v1...
> Longitudinal data indicate that approximately 22% of women who undergo clitoral reconstruction experience a post-operative decline in orgasmic experience [25, 26]
From [25] abstract: Most patients reported an improvement, or at least no worsening, in pain (821 of 840 patients) and clitoral pleasure (815 of 834 patients)
So, I think the quote needs to be interpreted as surgery, even though beneficial on average, still having a pretty high percentage of negative outcomes (22%) and nerve mapping potentially helping reduce that.
And talk to any gyn doc in the west: it's happening among those communities in the west too (but on a lesser scale). In several EU western countries the most common gynelogical surgery act is re-building the hymen (so that the woman can pretend she's a virgin once she marries, often forcibly by her family). You may not have gyn doctors friend but I do. And midwives. And they know.
"... surveys show that the practice of FGM is highly concentrated in a swath of countries from the Atlantic coast to the Horn of Africa, in areas of the Middle East such as Iraq and Yemen and in some countries in Asia like Indonesia, with wide variations in prevalence. The practice is almost universal in Somalia, Guinea and Djibouti, with levels of 90 per cent or higher, while it affects no more than 1 per cent of girls and women in Cameroon and Uganda"
Now from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_on_female_geni...
"FGM is practised predominantly within certain Muslim societies,[13] but it also exists within some adjacent Christian and animist groups.[14] The practice is not required by Islam and fatwas have been issued forbidding FGM,[15] favouring it,[16] or leaving the decision to parents but advising against it."
Let's call a cat: of these 230 mutilated women, a vast majority are muslims. There are 900 million muslim women on earth and nearly 1/4th of them have been mutilated by their community.
Ponder this.
Can you source that claim?
If the point here is that this is an Islamic/Muslim issue, then you'd find this in other Muslim populations. It's an Africa issue. Ethiopia is 60% Christian, yet had a 65 percent rate of FGM. Look at Pakistan, and the levant in general. Very Muslim populations yet very low levels of FGM.
The fact that SA recently (past ~15 years) passed quite a few reforms that significantly lax old theocracy rules (e.g., women are now legally allowed to drive, they are no longer obligated to wear hijab outside, no male chaperone requirements, western-tier public music festivals and concerts can now be hosted, etc.) only solidified that opinion.
500,000 in the USA. 98%+ in some other countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalence_of_female_genital_m...
Also: If pain becomes a contest, we're all losers.
Also: Thank you for complaining. There is much to complain about. There's so much to complain about that we can sit in a circle and take turns complaining and everybody will probably learn something.
Not in Europe.
> Circumcision is prevalent among 92% of men in North Africa and around 62% in Sub-Saharan Africa. In western and northern parts of Africa it is mainly performed for religious reasons, whereas in southern parts of Africa it rarely performed in neonates, instead being a rite of passage into manhood.[22]
> Studies evaluating the complications due to traditional male circumcision have found rates varying from 35% (Kenya) to 48% (South Africa). Infection, delayed wound healing, glans amputation and injury, bleeding, loss of penile sensitivity, excessive removal of foreskin, and death are the major complications reported.[23]
...
> ...There are tribes, however, that do not accept this modernized practice. They insist on circumcision in a group ceremony, and a test of courage at the banks of a river. This more traditional approach is common amongst the Meru and the Kisii tribes of Kenya.[40] One boy in Meru County, Kenya was assaulted by other boys because they wanted him to be circumcised in a traditional ceremony as opposed to in a hospital.[44]
...
> Amongst the Maasai people of Kenya and Tanzania, male circumcision has historically been the graduation element of an educational program which taught tribal beliefs, practices, culture, religion and history to youth who were on the verge of becoming full-fledged members of society. The circumcision ceremony was very public, and required a display of courage under the knife in order to maintain the honor and prestige of the young man and his family. The only form of anesthesia was a bath in the cold morning waters of a river, which tended to numb the senses to a minor degree. The youths being circumcised were required to maintain a stoic expression and not to flinch from the pain.[40]
...
> In some South African ethnic groups, circumcision has roots in several belief systems, and is performed most of the time on teenage boys: "The young men in the eastern Cape belong to the Xhosa ethnic group for whom circumcision is considered part of the passage into manhood. ... A law was recently introduced requiring initiation schools to be licensed and only allowing circumcisions to be performed on youths aged 18 and older. But Eastern Cape provincial Health Department spokesman Sizwe Kupelo told Reuters news agency that boys as young as 11 had died. Each year thousands of young men go into the bush alone, without water, to attend initiation schools. Many do not survive the ordeal.[59]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcision_in_Africa (includes NSFW images).
