Get #Cliterate: Overcoming Socially Constructed Ignorance

Think you know the clitoris? Brooklyn-based artist Sophia Wallace wants you to think again. In fact, she's showing the world just how much they don't know about this powerful organ through her multimedia project, Cliteracy, which combats the lies and myths surrounding the dominant social conception of female sexuality while encouraging people to educate and empower themselves.

The project is as diverse in method and medium as it is expansive. It includes an anatomically correct golden clitoris statute, an interactive clit rodeo, street art, billboards and a mural exploring sexual violence. There's even an installation piece of “100 Natural Laws” of the clitoris, which range from “the world isn’t flat and women don’t orgasm from their vaginas” to “society idealizes male genitals while teaching girls that their genitals are grotesque and shameful yet the nexus of their worth.” The Cliteracy movement also recently launched a digital exploration of the history, anatomy, education, and cultural stigma surrounding the clitoris with the Huffington Post.

This comprehensive attempt to educate people with accurate information about the clitoris is largely unprecedented. In fact, according to the Huffington Post, very few sexual health textbooks mention the clitoris at all, and even the ones that do often fail to adequately address it. This is (unfortunately) unsurprising given the way our society shames and obscures female sexuality.

Female sexuality in our society is often exclusively discussed in terms of male sexuality. Penis-in-vagina sex is hailed as the end-all-be-all and male sexuality framed as active (while female sexuality is passive — the vagina exists for the penis). Even something as simple as the colloquial use of the word “vagina” to refer to what is actually the vulva— which includes labia majora and minora, mons pubis, external urethral, and opening of the vagina, among other things—is just one example of how society reduces female genitalia to its functions as a reproductive agent and facilitator of male pleasure.

What's more, our society tends to view female sexual pleasure as bad and deviant. Because the clitoris’s sole purpose is pleasure — and is, in fact, the only organ in the body that functions exclusively for pleasure with 2-3 times as many nerve endings as a penis — and has nothing to do with reproduction or with male pleasure (unless they get pleasure from giving pleasure, which they should), therefore, it's seen as taboo to discuss.

The invisibility of the clitoris is an example of what Londa Schiebinger refers to as “culturally cultivated ignorance” in her book Plants and Empire. Different pieces of information are distinctly but discretely left out of our common body of knowledge in order to promote specific agendas and uphold existing power structures. Obscuring information about the clitoris and female sexual pleasure disempowers women and maintains the supremacy of the penis-in-vagina model of sex, all of which reinforces our patriarchal social structure.

Cliteracy, therefore, is one part of a larger cultural paradigm shift surrounding female sexuality. People (like the ever-wonderful Nicki Minaj in a recent interview with Cosmo) are starting to recognize that equality during sex is part of larger social and political equality for all. And that all starts with a basic recognition of female anatomy and the power of the clitoris.

***NOTE: Though this article conflates genitals with sex/gender, the author would like to note that not all women have clitorises and not all clitorises belong to women.