At some point when I was an infant, a friend of my mother's asked her to babysit for her little girl, whom I'll call Susan. My mother already had an older daughter as well as my newborn self, so she thought she was pretty well versed in the appearance of a female baby's genitals. Thus she was taken aback, while changing Susan's diaper, to see the girl's clitoris protruding from between the rounded mounds of her labia. It didn't quite look like a penis - my mother had a son and knew what to expect on that score - but it wasn't strictly girlish either. It looked like the tip of a nose or a pinkie, and when my mother wiped it with a cloth, it stiffened slightly, to my mother's embarrassed amusement. My mother didn't care for the look of Susan's prominent, inflatable clitoris. She thought of her own daughters and how much she preferred their genitals, neatly packed and contained as they were, the clitoris subsumed by the chubby vulva and any tactile sensitivity it may have obscured from view.
It is an assumption universally held that men know more or less where they stand relative to other men when it comes to the dimensions of their genitals. As teenagers, they may compare organs directly. As mature adults, they may resort to a variation of their breast-appraisal mechanism, a southward flickering of the eyes while standing at a public urinal or sauntering through the men's locker room, where the rule of thumb seems to be that towels should be draped over the shoulder, not around the waist. (For the record, the average penis is about 4 inches long when flaccid, 5.7 inches, when erect. That's a bit bigger than the gorilla's 3-inch erection, but then there's the blue whale, the world's largest mammal, who has, yes, a 10-foot pole.)
Women may think they know the clitoris pretty well. They count it as an old friend. They may even believe there is a Goddess out there somewhere named Klitoris, Our Lady of Perpetual Ecstasy. They never bought Freud's idea of penis envy- who would want a shotgun when you can have a semiautomatic? But ask most women how big their clitoris is, or how big the average clitoris is, or whether there are any differences at all from one woman to the next, and they probably won't know where to begin or what units to talk about. Inches, centimeters, millimeters, parking meters? Men worry that penis size matters to women, and women vigorously assure them that it doesn't. But does clitoral size matter to a woman? The girl I called Sue is now about my age. Assuming that she kept her enlarged clitoris-and she may not have, as I'll discuss - is she a superorgasmic adult, stimulated by the slightest rub, mistress of her pleasure no matter how inept her partner? Or does mass again not matter, and is there something else about the clitoris that gives it its kick?
The clitoris is usually spoken of as the homologue of the penis, and embryonically that's true: it arises from the same region of the fetal genital ridge as the shaft of the penis. But the comparison is not wholly accurate. A woman doesn't pee or ejaculate through her clitoris, of course. No urethra runs through it. She does nothing practical at all with her clitoris. The clitoris is simply a bundle of nerves: 8,000 nerve fibers, to be precise. That's a higher concentration of nerve fibers than is found anywhere else on the body, including the fingertips, lips, and tongue, and it is twice the number in the penis. In a sense, then, a woman's little brain is bigger than a man's. All this, and to no greater end than to subserve a woman's pleasure. In the clitoris alone we see a sexual organ so pure of purpose that it needn't moonlight as a secretory or excretory device. For this reason, maybe it's best that the clitoris normally is hidden within the vulval cleft: it is, in its way, a private joke, a divine secret, a Pandora's box packed not with sorrow, but with laughter.
The clitoris is a good package, and so it is small, and best thought of metrically. Its fetal growth is complete by the twenty-seventh week of gestation, at which point it looks like what it will look like on the girl once she's born. Like the classic Greek column, the clitoris is a cylindrical structure with three sections - base, shaft, and crown. But it is an archaeologist's column, for the lower two sections of it are largely subterranean, hidden beneath the skin of the vulva. The part that is most easily visible when you spread open the vulva is the glans of the clitoris, the equivalent of the column's capital. The glans sits proudly, maybe a bit smugly, beneath its A-lined roof, a hood formed by the junction of the inner labia. Glans is an annoying word, similar enough to gland to make you wonder if there is something glandular - that is, secretory - about this magic button. There isn’t. Glans means "a small, round mass or body" or "tissue that can swell and harden," both of which apply to the glans clitoris. If you looked closely, you'd see that the glans clitoris resembles the glans, or head, of the penis, with the same deco bulbousness bordering on heart-shaped, though because it has no opening. It does not stare back with a Cyclopean eye, as the penis does. The clitoral glans surmounts the shaft, or body, of the clitoris, which is partly visible and then extends under the muscle tissue of the vulva, up toward the joint where the plates of the pubic bone meet, the pubic symphysis. The shaft is surrounded by a capsule of fibroelastic tissue, a kind of latex jacket that you might slip into to go for a skin-dive. It is the meat of the clitoris, the tube that you feel dancing under flesh if you take an onanistic moment and rub the meadow of the mons. The shaft is attached to twin crura, or roots, which arc subcutaneously like the two halves of a wishbone out toward the thighs and obliquely toward the vagina. The crura anchor the clitoris to the pubic symphysis. Glans, shaft, crura: a tripartite Greek column whose changes depending on mood, from the stately Doric of a working day through the volute, unwinding Ionic and cresting in the extravagant, midsummer foliage of Corinthian, when leaves and flowers are as fat as fists and life is drunk on its gorgeous, fleeting infinity.
Considering its largely veiled configuration, the clitoris is hard to measure - it is, in fact, more easily felt than seen - but doctors have done their calipered best to be systematic about it and to offer up "normative values." Mostly they are concerned with the head and body of the clitoris, as these are the components that give the organ its heft, and hence its perceptibility to anybody inspecting it. The average infant clitoris, when measured from the base of the shaft to the top of the glans, is about 4 or 5 millimeters, the height of a pencil eraser. Grow, and your clitoris grows with you, to an average adult length from base to glans of 16 millimeters, the diameter of a dime. About a third of that span is the glans, two-thirds the shaft. Despite published standards, the clitoris, like any other body part, rejoices in deviance. Masters and Johnson noted that some women have a long thin shaft surmounted by a petite glans, others a fat glans on a short thick shaft, and so on through any number of variations and combinations. After reaching maturity, the clitoris stays pretty much the same into old age. It can get bigger during pregnancy, possibly as a result of mechanical and vascular changes, and often it stays enlarged forever after. But the nice thing about the clitoris is that it is not particularly responsive to estrogen and thus does not care whether you are taking birth control pills or estrogen replacement therapy. It will not atrophy after menopause, the way the vagina can. It will always be there for you.
