Tabby’s Deep Dives 1
The Clitoris
Everything you didn’t know about the secret life of a girl’s best friend
If I had to come up with a collective description of my early experiences with sex, it would be ‘good in parts’. I have had guys who didn’t know where to put it; guys who did know where to put it, but came too soon; sophisticates who both knew where to put it, and didn’t come too soon, but were so self-absorbed that they stared into space doing press-ups on me until they did; a married guy the entirety of whose sexual relationship was with my boobs; a divorcee whose first action after he came was to ring his mother (very touching); and one or two others who have mercifully faded from memory.
At the end of it, I was left scratching my head. Nice though sex was, there was something missing, and a potential clue lay in the fact that the sex I had had with girls had always been of much better quality. It wasn’t that I fancied girls more than guys — I don’t — it was just that overall, the girls were better at sex.
At this point, the assertive part of me (Tabby A) took over, and started negotiating her way towards a different deal. Although it freaked most of the guys out, making them aware that sex wasn’t purely for their own benefit transformed my experience, although it didn’t fix my problem entirely. I reminded them that we weren’t in some kind of race, that cocks were nice, but so were kisses, and I introduced them to the radical concept of my own pleasure. That was when I began to make some truly astonishing discoveries and completed my understanding of why sex with men had sometimes fallen short of expectations.
First, most guys would prefer to have sex than breathe, but they would die rather than discuss it with their partner. Second, the moment most guys have a hard-on, the logic goes out the window. To say that this is a recipe for lack of progress is an understatement. Although I have met some highly rewarding exceptions to the rule, discussing the finer points of sex with men is difficult when they aren’t aroused, and impossible when they are. This is one of the reasons why consent has become such an issue lately — women have suddenly woken up to the idea that sex isn’t a one-way street.
Anyway, to cut a very long story short, one of the astonishing discoveries I made was that the majority of guys, and a worryingly large percentage of my girlfriends, believed the clitoris to be a small, very sensitive button, hidden away at the top of a woman’s slit. I grew up in a medical family, and when I introduced this idea at home one weekend, the response was, ‘What? You are kidding, right?’
So let’s talk about what the clitoris is, and what it is not.
An Anatomy Lesson
The clitoris is not a small, super sensitive button, hidden away behind a little soft fold of flesh in the gateway to heaven. Instead, it is a large erectile organ, comparable in internal extent to the deep supporting structure of the penis, and in many ways similar to it. The clitoris extends in a boomerang shape within the perineum and can interact, directly or indirectly, with many of the other organs within that part of our body, including the vagina, the bladder neck, and the rectum. If you have ever had so-so sex, the explanation is probably because one or both parties needed to learn more about the structure and function of this wonderful, but largely hidden organ.
The bit that everybody calls ‘the clit’ is the very tip of the iceberg — medics call it the ‘glans’, while some of my friends call it their ‘little man’. The reason for the latter name is that both the glans and the tip of the penis are very sensitive, and here the good news for women is that the glans clitoris has about four times as many sensory nerve endings per unit area as the penis, so it is a hands-down win when it comes to stimulation for us. Or it would be, if more guys knew where the glans clitoris was and how to engage with it.
The clitoris has had a variable press in the past and there was confusion about it even in medical texts right into the nineteenth century. On the one hand, it has been known since Pandora was created by Zeus that stimulating the clitoris could cause orgasms, but on the other, attitudes towards female sexuality have left a lot to be desired until recently. The apex example of this was the way Freud got away with declaring that being able to achieve vaginal orgasms was superior to being able to achieve clitoral orgasms —leaving a trail of angst behind him. Thank you for your concern about our sexual development, Sigmund.
After that helpful comment, the clitoris became a guilty secret until the 1960s, when the pioneers of sexual science wiped the slate clean, or attempted to do so. They succeeded in rehabilitating the clitoris as an organ of pleasure, but for whatever reason, they didn’t question the Freudian concept of two types of orgasm, when in practice there is only one. Yes, I know this is swimming against the stream, but attitudes to this aspect of sex on social media are fifty years out of date.
There are four different anatomical routes that can be used to stimulate me towards an orgasm, two of which require me to be in a cusp catastrophe state (more on this in part two), but whichever path my lover chooses, I still have the same old orgasm.
Thanks to FabLab and the totally wonderful Marie Docher, who took the photograph below, we have an image of a 3D printed clitoral complex, of which more in a moment. The annotations are mine, and I hope that Marie and FabLab forgive me for adding them, because this puppy is the most fabulous teaching aid ever. If you read and understand what follows, then I promise that sex will never be the same again for you or your lover.
