> the clitoris did not even make it into standard anatomy textbooks until the 38th edition of Gray’s Anatomy was published in 1995.
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.
Being removed for versions 25 to 38… honestly confirms the feminist narrative of some people being idiots, though.
Like, imagine documentation on object oriented programming being removed because it offended some functional programming folks.
I am not aware of actual code removal but skirting in that direction there was a movement, just a couple years back, to replace words that had become more offensive than they were in the recent past. One example is renaming master to main.
I am not stating any opinion for or against any words or terms in this context.
I think it communicates maliciousness not idiocy
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
Keep word: adequately. This is not adequately explained by stupidity.
This gets complicated when the malicious have also read the saying and intentionally feign stupidity, but that's just chaos politics.
There is obviously truth to it but it does not confirm the whig interpretation i.e. it was supposedly _removed_ rather than never present
This might be the first casual reference I've seen to whig history, is that memeplex picking up steam?
There's a fair amount of modern/modernist-era thinking about bending the chaos of humanity to meet rigid ideal social structures, from about the late nineteenth to late twentieth century. And to be clear, the chaos of the early industrial period led to marked declines in public health, sanitation and the like. Some of these innovations worked reasonably well (the standardization of healthcare and schooling), some of them had unforeseen side effects (replacing horses and their large amounts of fecal matter with cars and invisible pollution), and some straight up did not work (much of the social engineering that went into low-income public housing in the West)
I don’t know about “idiots” but bias towards women was obviously real and prevalent. Treating the idea that that might have influenced medical literature as a “meme” is slightly bizarre to me.
Bias towards women would be understood by most readers as favouring them. I would have written bias against women here.
The meme is that before [insert your contemporary period] people were so backwards that they would miss something like the clitoris entirely. The meme isn't that people and cultures were prejudiced or biased, but that they were prejudiced in an idiotic way. If you believe that's how prejudice works, then you'll be utterly blind to much contemporary prejudice.
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.
Isn't type 1a circumcision (removal of the clitoral hood, but not other parts) very rare? At least that's what the Wikipedia article claims, referencing a 2008 WHO report.
What’s your best source that African FGM is about enhancing female sexual pleasure, specifically for oral sex?
This was several years ago and unfortunately I didn't archive my research. Every year it becomes so difficult to dig up stuff, and I don't have time today to go back down that rabbit hole. (These days I'm much better at archiving stuff.)
Here's a couple of articles by one of most vocal supporters of FGM in West Africa:
* https://www.thepatrioticvanguard.com/hurray-for-bondo-women-...
* http://www.fuambaisiaahmadu.com/blogs/my-response-to-fuambai...
And some skeptical but engaging discussions about her views:
* https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/TMR/article/...
* https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.14318/hau6.3.011
The second link of the four is a response to the last.
I was sloppy in being too specific in saying removing the clitoral hood was sometimes justified as enhancing oral sex. Now that I think about it, that might be one of the views regarding labial extension, which is often lumped in with FGM but obviously quite different from cutting the clitoral hood. The claims about enhancing sexual pleasure I think largely came from more polemical literature, as well as some English-language African feminist blogs and bulletin boards, and I would suspect those views may be, at least to some extent and in their specificity, recent revisionist justifications. In African discourse there's a reactionary vein that pushes against Western criticisms of traditional African practices, and one of the ways to do that would be to subvert the paternalistic disgust about FGM by explicitly arguing the practice promotes one of the West's other ideals, sex positivity.
To be clear, I'm not trying to defend any of this. Just trying to point out that the West's exceedingly simplistic and categorical perspective hides a very strong cultural prejudice, as well other problematic assumptions about how and why these practices persist.
So, you admit you have no evidence supporting your bizarre claims, and aren't defending a practice you claimed was at least sometimes without negative connotations. Gotcha.
My comment about negative connotations was referring to oral sex, where it was claimed the local culture never viewed performing oral sex on women as emasculating, but something men were expect to do. Genital modification itself has to some extent negative connotations everywhere these days, if only because of the influence of Western media, but that has also given rise to a reactionary dynamic that tries to defend these practices using the language of contemporary Western morality, e.g. sex positivity.
> an act that lacks any negative connotations
If you can imagine that forced genital mutilation without anesthetics lacks negative connotations, as long as it's "for her eventual pleasure".
Good Lord.
I don't particularly agree with the OP but from my European pov, male circumcision doesn't seem to have negative connotations, certainly not in the US.
Negative connotations and actual negativity are two separate things. Alcohol tends not to have negative connotations whereas things that are better for your health and less addictive, cannabis, magic mushrooms, have negative connotations.
> annoying meme in feminism and history generally, that people in prior eras were idiots
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”.
> annoying meme in feminism...that people in prior eras 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.