NO, THE CLIT IS NOT SHAPED LIKE A BUTTON OR A PEA

While I'm on the subject of human anatomical structures "discovered" in these last few decades -- I just posted on the lymphatic system in the brain -- allow me to state without any fainting in the audience please that the clitoris does not resemble a button or a pea. Among older people it’s still taboo to talk about it, which is tragic, because the information they have is wrong. After millennia of secrecy and misleading information, part of the work of the 1970s women’s movement as women flooded into medicine was finding out how female bodies actually work. 

That mission was successful. Women sometimes communicate the real shape of the clitoris by drawing it on drumheads, wearing the shape as a ring, earrings or a pin, or embroidering it in a field of flowers [see above]. You can get such items on Ebay and Etsy. A clit though is far larger than an earring. It's 3 1/4" x 3 1/4".

The tip is the emerging end of a buried stalk that often extends to the vagina. That’s what caused the “G Spot” mystery. In some women the stalk then runs parallel to the vagina which uses part of the clit as a front wall, solving the huge and ongoing controversy about the Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm. (For 35% women, that’s decidedly no myth.) The other 65% have a different pathway. The clitoris though has 8000 nerve endings just in the tip. Multiply that by 3 1/4" x 3 1/4". 

As was the case with the brain’s lymphatic system, this should have been recognized long ago. In parts of Africa, it obviously was. Whoever came up with female genital mutilation, slashing off the bulbs and glans, not “just” that tip, understood quite clearly that it was not a button. The guy or woman deserves his/her own ring of hell. So do those who know this is the case, but continue to draw these complex structures as a black, brown or pink pea. 

That leaves even knowledgeable men clueless and many women trying to figure out why they cannot stimulate themselves or their female partners. Sharon Stone in a bathtub made it look so easy. Well. It is, actually. Women possess the only human organ that has no purpose other than ecstasy. Vaginas double as birth canals, but the clit has no goal other than lifting its owner off the planet and keeping her there. Teens fall in love with their horses and bikes for a reason. Granted, horses have big, long-lashed, limpid brown eyes and adore you back, but bikes don’t. It’s those saddles bouncing against the clit bulbs, in rhythms that surge and let up, as the horse runs, as the bike hits rough terrain. 

However, a tentative person reaching for the Forbidden, thinking that the trick is to rub a “button” or a “pea” real hard and fast, given those 8000 nerve endings, can definitely feel Attacked by an Angry Deity. That’s why there’s a hood just above it, and probably why tight jeans and terrycloth towels were invented. Housewives in the 1930s discovered the pleasures of vibrating “muscle relaxers”. By the 1960s it was the “wrong” end of an electric toothbrush. Some began sitting on their washing machines....

It’s just that no-one quite knew why.

So they were all missing parts of it. 

These days, even Wikipedia will tell you, although the article buries the lede and explains in quite stuffy medicalese:

“....The clitoral body forms a wishbone-shaped structure containing the corpora cavernosa – a pair of sponge-like regions of erectile tissue which contain most of the blood in the clitoris during clitoral erection. The two corpora forming the clitoral body are surrounded by thick fibro-elastic tunica albuginea, literally meaning "white covering", connective tissue. These corpora are separated incompletely from each other in the midline by a fibrous pectiniform septum – a comblike band of connective tissue extending between the corpora cavernosa.[23][24] The clitoral body extends up to several centimeters before reversing direction and branching, resulting in an inverted "V" shape that extends as a pair of crura ("legs").[27] The crura are the proximal portions of the arms of the wishbone. Ending at the glans of the clitoris, the tip of the body bends anteriorly away from the pubis.[25] Each crus (singular form of crura) is attached to the corresponding ischial ramus – extensions of the copora beneath the descending pubic rami.[23][24] Concealed behind the labia minora, the crura end with attachment at or just below the middle of the pubic arch.[N 1][29] ”

Ahem.

Well, yes.

Many can testify to that. Loudly.

That capacity for interstellar expeditions does not diminish with maturity. Indeed, “there is no identified correlation between the size of the clitoral glans, or clitoris as a whole, and a woman's age, height, weight, use of hormonal contraception, or being post-menopausal, although women who have given birth may have significantly larger clitoral measurements.”

Yes you read that last correctly.

The clitoris, the whole structure with its 8000 nerve endings just in the tip, gets bigger and more eager with each vaginal birth.That’s another argument against C-sections. Of course there’s an urgent, lifesaving need for them sometimes. Worldwide in developed nations, though, doctors put the medical need for C-sections at 3%. In the U.S., they are “performed” on 25-33% of the women. Hey, it’s the woman who’s performing here. A woman’s body?Let it be, let it be, in all its glorious complexity, let it be....

Seriously, scientific questions raised: Did medical research actually miss an organ this size? If so, to what extent do social viewpoints affect scientists' ability to see evidence? If not, why was this information suppressed for centuries? How?