This was probably my favorite thing I read yesterday thanks to the serendipity of what my friends share.
It is infuriating in so many ways, showing the misogyny in medicine, but it's also written in a delightful, funny way. Plus, it was truly educational, which I love. And I've studied these things pretty deeply.
Renee Stonebraker
Jul 02, 2026
"Adult women should not still be debating on what orgasms do or do not exist in the year 2026. In a time where science is trying to create artificial wombs, the fact that the bodies of over half the population are still considered medical mysteries has continued to disappoint me.
Unfortunately, I have to start with a horrific fact I stumbled upon.
If Youâve Had an Episiotomy, I Regret to Inform You
Theyâve been cutting blind. I hate to go in dry, but there is no other way to break this news. The first complete 3D map of the nerves inside the clitoral glans, which, yes, extends down and around to where they like to slice women open during childbirth, was not completed until March of 2026. As in, about four months ago at the time of this publication. Yeah.
In March 2026, a team of researchers at Amsterdam University Medical Center published the first complete 3D map of the nerves inside the clitoral glans.[1] They used a synchrotron, a machine that generates X-rays ten trillion times stronger than a conventional CT scanner, to image donated female pelvises at a resolution of 0.001 millimeters.[2] The map corrected multiple errors in existing medical literature. It revealed that the main sensory nerve of the clitoris doesnât taper as it reaches the glans as previously believed. Instead it branches like a tree throughout the glans and extends further into the clitoral hood than anyone had documented.[3] It confirmed that the clitoris contains over 10,000 nerve fibers, with a nerve density up to 15 times greater than the penis.[4]
That last figure had previously been estimated using data from a cow. From 1976.[4]
The lead researcher, neuroscientist Ju Young Lee, said she was drawn to the project by a specific clinical horror: there was no comprehensive nerve map to perform an episiotomy.[5] Episiotomy is a surgical incision of the vaginal opening and perineum made during childbirth to widen the passage. It is one of the most common surgical procedures performed on women worldwide. Episiotomy rates range from roughly 10% of vaginal births in Sweden to 100% in Taiwan. For first-time mothers globally, rates range from 63% in South Africa to 100% in Guatemala.[6] Worldwide there are approximately 100 million vaginal deliveries per year.[7]
Leeâs words, about what her research revealed: âWomen suffer from long-term side effects due to nerve damage.â[5]
The nerve network that makes this possible runs through the pudendal nerve, which divides into three branches serving the entire perineal region: clitoral, perineal, and inferior rectal.[8] An episiotomy cuts into perineal tissue served by branches of the same nerve trunk that runs to the clitoris. A 2021 anatomical study that performed 61 incisions on 47 female cadavers found that mediolateral episiotomy incisions posed direct risk of injury to ipsilateral nerve, muscle, erectile, and gland tissues.[9] Surgeons performing this procedure were doing so without a complete map of the nerve architecture in the tissue they were cutting.
In contrast, the penis nerve network was mapped in 1982.[10] Four decades of a head start, even though the technology capable of mapping the clitoris at this resolution existed years before 2026. The donated pelvises came from standard anatomical donation programs. As the research team stated plainly: what changed wasnât technological capacity. What changed was priority.[11]
Chronic Bean Neglect
I bet you werenât expecting a brief history on the magic jelly bean, but here we are. You can examine your life choices when you finish this article and decide to drink a glass of wine while in a dissociative state.
In 1559, an Italian anatomist named Realdo Colombo announced he had discovered the vibration addict. He called it the seat of womenâs delight, the love or sweetness of Venus, and he meant it as praise. Within two years his own successor at Padua, Gabriele Falloppio, the man the fallopian tubes are named after, was publicly disputing the claim, insisting heâd written it up first and just sat on it for a decade. Falloppioâs own student later formally accused Colombo of plagiarism. Three men, one organ, a fifteen year priority fight over who got to put his name on it.
Here is the part where I have to acknowledge the insanity: Three men fighting over who âdiscoveredâ a completely visible piece of anatomy that most women locate in their preteens? Imagine if any amount of women were demanding recognition for âdiscoveringâ a ballsack. Be so for real.
Anyways, Colomboâs teacher was Andreas Vesalius, the most influential anatomist in Europe, the man whose textbooks shaped medicine for the next two centuries. Vesaliusâs response to his own former studentâs discovery was to deny the organ existed in healthy women at all. He called it âthis new and useless partâ and classified it as a pathological abnormality, something that showed up only in hermaphrodites, not in normal female anatomy.[70] This is my official petition to add âthe Ben Shapiro of 1500s Italyâ to his Wikipedia page.
