Book Review: The Sweetness of Venus: A History of the Clitoris

The Sweetness of Venus: A History of the Clitoris. Sarah Chadwick, Wild Pansy Press, February 14 2021, Paperback and E-Book, 253 pages.

Reviewed by Julie S. Halpern.

Women’s health, particularly gynecology and female sexuality, has been the domain of male doctors and scientists throughout history. From ancient physicians and scholars such as Galen (whose theories were regarded as the gold standard for over a thousand years!) to Freud, women’s bodies have been diminished, feared, and pathologized.

The clitoris may be the least understood and most maligned organ in the human body. Missing or poorly represented in most paintings, sculptures, and medical illustrations of women throughout the centuries, Sarah Chadwick asserts that the clitoris deserves respect and understanding. It needs to be seen as its unique and very important self rather than an inferior, inverted, or lesser version of the male penis.

Ms. Chadwick, a British-born educator now living in Chicago, was frustrated with the lack of realistic sex education material for her young daughter. In response, Chadwick has written an extensively researched book, balancing the false narratives of entrenched male attitudes with lighthearted humor. Refreshingly free of feminist buzzwords and political posturing, Ms. Chadwick’s warmth and light touch reveal her dedication to women’s freedom and enjoyment of their bodies. Drawing on primary medical sources and illustrations (ranging from the ridiculously laughable to the disturbingly graphic), Chadwick details various tortuous remedies and cures for real or imagined maladies ranging from hydrotherapy to actual genital mutilation.

Throughout the years, literature of all types offers cautionary tales of the “trouble” a sexually aroused woman can create. Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Hester Prynne, and countless other heroines of the Romantic and Victorian eras exemplify the societal fears of the times. Soon to follow were scientific “discoveries” fabricated by male doctors, claiming that female sexual need or pleasure was in fact a serious mental disease, referred to as “hysteria,” a term still frequently used to describe a woman suffering from stress or trauma.

In the most delightfully scathing portion of the book, Ms. Chadwick channels and “interviews” several iconic and notorious female authors by inviting them to tea. Aphra Behn, Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, George Sand, and even Jane Austen gleefully weigh in with their views of unbridled sexual enjoyment, set against the hypocrisy, paranoia, and often total cluelessness of their eras.

In the mid-twentieth century, researchers such as Alfred Kinsey, William Masters, Virginia Johnson, and Shere Hite and creators such as Georgia O’Keeffe and the Guerrilla Girls finally crack through centuries of ignorance and misunderstanding. The female body, particularly the clitoris, has at last come into her own. But even today, myths and fear, sometimes masquerading as religious doctrine, flourish, with the intent to subdue and frighten women. From masturbation to pornography, the still male-dominated scientific community is begrudgingly coming to accept the necessity for women to understand their bodies and embrace their sexuality.

Sarah Chadwick, an articulate and compassionate spokeswoman for a new generation of women, is to be commended for her exceptional research, kindness, and candor. May The Sweetness of Venus mark the beginning of a healthy (and hysteria-free) era for women.