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dissection was unthinkable. Most of what they understood about the genitals was inferred by their animal dissections. The Catholic Church, which dictated life in the Dark and Middle Ages, strictly forbade human
ALTHOUGH THE GENITALS WERE UNDERSTOOD to be
equivalent, sex in ancient Greece was by no means equivalent for men and women. In the realm of the elite, men used sex to assert status and power over their inferiors; women, boys,
slaves, and foreigners. Pleasure was a secondary goal.
Women, who had no status to establish, were believed to be able to both give and receive pleasure. Men in fact, believed that once women were aroused, they were insatiable which presented a grave threat to the male-centered social order.
In an often quoted Greek myth, Hera, the queen of the Olympian goddesses, and her husband, Zeus, king of the Heavens, get into a furious row over who enjoys sex more,
men or women. Hera asserts that it is men, while Zeus insists that it is women. In order to settle the disagreement, they
decide to consult the sage Tireslas, who was known to have experienced sex as both a man and a woman. Tireslas agrees
with Zeus, saying that women experience pleasure nine times more then men. Hera was so angry for losing the argument
that she blinded poor Tireslas, who had only affirmed what Greek men believed about sex anyway.
dissection. Under the aegis of the church, medical research waned, but the masterworks of the Greeks remained available in surreptitious editions and served as the basis of rational medical knowledge until they were openly distributed again during the Renaissance.
Exploring and mapping the body was one of the grand obsessions during the Renaissance. In medical schools across Europe, the restrictions on human dissection loosened, opening the floodgates of discovery. The first anatomical illustrations of the human body were done in the late fifteenth century and, as Laqueur notes, “the more Renaissance anatomists dissected, looked into, and visually represented the female body, the more powerfully and convincingly they saw it to be a version of the male’s.” 15 Echoing Galen in 1546, Charles Estienne, physician to King Louis XIV, confidently insisted that “what is inside women, likewise sticks out in males, but what is the foreskin in males is the pudendum [vulva] in women... what is a small covering [clitoral hood] in the opening of the vulva, such appears as a circular outgrowth [foreskin] of the male genitals.” 16
In the sixteenth century, the clitoris became the object of a famous Renaissance turf war between two preeminent Italian anatomists, Gabriel Fallopius and Renauldus Columbus. Each claimed to have “discovered” the clitoris. But Laqueur points out that “Kaspar Bartholin, the distinguished seventeenth-century
anatomist from Copenhagen, argued in turn .that both Fallopius and Columbus were being vainglorious in claiming the ‘invention or first Observation of this Part,’ since the clitoris had been known to everyone since the second century.” 17 Fallopius succeeded, nonetheless, in having the egg transport tubes named in his honor, and today, we speak of the Fallopian tubes, although egg tubes would be a more descriptive and serviceable designation.
Laqueur explains that this knowledge of the entire clitoris was not the sole province of the intelligentsia. In a popular midwifery manual published in 1671, the English midwife Jane Sharp argued that the penis and the clitoris were nearly identical in structure and function. “The clitoris,” she notes, “will stand and fall as the yard [penis] doth and makes women lustful and take delight in copulation.” 18
VIVA LA DIFFERENCE?
According to Laqueur, the one-sex concept remained intact until the eighteenth century when “sex as we know it was invented.” 19
Amidst the political ferment that led up to the French Revolution,
than skin deep. Where before there had been only one basic structure, now there
ALTHOUGH THE GENITALS WERE UNDERSTOOD to be
equivalent, sex in ancient Greece was by no means equivalent for men and women. In the realm of the elite, men used sex to assert status and power over their inferiors; women, boys,
slaves, and foreigners. Pleasure was a secondary goal.
Women, who had no status to establish, were believed to be able to both give and receive pleasure. Men in fact, believed that once women were aroused, they were insatiable which presented a grave threat to the male-centered social order.
In an often quoted Greek myth, Hera, the queen of the Olympian goddesses, and her husband, Zeus, king of the Heavens, get into a furious row over who enjoys sex more,
men or women. Hera asserts that it is men, while Zeus insists that it is women. In order to settle the disagreement, they
decide to consult the sage Tireslas, who was known to have experienced sex as both a man and a woman. Tireslas agrees
with Zeus, saying that women experience pleasure nine times more then men. Hera was so angry for losing the argument
that she blinded poor Tireslas, who had only affirmed what Greek men believed about sex anyway.
dissection. Under the aegis of the church, medical research waned, but the masterworks of the Greeks remained available in surreptitious editions and served as the basis of rational medical knowledge until they were openly distributed again during the Renaissance.
Exploring and mapping the body was one of the grand obsessions during the Renaissance. In medical schools across Europe, the restrictions on human dissection loosened, opening the floodgates of discovery. The first anatomical illustrations of the human body were done in the late fifteenth century and, as Laqueur notes, “the more Renaissance anatomists dissected, looked into, and visually represented the female body, the more powerfully and convincingly they saw it to be a version of the male’s.” 15 Echoing Galen in 1546, Charles Estienne, physician to King Louis XIV, confidently insisted that “what is inside women, likewise sticks out in males, but what is the foreskin in males is the pudendum [vulva] in women... what is a small covering [clitoral hood] in the opening of the vulva, such appears as a circular outgrowth [foreskin] of the male genitals.” 16
In the sixteenth century, the clitoris became the object of a famous Renaissance turf war between two preeminent Italian anatomists, Gabriel Fallopius and Renauldus Columbus. Each claimed to have “discovered” the clitoris. But Laqueur points out that “Kaspar Bartholin, the distinguished seventeenth-century
anatomist from Copenhagen, argued in turn .that both Fallopius and Columbus were being vainglorious in claiming the ‘invention or first Observation of this Part,’ since the clitoris had been known to everyone since the second century.” 17 Fallopius succeeded, nonetheless, in having the egg transport tubes named in his honor, and today, we speak of the Fallopian tubes, although egg tubes would be a more descriptive and serviceable designation.
Laqueur explains that this knowledge of the entire clitoris was not the sole province of the intelligentsia. In a popular midwifery manual published in 1671, the English midwife Jane Sharp argued that the penis and the clitoris were nearly identical in structure and function. “The clitoris,” she notes, “will stand and fall as the yard [penis] doth and makes women lustful and take delight in copulation.” 18
VIVA LA DIFFERENCE?
According to Laqueur, the one-sex concept remained intact until the eighteenth century when “sex as we know it was invented.” 19
Amidst the political ferment that led up to the French Revolution,
than skin deep. Where before there had been only one basic structure, now there
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