Half the World Has a Clitoris. Why Don’t Doctors Study It? And Can They Really Do It? It’s More than an Interesting Case of Medical Ethics
One morning, my husband woke up with a sore throat, and he was feverish with a dry cough. I knew what it was, of course: chicken pox, and he was the first person in the history of medicine to actually catch it in the 20th century.
We took him to the doctor, who, after a bunch of blood tests, handed him a prescription and told us to bring him back in two weeks for an exam.
Then we set out for my in-laws’ house on the outskirts of our town.
“This is gonna be really hard on you, and you can’t do this alone,” my husband said. “I have to come, too.”
“Why, because your dick gets erections during the day, and you don’t want to miss any?” my mom said, when she came to visit.
My husband and I were in total agreement. We weren’t doctors, we weren’t qualified to do it, and we’d be making my father-in-law out to be the devil if he tried to pull me away from him.
We were, however, an item.
I remember thinking that as I pulled out of the drive on our way to my father-in-law’s house. “This is gonna be really hard on me,” he repeated. “You don’t know how hard this is.”
Then, in the backseat of the car, he pulled a tissue from his pocket and handed it to me.
“It’s not a penis,” he said. “It’s a clitoris.”
My father-in-law’s house was a small ranch with an old garage, an enormous oak tree, and a barn at the end of the driveway. The first thing I noticed upon entering the old house was my father-in-law’s car in the driveway. On the garage floor was a metal pole from his car, with a big, white, plastic bag hanging out on it like a dead body. Inside the bag was about a pound of chicken po