[22]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5422680
[23]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3474774
[40]: https://web.archive.org/web/20080906115430/http://htc.anu.ed...
Going in detail, first consider that for a feature to be evolutionarily selected for two things have to be true:
1. It must increase the fitness of the organism that carries it, i.e. the likelihood of its carrier having descendants as compared to non-carriers ( or be a side effect of another feature that improves fitness enough to be a net positive, etc etc )
2. It must be inheritable (and, in sexually reproduced organisms, mutually compatible during embryonic development).
One such a feature has reached dominance in a given population, as long as it continues to be important for fitness it cannot really be deprecated in favour of an alternative from scratch, even if that alternative is arguably better.
That's why, for instance, vertebrate ocular nerves connect to our retinas on the inside of our eyeball, resulting in us having a blind spot. Cephalopods, on the other hand, evolved their eyes independently the "reasonable" way, connecing their nerves from behind the eyeball. There's no way a vertebrate could mutate from scratch for its optical nerve to connect to the retina from behind without causing absolute mayhem in embryonic development. Our hacky solution for the blind spot? Let the brain hide it in software.
Going back to your question, some spots of the body being more sensitive than others became critical for evolutionary fitness long before nervous systems were complex enough to generate conscious qualia, let alone enough for them to be consistently involved in decision making. Furthermore, mapping of specific nerves to intensity of feeling on the CNS would imply complex hardcoding of something which is much easier to solve with "this place important, have more nerves", and maybe would even conflict with the fitness benefit of a CNS with enough neuroplasticity to learn anew during the development and lifetime of an organism.
So, in summary, the solution of having more nerves where it matters is simple, good enough, and has no reason to be rolled back in favour of a radically different alternative.
> Our hacky solution for the blind spot? Let the brain hide it in software.
I would say the solution is just having two eyes, since their respective blind spots don't overlap in the visual field.
I would also say that the brain doesn't hide the blind spots, but rather doesn't pay any attention to them in the first place. There's just a lack of information from them, and this deficit isn't normally noticeable because the other eye makes up for it. I think Dennett explains it that way somewhere, probably in Consciousness Explained
This isn't necessarily true. If you map out changes through the history of species, you'll find no significant changes but a lot of diversity for long periods, followed by big changes and low diversity for a short period. That's because during "abundant" times, the population will develop diversity as long as it doesn't significantly hinder reproductive rates. When an environnemental pressure comes up, the diversity dies down because the ones lucky enough to have adaptations that suddenly become useful and reproduce more.
So an animal might get a longer neck, but that doesn't significantly increase reproduction because food is aplenty. It's only when there's a drought that longer necks become an advantage and the trait is now selected for.
Not saying your answer is right or wrong, but I don't think this is a sufficient explanation. If the body can differentiate areas enough to produce more nerves in one area, then it could plausibly instead produce fewer nerves which inherently produce a stronger signal - just as we have nerves which respond differently to different stimuli (e.g. heat, light, etc). Also it could be neither and we kinda randomly ended up with what we have because no option was strongly disadvantageous at the time.
I can't tell why other areas may have needed higher spatial resolution; maybe it was evolutionary important in the past, and remains today. Or maybe just adding more nerves due to a random mutation correlated with better reproductive outcomes due to a stronger signal, or higher sensitivity, so more nerves are present for no other reason.
The brain does do some of what you’re describing though. The somatosensory cortex gives disproportionate space to certain body parts (the sensory homunculus). So there is central amplification, but it works on top of peripheral density, not instead of it. Without the dense nerve input, you’d basically have an on/off switch instead of nuanced sensation.
Think of a television. What gives you a better picture, quadrupling the number of pixels or making the existing pixels 4x as intense?
It's not like evolution would leave a significant amount of signal/noise ratio on the table for all other nerves.
Presuming nerves are already optimized if you want more signal you have to add nerves.
I still remember "Show HN: Clitly, my app for finding the Clitoris".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realdo_Colombo
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Anatomist-Federico-Andahazi/dp/038549...
Lol. Hard to take that statement serious.
Would be really interesting to get a few dozen of these and map out the variability. Gotta start somewhere though
