2023: The Year of the Clitorides?
Because snakes have them too
Harvey Weinstein is a rapist. So says a second jury of his peers after deliberating for nine days. (A jury in New York took just five days to come to the same conclusion two years ago.) While this feels like positive note on which to end the year—it is seeming more and more likely that Harvey, 70 and in poor health, will die in jail—the verdict was actually mixed.
He was convicted of rape, forcible oral copulation, and sexual misconduct stemming from an encounter with a European actor and model who was referred to during the trial as Jane Doe #1. You may remember from a few issues back that cross examination of this witness focused in large part on the specifics of Weinstein’s genitals which are deformed after a 1999 brush with gangrene. Defense attorneys suggested that Jane Doe #1 had never mentioned this until it was brought up by other witnesses at the trial and tried to use this as proof that she’d never seen Weinstein naked. Clearly, the jury didn’t buy that.
It was not convictions all around, however. Weinstein was acquitted on charges that came from a 2010 incident with a massage therapist, and the jury could not reach a verdict on the charges related to the last two women in this trial who have been identified as Jennifer Siebel Newsom, filmmaker and wife of California Governor Gavin Newsom, and Lauren Young, a model/screenwriter.
In a statement Newsom said: “Harvey Weinstein will never be able to rape another woman. He will spend the rest of his life behind bars where he belongs.” She went on to say: “Throughout the trial, Weinstein’s lawyers used sexism, misogyny, and bullying tactics to intimidate, demean, and ridicule us survivors. The trial was a stark reminder that we as a society have work to do.”
She’s right. Weinstein’s legal team continually portrayed the survivors as opportunistic women looking to sleep with the big boss. (One of his lawyers suggested that if she hadn’t become successful we’d see Newsom as “just another bimbo who wanted to sleep with Harvey Weinstein.”) What strikes me even more though is that despite a second conviction and 87+ complaints against him, Weinstein and team still insist he’s innocent and has done no damage. His lawyers are being paid but I think he actually believes what he did was not wrong.
The charges that stuck carry up to 24 additional years in prison which, unless any of Weinstein’s appeals are successful, would be served after he is released from prison in New York. Prosecutors in Los Angeles will have to decide whether to retry Weinstein on the charges that resulted in a hung jury.
I’m signing off for the year, but I hate the idea of ending with a third consecutive story about this piece-of-shit predator. So, instead I will leave you with this tidbit. Scientists have finally found the snake clitoris. (You didn’t even know it was missing, did you?)
Megan Folwell, a doctoral student at the University of Adelaide in Australia wrote a new study detailing how the organ varies among types of snakes and theorizing what role it plays in reproduction. Folwell said that very little research had been done on the subject until now and that most people in the field seemed content to just say that snakes don’t have clitorides (a reader informed me last week that this is the correct plural version of the word, though the dictionary also accepts clitorises): “It’s quite a taboo area. Female genitalia is not an easy subject to bring up sometimes and I think people were happy saying ‘it doesn’t exist. There’s no need for snake to have one.’”
Folwell’s research—for which she dissected the genitalia of nine different species of snakes—found that females in all nine species did, in fact, have the magical nubbins we discussed last week. Moreover, she found a cluster of nerve endings in the clitorises of snakes that she believes play a role in sexual arousal. Though she says more research needs to be done, she thinks the clitoris could create “sensation [for] the female snake during courtship and copulation, which might promote longer and more frequent mating leading to increased fertilization success.”
This knowledge of pleasure organs in our slithery friends comes just a few months after a New York Times article titled “Half the World Has a Clitoris, Why Don’t Doctors Study It?” suggested that we still have a lot to learn about human clitorides. Rachel E. Gross, author of Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage, explains that no subspeciality of medicine “owns the clitoris” and that as such it often goes overlooked even by doctors like urologists and obstetrician/gynecologist who spend many hours at eye-level with vulvas. The result is that few doctors are experts in the clitoris (which expands well below the surface of the vulva and includes upwards of 8,000 nerves) and many ignore it entirely (which has resulted in medical procedures that can destroy clitoral sensation).
The experts Gross interviewed agreed that the clitoris is given short shrift because women’s sexual pleasure has never been a priority in modern medicine. Dr. Rachel Rubin, a urologist and sexual health specialist who has given herself the title of clitorologist, told the Times: “I truly believe we are just several decades behind on the female side. But we have to do the work. And we have to have people interested in doing the work.”
Perhaps 2023 will be the year of the clitoris—the year we address this lack of knowledge for snakes and humans alike.
Have a great holiday (if you celebrate one) and a happy, healthy, and sexy New Year.