> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Renaming things to better names happens all the time, selectively removing something is much worse. Especially for a reference book like Gray's Anatomy
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.
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
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.
How is "allowlist" or "denylist" not more clear to, say, someone for whom English is a second language?
Sure blacklist was already an English word, but it's not necessarily _common_, and the distinction between blacklist and whitelist is kinda arbitrary. If you'd like to explain Why the word means what it does I'd love to hear it
Allowlist and denylist are clearer, in that the meaning is in more clear alignment with the words it's made up of.
The old terms just make more sense to those who are old enough to be used to it.
The etymology is interesting - Pebble Voting was used in the early democracies in Greece from 500 BC. Black pebbles meant 'no' and white meant 'yes'. The tradition evolved to the black and white marbles used in the Roman senate centuries later, i.e. two millennia ago. The practice has since continued – it was used in the early American republic in the 18th century, and the word 'ballot' used today for voting means just that - a 'little ball'.
The word 'blacklist' probably originated from this meaning. It was in use in England since before, but it was probably the "Black List of Regicides” that popularised the term. It was a list compiled by the administration of King Charles II England of those to be punished for the beheading of his father King Charles I in 1649, following the restoration of the monarchy of England in 1660. As this list was rather long, it was a probably a bit of a traumatic event for the gentry in London and it’s not hard to imagine that the memory of the dreaded "blacklist" stuck. A century later the word was in general use for a list of enemies, detractors, and unwanted people.
Conversely, "in the black" is the notion of having no debts or a positive cash flow. This obviously comes from the centuries old principle of using black for credit, and red ink for debit and negative balances in the double-entry accounting system codified in the 15th century.
A tangential but equally fascinating concept is the practice of forbidding - or blacklisting - words in totalitarian regimes like Maoist China. Controlling language was a key strategy to influence thought, define in-groups, and ostracize out-groups. It's a hallmark of a totalitarian systems aiming to shape thought through language. Very much not at all in line with the principles of ballot voting in a democratic system one should think.
(The last argument can be used with any word. I could find your Gallicism offensive and demand that all words with a French etymology should be removed from English to restore it to it's Old-English form before the oppressive Normand rule, since after all, the old words would just make more sense to those who are old enough to be used to it, and my feelings are important.)
Thank you for sharing the etymology! It's quite interesting, I agree!
I may have been a bit too pithy/I sufficiently clear with that last statement I made.
I meant it in the sense that understanding the word relies on a lot of contextual/colloquial/cultural understanding that's typically gained via time and exposure. At least, more of it than allow/deny requires.
Imagine an alien culture encountering blacklist vs Denylist. The latter requires a lot less context to translate, because Deny is used a lot more consistently.
My argument is mainly one about _clarity_, not hurt feelings.
To me (where English is a second language), Allowlist and denylist seem unclearer. Is it a block list, a exclude list, or a permission list? Allow/deny would lead me to the last one, as in authenticate users who has some permissions but not others.
Blacklist and whitelist would be closer to include/exclude, so the replacement would be a includelist and excludelist, or include/exclude as shorthand.
I feel like a permission list is kind of a superset of a block list and an exclude list. Or they're all different perspectives/solutions to the same kind of problem, that a permission list is the more generalizable solution for.
Or it's a way of framing the problem that doesn't embed the "exclusion" idea in the naming.
And it kinda bridges over to the idea of Access Control Lists a bit better?
Allowlist/Denylist are clear and perhaps more specific, but blacklist/whitelist are not arbitrary, they're just using black in valid ways according to common English dictionaries, which is similar to how other languages use the word black, but it is less specific.
> If you'd like to explain Why the word means what it does I'd love to hear it
Simply because black means different things depending on the context. Evil, invisible, mysterious, absence of light, sinister. It's not arbitrary because that's how the word black is commonly used.
I'm not trying to argue about validity here, but rather that these definitions/meanings of the word black are not "primary" definitions but secondary meanings based on that contextual/cultural/colloquial use. Arbitrary in the sense that that "commonality" is arbitrary and cultural, and language could just have easily developed to flip the colloquial definition.
Contrasted against using words where the Primary definition is the one that matters.
Imagine an alien culture encountering the word. Blacklist versus Denylist. The latter requires a lot less context to understand the meaning, because "Deny" has a single pretty consistent definition.
> Imagine an alien culture encountering the word. Blacklist versus Denylist.
