This is especially true in cases where there are physical causes for female sexual dysfunction. The entire medical narrative around female sexual function and orgasm is written as if actual anatomy and physiology are irrelevant. Every study starts out explaining “little is known” or something about how women are too emotional. Relationship factors and body image are considered far more relevant to discussions of female sexual health than how the clitoris actually works and it’s fucking ridiculous.

Unfortunately, it is often women who perpetuate this narrative. I even came across some article recently where the female journalist was saying it shouldn’t matter where or what exactly the G-Spot is. She is happy to keep it, and presumably the rest of female sexual physiology, mysterious. Women are often behind discussions of female sexuality that emphasize psychology over physiology and anatomy, and dismiss objective measures of sexual function, such as objective measures of orgasm, as irrelevant. They report their orgasms aren’t important in surveys but later contradict themselves in ratings of sexual encounters. There is a low concordance between physiological and self-reported arousal. I’ve only studied this one area, but it was previously enough to make me lose hope that women even value objective science behind sexual function enough to even care that clitoral nerves are omitted from medical literature.

I’m working on changing this again, but I’m dealing with doctors, it is not female OB/GYN, for whom vulvar anatomy and female sexual health should be most relevant, who is open to learning this anatomy and including it in their textbooks. Only in male dominated Urology have studies of vulvar anatomy been published. Only in their textbooks is clitoral physiology taken seriously. Why is that? Why is it that the female led OB/GYN department at UTSW is ignoring my requests for them to teach their residents this anatomy and include it in the textbooks they publish there? Meanwhile the Plastic Surgery department is funding an anatomic study? Everything has been backwards.

Sometimes I don’t know how men are supposed to take us seriously when we don’t seem to take ourselves or our own bodies seriously. When women themselves are emphasizing subjective experience over objective, quantitative science, why should anyone take us seriously?

I have had female OB/GYNs tell me that they shouldn’t have to learn clitoral anatomy. I’ve had them scoff at me when I’ve tried to tell them it was important. I’ve been kicked out of a doctor’s office by a female OB/GYN. I’ve had the female presidents of both ACOG and ABOG blow me off. The ACOG committee opinion on female sexual health omits discussion of objective physiology and anatomy, focusing only on psychology. The chair of the committee who wrote that opinion is female. I’ve had a female journalist with an MD from Yale tell me there is no story here. She says, “No one knows that anatomy well.” But this is not true and getting to know it well is so easy. I just dissected a clitoris last week and the dorsal nerve of the clitoris HUGE! I had a group of women who call themselves “clit feminists” kick me out after I tried to get their help changing this. They told me no one would take me seriously, that the media would not care, that we can’t know the anatomy because we “don’t have enough sonograms.” When I argued, because of course I am right, they told me I was combative. In this case, these women who alleged champion for female sexual health, care more about enforcing politeness than they do about doctors understanding female bodies.

I am just venting and maybe I’m wrong. It just seems like women need to start valuing objective science more if we want to be taken seriously. We need to value our own bodies more if we want to be taken seriously. Why does it seem like we don’t? If we keep focusing so much on what is only in our heads rather than what is objective and observable, I just don’t see this getting better.