[wahern]

> the clitoris did not even make it into standard anatomy textbooks until the 38th edition of Gray’s Anatomy was published in 1995.

This seemed surprising, as it hews too close to an annoying meme in feminism and history generally, that people in prior eras were idiots. And it turns out to be wrong. The clitoris was in Gray's Anatomy until 1947, when it was removed by the editor Charles Goss for the 25th edition. See https://projects.huffingtonpost.com/projects/cliteracy/embed... Indeed, the clitoris had been depicted in Classical medical books.

Why it was removed--and stayed removed for nearly 50 years--would make for an interesting story about mid-century culture, if not for a cynical throwaway comment, though it seems nobody knows Goss' actual motivations.

[jychang]

Being removed for versions 25 to 38… honestly confirms the feminist narrative of some people being idiots, though.

Like, imagine documentation on object oriented programming being removed because it offended some functional programming folks.

[austin-cheney]

I am not aware of actual code removal but skirting in that direction there was a movement, just a couple years back, to replace words that had become more offensive than they were in the recent past. One example is renaming master to main.

I am not stating any opinion for or against any words or terms in this context.

[pron]

Somewhat on a tangent, but when people talk about offensive language in the context of cultural criticism they don't mean terms that cause the people who hear them to be offended but things that may diminish the value of some people in the eyes of the people who hear them. I.e. something is offensive, in this sense, to some group X not if people in group X are offended when they themselves are exposed to it but if people who hear it may come to devalue people in group X. Whether it actually does or does not is another matter. In that sense, the discussion of the clitoris in an anatomy book is not offensive in the same way as the term master, but its absence is. Its inclusion could be offensive in the sense of scandalising some people who see it, but it's not the same sense.

[dotancohen]

My grandfather was a slave - he passed in 2007. I have no objection to the term master, nor have I heard anybody ever who was affected by actual slavery to take offence to the term.

I remember much debate about this, and not once was an actual affected person mentioned who took offence.

[pron]

1. My whole point was that it is not about anyone in the affected group taking offence. The question is whether other people can come to devalue people in the affected group. In this context "offensive" doesn't mean taking offence, but devaluing. To take and extreme and controved example, if I tell a subordinate that the women on our team were "diversity hires" who did not deserve to be hired, the harm is not in a woman hearing I said that. It is done even if none of the women on the team ever know I said that. Similarly, it doesn't matter if the women on our team all agreed with that statement and weren't offended by it.

2. I make absolutely no claim about the effectiveness of using or avoiding certain terms even in the relevant context. I'm only saying that people misunderstand what "offensive" means in this context. It means things that may make some people think less of others, whether or not those others know about it or are offended by it.

[didibus]

I think OP explicitly said that it's not about the affected party feeling offended, but about how it makes you look to choose such words.

Think bad PR, not actual people complaining due to being offended. Like if I named my code library dead babies, it's possible nobody whose delt with a dead baby finds offense to it, but many people might find it off putting that I've chosen to call it that. So if I was a high value corporate entity who doesn't want bad PR, I might want to rename it.

I think in the end it's more of a, oh damn, did I just make a master/slave analogy for my database design? Maybe someone will find that offensive, and I don't want that, so I'll rename it as a precaution, even if no one has yet to let me know it's offending them.

[aj_hackman]

The anti-master position also willfully disregards synonymy. Just because I have mastered the English language does not mean it belongs to me. Master Splinter does not own the Ninja Turtles.

[austin-cheney]

I cannot own the perspectives and unspoken histories of other people, nor will I try. Trying to do so ultimately only results in shades of self-censorship or poor imitation.

Instead I will do my best to balance my language between brevity and specificity while hoping my instructions are clear, direct, and honest for the audience. Everything else is left to chance.

I have found over the years, the degree of my communication's success is left more to the particularities and desires of group thought from a given audience than from the words themselves. I come to this conclusion through numerous times of providing the same communication, verbatim, to difference audiences and watching the wildly differing results.

