The Clitoral Awakening | Louisa Lorenz | TEDxUniGoettingen

when I was 24 I came across an online article on Facebook that a friend had posted and it was by the New York Museum of sex the title was the internal clitoris now this by itself was already intriguing but what made me really curious was the comment my friend had posted with it it said astounding I didn't know this did you so me being generally interested in female sexuality as I guess every 24 year old feminist is clicked on the link to see if I could learn something new and on that day roughly five years ago began a journey that brings me to stand in front of you today because I did learn something new and it really changed my life most people are familiar with the term clitoris but still most people have a very distorted idea of what the clitoris actually is because it is often mistaken for this tiny but Enosh part that is above the vaginal opening at the top right where the inner labia meet and yes this is the clitoris so don't worry but let me tell you you haven't seen the end of it because this is only the tip of the iceberg the clitoris is actually around 9 to 12 centimeters long so before I go into this even more just to make sure that we're all on the same page I will give you a quick introduction to the anatomy of the clitoris when a baby is born it is around week 10 to 14 that the genitals develop and they do this from the same tissue from the same origin this is called the genital tubercle which you see at the top and then with penises the tissue this erectile tissue is directed outward and forms the shaft and for everybody who has a vulva the erectile tissue is directed inward and forms the clitoris and for some people even it is something in-between because nature doesn't really conform to social expectations of what genitals should exactly like yeah so it's basically the same thing just organized differently as you can see here on the picture this is the clitoris this whole red body is the clitoris and the only part that you can see from the outside is the very top which you see there at the top of the picture beneath that is the urethra this is where you pee from and then the vagina and then down at the bottom the anus so this whole red body is inside so you can see it from the outside and if you've ever seen a clitoris or if you have one and you think about where it starts and then think all the way back to the anus is actually quite a long way so this is a pretty big thing yeah and this is what you only can can feel inside you can't see it from the outside now when I was 24 I had never seen a picture like this I didn't know any of this it was not in my biology book I wasn't told about this in my sexual education class I grew up in a fairly liberal household but my parents didn't know this and neither did my friends I was told about fertilization and conception and I was told how to prevent it I read about sexual practices in a variety of women's magazines so I think it seemed like I was fairly educated on sex but yet nobody had ever cared to tell me what my clitoris looks like and and this really upset me it was a shock for me when I found out about this in the beginning I couldn't really admit to myself that this was new information because it didn't fit my self-image at all that I was someone who didn't know what a clitoris looks like in my mind I grew up in Western world where women were equal people were educated and set on sex and I was emancipated I owned a vibrator for Christ's sake so not knowing what a clitoris looks like yeah I couldn't deal with that I think my first solution was just to suppress that there was this lack of knowledge and I stumbled on this information by accident it was just facilitated by the mysterious ways of the internet and social media so but for the moment I was overwhelmed with the information but in the back of my mind I was of course still curious and so I think the universe just kept sending clitoral content my way a while later I discovered an artist on tumblr her name is Sofia Wallace so for those of you don't know tumblr is a blogging website so more social media she's a photographer but she also makes clitoris alright and on tumblr I discovered this in her art she expressed something that I had felt inside the whole time but was unable to put my finger on namely that it was a great injustice that nobody had told me about the clitoris so this is just an extract from her work democracy without literacy is fallacy let that sink in for a minute and took me a long time with this after a while I started to realize that not knowing about the clitoris was not just about me or my personal sex life instead it was telling about the still existing injustice in our society when it comes to gender equality and it was telling about the way we subtract pleasure especially female pleasure from our sexual education and it was also telling about the way we teach people to look at women's bodies namely to see them for less than what they really are so this kind of upset me and once I realized that I bought a book and then another book and I went to workshops and just started to talk to people about this I began to educate myself on this topic as much as I could in 2016 I even wrote my bachelor thesis on the cultural history of the clitoris because it both bothered and fascinated me that there were so many myths and misconceptions and misunderstandings about this organ that ultimately had also shaped and influenced my life and it took me a lot of work actually it isn't still ongoing process to liberate myself from this doubt and misconception about my body that society and education had planted in me I experienced the difference it made to know about the clitoris for my sense of independence and autonomy and in the beginning when I first learned about this the information was really difficult to grasp now at least I had an idea of what the clitoris looks like but I didn't really understand it I didn't understand the proportions how big it is I mean actually as you've seen in the picture there's no significant size difference between penises and clitoris and I think this is something that surprises people the most I mean of course penises come in all shapes and sizes and so do clitoris but because this body of erectile tissue is basically the same just as I said organized differently there's no there's no large difference between the two and and most people don't know that so I didn't understand that at first either took me a long time to to really grasp that but once I became more conscious of what I was learning my first reaction was oh my god everything makes sense now now I finally understood why this thing feels good and maybe this other thing doesn't feel so good even though everybody's telling me it should feel really good but it doesn't and let me break it to you vaginal orgasms are not a thing and everybody knew that until Freud came along and yeah kind of after that for everybody so understanding genital Anatomy really helped me to understand my body and it baffles me that in sexual education still today we only talk about erections and ejaculation and orgasm when we talk about the penis and when we talk about other genitalia all I hear is eggs and conception and maybe if nobody's too ashamed to say it menstruation and it also upsets me that still in every women's magazine I can see a 100 in one sex tip section and 99 of them are about seducing men or how to become a more exciting and better lover when in my experience the best way to become a good lover is to know your own body first and then to be willing to invest the time and energy to get to know your partner's body too and then the other two sex tips are probably about the mysterious g-spot which is not mysterious at all actually because the g-spot is just your prostate which is part of your internal clitoris which you could have known if you had learned about it in school along with the eggs and the conception and the menstruation that we don't so because of my own experience and because so many people approached me to share the knowledge that I had gained about the clitoris I felt compelled to create a space for people of all ages and gender to catch up on this knowledge and to talk about how it makes them feel because if we refuse to teach people about the full anatomy of the clitoris we keep people especially those who have a clitoris from reaching their full potential not just in bed but in the world we are complicit in making them feel and seem inferior by not talking about their power and by lying to them about their abilities we keep them small so it is 2018 this knowledge has been around for centuries there's really no excuse not to teach this and often people say oh we don't teach this because we don't want to give them ideas now let me ask you something think about the brain this marvelous organ that has enabled our species to become what we are today and that controls our entire life we can't see it from the outside but a great deal of our human identity is shaped by the fact that we know it's there and we know how it works sort of so just imagine someone saying oh yeah the brain not going to teach that in my biology class you know might give them ideas maybe they will start to think that would be outrageous nobody would say that but still this is exactly what we do to genital Anatomy and not not just that we keep this knowledge from people we also make them feel ashamed for not knowing so tonight I shared my story of clitoral awakening with you and for me learning about the clitoris has men and knowing my value in a world that is constantly trying to tell me that I am less than so before I end this I would like to ask you to think back to the time that you first learned about the internal clitoris and think about what it means to you and how it made you feel and maybe if you had your clitoral awakening today in this really short time I would encourage you not to feel ashamed for not knowing but instead to see it as a springboard for change for yourself and for society thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 978,619

Rating: 4.3046064 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Humanities, Feminism

Id: Wq_VAEGpBW8

Length: 13min 56sec (836 seconds)

Published: Fri May 04 2018