Le Clitoris is a three-minute animated documentary by Montreal filmmaker Lori Malépart-Traversy that explains, with cheerful cartoons and plenty of jokes, what the clitoris really looks like and why it was misunderstood for so long. She made it in 2016 as her graduation film at Concordia University's Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, and it went on to win awards at festivals in Europe and North America. The full film is embedded below, with English subtitles available.
A frame from Le Clitoris: the film's anatomist character peers out between a pair of drawn legs. The hand-painted style keeps a sensitive subject light without making it silly.
Watch the film
The film moves quickly from anatomy to history: what the organ is made of, how far it extends beneath the skin, and how it was admired, ignored, mislabelled and finally mapped. It runs about three minutes, so it works well as a conversation starter in a classroom, a health workshop or at home with a curious teenager. The Vimeo version offers subtitles in more than twenty languages.
Who made it and how
Lori Malépart-Traversy is a Canadian animator and director based in Montreal. She has said she set out to make a film about female sexuality and settled on the clitoris after the research turned up more surprises than she expected. The finished short was painted in gouache on paper and combined with 2D digital animation, with original music by Eliazer Kramer.
The film travelled widely for a student project. It won the audience award for best short film at Festival Vues d'en face in 2017 and the audience award for best documentary at the Chicago Feminist Film Festival the same year, among about ten prizes and honourable mentions, and it screened at dozens of festivals including Annecy. Malépart-Traversy told Vice she wanted people to see the organ as something "more alive than just a flap, or vulva, or hole, or vagina."
The anatomy the film explains
The film's central point is that the part most people can see is only the tip. The visible glans, usually about the size of a pea, sits under a small hood of skin where the inner labia meet. It is densely packed with nerves; anatomical reviews put the number of sensory nerve endings at around 8,000, and some estimates go above 10,000.
Behind the glans, most of the organ is internal:
- The body, a shaft of two columns of erectile tissue, which runs back and up beneath the skin.
- The crura, two "legs" that branch out from the body in an upside-down V and anchor to the pelvic bones. Together with the body they can measure 10 centimetres or more.
- The vestibular bulbs, two masses of erectile tissue that lie on either side of the vaginal opening.
During arousal these tissues fill with blood and swell, much like the comparable tissues of the penis, which develops from the same embryonic structure. As the film stresses, the only known purpose of the clitoris is sexual pleasure.
A long history of being overlooked
The film races through centuries of history in a few lines, and the real story is just as odd. Ancient Greek and Roman doctors knew the organ existed; the Hippocratic writers called it columella, "little pillar". Yet the influential anatomist Galen, and later Andreas Vesalius, treated the vagina as the female version of the penis, and Vesalius even argued that a clitoris was not found in healthy women.
Renaissance anatomists then argued over who had found it first. The French physician Charles Estienne described it in 1545, though he thought it had to do with urination. Realdo Colombo wrote about it in 1559 as the seat of women's pleasure, and two years later Gabriele Falloppio claimed the discovery for himself. In the 17th century the Dutch physician Regnier de Graaf gave a detailed account, and in the 19th century the German anatomist Georg Ludwig Kobelt described the internal structure so accurately that modern researchers still praise his work.
Then much of that knowledge faded from view. Sigmund Freud argued in 1905 that orgasms centred on the clitoris were a sign of sexual immaturity, an idea later challenged by Alfred Kinsey and by feminist writers. Many 20th-century textbooks showed the organ as a small nub, if they showed it at all.
How scientists mapped it again
The modern picture comes largely from Australian urologist Helen O'Connell. In 1998 she published dissection studies showing much more erectile tissue than standard texts described, and in 2005 she used MRI scans to show how the internal parts connect with the urethra and vagina. In 2008 the French researchers Odile Buisson and Pierre Foldès produced the first full 3D ultrasound images of the organ during stimulation.
In 2016, the year Le Clitoris was completed, French researcher Odile Fillod designed a life-size model that anyone with a 3D printer could make. Stories that French schools would adopt it for sex education went viral around the world, but they were not accurate.
Gaps in teaching remain. A 2022 review of Greek secondary-school biology textbooks used since the 1870s found the clitoris mentioned in only one of 113 books, and in a 2019 study about two-thirds of postgraduate students could not correctly name parts of the vulva, even when shown detailed pictures.
Why a short cartoon helps
Animation lets a filmmaker draw parts of the body clearly and without embarrassment, and humour keeps viewers watching long enough to learn something. Le Clitoris is not a medical textbook, and its quick history skips plenty of detail, but it gets the basic facts right and leaves people curious to find out more.
Accurate knowledge of anatomy matters for health as well as pleasure. It helps people describe symptoms to a doctor, understand what happens during childbirth or surgery, and recognise harmful practices such as female genital mutilation, which damages or removes this very organ and which several countries have now outlawed. Anyone with pain, numbness or other concerns in this area should talk to a doctor.
Sources: Lori Malépart-Traversy on Vimeo · Le Clitoris (2016) on Vimeo · HuffPost Canada (2017) · Wikipedia: Clitoris · DAFilms: The Clitoris (awards and festivals) · via ufunk and Demilked
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