If I lived by commission I suspect I would alter my behavior. Instead, I manage a software team for a living.

[pron]

I wasn't trying to suggest how individuals should behave nor claim that language has a large impact on social dynamics in general. I'm merely saying that in the context of cultural criticism the thing that is sometimes referred to as "offensive language" doesn't mean language that may insult or offend the sensiblities of those who hear it but language that may seem to make those who hear it think less of others. I don't know if this is useful or silly, but that is what it means.

[BugsJustFindMe]

This is insightful. Thank you.

[augusto-moura]

Renaming things to better names happens all the time, selectively removing something is much worse. Especially for a reference book like Gray's Anatomy

[austin-cheney]

The severity of harm is highly subjective, though I do agree with you about the harm. The more important thing is the intent, which completely underscores that severity.

[tbossanova]

Main is also an easier name for beginners. I’m old school and always got the comparison of master branch to master tapes and such things, but people new to this stuff wouldn’t necessarily have the same intuition about the name. Main is just clearer (for now). Similar to blacklist/whitelist. I had no context for either of those and it took me soooooo long to remember what they meant. Allowlist/denylist is just so much clearer. Any reduction in harm, however tiny, is a nice bonus to just making things clearer for more people

[bigstrat2003]

No, blacklist and whitelist are far superior because blacklist is a normal English word. It isn't even a term of art, programmers just adopted a word that already existed in the English language (and used whitelist by way of analogy). The argument that the new terms are better holds no water whatsoever. The old terms were superior.

[lelanthran]

Dunno about whitelist, but blacklist had the same meaning for hundreds of years.

[ciupicri]

This master tape thing didn't even cross my mind. subversion used trunk. git used master which sounded way better for me. End of story. They're just words, non-native words for me.

As for whitelist and blacklist, I don't remember having any difficulties with them. Maybe on the first encounter, but that's it.

[bigstrat2003]

It's not even "was", that movement still exists. People are still out there trying to remove terms of art on the basis of the theoretical offense felt by an extreme minority of people. It's ridiculous.

[IAmBroom]

Or, it's thoughtful and considerate.

Potato, potahto.

[wat10000]

That's not even remotely similar.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

> Like, imagine documentation on object oriented programming being removed because it offended some functional programming folks.

Let's not pretend we are fundamentally different from people living in other epochs, just biases change. We literally changed branch names of git repos because some people in one big country felt the naming could be offensive to another group of people.

[voxl]

I think it communicates maliciousness not idiocy

[amirhirsch]

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. If you are the editor of Gray’s Anatomy, incompetence is malice.

[SecretDreams]

> incompetence is malice

A subtle distinction, but I'd flip this as "malice is incompetence".

[entropicdrifter]

Both ring true, in this case.

[cheschire]

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

[voxl]

Keep word: adequately. This is not adequately explained by stupidity.

[Larrikin]

It feels like lately there are people committing malice knowingly trying to justify it as just a joke or unknowingly doing something from stupidity to make it more palatable to people that will then excuse them.

I think this rule may have always been fake when anyone with even a little bit of power did it.

[chris_wot]

It does occur to me that you can be both malicious and stupid at the same time.

[euroderf]

"Ripped from the headlines!"

[TheOtherHobbes]

I've never understood why this is taken seriously. Law has clear concepts of bad faith and mens rea, and this implies they're irrelevant.

Of course it's unproductive to start from assumptions of bad faith, which is a fair point. Bad faith requires evidence of intent, stupidity doesn't.

But there are still situations where bad faith is a reasonable hypothesis to test. And some negative actors are clever enough to operate deliberately inside a zone of plausible deniability.

[davorak]

> adequately explained by stupidity

What is the adequate explanation via stupidity in this case though? If there is one that sure maybe we should lean that way without further evidence.

[Applejinx]

This gets complicated when the malicious have also read the saying and intentionally feign stupidity, but that's just chaos politics.