Seems like it's just another step in developing one's language skills, no more or less ambiguous than "deny" for someone who doesn't know either word, but I'd wager than "black" would probably be encountered earlier in the vocab training list. It's a bit of a stretch, imo. "Reject" or "Turn-away" or "Block" works too, as well as many others, language is flexible, it doesn't seem names for lists are worth so much energy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
I don't know where you got inferiority from that, but it's a well-documented phenomenon that autistic people are more likely to go against the norm than non-autistic people. It's called "positive non-conformity". This suggests non-autistic people are more likely than autistic people to accept how things are and perpetuate it.
While I have many autistic friends from abusive living situations that were forced to accept how things were, I find that the autistic people I meet still tend to be much more varied than the non-autistic. Though I don't know for sure whether this is a side effect of their neurotype or of their societal treatment.
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.
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.
> 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”.
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".
Page 7 [0] of the report seems to indicate that FGM reconstruction actually seems to have negative outcomes post-surgery. I'm surprised by this. I'm also shocked to see how prolific FGM is too (230 million women?!).
> seems to indicate that FGM reconstruction actually seems to have negative outcomes post-surgery.
> Longitudinal data indicate that approximately 22% of women
who undergo clitoral reconstruction experience a post-operative decline in orgasmic experience [25, 26]
From [25] abstract: Most patients reported an improvement, or at least no worsening, in pain (821 of 840 patients) and clitoral pleasure (815 of 834 patients)
So, I think the quote needs to be interpreted as surgery, even though beneficial on average, still having a pretty high percentage of negative outcomes (22%) and nerve mapping potentially helping reduce that.
No, it's important context, and attempting to suppress it does everyone a disservice. Without taking these kinds of points of comparison into consideration, one becomes susceptible to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy , and may become convinced about supposed bias where the evidence doesn't support the claim, contradicts it or even shows the opposite.
Another classic example is the discourse around "missing and murdered Indigenous women" in Canadian politics. It was popular enough around a decade ago to be more or less a set phrase. To listen to politicians and wonks discussing the matter, you would imagine that Indigenous men didn't ever get kidnapped or murdered. As a matter of fact, the statistics showed that it happened to them at over twice the rate of the women. (They also showed that it was not an alarmingly high rate compared to other Canadian populations, and that the perpetrators were usually themselves Indigenous — as you'd expect for generally fairly isolated communities.) But you would get silenced in many places (e.g., banned from the Canada subreddit) for pointing to those statistics.
> But you would get silenced in many places (e.g., banned from the Canada subreddit) for pointing to those statistics.
Canada has an incredibly censorious culture. I have been downvoted to -4 [0] [1] and flagged for merely suggesting that Canadians do not care about medical privacy (or privacy in general) in light of things like Bill C-22 and DNA collection at the US border [2].
Interestingly enough, questioning gender ideology and being trans critical (maybe even transphobic) is now acceptable on HN [3], but Canadians have something very dark to hide when it comes to respecting medical privacy given how hard posts of this nature are downvoted, flagged, and censored.
Surprised he didn't willingly relinquish a sample.
Privacy is not actually a core Canadian value.
Neither in spirit nor in letter do Canadians actually
demonstrate that they give a shit about privacy; see
for instance Bill C-22.
I invite commenters to demonstrate otherwise instead of
merely downvoting incontrovertible facts.
To someone who is shocked at the prevalence of female genital mutilation in other cultures, the widespread acceptance of other types of genital mutilation in (probably) their own culture is an important piece of context, I'd say.
I hear what you are saying. But hear me out. I think their comment is ok.
No one is forced to follow that thread. And the comment does provide additional information.
In fact, I never considered circumcision a form a gender mutilation. Despite being circumcised. But that comment got me thinking about it in a new way. And thinking about GM in a larger context.
This is a bad take. If society takes genital mutilation of children seriously, and it gets outlawed in more and more countries, it helps save ALL children from genital mutilation. Only a shortsighted person would see it as a zero sum.
There wasn't really an all lives matter on the same sense as the black lives matter movement.
Plus there's 'all lives matter' as in the proponent doesn't want to do anything, and 'all lives matter' as in police brutality is bad no matter who it's aimed at, and should be stopped completely.
The latter more closely mirrors the parents example.
