The extent to which male-unless-otherwise-indicated permeates our thinking may seem less surprising when you realise that it is also embedded in one of the most basic building blocks of society: language itself. Indeed, when Slocum criticised male bias in anthropology, she pointed out that this bias appeared ‘not only in the ways in which the scanty data are interpreted, but in the very language used’. The word ‘man’, she wrote, ‘is used in such an ambiguous fashion that it is impossible to decide whether it refers to males or to the human species in general’. This collapse in meaning led Slocum to suspect that ‘in the minds of many anthropologists, ‘man’, supposedly meaning the human species, is actually exactly synonymous with ‘males’. (IW, p.4)

“Penfield really didn’t study very many women, and so the assumption has always been that what is the case for men will be the case for women,” says Gillian Einstein, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, who coined the term hermunculus. 

The only study using a focal sensory-tactile nonarousing stimulation paradigm in the form of soft brushing of the penile shaft was limited to men and does not inform about female genital field location (Kell et al., 2005). Indeed, no study to date has functionally mapped the female genital field in humans using a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-compatible focal sensory-tactile nonarousing stimulation paradigm, contrasting neural response to sensory stimulation of the clitoris against sensory stimulation of a control region.