The glans of the clitoris might be all we can see, but behind it, the clitoris is best imagined as an octopus-like structure. The glans is the only visible component of a much larger body, which extends backwards into the pelvis at right angles to the skin before curving sharply downwards. The body is between a half and three-quarters of an inch long, and it divides at a place called the ‘root’ into two branches called the crura (singular ‘crus’), and a couple of ‘vestibular bulbs’, henceforth just ‘bulbs’.
All of this lies in the area behind the labia minora and majora, to which it is not connected, and it straddles the last inch or two of the vagina before that peeps shyly into the outside world. The structure shown in the model above bears a remarkable resemblance to the penis, except that the glans clitoris is much smaller that the penis and the deep clitoral structures lack a structure called the corpous spongiosum, which plays a key part in erections for men.
The glans is covered by a fold of flesh called the prepuce, whose major role in life is to baffle young guys who were too embarrassed to listen during their sex ed classes, and who remain too embarrassed to ask their girlfriends. When I wrote above that the structure is an erectile organ, it is — big time — and the bulbs, which are about an inch long at rest, double in size when they are excited. Anatomists still cannot prove exactly what the bulbs do, but they work pretty well for me, and although I can get along with the idea that they might help with lubrication and increase vaginal tone during sex, that may not be their primary role.
The crura lie outside the bulbs and can be nearly three and a half inches long at rest — so they are a big deal —while the whole clitoral structure is hung on a ligament attached to the body. This ligament stops the clitoral complex from straightening out, which would be its natural inclination when it fills with blood and begins to swell up during foreplay. Yet more ligaments act like seat belts, attaching the complex to the deeper structures of the mons and to the labia majora (the fleshy pads either side of your puss).
There is a good reason for all these seat belts because a high-intensity female orgasm resembles a kind of pelvic car crash. A key point is that the first part of the vagina nestles right in between the bulbs when they are erect, while a second is that the space between the top of the vagina, the sides of the bulbs and the root of the clitoris is occupied by the urethra (the tube that urine passes down from the bladder to the outside, shown here in tasteful green). Without the ligaments, everything would slide away from the other bits, and sex would considerably less diverting. As shown in the illustration below, in many women, the top half of the vagina is slightly crushed at the sides by the bulbs when they are erect.
The image shows the vagina at rest, but if you stretch it and allow the bulbs time to erect, then the bulbs act like a gear change connected directly to the root of the clitoris, and when you let the clutch out, the effect is… mmmm.
The neurology of sex
Surprising fact A is that the root of the clitoris is the most sensitive part of the entire organ, despite being inside the body. That’s right — the bit of the clit that we can see and touch might be sensitive, but it is nowhere near as sensitive as the root. You can’t see the root, but a woman can feel it when you stimulate it, and it explains why the area between the urethral opening and the glans clitoris on the skin is so sensitive to pressure — there is a lot of precision clockwork squeezed in behind there.
To make certainly sure that none of the anatomical potentials for stimulation is lost, the clitoral complex (this isn’t an entirely correct term, but it is a very convenient one, and we will call it the CC from now on) is supplied by a pair of industrial-grade nerves, which link all the way back to the base of the brain. Other nerves link directly from the skin to the erectile tissue in the CC, which is why there is such a gratifying response to a well-placed lick or two down there.
Surprising fact B is that dense though the nerve supply of the glans clitoris might be, it is uneven, making it least sensitive at the twelve o’clock position, and most sensitive below the midline, so please direct your licks up. There are also — wait for this — vibration receptors, which Zeus built in several thousand years in advance of any good way of stimulating them. Maybe that guy wasn’t all bad after all. The glans can also detect pressure, leading to endless male fantasies why so many of us enjoy riding horses — the reason being, silly, that it is the only time I can go out openly wearing long leather boots and carrying a whip.
Putting it into practice
If you think about the anatomy of the CC, then you can appreciate that it sits just above the first inch or two of the vagina, so it has lots of potential for making its owner feel extremely pleased — but there is a catch. The CC needs to be warmed up first, or the bulbs and crura won’t erect properly, and the organ won’t be able to function anywhere near its full potential.
Staying with the gearbox analogy — which has worked for me with every guy I have had to educate — it is only when a woman is given time to become fully aroused that she will enjoy sex to the limit. It takes full arousal of the CC for the cogs to fully engage, after which the revs of her engine come under fine control. Yes, it is possible to get somewhere beforehand, but it is at the price of her clutch slipping badly, but the lack of a burning smell means that some guys just plow on regardless.
Surprising fact C is that once a woman comes, the CC begins to wind down again, as the blood flows out of it, and the whole organ begins to shrink. So far, this is exactly the same as what happens when a guy comes, but a woman can come again — the trouble being that the next time it will be a tiny bit harder, because now she has neuropeptides washing around in her pelvis whose specific purpose is to turn the CC off and it takes a while for those to disperse. Not long, but it takes time.