Further I would say your example is flawed. BLM assumed a level of racism that I don't think there is. This isn't a case of KKK members wanting to get the <racist slur>s out of the country and back where 'they belong' it's more an issue of laziness and profiling. That isn't to say it isn't racism, but just talking about racism allows police that aren't KKK members to tell themselves they aren't the problem. Focussing on the issues of laziness etc means they do actually need to face up to the issues.
The same thing with genital mutilation, this isn't simply a case of something that happens to girls in a far away land, this is happening to kids right now in the west. Focusing on FGM kind of misses the point.
BLM also never claimed cops were KKK members. You're really fictionalizing the movement and its history; also, you have presented zero credibility as an expert in how much racism exists among US police forces.
On some levels yes, but if the male experience isn't being talked about, then no.
If we were to talk about domestic violence the automatic assumption is male against female. Ignoring the fact that a third of victims are men. That isn't exactly a small minority, before you take into account that it probably an undercount as no one talks about men getting abused.
The same goes for breast cancer. Men can get it, its almost never talked about.
Respectfully, if we didn’t shutter men all the time, maybe there would be paradoxically more time for women. Unless we make it a zero-sum game where we’re all extremists who would lose if it makes the opponent lose too.
Mixed school is a bane for men, for example. I’m full on with the Mollahs on this one.
(Nonconsensual) genital mutilation is bad no matter who you are or what parts you have.
Also: If pain becomes a contest, we're all losers.
Also: Thank you for complaining. There is much to complain about. There's so much to complain about that we can sit in a circle and take turns complaining and everybody will probably learn something.
My understanding is that (nonconsensual) circumcision of infants is quite common in some regions of the planet, and that some impacted individuals wish that this decision had not been made for them without their consent.
> Circumcision is prevalent among 92% of men in North Africa and around 62% in Sub-Saharan Africa. In western and northern parts of Africa it is mainly performed for religious reasons, whereas in southern parts of Africa it rarely performed in neonates, instead being a rite of passage into manhood.[22]
> Studies evaluating the complications due to traditional male circumcision have found rates varying from 35% (Kenya) to 48% (South Africa). Infection, delayed wound healing, glans amputation and injury, bleeding, loss of penile sensitivity, excessive removal of foreskin, and death are the major complications reported.[23]
...
> ...There are tribes, however, that do not accept this modernized practice. They insist on circumcision in a group ceremony, and a test of courage at the banks of a river. This more traditional approach is common amongst the Meru and the Kisii tribes of Kenya.[40] One boy in Meru County, Kenya was assaulted by other boys because they wanted him to be circumcised in a traditional ceremony as opposed to in a hospital.[44]
...
> Amongst the Maasai people of Kenya and Tanzania, male circumcision has historically been the graduation element of an educational program which taught tribal beliefs, practices, culture, religion and history to youth who were on the verge of becoming full-fledged members of society. The circumcision ceremony was very public, and required a display of courage under the knife in order to maintain the honor and prestige of the young man and his family. The only form of anesthesia was a bath in the cold morning waters of a river, which tended to numb the senses to a minor degree. The youths being circumcised were required to maintain a stoic expression and not to flinch from the pain.[40]
...
> In some South African ethnic groups, circumcision has roots in several belief systems, and is performed most of the time on teenage boys: "The young men in the eastern Cape belong to the Xhosa ethnic group for whom circumcision is considered part of the passage into manhood. ... A law was recently introduced requiring initiation schools to be licensed and only allowing circumcisions to be performed on youths aged 18 and older. But Eastern Cape provincial Health Department spokesman Sizwe Kupelo told Reuters news agency that boys as young as 11 had died. Each year thousands of young men go into the bush alone, without water, to attend initiation schools. Many do not survive the ordeal.[59]"
> I'm also shocked to see how prolific FGM is too (230 million women?!)
And talk to any gyn doc in the west: it's happening among those communities in the west too (but on a lesser scale). In several EU western countries the most common gynelogical surgery act is re-building the hymen (so that the woman can pretend she's a virgin once she marries, often forcibly by her family). You may not have gyn doctors friend but I do. And midwives. And they know.
"... surveys show that the practice of FGM is highly concentrated in a swath of countries from the Atlantic coast to the Horn of Africa, in areas of the Middle East such as Iraq and Yemen and in some countries in Asia like Indonesia, with wide variations in prevalence. The practice is almost universal in Somalia, Guinea and Djibouti, with levels of 90 per cent or higher, while it affects no more than 1 per cent of girls and women in Cameroon and Uganda"
"FGM is practised predominantly within certain Muslim societies,[13] but it also exists within some adjacent Christian and animist groups.[14] The practice is not required by Islam and fatwas have been issued forbidding FGM,[15] favouring it,[16] or leaving the decision to parents but advising against it."
