The Sweetness of Venus - A History of the Clitoris

You Are Not Broken

Kelly Casperson, MD

Medicine, Health & Fitness

5 • 743 Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2021

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today I am lucky enough to interview Sarah Chadwick, author of “The Sweetness of Venus”. She is passionate about sex equality, gender studies, humor and learning. Her book is dedicated to: “This book is for all those who have a clitoris, or the opportunity to engage with one.” Why she wrote this book! You talk about how the clitoris is lost and found and lost and found throughout documented history. “17th-century under-the-table narrative about sex has a strong emphasis on mutual pleasure that is noticeably lacking in many of today’s sex-ed books and in too many sex-ed classes.” Why don’t we tell girls and boys about this aspect of a woman’s anatomy? We discuss the female condition of being frigid – now we have a medical disorder if we don’t orgasm with PIV sex. In 1994 U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jocelyn Elders suggested sex should be mentioned as safe and healthy in school curricula. In answer to a question at the UN Conference on AIDS as to whether she thought teaching about masturbation in schools might reduce unsafe sex, she replied: “I think that is something that is part of human sexuality and it’s part of something that should perhaps be taught. But we’ve not even taught our children the very basics.” She was forced to resign by Bill Clinton as a consequence.” 1966 – The sexually adequate female “Frank S. Caprio, M.D., recommends “psychiatric assistance” for any woman who prefers clitoral stimulation to other forms of sexual activity. ” How did views about female morality come to be bound up with women’s sexuality? How is sharing this on social media going? Are we allowed to say clitoris? Can you talk about the American versus UK approach to menopause care? Our emphasis on “natural” and the pressure to be “natural” https://www.instagram.com/its.personalgirls/ The Sweetness of Venus: A History of the Clitoris Sarah Chadwick https://amzn.to/3ppAzd5 --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kj-casperson/message Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to You Are Not Broken, the only podcast that combines science, medicine, and psychology, to re-educate your brain and help you live your best-to-love life.
0:15.5	And I'm your host, Ford Certified Female Urologist, Dr. Casperson.
0:26.1	Thank you. board certified female urologist, Dr. Casperson. Welcome, friends.
0:27.3	Today I'm so excited to have Sarah Chadwick, the author of The Sweetness of Venus,
0:31.9	and she's going to come and interview with us today.
0:34.0	She's passionate about sex equality, gender studies, humor, and learning. And you dedicated
0:39.6	this book for all those who have a clitoris or the opportunity to engage with one, which I thought
0:44.6	was just brilliant. Welcome and thanks for coming on. Thank you. Thrill to be here. Great to meet you.
0:50.4	So thank you so much for writing this book. Can you tell us like why you decided to write? Why does the world need a book about the clitoris and why did you want to write it?
0:59.8	Do you know what? The real trigger for this book was a conversation with my daughter in her early 20s and she came to me and she said, can I ask you a question, mum? How does sex really work?
1:10.4	She said, of course, I know the mechanics,
1:12.3	but I don't think I'm doing it right. And I realized that although I had considered myself a very
1:17.6	liberal mother that I had given her labels for her vulva her vagina, her clitoris, that actually
1:23.7	I haven't talked about female desire and pleasure. And so we very quickly put that right.
1:29.3	But that also opened up a conversation about her friend group amongst her peers with my sons,
1:36.2	about what their experiences were. And I realized that today's generation had not been served well
1:43.2	by the internet and the free availability of
1:46.1	porn and that actually I then began to listen to discussions about if you leave sex centre porn,
1:52.7	then actually you're worse off than we were maybe 20 years ago. And that was the trigger for
1:59.3	backtracking into what is our, what is our sexual culture,
2:03.6	what had been the drivers for this, why is there still such misinformation about how
2:09.5	female sexual desire and pleasure works? And then I realized that whilst there was still
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