The belief that congenital clitoromegaly is proof of precocious sexuality in young girls and “nymphomania” in grown women is alive and well.
An interesting history on the medical evolution of this belief is found in Nymphomania: The Historical Construction of Female Sexuality, by Carol Groneman, 1994
This is really an astonishing, well documented research paper. The case studies are an incredible indictment against Victorian and early-to-mid twentieth century medicine.
Some interesting excerpts:
“A woman’s body would yield evidence of behavior to the trained eye of the physician that the woman herself might deny. In this way, gynaecology was able to lay claim to a unique role in the diagnosis and treatment of female disease. Although a study of six thousand French prostitutes, published in English in 1840, refuted the widely-held belief that sexual excess would mark the genitals in some obvious way, gynaecologists throughout the nineteenth century drew attention to the size of the clitoris and continued to diagnose hypertrophy of the clitoris among those women they labelled as nymphomaniacs (Meigs [1848] 1859,151; Parent-Duchatelet in Gilman 1985, 223).”
“Redness, soreness, or itching of the genitals was often noted, but in particular, an enlarged clitoris or labia was believed to be the pre-eminent indicator of female lasciviousness.17 A woman’s body would yield evidence of behavior to the trained eye of the physician that the woman herself might deny. In this way, gynaecology was able to lay claim to a unique role in the diagnosis and treatment of female disease. Although a study of six thousand French prostitutes, published in English in 1840, refuted the widely-held belief that sexual excess would mark the genitals in some obvious way, gynaecologists throughout the nineteenth century drew attention to the size of the clitoris and continued to diagnose hypertrophy of the clitoris among those women they labelled as nymphomaniacs (Meigs [1848] 1859,151; Parent-Duchatelet in Gilman 1985, 223).”
“The removal of the clitoris was justified because – according to Isaac Baker Brown, one of the major, and ultimately discredited, British proponents of the operation – it supposedly ‘removed the abnormal peripheral excitement of the pudic nerve,’ which otherwise would probably lead to insanity and death (1866, 70).
“The ideological assumptions of the period, however, imagined that female desire was passive and latent, connected to true love, marriage, and motherhood. A woman’s strong physical response to a doctor’s touching the clitoris or labia, or her vaginal contractions upon insertion of a speculum, were interpreted by some as the signs of excessive sexuality, indicative of a masturbator or a nymphomaniac.”
“Nymphomaniacs were driven to prostitution to satisfy their desires; prostitutes were often lesbians. 28 According to the New York gynaecologist Bernard Talmey, ‘It is known that Lesbianism is very prevalent among the prostitutes of Paris. ...One-fourth of all the prostitutes in Paris serve as tribadists for the rich women who patronise public houses’ ([1904] 1912, 150–51).”
“The Victorians believed that sexual restraint and adherence to highly differentiated gender roles were both evidence of and necessary for the continuation of the advanced level of civilization they had achieved. Lesbians, nymphomaniacs, and prostitutes – and by extension, suffragists, feminists, and the modern woman – were considered not only diseased, but dangerous as well (Lombroso and Ferrero 1897, 246; Thoinot 1911,469–70; Chauncey 1982–83).”
“In a case in 1894, Dr. A. J. Block decided that a thorough physical examination of a nine-year-old girl brought to him by her mother was needed to determine the degree of her perversion (diagnosed as masturbation tending toward nymphomania). He touched the vagina and labia minora and got no response. ‘As soon as I reached the clitoris,’ he reported, ‘the legs were thrown widely open, the face became pale, the breathing short and rapid, the body twitched from excitement, slight groans came from the patient’ (Block 1894, 3). Block stated emphatically that the child’s violent response proved that the clitoris alone was responsible for her ‘disease.’ He performed a clitoridectomy (Block 1894).”
“By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, discussions about nymphomania reflected increasing concern over the “New Woman’s” greater independence and potential opportunity for sexual experience. Commentators feared the “proletarianization of sexuality” – that is, that middle and upper-class women who left the safe confines of home to work or attend school would become like working-class women, who were perceived as inordinately lustful and as sexual opportunists. 31
“Furthermore, some authors began to focus on the potential ..masculinization” of women who stepped outside the boundaries of family and home. Career women, feminists, educated women who did not marry – a growing number at the turn of the century – were taking on male roles and potentially acquiring the “masculine” trait of aggressive sexual behavior. This concern about women’s masculinization coincided with the development of new psychoanalytic theories that reasserted the essential passivity of female sexuality and underscored the notion that a mature, fulfilling sexual experience for a woman could only be achieved through vaginal orgasm in heterosexual intercourse (Freud [1905] 1962, 86–93). Eventually, those women who did not experience vaginal orgasm but maintained their sexual focus and excitement in the clitoris would be diagnosed by psychoanalysts as ‘frigid.’ ”
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So, they were either diagnosed as nymphomaniacs (insane), or frigid, (slightly less insane, but insane all the same). Man, they couldn’t win.
Interesting how doctors inserted suffragette-ism and feminism into their diagnoses, as proof of the progressive masculinization of the sexually aggressive female—all signs of incurable nymphomania. And their opinion that commoners were insinuating their “base” sexuality into the docile lives of the upper classes via rich ladies with large clitorises who visited prostitutes for clandestine “lesbic” laisons. This isn’t medicine, this is incredibly good pornography.
It’s beyond me how a man—no, fuck that—how so many men, a whole society of men, could be so victimized by a “sexually aggressive” spouse that he would order her to be sexually crippled, or locked up for the rest of her life. Life would be incredibly dreary without women with healthy sexual appetites. Some guys would never get laid, for sure.
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