Let's call a cat: of these 230 mutilated women, a vast majority are muslims. There are 900 million muslim women on earth and nearly 1/4th of them have been mutilated by their community.
> Let's call a cat: of these 230 mutilated women, a vast majority are muslims. There are 900 million muslim women on earth and nearly 1/4th of them have been mutilated by their community.
If the point here is that this is an Islamic/Muslim issue, then you'd find this in other Muslim populations. It's an Africa issue. Ethiopia is 60% Christian, yet had a 65 percent rate of FGM. Look at Pakistan, and the levant in general. Very Muslim populations yet very low levels of FGM.
> In several EU western countries the most common gynelogical surgery act is re-building the hymen (so that the woman can pretend she's a virgin once she marries, often forcibly by her family).
I am not the person you are asking, but (to me personally) it just says that Saudi Arabia had made massive strides to become a modern 21st century society, as opposed to some of their regional neighbors who still practice FGM on a notable scale.
The fact that SA recently (past ~15 years) passed quite a few reforms that significantly lax old theocracy rules (e.g., women are now legally allowed to drive, they are no longer obligated to wear hijab outside, no male chaperone requirements, western-tier public music festivals and concerts can now be hosted, etc.) only solidified that opinion.
> I am not the person you are asking, but (to me personally) it just says that Saudi Arabia had made massive strides to become a modern 21st century society, as opposed to some of their regional neighbors who still practice FGM on a notable scale.
That assumes that Saudis did use to do FGM.. and that's not true either.
Dumb question, why do “sensitive” spots on the body need more nerves? Couldn’t you just have the normal touch-sensing nerves and map signals from specific spots on the body to stronger/pleasurable qualia in the brain?
Not a dumb question. The shortest (and at a glance unsatisfactory) answer is because it works, and therefore it evolved that way.
Going in detail, first consider that for a feature to be evolutionarily selected for two things have to be true:
1. It must increase the fitness of the organism that carries it, i.e. the likelihood of its carrier having descendants as compared to non-carriers ( or be a side effect of another feature that improves fitness enough to be a net positive, etc etc )
2. It must be inheritable (and, in sexually reproduced organisms, mutually compatible during embryonic development).
One such a feature has reached dominance in a given population, as long as it continues to be important for fitness it cannot really be deprecated in favour of an alternative from scratch, even if that alternative is arguably better.
That's why, for instance, vertebrate ocular nerves connect to our retinas on the inside of our eyeball, resulting in us having a blind spot. Cephalopods, on the other hand, evolved their eyes independently the "reasonable" way, connecing their nerves from behind the eyeball. There's no way a vertebrate could mutate from scratch for its optical nerve to connect to the retina from behind without causing absolute mayhem in embryonic development. Our hacky solution for the blind spot? Let the brain hide it in software.
Going back to your question, some spots of the body being more sensitive than others became critical for evolutionary fitness long before nervous systems were complex enough to generate conscious qualia, let alone enough for them to be consistently involved in decision making. Furthermore, mapping of specific nerves to intensity of feeling on the CNS would imply complex hardcoding of something which is much easier to solve with "this place important, have more nerves", and maybe would even conflict with the fitness benefit of a CNS with enough neuroplasticity to learn anew during the development and lifetime of an organism.
So, in summary, the solution of having more nerves where it matters is simple, good enough, and has no reason to be rolled back in favour of a radically different alternative.
>1. It must increase the fitness of the organism that carries it, i.e. the likelihood of its carrier having descendants as compared to non-carriers
This isn't necessarily true. If you map out changes through the history of species, you'll find no significant changes but a lot of diversity for long periods, followed by big changes and low diversity for a short period.
That's because during "abundant" times, the population will develop diversity as long as it doesn't significantly hinder reproductive rates. When an environnemental pressure comes up, the diversity dies down because the ones lucky enough to have adaptations that suddenly become useful and reproduce more.
So an animal might get a longer neck, but that doesn't significantly increase reproduction because food is aplenty. It's only when there's a drought that longer necks become an advantage and the trait is now selected for.