So: discovered, disputed, plagiarized, and declared a birth defect, in that order, all within about fifteen years, in the 1500s. This set the medical communityâs treatment of the devilâs doorbell on a track that prevails even today.
Here is what we knew about the schamzĂźengelchen (enjoy your google) before 2026: not much, and some of what we thought we knew was wrong. Helen OâConnell, an Australian urologist, published the first thorough anatomical study of the magic button in 1998, revealing that prior anatomical atlases had either omitted it entirely or depicted a fraction of its actual structure.[12] OâConnell has described what followed as the little man in the canoe being âdeleted intellectually by the medical and scientific community, presumably aligning attitude to a societal ignorance.â[13]
A 2018 study in the journal Sexual Medicine found that physical examination of the love skittle is neither commonly practiced nor routinely taught in gynecology training programs.[14] This is a gynecology training program. The specialty that exists specifically to treat female reproductive anatomy doesnât teach the gatekeeper of good.
There are, as of 2026, 20 times more scientific papers on the penile glans than on the clitoral glans. As a reminder the hooded lady exists in over half the worldâs population...."
I find it very curious how for such a long time the TRAs were going âthis post might *look* like legitimate feminist analysis but itâs actually super terfy! You can tell because of dogwhistles like âfemaleâ, âlesbianâ and âwomanââ and now theyâve decided to co-opt feminist rhetoric with their own dogwhistles to make it super male-supremacy-y. Funny how that worked out, huh.
someone else said it first but iâm forever revolted by the fact that gender clinics and other parts of our medical system define a âfunctionalâ vagina as any hole between the legs that a penis can be put in.
This is how society views female genitalia. They don't quite view it as a human organ in all the integrity that would insinuate. They view it kinda like an accessory to dick. It's defined in relation to dick- not defined by its own self. It's viewed as like a negative space juxtaposed to a positive object (dick). It's viewed as like the background to the main character (dick). It's not seen fully as its own thing with its own functions for its own right and its own integrity. Because of this, something interesting happens with the way people view women- we are seen both as sex objects, and as sexless objects simultaneously. This is the heart of why women aren't seen as fully human, in my opinion. Part of being human is having genitalia. Women aren't fully seen as having genitalia.
Anyway. This is why, in people's mind, it makes sense to cut a random hole and say what? It's exactly the same as a vagina what's the difference?
This is also why itâs NOT equivalent to circumcision. It comes from a completely different ideological place; circumcision is done by men to boys, and whilst itâs also bad, these men are not doing it to remove menâs ability to feel pleasure for the psychological comfort of women. A closer male analogue to fgm would be removing the entire penis - hell, even castration is closer to that. But men love to claim that circumcision is equal to fgm and it just plainly obviously isnât.
the villainisation of women and girls with eating disorders is so gross. âariana grande knows what sheâs doing, sheâs setting such a bad example for her younger fansâ
just shut the fuck up. eating disorders virtually only exist in the first place because of patriarchal beauty standards forced onto literal teenage and pre-teen girls, and now not only are they dealing with a deadly chronic illness but itâs the victims who are blamed for somehow âpromotingâ this deadly chronic illness too â and, not the patriarchal agents
no one does this to any other form of health condition. no one says men who are depressed are promoting depression, or men who are out openly doing drugs are promoting drug addiction. no one says fat men are promoting obesity, while fat women face so much vitriol.
isnât it curious then that with eating disorders â whose sufferers are 90% girls and women â itâs the girls and women who are blamed for âpromotingâ it?
not to mention that girls and women with anorexia have been endlessly mocked, whether it be grown ass males for the last 3 decades making memes about literal teenage girls dying, millions of people telling her to âjust eatâ, or people still commenting on a girl or womanâs weight
the perfect weight for a girl or a woman is when sheâs a man. girls and women deserve better. we deserve to just exist freely in our bodies, the same way men do.
So I just read this article about how people end up fucking up whatever task theyâre doing when they feel like theyâre being watched.  Scientists have discovered that the sense of being observed actually SHUTS OFF a part of the brain, the inferior parietal cortex.Â
Given the fact that women are constantly watched in our society, and we are constantly REMINDED that we are being watched by people making fun of fat, âuglyâ, or gender-nonconforming women, it makes me wonder how many women have messed up important tasks or projects or just day-to-day activities because A PART OF OUR BRAIN is permanently being deactivated?
Like talk about a fucking handicap.
Women are constantly held under the microscope- whether we are attractive or unattractive, the gaze of patriarchy never ends.