[mhh__]

There is obviously truth to it but it does not confirm the whig interpretation i.e. it was supposedly _removed_ rather than never present

[pfannkuchen]

This might be the first casual reference I've seen to whig history, is that memeplex picking up steam?

[lopsotronic]

Back in the Aughts a large number of home-schooling and educational reform organizations (leaning heavily on the Fundamentalist side of the Christian spectrum) had apparently determined that Set Theory originated in Socialist / Bisexual circles.

"A Beka Book" (now styled "Abeka") was not just the province of homeschoolers, but made its way into the educational and academic curricula in many higher learning institutions.

Unlike "modern math" theorists who believe mathematics is a creation of man and thus arbitrary and relative, A Beka Book teaches that the laws of mathematics are a creation of God and thus absolute, and that A Beka Book provides texts that are not burdened with modern ideas such as Set Theory.

It would have made a great deal less fuss if it didn't turn out that Abeka books were being bought in their thousands with tax dollars. I suppose this sort of thing would barely raise an eyebrow these days. I've been seeing far more avante garde ideas flowing forth in the public-funded wells of the former Confederacy of late.

[bobthepanda]

There's a fair amount of modern/modernist-era thinking about bending the chaos of humanity to meet rigid ideal social structures, from about the late nineteenth to late twentieth century. And to be clear, the chaos of the early industrial period led to marked declines in public health, sanitation and the like. Some of these innovations worked reasonably well (the standardization of healthcare and schooling), some of them had unforeseen side effects (replacing horses and their large amounts of fecal matter with cars and invisible pollution), and some straight up did not work (much of the social engineering that went into low-income public housing in the West)

[TheOtherHobbes]

The left are accused of this far more often than the right are, even though the right own think tanks like Heritage, mega churches,mega news channels like Fox, large parts of academia (esp. economics and MBA culture), most of the lobbying machinery, and most of the bot farms.

While I think the suggestion - popular with left wing academics - that society can be engineered towards perfect fairness from a blank slate is obvious nonsense, it's also true there have been decades of active social engineering towards other ends which were deliberate, organised, and generously funded, and have become so pervasive they're experienced as constant background noise.

[bobthepanda]

I specifically didn’t mention left vs right because I agree. At least in the postwar era this was mostly done via Rockefeller Republicans in the US, who were okay with popular big spending programs but used them as a means to an end. Think highway building clearing out poor and minority neighborhoods, or making sure that public housing isn’t too comfortable.

[Fraterkes]

I don’t know about “idiots” but bias towards women was obviously real and prevalent. Treating the idea that that might have influenced medical literature as a “meme” is slightly bizarre to me.

[b800h]

Bias towards women would be understood by most readers as favouring them. I would have written bias against women here.

[JKCalhoun]

> Bias towards women would be understood by most readers as favouring them.

We run in different circles I guess.

[amenhotep]

It's a word that's commonly used incorrectly, yes.

[JKCalhoun]

Ahhh, I see. I suck at grammar.

[wahern]

The meme is that before [insert your contemporary period] people were so backwards that they would miss something like the clitoris entirely. The meme isn't that people and cultures were prejudiced or biased, but that they were prejudiced in an idiotic way. If you believe that's how prejudice works, then you'll be utterly blind to much contemporary prejudice.

EDIT: Relatedly, The Guardian article sites the statistics about female genital mutilation. And you might think, how could people in this day be so cruel? Well, in some (but not all) of those cultures, such as parts of West Africa, female sexual pleasure is highly valued, a clitoral circumcision involves removing the clitoral hood only, similar to circumcision for men, and is viewed as enhancing female sexual pleasure, specifically for oral sex, an act that lacks any negative connotations. Now, embedded in that narrative might be a deeper, more subtle bias against women, but by not appreciating and grappling with that dynamic you're ignoring and diminishing how many women in those cultures understand feminism, which is its own anti-feminine and culturally centric (i.e. "colonial") bias.

