Comment by wahern
3 days ago
> 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.
Somewhat on a tangent, but when people talk about offensive language in the context of cultural criticism they don't mean terms that cause the people who hear them to be offended but things that may diminish the value of some people in the eyes of the people who hear them. I.e. something is offensive, in this sense, to some group X not if people in group X are offended when they themselves are exposed to it but if people who hear it may come to devalue people in group X. Whether it actually does or does not is another matter. In that sense, the discussion of the clitoris in an anatomy book is not offensive in the same way as the term master, but its absence is. Its inclusion could be offensive in the sense of scandalising some people who see it, but it's not the same sense.
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Renaming things to better names happens all the time, selectively removing something is much worse. Especially for a reference book like Gray's Anatomy
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It's not even "was", that movement still exists. People are still out there trying to remove terms of art on the basis of the theoretical offense felt by an extreme minority of people. It's ridiculous.
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That's not even remotely similar.
I think it communicates maliciousness not idiocy
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. If you are the editor of Gray’s Anatomy, incompetence is malice.
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"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
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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?
Back in the Aughts a large number of home-schooling and educational reform organizations (leaning heavily on the Fundamentalist side of the Christian spectrum) had apparently determined that Set Theory originated in Socialist / Bisexual circles.
"A Beka Book" (now styled "Abeka") was not just the province of homeschoolers, but made its way into the educational and academic curricula in many higher learning institutions.
Unlike "modern math" theorists who believe mathematics is a creation of man and thus arbitrary and relative, A Beka Book teaches that the laws of mathematics are a creation of God and thus absolute, and that A Beka Book provides texts that are not burdened with modern ideas such as Set Theory.
It would have made a great deal less fuss if it didn't turn out that Abeka books were being bought in their thousands with tax dollars. I suppose this sort of thing would barely raise an eyebrow these days. I've been seeing far more avante garde ideas flowing forth in the public-funded wells of the former Confederacy of late.
> Like, imagine documentation on object oriented programming being removed because it offended some functional programming folks.
Let's not pretend we are fundamentally different from people living in other epochs, just biases change. We literally changed branch names of git repos because some people in one big country felt the naming could be offensive to another group of people.
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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)
The left are accused of this far more often than the right are, even though the right own think tanks like Heritage, mega churches,mega news channels like Fox, large parts of academia (esp. economics and MBA culture), most of the lobbying machinery, and most of the bot farms.
While I think the suggestion - popular with left wing academics - that society can be engineered towards perfect fairness from a blank slate is obvious nonsense, it's also true there have been decades of active social engineering towards other ends which were deliberate, organised, and generously funded, and have become so pervasive they're experienced as constant background noise.
I specifically didn’t mention left vs right because I agree. At least in the postwar era this was mostly done via Rockefeller Republicans in the US, who were okay with popular big spending programs but used them as a means to an end. Think highway building clearing out poor and minority neighborhoods, or making sure that public housing isn’t too comfortable.
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.
> Bias towards women would be understood by most readers as favouring them.
We run in different circles I guess.
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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?
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> 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.
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They weren't idiots. And one doesn't have to give Goss the benefit of the doubt, nor his successors. The ensuing 50 years of omission are a clear admission of what the goal was and is.
It is the year of our Lord 2026, men proximate to power are openly speculating about the removal of the vote from all women, the end of no-fault divorce, and laws to enforce a birth rate that increases the prevalence of white skin. None of these policy goals are interested in the clit, or indeed, any health care that doesn't directly contribute to the production of heirs.
So as you pointed out, this omission was done deliberately.
If one points this kind of thing out in a vacuum, you are labelled 'hysterical' or 'doing the annoying meme'. Your reaction of instant scepticism is the kind of thing I'm talking about.
Everything is uphill and 'in doubt' until you find a source that's 'credible'. If no one 'legitimate' ever bothered to write it in a way you, a man, will hear it, then it's yet another harpy shrilling about imagined oppression.
You can imagine how exhausting such reactions are the nth time you have to delicately handle them.
pembrook has replied that the deletion of the clitoris from Gray's Anatomy is "an internet myth" (but I can't reply to their message, as it has been flagged). They then cited a published paper (Hear Read This), which I scoured to find a reference claiming the size of the clitoris was diminished in some editions (!), but never deleted entirely.
This put enough fire under me to look it up, hoping to prove pembrook wrong. I admit I wanted this feminist-persecution "fact" to be true.
The Internet Archive has one copy in the suspect period (post-1943), the 1944 28th edition by T. B. Johnston. It contains an entry for 'Clitoris' in the index, with 5-6 subheadings about the structure. Clearly, not deleted.
Screenshot of the index in question: https://imgur.com/a/qFfn9gr
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> What the hell has happened to HN? Am I speaking with some Russian bot farm trying to breed political radicalization?
Sadly not - check sentiment on X around these topics, heritage foundation etc are pushing all these topics right now
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This is nonsense, as one can easily verify by looking at Gray's Anatomy (30th edition, 1985) on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/anatomy-of-the-human-body/page/4...
> 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.
> The clitoris was in Gray's Anatomy until 1947, when it was removed by the editor Charles Gross for the 25th edition.
This is also false [1]. One guy didn't wake up one day in 1947 and decide to remove all references to the clitoris in Gray's anatomy.
It's yet another version of the same internet myth, the goal being to caricature people in the past as cartoonishly evil and misogynistic.
Please never use Huffington Post articles as a primary source.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9541205/
Please also don't ask people to Here, Read This on a lengthy citation with no direction.
The item I presume you are intending them to notice is the green-shaded Table 1, 3rd and 4th instances of the word "clitoris" in that paper. It basically supports your claim: HuffPost posted a false "fact".
Well duh, Gray's had male editors and none of them could find it.