Just last week I was walking my dog and bent over to literally pick up poop. Â Suddenly I heard whistling and looked up cause I knew I was the only person around. Â Sure enough, about 300 feet away, some construction worker was perched on top of a building, grinning at me and calling out stuff I luckily couldnât hear because he was so goddamn far away.
I wonder what it does to women to have this constant source of stress hanging over us, each and every day, knowing we are being scrutinized and examined no matter what weâre doing. Â I wonder how many more accomplishments, life-changing discoveries, inventions, etc would have been achieved by women if we didnât have this constant brain-handicap imposed on us by men.
This feeling of being watched extends even when weâre alone and affects our abilities- hereâs a study where women took a math test while in a bathing suit and performed significantly worse than women fully dressed, even though all the women were alone when taking the test. The men in bathing suits and the men fully-dressed had no significant difference in performance. It is a major fucking handicap.
This extends to women who have been victims of stalking. The sense of being watched never goes away and thereâs this part of my brain that feels like itâs constantly shut off at all times with this fear itâs so hard to explain.
This is one of many reasons why female-only spaces are important. We need places to go where we can breathe and decompress. Where no oneâs looking over our shoulders.
Even in left wing circles itâs literally like pulling teeth trying to get people to take misogyny seriously as a real problem that is killing women and ruining their lives everywhere all the time and not like a haha silly 1950s problem we just make jokes about now
There are so many people that look at me like I spat on their mother's grave when I say that the domestic violence epidemic, sex trafficking, child marriage, and femicide are the issues modern feminism is combating. There's this insidious mentality that feminism won once women were able to enter the workforce and whenever someone who believes that is confronted with sex based violence they react poorly.
literallyâŚ.the idea that having your fatherâs last name is ~just as bad~ as having your husbandâs last name has always been wacky as hell to me because regardless of where it came from, thatâs the name Iâve been called since birth. itâs not any less âmyâ name than it is my brotherâs name just because Iâm female. I reject the idea that I donât truly belong to my family of origin just because of my gender. If anything, that reinforces the idea of daughters as expendable possessions to be sold into marriage.
and itâs not that thereâs no valid critique to be made of patronymic traditions, but it should be obvious why many women prefer to keep the identity they were born with instead of taking on their husbandâs identity upon marriage. Itâs almost like we have decades of life experiences, relationships, and self-conception tied to our names.
I got an anti-choice flyer in the mail and skimmed all their points âansweringâ questions like what if the pregnancy is a result of rape, what if the pregnancy is dangerous to the woman, etc. And of course their answers always ended up demanding that women keep the pregnancy and give birth. My question is, so do you expect women to just go about our lives accepting that they can change at any second on any manâs whim? Accepting that at any moment we could be forced to give up 9 months of our lives and go through the physical trauma of labour and birth, and deal with the way it permanently alters our bodiesâŚjust because a man rapes us? Are our bodies never our own? Are our bodies just potential incubators at all times? How unfathomably cruel. Womenâs bodies are our own. How dare you expect us to accept a life where we could be forced into pregnancy and birth at any second. I simply donât have words for how evil and sadistic that is.
The female body, when lacking the nutrients needed to run the body properly, shuts down the female reproductive system first. Libido shuts down; the menstrual cycle quits; she does not want sex--unless it is for either the affirmation or degradation of her body-- nor is she able to birth a child. All of her body's resources go purely to the continuation of her survival.
After the female body recovers from her starvation, there is a distinct possibility that she will never be able to get pregnant or carry a pregnancy to term. Even if she is able to, this process will likely be far more difficult and unlikely than it would typically be.
These facts directly dispute the oft repeated claim that a woman's biological purpose is to reproduce. When given the choice between survival and reproduction, the female body chooses, time and time again, survival. Reproduction is not prioritized in the slightest; in fact, it is often the very first bodily function to be shut down--literally deemed the least important part of a woman's body. And this choice of survival--the prioritization of the heart, the lungs, the bones--over the reproductive system is not even to the purpose of allowing a woman to reproduce later in life; no, the reproductive system is at the very least damaged, if not debilitated for the rest of the woman's life.
If the female body, as so many claim, was biologically "meant" to first and foremost reproduce, perhaps it would choose to increase libido and prioritize the reproductive system in order to let the woman birth a descendant before ultimately dying. This is not what the female body does. The female body itself declares that its own life, not that of which it could create, is the most important, that the female body, alive, is worthy even if it never passes its genes on. The female body declares that it is not alive only to further humanity, to reproduce and then die, but instead to live; to live its own life, following the desires of the woman in command of it and no one else.