What you say is correct, and that is why I was referring specifically for what's necessary for "features" (the term I used for "phenotypes" to make it more HN) to become ubiquitous. It is a general rule of thumb in evolutionary biology that the more diversity is observed in a given population for a particular phenotype (e.g. hair colour, height, blood group, etc.) the less relevant it is for fitness within its observed range. When a phenotype is strongly selected for in a given population (e.g. bipedalism, opposable thumbs, the ability to speak) it soon becomes dominant and there is much less diversity.
As to your example about, for instance, neck length during abundant times, that follows the same rule: during abundant times neck length simply does not matter for fitness, therefore (all else being equal) there can be phenotypic diversity in the population.
One caveat though as to how a given phenotype may become ubiquitous without favourable selection is of course genetic drift[0], given a small enough population which is isolated for a long enough timeframe. Eventually that phenotype may become selectively "advantageous" inasmuch as it is no longer compatible with alternatives, and individuals from the isolated population who this phenotype can no longer have successful offspring with individuals of a different phenotype, resulting in speciation. That's what I meant with regards to a "make nerves on important places generate more pleasure/pain in brain" genotype being incompatible with a "have more nerves on important places" one. A hypothetical hybrid creature would be a mess.
> Our hacky solution for the blind spot? Let the brain hide it in software.
I would say the solution is just having two eyes, since their respective blind spots don't overlap in the visual field.
I would also say that the brain doesn't hide the blind spots, but rather doesn't pay any attention to them in the first place. There's just a lack of information from them, and this deficit isn't normally noticeable because the other eye makes up for it. I think Dennett explains it that way somewhere, probably in Consciousness Explained
The blind spot still isn't noticeable if you close one eye, though. You have to look for it carefully with a specific setup that allows you to detect the discrepancy between what you see and what's actually there.
As a software dev, I think this is actually quite a satisfying and sensible answer. A simple reliable hardware solution in favour of a brittle “clever” software one
> mapping of specific nerves to intensity of feeling on the CNS would imply complex hardcoding of something which is much easier to solve with "this place important, have more nerves"
Not saying your answer is right or wrong, but I don't think this is a sufficient explanation. If the body can differentiate areas enough to produce more nerves in one area, then it could plausibly instead produce fewer nerves which inherently produce a stronger signal - just as we have nerves which respond differently to different stimuli (e.g. heat, light, etc). Also it could be neither and we kinda randomly ended up with what we have because no option was strongly disadvantageous at the time.
Having more independent samples helps filter out noise. If you had individual sensory neurons with outsized influence, then misfiring of such neurons would also have outsized influence.
Sounds plausible at least, but I think the question isn't necessarily making a valid assumption. Why do men have to have nipples? Why is our retina installed backwards? Why do sinuses drain upwards? It's just a path evolution took, it doesn't jump to some optimal design.
male nipples are developmental vestiges, the male condition is derived from response to embryonic testosterone, and is a developmental variation from default.
early stage embryos of both sexes are not easily distinguishable by genitalia, they look morphologically similar. later developmental events culminate in morphological rearrangement to male form.
lack of response to testosterone during development results n a curious state of affairs, where a person is genetically male, having x, and y chromosomes, develops according to a female plan. external appearances are female, with loss of secondary sex development in puberty.
Fingers, for instance, not only have higher sensitivity, but also much higher spatial resolution due to the more dense nerve network.
I can't tell why other areas may have needed higher spatial resolution; maybe it was evolutionary important in the past, and remains today. Or maybe just adding more nerves due to a random mutation correlated with better reproductive outcomes due to a stronger signal, or higher sensitivity, so more nerves are present for no other reason.
Nerve density isn’t mainly about intensity, it’s about spatial resolution. More nerve endings per square centimeter means you can distinguish finer details of touch, texture, and pressure. The brain can’t invent spatial detail that isn’t in the incoming signal. Amplifying a sparse signal centrally would be like zooming into a low-res photo.
The brain does do some of what you’re describing though. The somatosensory cortex gives disproportionate space to certain body parts (the sensory homunculus). So there is central amplification, but it works on top of peripheral density, not instead of it. Without the dense nerve input, you’d basically have an on/off switch instead of nuanced sensation.
> Dumb question, why do “sensitive” spots on the body need more nerves? Couldn’t you just have the normal touch-sensing nerves and map signals from specific spots on the body to stronger/pleasurable qualia in the brain?
