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Hello GFPs! Thank you all for your lovely and kind responses to last week’s post — as you can imagine I was pretty nervous about sending out something so revealing and vulnerable. Your reactions meant so much to me ❤️
Back to your regularly scheduled programming this week — and be sure not to miss NEXT week’s post because do I have an announcement for you! [fleabag look to camera]
And don’t forget to check out the community area which this week has hosted:
a call for data on on women's experiences with sport and menstruation
a call for data on women’s experiences of transport inequality
an article on the incredible cooking millennial men
And more! Join us!
A gift clitoris
GFPs, given the number of people I made cry with last week’s post (with particular apologies to several members of my family) this week I have decided to try to focus on good news, starting with the fact that that scientists have successfully conducted clitoral reconstruction surgery on multiple women — and here’s the best hit, only FORTY YEARS after they first performed the feat on the penis! Yes, friends, it has only taken a little less than my entire lifetime to date for scientists to get to the ladies and if that isn’t progress I don’t know what is. Three cheers for the rapid forward motion of science for women!
This is, of course, actually great news, despite how long it’s taken. Surgery for vulvar cancer is life-saving, but around one-quarter of cases involve removing part of the clitoris and, until now, “the wound was simply closed afterward, and the clitoris disappeared beneath a layer of skin, with little attention paid to quality of life or whether orgasm would still be possible.”
So far so standard — it reminds me of a paper I read a few years ago (as research for this episode of the Visible Women podcast) about (one of the many) issues with default male hip replacement devices is that they have been designed without reference to the fact that for many sexual positions a woman’s hip joints have to actually open quite wide and the replacement hips simply were not designed to accommodate that range of motion. And not to be that person, but come on, if a medical device was affecting men’s sex lives it would simply never have made it to market.
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Anyway, I do not mean to look a gift clitoris in the mouth (don’t worry I will not be asking AI to create a gift clitoris like I did for the horrifying gift horse…or actually…I’m kind of curious now…hang on…)
well, well well…
Reader, after some back and forth and several more instances of my of being told off by an LLM for asking it to give me nudies I did manage to get ChatGPT to create an anatomical rendering of a clitoris, but it point blank REFUSED to create a “gift clitoris” even when I clarified that it was not a request for a graphic image, whatever a graphic gift clitoris might be.
Lumo, however, Proton’s “privacy-first” AI which GFP Julia put me onto a couple of weeks ago (this is not an ad!), was much more willing to play ball and gave me a range of options (of varying disturbingness), so that’s nil point to ChatGPT on this as in so many things.
vote for your favourite gift clitoris!
Now, where were we…ah, I seem to have have gone on a wild flight of fancy that is perhaps not entirely germane (or strictly appropriate) to the serious topic of clitoral reconstruction surgery. Anyway, as I said, this is very positive news for women who have their sexual function affected by surgery:
Among the first 23 women with vulvar cancer who underwent the reconstruction procedure, ninety percent were able to achieve a clitoral orgasm again after surgery. This typically occurred between three and six months after the operation. Ten Eikelder [a gynecologic oncologist and one of the doctors who developed the new technique]: ‘Initially, the clitoris may be overly sensitive or, conversely, less sensitive. However, recovery is generally optimal after one year. In most women, sensation returns to a level comparable to what it was before surgery.’
And who knows: maybe the next development in science for women could come only thirty years after the respective development for men?