The next time someone tries to insist that women are biologically meant for nothing more than populating the earth in the cage of kitchens and bedrooms, remind them of the hundreds of thousands of women living their lives, making scientific discoveries, creating art, and leading nations who survived an attempt of making themselves small, and now take up space, for years, completely unable to reproduce.
I love how thereâs literally not a religion on this earth that doesnât ban women in some way, shape, or form from participating in basic rites or accessing holy ground just because theyâre women.
while there are many TIMs who appropriate butchfemme language, i've also seen an equal amount of them who are completely vitriolic towards the culture, with a very specific kind of hate directed towards butchness. notice the use of tma (TIMs) and tme (literally everyone else, but specifically in this case women). they very much hate butchfemme because, as a female exclusive culture, it does not cater to them.
wow i wonder why males who are desperately trying to escape their maleness, self identity as lesbians, and equate womanhood with femininity hate butches. i can't possibly think of a single reason
they hate it because its just another piece of logic and evidence that sex is real and not based on clothes or identities, and that sexuality is real and not based on identities
feminism âruinsâ everything because it makes you think. it stops you from blindly following anything. when i see myself in the mirror and my eyes are distracted by my acne or my crooked teeth or asymmetrical eyes, my brain starts recalling The Beauty Myth or Susan Sontagâs essays on beauty in On Women. with that, i can no longer stare at myself and see genuine imperfections meant to be fixed but rather i am allowed to confront the actual reason i see these imperfections in the first place. when i find myself or others being too quick to judge a woman and ignore the manâs wrongdoings, i think of Woman Hating and acknowledge these judgements. when i habitually refer to everyone as âguysâ, i think of Invisible Women and recognize the default male in my language. when i start feeling lost and am tempted to fall back into religion, i think of the excerpts i read from When God Was A Woman and remember everything âJesusâ and âGodâ stole from us.
feminism gets tiring and frustrating because misogyny is everywhere. from language to behavior, misogyny just lingers in the air. and feminism forces you to acknowledge its presence instead of trying to shoo it away. and as much as it hurts sometimes, it never fails to help me grow. what i was blinded to yesterday, i see clearly now. i donât have to let patriarchy run my life, i donât have to lay under menâs boots and cry. i can be the change i want to be in the world and i am capable of doing the things my ancestors wouldâve loved to have the freedom to do. especially being a black girl, the freedom i have now is not something i can take for granted. those women before me fought tooth and nail with everything they had for me to be here.
I cannot get over how stupid this is. Men are so coddled that people are like wah there's not books written specifically for our poor uwu boys that's why :( like how genuinely idiotic do you have to be to make an argument like that.
You are so sexist that in your mind the few books that women/girls enjoy convinces your shriveled brain that boys are being left out and that's why they're stupid and uninterested in reading...
There's literally millions of books to choose from. Even if you refuse to read books by icky women there's more books and types of books than you could possibly ever want. Who gives a fuck. In primary school we HAD to read these idiotic books clearly targeting boys and their interests even.
These people are obsessed with pretending men aren't coddled enough and that's why they cannot do anything anymore. It's not anyone other than men and boys fault that men and boys are falling behind - in spite of all of human history being catered to them.
How is it still so hard for people to accept that homosexuals are actually homosexual and that we can't just upgrade into the politically correct "hearts not parts" sexuality just because they decided that sex shouldn't matter? It's like they completely forgot why this community even exists.
I get that the majority of them are at best bisexual and can't actually relate to lesbians (and lesbians have always been a minority so it becomes very obvious why they suddenly forgot about us when there's a flood of non lesbians claiming that label and correcting us with their tumblr wisdom on what our community looked like and the history they never actually experienced) even then they just can't deal with us having boundaries and it's so weird.
They pretend to be progressive but act like every other creep who sees lesbians as a challenge because he thinks we're just playing hard to get. It's like they're trying to solve a riddle.
"ok fine you said lesbians aren't attracted to men but what about dick? Is that negotiable? What if I just told you I'm not a man and you pretend my dick is a strap? Can we meet somewhere in the middle? Come on you said no men and I just told you I'm not a man anymore, so where's the problem? What's wrong with you? Why do you hate me? Do you want me to die??"
"Ew are you attracted to genitals? Do you see people as walking genitals you freak?'
"Why is it so important if someone has a dick? What if you meet someone you like, would you reject them when you realize they have this really unimportant body part that you have some weird hangups over? Maybe you should work on that because that's not normal"
"nobody cares about your weird genital fetish, we don't need to know what you do in the bedroom, stop shoving it down our throats and keep it to yourself"
I'm genuinely concerned for young lesbians who will find online communities, read this manipulative homophobic bullshit and believe that there is something wrong with them for having boundaries and not being attracted to the opposite sex.