Think of a television. What gives you a better picture, quadrupling the number of pixels or making the existing pixels 4x as intense?
Sensing nerves aren't especially energy hungry when considering their volume in the human body, so evolution doesn't have much reason to minimize them.
I think you have it backwards. The brain doesn't "know" what's supposed to be sensitive or pleasurable. It boots up with no training data after all. It machine learns what's sensitive due to a combination of nerve density and other factors. We haven't figured out all the other factors yet. But that's why there's a correlation between nerve density and sensitivity: density means sensitivity.
Go take a picture in a dark room and edit the photo to try to make it like you've got the lights on in photo editing software. You get a noisy grainy mess and little to no detail.
It's not like evolution would leave a significant amount of signal/noise ratio on the table for all other nerves.
Presuming nerves are already optimized if you want more signal you have to add nerves.
I remember that Matteo Realdo Colombo (1515-1559) [1] described the clitoris. There is a novel about the story [2] which was the finalist on one of the top Spanish literary prizes [3].
>Many of the contributions made in De Re Anatomica overlapped the discoveries of another anatomist, Gabriele Falloppio, most notably in that both Colombo and Falloppio claimed to have discovered the clitoris.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is insightful. Thank you.
Renaming things to better names happens all the time, selectively removing something is much worse. Especially for a reference book like Gray's Anatomy
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.
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
Dunno about whitelist, but blacklist had the same meaning for hundreds of years.
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.
How is "allowlist" or "denylist" not more clear to, say, someone for whom English is a second language?
Sure blacklist was already an English word, but it's not necessarily _common_, and the distinction between blacklist and whitelist is kinda arbitrary. If you'd like to explain Why the word means what it does I'd love to hear it
Allowlist and denylist are clearer, in that the meaning is in more clear alignment with the words it's made up of.
The old terms just make more sense to those who are old enough to be used to it.
The etymology is interesting - Pebble Voting was used in the early democracies in Greece from 500 BC. Black pebbles meant 'no' and white meant 'yes'. The tradition evolved to the black and white marbles used in the Roman senate centuries later, i.e. two millennia ago. The practice has since continued – it was used in the early American republic in the 18th century, and the word 'ballot' used today for voting means just that - a 'little ball'.
The word 'blacklist' probably originated from this meaning. It was in use in England since before, but it was probably the "Black List of Regicides” that popularised the term. It was a list compiled by the administration of King Charles II England of those to be punished for the beheading of his father King Charles I in 1649, following the restoration of the monarchy of England in 1660. As this list was rather long, it was a probably a bit of a traumatic event for the gentry in London and it’s not hard to imagine that the memory of the dreaded "blacklist" stuck. A century later the word was in general use for a list of enemies, detractors, and unwanted people.
Conversely, "in the black" is the notion of having no debts or a positive cash flow. This obviously comes from the centuries old principle of using black for credit, and red ink for debit and negative balances in the double-entry accounting system codified in the 15th century.
A tangential but equally fascinating concept is the practice of forbidding - or blacklisting - words in totalitarian regimes like Maoist China. Controlling language was a key strategy to influence thought, define in-groups, and ostracize out-groups. It's a hallmark of a totalitarian systems aiming to shape thought through language. Very much not at all in line with the principles of ballot voting in a democratic system one should think.
(The last argument can be used with any word. I could find your Gallicism offensive and demand that all words with a French etymology should be removed from English to restore it to it's Old-English form before the oppressive Normand rule, since after all, the old words would just make more sense to those who are old enough to be used to it, and my feelings are important.)
Thank you for sharing the etymology! It's quite interesting, I agree!
I may have been a bit too pithy/I sufficiently clear with that last statement I made.
I meant it in the sense that understanding the word relies on a lot of contextual/colloquial/cultural understanding that's typically gained via time and exposure. At least, more of it than allow/deny requires.
Imagine an alien culture encountering blacklist vs Denylist. The latter requires a lot less context to translate, because Deny is used a lot more consistently.
My argument is mainly one about _clarity_, not hurt feelings.
> How is "allowlist" or "denylist" not more clear to, say, someone for whom English is a second language?
Because neither of those are actual words in English. They make sense to someone whose first language is English.
To me (where English is a second language), Allowlist and denylist seem unclearer. Is it a block list, a exclude list, or a permission list? Allow/deny would lead me to the last one, as in authenticate users who has some permissions but not others.