I have never seen any scientific work on this, but my own experience with guys and my experience of having sex with other women is that if you give the CC time to get 100% charged right at the start, then the first post-orgasm cooldown starts from such a high point that it is easy to overcome the negative neuropeptides and boost the CC right back to where it started from after each orgasm (there is a limit to this… and the cooldown does get noticeably longer after each time I come).
It follows that failure to get the organ fully up to speed right at the start can lead to a cascade of problems further down the line, which is the equivalent, guys, of taking your precious convertible on a track day and flooring it before warming up the engine. There are many women who have trouble achieving orgasm by penetration, and in some cases, it appears to be because of how they are made, but in a fair proportion, it is due to sexual partners who lack patience and who don’t allow enough time for their lady love’s arousal to take care of her orgasms for itself.
Let’s think how we could warm the CC up, short of the obvious short cut of stimulating the visible bit? I know, you could kiss and cuddle its owner while telling her that you have never met a more wonderful, sweet and wise person in your entire life. After a certain amount of this, plus help with washing up and various bits of tedious shopping, she might allow you to remove some of her clothing and to extend the area of kissing and stroking to include such vital areas as her boobs and especially her nipples.
There isn’t any rush, but in the fullness of time, you might start to lick her clit very gently, but increasingly firmly with your tongue, because this will take her to orgasm fairly quickly at the start. However, if you know what you are doing, and she concentrates on the sensations it causes, you will get her there anyway by introducing something into her gorgeous puss that has the potential for causing her further stimulation. If she is in good physical shape, then because there isn’t a lot of space for expansion in that area, the more aroused she gets, the more stimulated the root of her clitoris will become until — if you are a real artist — she will come. Ultrasound scans taken while couples have been having sex have shown that the clitoral root moves when penetration occurs, and that it comes under pressure with each and every thrust. Which leads us to…
It isn’t the length that matters
Surprising fact D: the length of a guy’s cock is neither here nor there, it is how thick the shaft is and how well it is placed that matters when it comes to penetrative sex — assuming that the girl’s CC has been warmed up properly. This will only come as a surprise to guys, because every woman knows it, even if she hasn’t let you in on the secret yet. Basically, the more an erection stretches the vagina and compresses the root of the warmed-up CC, the better it feels to be on the receiving end.
As ever, there is a catch, because it is not for nothing that an erection is known in medical circles as ‘nature’s dilator’ and the vagina stretches to take whatever it has to accommodate. That means that if your partner happens to be gifted with a thick cock, it won’t be creating anywhere near such a memorable impression a year or two down the line. You will just get used to it. A prolonged period of abstinence will reverse the process somewhat, with the exception that once you have delivered a child vaginally nothing ever goes back to quite the way it was.
Some positions work better than others
Surprising fact E is that it really does matter what guys do with it. The best lovers I have had have simply been good at making me feel good before, not to mention during sex, and size hasn’t even come into it.
The anatomy of the CC does explain why some positions work better than others — the popularity of the much-maligned missionary position being because there is always an upward component of pressure to help keep the clitoral root on the move.
As one cannot fail to notice, when a guy has an erection, it points up, and although it can be pulled out at right angles to his body, there is a strong tendency for it to return to the vertical. This may not be an accident, because if you have sex in missionary or cowgirl positions, the natural pull of an erection back towards its owner’s abs is always compressing the bulbs of the CC nicely, and therefore rocking the root. Yummy.
The preceding paragraph doesn’t mean to say that other sexual positions don’t work, but for women who can bring themselves to award points, you may find that some have more effect than others. For example, leaning forward in reverse cowgirl (in other words, toward my guy’s feet) gets few votes from me because it is just about the worst position for stimulating my CC you can imagine, although the extra stretching occurs does offer some compensation. Although I can come in this position, I usually need manual help. On the other hand, leaning back in cowgirl can be terrifically rewarding, because the natural pull of my man’s cock is now towards my CC. The clutch is in, please depress the throttle…
The ultimate stimulation in my experience at least is a missionary with the guy kneeling and his thighs on either side of my pelvis. This requires a bit of hip flexibility, and it may even a thin pillow underneath you to get things absolutely right, but in this position, any erection is angled up and pointing as directly at the root as is anatomically possible.
For girls having sex with girls, triggering the sensitivity of the root means getting creative, and this is where toys and fingers come in. A bit of experiment will be necessary, but if you can find a vibrator which is thick enough to stretch your partner’s pussy, and use it to apply a gentle but firm upward pressure once it is inside her, then it will pay off (by upward, I mean towards the skin of her tummy). You will only need about a couple or three inches inside to engage the clitoral root. This is where vibrators which have a ‘lift’ towards the tip can pay off, but it is a waste of time putting these in too deep, or you will overshoot your target. The Svakom G spot vibrator is a good example — even if the ‘G spot’ concept is a legacy of quack science, the principle still holds.
