An informative, funny, feminist history of the clitoris.
THE SWEETNESS OF VENUS
by Sarah Chadwick
Armin Lear, February 2021
(chez Laura Dail – voir catalogue)
The clitoris is the final taboo in the world of gender equality. For centuries, science thought women were inside-out men, and anxiety about female sexuality framed attitudes and perpetuated inaccurate information. The reality of women’s sexuality was ignored, repressed, or defamed. THE SWEETNESS OF VENUS takes a rigorous romp through science, religion, philosophy, and psychology, to unravel the history of the clitoris, and then uses this context to explore the language, literature, and art around it. Much of the clitoris’s story has been defined by those who discovered and mapped her. However, even after the true anatomy of the clitoris was finally fully mapped with 3D imaging in 2005, it still hardly gets a mention in America’s bestselling teen sex education book for girls, and no mention at all in the parallel book for boys. Equality when it comes to sex has not been achieved, yet.
Sarah Chadwick began writing her first book after a family move from the UK to Chicago in 2016. “I had always wanted to write, but once I had the idea for The Sweetness of Venus it was as if my chequered career came together – my love of reading, teaching, research, studying, libraries, high and low culture and writing seemed to coalesce with this project. While I was excited about the journey to America, I had given up a teaching career and PhD scholarship with the Perdita Project at Warwick University, but as these doors closed, I knew this one had always been ajar so I decided it was time to open it.” Sarah also runs the gritty, feminist @its.personalgirls Instagram page.
In illness, Bauer provides a surprising new lens through which to consider all of human history—she argues that bodily sickness and our conception of it has shaped our culture, our philosophies, and our religions, and has directly and indirectly affected how we view others, how we view ourselves, and how we fashion our world. She argues that sickness is the great mirror that reflects back our most urgent and eternal questions: Why does calamity descend without warning? How can we explain it? And how do we fight back? Told in a propulsive narrative style that brings sweeping history to life through intimate individual stories—the feverish Mesopotamian sufferer; the plague victim who dies alone, the last in his village; the seventeenth-century teenager racked by smallpox; the Congolese grandmother watching her family die of Ebola—Bauer takes readers on a journey from humans’ earliest days when sickness was an unsolvable mystery, evidence that humans were powerless to the unseen forces of gods, to more modern times and the birth of germ theory, when secularism grew alongside our fear of contamination. A multidisciplinary human history like no other, BONES, BLOOD, BREATH is a big think book that tells a large-scale, vivid, chronological story, stretching around the world from ancient times until the present—it will change the way we understand who we are.