Post #1472749
2026-04-20 21:41 UTC
Replies (5)
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@pgor@mastodon.social 2026-04-20 23:22
@aleen@wandering.shop Did… did they really just say “near the pee hole”? 🙄
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@aleen@wandering.shop 2026-04-20 21:42
maybe the researchers just couldn't find it until recently
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@Linnefaulk@mastodon.social 2026-04-20 22:55
@aleen@wandering.shop Now every guy will be looking for magenta clit. 🙄
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@saltywizard@beige.party 2026-04-21 00:06
@aleen@wandering.shop they had to find it before they could map it. basic cartography.
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@twasink@aus.social 2026-04-21 06:40
@aleen@wandering.shop Scientific and medical misogyny is alive and well. It's not the reason it took until 2026 to fully map the nerves of the clitoris. The nerves in the clitoris are greater in number, more complex, and a lot denser than the penis. That makes it an inherently harder problem. As the paper notes, the clitoral nerves can't be mapped by gross dissection (unlike the penile nerves); the first full anatomical study of the clitoris (in 1998) was at the same level of detail as the penile ones done a couple of years earlier, but weren't able to resolve nerve mappings. For this technique, which needs an X-ray synchrotron and was first used on human organs in 2021, they need to use donor organs. There's also only about 50 of the devices in the world, so there's a lot of competition for time on the devices. In the case of the clitoris, the _two_ donor organs (obtained post-mortem, naturally) were also post-menopause, which is likely to be a significant factor. The organs also need to be fresh, as cold storage damages the very fine nerve structures they are trying to map. So they are dependent on getting a time slot, and having a woman who dies and donates their body to science around that time slot (because these slots do not get shuffled easily). That's why they only used 2 organs, and the paper itself doesn't claim to have "fully mapped" the clitoris – just those 2. The scans were done in 2024 - only three years after it was _possible_ to do it. In short, sometimes things get explained because things are harder, not merely because people aren't looking.