Blacklist and whitelist would be closer to include/exclude, so the replacement would be a includelist and excludelist, or include/exclude as shorthand.
That's fair!
I feel like a permission list is kind of a superset of a block list and an exclude list. Or they're all different perspectives/solutions to the same kind of problem, that a permission list is the more generalizable solution for.
Or it's a way of framing the problem that doesn't embed the "exclusion" idea in the naming.
And it kinda bridges over to the idea of Access Control Lists a bit better?
Allowlist/Denylist are clear and perhaps more specific, but blacklist/whitelist are not arbitrary, they're just using black in valid ways according to common English dictionaries, which is similar to how other languages use the word black, but it is less specific.
> If you'd like to explain Why the word means what it does I'd love to hear it
Simply because black means different things depending on the context. Evil, invisible, mysterious, absence of light, sinister. It's not arbitrary because that's how the word black is commonly used.
I'm not trying to argue about validity here, but rather that these definitions/meanings of the word black are not "primary" definitions but secondary meanings based on that contextual/cultural/colloquial use. Arbitrary in the sense that that "commonality" is arbitrary and cultural, and language could just have easily developed to flip the colloquial definition.
Contrasted against using words where the Primary definition is the one that matters.
Imagine an alien culture encountering the word. Blacklist versus Denylist. The latter requires a lot less context to understand the meaning, because "Deny" has a single pretty consistent definition.
> Imagine an alien culture encountering the word. Blacklist versus Denylist.
Seems like it's just another step in developing one's language skills, no more or less ambiguous than "deny" for someone who doesn't know either word, but I'd wager than "black" would probably be encountered earlier in the vocab training list. It's a bit of a stretch, imo. "Reject" or "Turn-away" or "Block" works too, as well as many others, language is flexible, it doesn't seem names for lists are worth so much energy.
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.
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.
Or, it's thoughtful and considerate.
Potato, potahto.
That's not even remotely similar.
I think it communicates maliciousness not idiocy
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. If you are the editor of Gray’s Anatomy, incompetence is malice.
> incompetence is malice
A subtle distinction, but I'd flip this as "malice is incompetence".
Both ring true, in this case.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
Keep word: adequately. This is not adequately explained by stupidity.
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.
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.
> 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.
It does occur to me that you can be both malicious and stupid at the same time.
"Ripped from the headlines!"
This gets complicated when the malicious have also read the saying and intentionally feign stupidity, but that's just chaos politics.
There is obviously truth to it but it does not confirm the whig interpretation i.e. it was supposedly _removed_ rather than never present
This might be the first casual reference I've seen to whig history, is that memeplex picking up steam?
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Bias towards women would be understood by most readers as favouring them. I would have written bias against women here.
> Bias towards women would be understood by most readers as favouring them.
We run in different circles I guess.
It's a word that's commonly used incorrectly, yes.
Ahhh, I see. I suck at grammar.
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.
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.
What’s your best source that African FGM is about enhancing female sexual pleasure, specifically for oral sex?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It’s pretty clear that OP was referring to cunnilingus.
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.
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
> 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.
I don't know where you got inferiority from that, but it's a well-documented phenomenon that autistic people are more likely to go against the norm than non-autistic people. It's called "positive non-conformity". This suggests non-autistic people are more likely than autistic people to accept how things are and perpetuate it.
While I have many autistic friends from abusive living situations that were forced to accept how things were, I find that the autistic people I meet still tend to be much more varied than the non-autistic. Though I don't know for sure whether this is a side effect of their neurotype or of their societal treatment.
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.
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
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...
> 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”.
> 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.
Well duh, Gray's had male editors and none of them could find it.
> 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/
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".
Ironic, from reading the article it actually takes a while to find the research...
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.18.712572v1
>>> PDF with the images
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.18.712572v1...
This should be the story link.
Indeed, wonder did OP really read through the article?
Page 7 [0] of the report seems to indicate that FGM reconstruction actually seems to have negative outcomes post-surgery. I'm surprised by this. I'm also shocked to see how prolific FGM is too (230 million women?!).
[0]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.18.712572v1...
> seems to indicate that FGM reconstruction actually seems to have negative outcomes post-surgery.
