By Hans Billimoria
Last September we moved back to Paba’s childhood home near Ibbagamuwa, North of Kurunegala, and I discovered Clitoria Ternatea, a distinctive flower, commonly referred to as Katu Rodu Mal in the area. I had heard of it before, this flower with the clitoral appendage, and had seen a vivid painting of it at an exhibition at the Barefoot Gallery by my botanist Uncle, Michael Harridge, but it was only in Ibbagamuwa that I was able to examine the flower up close, and you can immediately see the source of the Latin genus – the flower is shaped like a vagina with a pronounced clitoris protruding at the fold where stem meets flower.
My first thought – what a wonderful tool to discuss sexual pleasure with young people in the classroom. This ubiquitous flower is something every Health Teacher would have access to in Sri Lanka. The double petaled dark blue variety could even extend the discussion to the Labia Minora and Labia Majora, ensuring basic vaginal anatomy was accessible and… This delusion dissipated with a quick prickly nip of reality.
The Health and Physical Education text book can’t bring itself to include a line drawing of external female genitals. Male reproductive organs by virtue of being positioned outside of the body offer a semblance of what a penis and testicles may look like as they hang flaccid and docile, but female reproductive organs tucked deep inside resemble a prehistoric cave painting of an ox.
Female Reproductive System, Grade 8 Health & Physical Education Text Book
I had to wait until I got close up to a vagina to fully appreciate that women urinated from an orifice only meant for peeing. I knew they sat and peed. Growing up with three sisters, sitting and peeing was the corner stone of difference in human reproductive anatomy. This corner stone was never built on though, and if my parents were hopeful that school would fill this vacuum of essential biological information, they must have known it was malformed peer-data that we would have to depend on. The adult teachers I had access to, bar one who discussed his sexual exploits with Alsatian dogs and old women as a struggling student in Germany, didn’t really want to elaborate on sex and reproduction either.
Curiously, discovery of the female urethra followed the realizing of the clitoris by almost a decade. Australian women’s magazines shipped across for my mother and grandmother to peruse from the relatives that made it across to the promised land had at bare minimum a women’s health column that provided the erotic titillation a young tween/teenage boy required in the absence of on demand pornography a few taps away on a smart phone. Clitoral stimulation, or the lack of thereof, was a common lamentation. So yes, the clitoris existed, but what was it?
Early exposure to sexually repressive narratives regarding masturbation, based on the biblical sin of Onan, compounded an already confusing set of data. How do girls masturbate? This was quickly answered by the generationally recurring urban legend of a glass test tube breaking inside a school girl vagina. While no one really believed that a girl had injured herself with a structurally compromised test tube, insertion of a phallic shaped object made sense. But then how does that reconcile with the Devil’s button? I first heard that term being used in a Church Youth Fellowship that I was a part of as a young teenager in the late 80s. It was used by a young man to describe the clitoris. There were no girls present to repudiate his caustic claim. Googling the term over three decades later I discovered that Devil’s Teat and the Devil’s Doorbell are both terms that have evolved through Christian discourse related to women’s pleasure for centuries. The former being associated with the Puritan witch hunt of Salem in the late 17th century and the latter as numerous social media posts, including this now much maligned Tweet stating that the purpose of the clitoris is reproduction, discombobulating further with the claim that touching the clitoris releases chemicals that rot your brain, kill you slowly, and mystically invite in the Devil.
This demonizing of the clitoris as a source of pleasure is not unique to one faith. In late 2017 we sat amidst a group of Bohra women who took us through the menu card options of female genital mutilation in Sri Lanka. All options from the removal of the prepuce of the clitoris, to a nick or a cut that allows for a little less blood-letting, to the symbolic placing of a butter knife over the clitoris so that the little prepubescent girl comprehended her source of sin, are part of the well woven tapestry of shame associated with sexual pleasure that shrouds our women and girls in Sri Lanka. One Bohra lady spoke of a young man who performed the clitoral circumcision on his new wife on the night of their wedding when he discovered she hadn’t been cut. On another occasion, a woman who married into a Bohra family at the age of 18 told of the trauma she experienced when they decapitated her clitoris with a pair of scissors.
These brutal assertions of purity and chastity are expressions of ownership and (at best) stewardship men are apparently bestowed with, stemming from early tribal laws such as the Ten Commandments where wives are lumped together with all other possessions and property including land, slaves, and livestock.
“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” [10th Commandment, Exodus 20:17 New Revised Standard Version]
That it continues to prevail and manifest itself in an age of apparent scientific preeminence and the supposed super information highway suggests something is broken, or at the very least, blocked. The fact that all our Sri Lankan faiths have devalued the woman and the ecosystem of her vagina illustrates how primeval patriarchy is in our region.
Imagine a tribe where sexual pleasure is not shunned, but discussed. Imagine a straightforward anatomy lesson that accurately depicts both internal and external female genitals, not just showing us where the clitoris is, or the urethra, but also the position of different types of hymens, including those born without. Imagine a lesson that tells of those vaginas who’ve had to surgically remove imperforate hymens to allow for menstrual blood [that is neither pure nor impure, just blood and tissue] to flow, underscoring that neither the hymen nor the clitoris can ever be used as a means of verification for chastity. Imagine the classroom application for the humble Clitoria Ternatea flower.
Let the vagina be. Let the clitoris enjoy pleasure. That is its sole purpose.
If we’re still too far a cry from depicting the external sexual and reproductive female organ then perhaps depict the internal organ in its entirety – show how the clitoris is not just a little nub that peeps out but is the iceberg of human anatomy.
Show it in its glory. How over 8000 nerve endings, twice as much as a penis, envelop her pelvic area making multiple orgasms happen again and again… and again. Perhaps Penis-Envy is another devious construct of patriarchy suggesting that women should somehow be jealous of men, when in actual fact, it is men that are guilty of covetousness. We covet the seemingly inexhaustible ability to feel wave after wave of sexual pleasure that women experience while we are limited to just one single ejaculation [after which, most often, we show no inclination to continue regardless of the state of sexual excitement or satisfaction or reciprocal anticipation our female partners feel].
If humanity only realized that the clitoris is intrinsic to our very sense of being. It gives us purpose. Those who have it, and those who choose to focus on it – the pleasure of giving pleasure. Celebrate the clitoris. Don’t diminish it. Don’t humiliate it. And please don’t mutilate it. This is not the Devil’s Doorbell it is a pinnacle of human joy.
First Published in the column OUTRAGEOUS with Pulse Magazine, September 2021