A couple of well-placed fingers can achieve the same result as the most expensive vibrator, but the secret here is to ensure that your lover is well lubricated, and only to apply moderate upward pressure with your fingertips. Which leads me to…
How to make an idiot of yourself
Some readers will already be thinking about one of the current memes in porn. In this hackneyed scene, the girl lies on her back, while the guy puts several fingers into her puss before moving them very rapidly backward and forwards while lifting his whole hand forcibly upwards to press on the vaginal wall. The end result is exactly what you would expect from such unsubtle treatment — the girl loses control of her bladder and pees herself.
Hey, well done, guys, she wet the bed! Look, I can do that without any help, all you have to do is ask me round, I can pee on your bed, and then I can go home again while you clean up and throw out the mattress. As a demonstration of how not to stimulate the clitoral root, this maneuver is tough to beat, because the bladder neck lies so close that it takes all the punishment instead and then gives up the ghost. If anybody ever tried that trick on me, not only would I kick them out, I would cut their balls off first, because this maneuver is about the best way of triggering an attack of cystitis I can imagine. Great sex is the product of skill and sensitivity, not the result of brute force and unforgivable poverty of anatomical knowledge.
There are many good sides to porn. One of the positive things it has done for women is a noticeable increase in the number of guys who know where the glans clitoris is to be found. While this is a minor marvel in itself, that was the good news. Although many scenes include a mandatory segment of clit licking, the majority of the male stars take the same approach to it as they would if they were told to paint a wall in a hurry. They just slap their tongues on everywhere, as if coverage was a substitute for technique, and the consequence is that the girls rarely come on screen. One lover of mine can do it with a single well-placed, highly anticipated lick — there must be a lesson in here somewhere.
Another service that porn has not performed for many young guys is to educate them about why foreplay is necessary. In most porn movies, foreplay is limited to the girl sucking on the guy’s cock, followed by the guy doing the tongue slapping thing, at the end of which he has to spit on her puss because she isn’t ready yet. Why the studs do not die of embarrassment when they are reduced to doing this I have no idea, but it is such a signpost of poor technique that it should be enough to get them banned from the set and have to sit in a bath full of ice cubes.
The reason for foreplay is to get a woman’s CC and her mental arousal up and running, and all it takes a little bit of patience, a sprinkle of subtlety, a dash of passion — and time. In a porn movie, with a seasoned camera crew, bright studio lighting, and a cynical stud, it isn’t surprising that many of the girls fail to turn on, because there is nothing in the context to cause it to happen. It isn’t necessary to be a keen student of human nature to appreciate that that in a case where the girl is neither mentally, nor physically aroused, she is only there because she is paid to be. Do not confuse this with life.
How to do it properly
How can you tell when the CC is fully online? It is easy, darling, her pussy lips will be fluffed up and she will be running wet. The folds of the pussy will be glistening with fluid, and, although you can’t see it, the bulbs will be fully in contact with its upper sidewalls. Spitting in there would be a complete, utter and absolute waste of time, because the whole place will be awash with lubrication. When everything is fully operational, your cock or a toy will slide in without any help whatsoever. Silk on silk — your patience will have bought the pair of you a ticket to heaven.
But there is one huge caveat. Even with the CC fully up and running, a woman may not feel turned on at all.
For the CC’s owner to be ready to have great sex with you, her brain has to be aroused too, and she needs to be saying yes. Which means that to arouse her properly, you will need to do an awful lot more than than just stimulate her clit. Since at least a third of women rarely or never experience a spontaneous desire for sex, and for almost all of us, desire only occurs in a context, that might involve really tricky stuff like believing in her and making her feel good about herself — which is the part of having great sex that many men struggle most of all to understand. This part of sex depends much more on your behavior towards her 24/7 and much less on what you do to her in bed. So while it is quite possible for you to get a woman’s CC online using pure mechanical stimulation, if you are a selfish brat for the entire rest of the time, then what follows will be so substandard for her that she would be crazy to consent to it.
I will write some more about how to get the CC primed for loving in another article, but for now there is one last thing. Surprising fact E is that the best way to learn how to lick a girl’s clit is to ask her. Forget everything you have seen on your computer, and ask exactly and precisely how she likes it done. Then do what she says — you will be surprised at how much she has to teach you. Just remember to keep reminding her that she is a goddess.
Tabby
Puppo, Vincenzo, and Giulia Puppo. “Anatomy of Sex: Revision of the New Anatomical Terms Used for the Clitoris and the Female Orgasm by Sexologists.” Clinical Anatomy 28, no. 3 (2015): 293–304. (Fans of the G-spot and female ejaculation should avoid this paper entirely!)
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