I Think We Forgot the Clitoris Existed for Pleasure

I Think We Forgot the Clitoris Existed for Pleasure

But somehow still found a way to blame victims for moaning during rape

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On a Saturday evening, I watched a movie, and a scene has stayed with me. A couple was robbed; armed men entered their home, took everything they came for, and before they left, they raped the wife in front of her husband.

She moaned and screamed. And when it is all over, when the men are gone, and the dust has settled. Then the husband was all-over the place; the conversation that follows is not about the robbery. It is not about her trauma or her pain or what she needs next.

He started lashing out at her for how she reacted during the incident. He gathered the family, and the question on the table is why she sounded like she was enjoying it? Or even if she knew the robbers?

The stolen goods were forgotten, and the violation was forgotten. What remained and what became the real crime in that room was the sound her body made without her permission.

I sat with that scene for a long time because it is not fiction. It happens in real homes, real family meetings, real marriages. And it reveals something deeply uncomfortable about how little we actually understand about women’s bodies and how eagerly we punish them for that ignorance.

The body does not ask for permission

Here is what nobody taught us in the way we needed to be taught. The clitoris exists entirely for pleasure. It is the only organ in the human body whose sole purpose is sensation.

It has no reproductive function. It exists for one reason and one reason only —to feel good. And yet it is one of the most ignored, most mutilated, and most misunderstood parts of the female body in cultures across the world.

When a woman is sexually stimulated, regardless of the circumstances, regardless of whether she consented, regardless of whether she wanted it, her body can respond.

Lubrication happens, the clitoris swells, and moaning can occur. This is not desire, this is not enjoyment, this is biology. The nervous system does not pause to ask whether this moment is appropriate or enjoyable before it responds to stimulation. It simply responds!

This is the same body that was designed to feel pleasure. The same nerve endings that make sex enjoyable are the same ones that react during assault.

The body cannot distinguish between the two in the way the mind can. And the mind, in that moment, is often somewhere far away, dissociating, surviving, enduring.

To blame a woman for her body’s involuntary response during rape is to reveal a fundamental ignorance about how the female body works.

But it is an ignorance society has been comfortable with for a very long time because understanding her body would mean taking it seriously. And taking it seriously would mean the blame could no longer so easily land on victims.

What do you know about the clitoris?

This is the contradiction at the center of everything. Society has spent centuries obsessing over women’s bodies, legislating them, policing them, commodifying them, shaming them. While simultaneously knowing almost nothing about how they actually function.

The clitoris was not fully mapped anatomically until 1998. Not completely understood in its structure and full size until the end of the twentieth century.

For everything that has been said and written and decided about women’s bodies and women’s sexuality throughout human history, the very organ responsible for female pleasure was largely a mystery to medical science until a few decades ago.

And in many cultures, it was not a mystery; it was a target. Female genital mutilation, which I was a victim of, exists in many parts of the world, specifically to remove it. To ensure that her body cannot feel what it was designed to feel. To make sure pleasure is not something she has access to. Truly, it affected my sense of sexual urge.

The clitoris, if present, will always perform its duty irrespective of the situation. So we cut it out where we could. We ignored it where we could not. And then we blamed her for the way her body responded anyway.

The issue of biological ignorance isn’t new. We have been here before with biology, using it selectively to shame women while excusing men from the same scrutiny.

For generations, women were blamed, abandoned, and in some cultures killed for failing to produce male children. The shame of having only daughters sat entirely on the mother. Her womb was the problem, or her body had failed to produce a male child.

And then science told us the truth. It is the sperm that determines the sex of a child. The Y chromosome that produces a male child comes entirely from the father. The woman’s egg carries only X.

She was never the one deciding; she never had that power, and yet she carried the blame for decades, centuries, across cultures and continents, as though the failure was hers alone.

We do the same thing with the clitoris. We do the same thing with arousal. We point at her body as evidence of something she did, when the truth is her body was simply doing what bodies do. Then biology becomes a weapon used against women.

What her body did was not a confession

Taking us back to that room, that family meeting was held. The husband who cannot look at his wife the same way. The relatives who came to discuss what her sounds meant instead of what she survived.

She needed a hospital. She needed someone to hold her hand. She needed to be told that what happened to her was not her fault and that her body’s response was not a betrayal of her or of her marriage. She needed every person in that room to understand that the nervous system does not negotiate with violence; it simply reacts! Instead, she got a trial.

This is what happens when a society decides to strip away the education, ignore the anatomy, erase the science, and replace all of it with shame. We create a world where a rape survivor sits in front of her own family and has to defend the sounds she made while being violated.

And the real horror is not just that this happens. It is that it makes sense to people, especially adults, to gather and collectively decide that a woman’s involuntary physical response during assault is more troubling than the assault itself. It is that her moaning became the scandal, and the men who robbed and violated her became almost incidental to the story.

The punishment does not stop there. The woman in that room is now at risk of losing her marriage, not because she was violated, but because of the sound she made while it was happening.

Her husband’s discomfort has become grounds for her displacement. The very person who should have held her closest is now the one holding the door open for her to leave.

Somewhere else, a young girl who was raped is being quietly prepared not for therapy or justice but for a wedding, married off to the man who violated her because a family decided that her shame needed to be covered rather than her wound healed. Her body became the problem the moment it was touched without her permission, and marriage to her abuser is offered as the solution.

And somewhere else still, a woman who conceived through rape is denied the right to end a pregnancy she never chose. Why? because she walked a certain road, wore a certain thing, existed in a certain place at a certain time, and the world decided that was consent enough.

Her body was violated twice, once by the man and once by the system that forced her to carry the evidence of what he did.

The clitoris they forgot existed for pleasure. The moaning they refused to understand. The pregnancy they forced her to keep. In the marriage, they used to silence her. The divorce they threatened her with for surviving.

All of it, every single piece of it, placed on our women's bodies like a debt we owe for simply being a woman in a world that has never quite decided that we deserve to be treated like one.