[flotzam]

Isn't type 1a circumcision (removal of the clitoral hood, but not other parts) very rare? At least that's what the Wikipedia article claims, referencing a 2008 WHO report.

[hombre_fatal]

What’s your best source that African FGM is about enhancing female sexual pleasure, specifically for oral sex?

[wahern]

This was several years ago and unfortunately I didn't archive my research. Every year it becomes so difficult to dig up stuff, and I don't have time today to go back down that rabbit hole. (These days I'm much better at archiving stuff.)

Here's a couple of articles by one of most vocal supporters of FGM in West Africa:

* https://www.thepatrioticvanguard.com/hurray-for-bondo-women-...

* http://www.fuambaisiaahmadu.com/blogs/my-response-to-fuambai...

And some skeptical but engaging discussions about her views:

* https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/TMR/article/...

* https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.14318/hau6.3.011

The second link of the four is a response to the last.

I was sloppy in being too specific in saying removing the clitoral hood was sometimes justified as enhancing oral sex. Now that I think about it, that might be one of the views regarding labial extension, which is often lumped in with FGM but obviously quite different from cutting the clitoral hood. The claims about enhancing sexual pleasure I think largely came from more polemical literature, as well as some English-language African feminist blogs and bulletin boards, and I would suspect those views may be, at least to some extent and in their specificity, recent revisionist justifications. In African discourse there's a reactionary vein that pushes against Western criticisms of traditional African practices, and one of the ways to do that would be to subvert the paternalistic disgust about FGM by explicitly arguing the practice promotes one of the West's other ideals, sex positivity.

To be clear, I'm not trying to defend any of this. Just trying to point out that the West's exceedingly simplistic and categorical perspective hides a very strong cultural prejudice, as well other problematic assumptions about how and why these practices persist.

[wat10000]

If this actually worked, you'd think there would be at least a few women without the cultural connection who get it done just for that purpose.

This sounds like the same sort of bullshit used to promote male circumcision. How about we just stop performing unnecessary surgery on our children? If someone wants to mess with their own junk, they can do it when they become an adult.

[IAmBroom]

So, you admit you have no evidence supporting your bizarre claims, and aren't defending a practice you claimed was at least sometimes without negative connotations. Gotcha.

[wahern]

My comment about negative connotations was referring to oral sex, where it was claimed the local culture never viewed performing oral sex on women as emasculating, but something men were expect to do. Genital modification itself has to some extent negative connotations everywhere these days, if only because of the influence of Western media, but that has also given rise to a reactionary dynamic that tries to defend these practices using the language of contemporary Western morality, e.g. sex positivity.

[IAmBroom]

> an act that lacks any negative connotations

If you can imagine that forced genital mutilation without anesthetics lacks negative connotations, as long as it's "for her eventual pleasure".

Good Lord.

[benj111]

I don't particularly agree with the OP but from my European pov, male circumcision doesn't seem to have negative connotations, certainly not in the US.

Negative connotations and actual negativity are two separate things. Alcohol tends not to have negative connotations whereas things that are better for your health and less addictive, cannabis, magic mushrooms, have negative connotations.

[LoganDark]

What? That practice is absolutely terrible. Many people just have no idea about it, and then their offspring might grow up with terrible shame or something if they ever learn what was taken from them.

Alcohol is also terrible. Nicotine is terrible. Even caffeine can be terrible if you become too dependent on it without realizing. Harm reduction is a thing that can make things less terrible but most users don't practice it. That's the real terror IMO.

> Negative connotations and actual negativity are two separate things. Alcohol tends not to have negative connotations whereas things that are better for your health and less addictive, cannabis, magic mushrooms, have negative connotations.

This is just legal vs illegal. Which is pretty much how morals are decided these days, especially for the non-autistic / "neurotypical" population

[nineteen999]

> Which is pretty much how morals are decided these days, especially for the non-autistic / "neurotypical" population

Give it a break. Nothing isolates "neurodivergent" people from the rest of society faster than treating neurotypical people as a morally inferior out-group.

