A Feminist Sexology Perspective on the Multifunctional Clitoris: Dispelling the Sole Purpose Myth

Abstract

The imposition of gender hierarchy has stigmatized and distorted knowledge about the clitoris. In instances when educators and activists resist the status quo by acknowledging and attempting to celebrate the clitoris, they often assert that the clitoris’s sole function is sexual pleasure. Though recognizing the clitoral role in pleasure supports liberatory progress, the sole function premise is inaccurate. The clitoris has multiple functions. The clitoris receives and transmutes sensation into sexual response psychophysiology: desire, arousal, plateau, orgasm, and resolution. Thus, together with the clitoris’s significant role in pleasure, it also functions in bodily protection and safety. Clitoral stimulation can reasonably be acknowledged as a prophylactic health behavior. The clitoris has reproductive functions as well. The clitoris supports reproduction while simultaneously fully functioning outside of reproductive sexuality, i.e., penile vaginal intercourse. The gendered lens through which we view the clitoris had hidden this sexual knowledge. Patriarchal cultures have not been able to conceptualize sexual pleasure, sexual safety, and freedom to participate (or not) in reproductive sexuality as characteristics that might co-occur for women as a sociopolitical identity, be they cisgender, transgender, or intersex women. This article presents evidence of simultaneous clitoral functionality in all these realms.