Editor’s note: This article contains graphic and objectionable content.
The things liberals spend time and energy on … The Huffington Post has a new mission: to fight media bias through clitoris education.
On May 18, The Huffington Post published a new multimedia initiative [1]: “Pulling Back the Hood: The Overdue, Under-told Story of the Clitoris.” Lamenting the media and sex education’s silence on the clitoris, the project, by HuffPo’s Carina Kolodny [2] and Amber Genuske [3] described the history, anatomy and education of the clit – to compare its discovery to that of the moon and support masturbation by little girls.
Front and center on the site’s first page, the project compares the discovery of the clitoris to other advances in American history.
“In 1969, we put a man on the moon. In 1982, we invented the Internet. In 1998, we discovered the full anatomy of the clitoris,” the project [1] read.
In the introduction, Kolodny and Genuske defended their decision to tell “the overdue and under-told story of the clitoris.”
“From ancient history to the modern day, the clitoris has been discredited, dismissed and deleted,” they argued. “Now, an underground art movement led by artist Sophia Wallace is emerging across the globe to challenge the lies, question the myths and rewrite the rules around sex and the female body.”
Wallace [4], their role-model, inspired the HuffPo project by creating Cliteracy, “an art project that fuses street art, textiles and typography with the goal of educating a largely ‘ilcliterate’ culture.”
Looking at how the clitoris is viewed by culture, the authors bashed sex education as well as the media – although some got it right. “Sex educator” Dan Savage, on The Colbert Report, talked about the clitoris, they highlighted, while 50 Shades of Gray mentioned the clit 10 times.
The clitoris should be revered like the penis, the authors furthermore argued.
The clitoris, the project boasted [5], “in its entirety is actually fairly equal in size to the penis” and even “has twice as many nerve endings as a penis.”
To offer clit-positive media, the project included numerous videos entitled “Clit vs. Penis: A Rap Battle” and “The A-B-C’s of the C-L-I-T.”
On May 19, HuffPost Live featured a segment [6] on the “project bust[ing] through taboos to help the common man (or woman) #GetCliterate,” with moderator Nancy Redd [7].
“I am so excited about this,” Redd began.
Besides crediting Wallace for her project, Kolodny pointed to female genital mutilation abroad.
“We can’t get upset or really understand what it means to have [the clitoris] removed,” she said, “because we don’t have a basic understanding of it ourselves.”
Hmm. Lots of people are upset about female genital mutilation. They just don’t happen to be sex-obsessed liberals.
Because the clitoris is “censored,” Wallace argued, “little girls probably know a lot more about their bodies and their sexuality before sex education.”
Her comment prompted Redd to discuss little girl masturbation.
“Anyone who knows a little girl, one of the very first things they often do is masturbate,” she said. “If you’re a mom and you have a daughter, you know where the hands go.”
A sex educator and author of O Wow: Discovering Your Ultimate Orgasm, Jenny Block [8] said that masturbation should be encouraged at a young age.
“The first time that we’re ‘caught’ with our hands between our legs, we’re told ‘no’,” she complained, that’s “wrong” and “yucky.”
She offered an alternative.
“Instead, we should just be told ‘save that for the privacy of your own room,” she began. “And if that’s what we were told, if we were told ‘Hey that feels nice, doesn’t it? That’s part of your body, and your body belongs to you and you’re welcome to do that, but it’s a private thing, at least until you have a grown-up adult sex consensual partner one day,’ we can give them appropriate information, we just choose not to.”
Wallace again spoke on the “shame” surrounding “this poor innocent organ that’s just trying to live.”
“Part of being a citizen in the world is having access to bodily integrity,” she said, “and the full range of your experiences in your body which includes pleasure.”
To enlighten listeners, Redd asked Block to describe “ways that partners can properly manipulate the clitoris in a way that behooves it best” – which she did.
To wrap up the segment, Redd joked about starting a “clit clique.”
“We all need to represent for the clit,” Wallace chimed in.
Pointing to the “Penis vs. Clitoris” video, Kolodny concluded, “The clitoris isn’t mentioned in culture, so let’s just make some awesome culture of our own.”
The project won the support of the feminist media, including The Guardian’s Jessica Valenti [9] and Cosmo’s Jill Filipovic [10].
The Huffington Post is no stranger in “exploring” sex – even to the point of promoting porn [11].
— Katie Yoder is Staff Writer, Joe and Betty Anderlik Fellow in Culture and Media at the Media Research Center. Follow Katie Yoder on Twitter. [12]