[benj111]

Your first 2 paragraphs missing the point that negative connotations are not the same as actually negative.

My view is that circumcision is negative. I disagree that it has negative connotations though.

Do we have different understandings of what connotation means? I would say in most of the western population having a glass of wine in the evening would be seen neutrally. Having a joint less so. I'm not saying having a joint is bad. But connotations are about the unspoken things, I'm not saying it, it's inserted by people based on their biases.

I think you're putting the cart before the horse. Things that society decides are immoral become illegal and visa versa.

Fwiw I'm Autistic, so I don't know if the last comment was aimed at me, and whether I should class it as a compliment.

[wvbdmp]

It’s pretty clear that OP was referring to cunnilingus.

[lkey]

They weren't idiots. And one doesn't have to give Goss the benefit of the doubt, nor his successors. The ensuing 50 years of omission are a clear admission of what the goal was and is.

It is the year of our Lord 2026, men proximate to power are openly speculating about the removal of the vote from all women, the end of no-fault divorce, and laws to enforce a birth rate that increases the prevalence of white skin. None of these policy goals are interested in the clit, or indeed, any health care that doesn't directly contribute to the production of heirs.

So as you pointed out, this omission was done deliberately.

If one points this kind of thing out in a vacuum, you are labelled 'hysterical' or 'doing the annoying meme'. Your reaction of instant scepticism is the kind of thing I'm talking about.

Everything is uphill and 'in doubt' until you find a source that's 'credible'. If no one 'legitimate' ever bothered to write it in a way you, a man, will hear it, then it's yet another harpy shrilling about imagined oppression.

You can imagine how exhausting such reactions are the nth time you have to delicately handle them.

[IAmBroom]

pembrook has replied that the deletion of the clitoris from Gray's Anatomy is "an internet myth" (but I can't reply to their message, as it has been flagged). They then cited a published paper (Hear Read This), which I scoured to find a reference claiming the size of the clitoris was diminished in some editions (!), but never deleted entirely.

This put enough fire under me to look it up, hoping to prove pembrook wrong. I admit I wanted this feminist-persecution "fact" to be true.

The Internet Archive has one copy in the suspect period (post-1943), the 1944 28th edition by T. B. Johnston. It contains an entry for 'Clitoris' in the index, with 5-6 subheadings about the structure. Clearly, not deleted.

Screenshot of the index in question: https://imgur.com/a/qFfn9gr

[nonce42]

This is nonsense, as one can easily verify by looking at Gray's Anatomy (30th edition, 1985) on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/anatomy-of-the-human-body/page/4...

[pembrook]

> The clitoris was in Gray's Anatomy until 1947, when it was removed by the editor Charles Gross for the 25th edition.

This is also false [1]. One guy didn't wake up one day in 1947 and decide to remove all references to the clitoris in Gray's anatomy.

It's yet another version of the same internet myth, the goal being to caricature people in the past as cartoonishly evil and misogynistic.

Please never use Huffington Post articles as a primary source.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9541205/

[IAmBroom]

Please also don't ask people to Here, Read This on a lengthy citation with no direction.

The item I presume you are intending them to notice is the green-shaded Table 1, 3rd and 4th instances of the word "clitoris" in that paper. It basically supports your claim: HuffPost posted a false "fact".

[mahogany]

> annoying meme in feminism and history generally, that people in prior eras were idiots

This sounds like a strawman to me but I’m not well versed in feminism. Do you have examples? On the topic of science, isn’t the criticism more that women were largely ignored or misrepresented in scientific studies? This doesn’t have to be because the authors were “idiots”.

[AlecSchueler]

> annoying meme in feminism...that people in prior eras were idiots.

Do you have examples of this? I read a lot of feminist literature and it's not something that's ever jumped out to me.

[pseudohadamard]

Well duh, Gray's had male editors and none of them could find it.