> Longitudinal data indicate that approximately 22% of women who undergo clitoral reconstruction experience a post-operative decline in orgasmic experience [25, 26]
From [25] abstract: Most patients reported an improvement, or at least no worsening, in pain (821 of 840 patients) and clitoral pleasure (815 of 834 patients)
So, I think the quote needs to be interpreted as surgery, even though beneficial on average, still having a pretty high percentage of negative outcomes (22%) and nerve mapping potentially helping reduce that.
>230 million women
500,000 in the USA. 98%+ in some other countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalence_of_female_genital_m...
Male genital mutilation is very common
Respectfully, this article is not about the male experience, it's okay to talk about women without putting men in the story.
No, it's important context, and attempting to suppress it does everyone a disservice. Without taking these kinds of points of comparison into consideration, one becomes susceptible to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy , and may become convinced about supposed bias where the evidence doesn't support the claim, contradicts it or even shows the opposite.
Another classic example is the discourse around "missing and murdered Indigenous women" in Canadian politics. It was popular enough around a decade ago to be more or less a set phrase. To listen to politicians and wonks discussing the matter, you would imagine that Indigenous men didn't ever get kidnapped or murdered. As a matter of fact, the statistics showed that it happened to them at over twice the rate of the women. (They also showed that it was not an alarmingly high rate compared to other Canadian populations, and that the perpetrators were usually themselves Indigenous — as you'd expect for generally fairly isolated communities.) But you would get silenced in many places (e.g., banned from the Canada subreddit) for pointing to those statistics.
> But you would get silenced in many places (e.g., banned from the Canada subreddit) for pointing to those statistics.
Canada has an incredibly censorious culture. I have been downvoted to -4 [0] [1] and flagged for merely suggesting that Canadians do not care about medical privacy (or privacy in general) in light of things like Bill C-22 and DNA collection at the US border [2].
Interestingly enough, questioning gender ideology and being trans critical (maybe even transphobic) is now acceptable on HN [3], but Canadians have something very dark to hide when it comes to respecting medical privacy given how hard posts of this nature are downvoted, flagged, and censored.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47571182[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47571396
[2] https://www.ctvnews.ca/london/article/canadian-man-denied-en...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47538165
To someone who is shocked at the prevalence of female genital mutilation in other cultures, the widespread acceptance of other types of genital mutilation in (probably) their own culture is an important piece of context, I'd say.
I hear what you are saying. But hear me out. I think their comment is ok.
No one is forced to follow that thread. And the comment does provide additional information.
In fact, I never considered circumcision a form a gender mutilation. Despite being circumcised. But that comment got me thinking about it in a new way. And thinking about GM in a larger context.
This is a bad take. If society takes genital mutilation of children seriously, and it gets outlawed in more and more countries, it helps save ALL children from genital mutilation. Only a shortsighted person would see it as a zero sum.
Is it? Did "all lives matter" help prevent police brutality? Or was it an attempt at whataboutism so you don't have to do anything?
There wasn't really an all lives matter on the same sense as the black lives matter movement.
Plus there's 'all lives matter' as in the proponent doesn't want to do anything, and 'all lives matter' as in police brutality is bad no matter who it's aimed at, and should be stopped completely.
The latter more closely mirrors the parents example.
Further I would say your example is flawed. BLM assumed a level of racism that I don't think there is. This isn't a case of KKK members wanting to get the <racist slur>s out of the country and back where 'they belong' it's more an issue of laziness and profiling. That isn't to say it isn't racism, but just talking about racism allows police that aren't KKK members to tell themselves they aren't the problem. Focussing on the issues of laziness etc means they do actually need to face up to the issues.
The same thing with genital mutilation, this isn't simply a case of something that happens to girls in a far away land, this is happening to kids right now in the west. Focusing on FGM kind of misses the point.
> BLM assumed a level of racism that I don't think there is
Why is your lived experience greater than that of an entire group of people?
BLM also never claimed cops were KKK members. You're really fictionalizing the movement and its history; also, you have presented zero credibility as an expert in how much racism exists among US police forces.
On some levels yes, but if the male experience isn't being talked about, then no.
If we were to talk about domestic violence the automatic assumption is male against female. Ignoring the fact that a third of victims are men. That isn't exactly a small minority, before you take into account that it probably an undercount as no one talks about men getting abused.
The same goes for breast cancer. Men can get it, its almost never talked about.
Respectfully, if we didn’t shutter men all the time, maybe there would be paradoxically more time for women. Unless we make it a zero-sum game where we’re all extremists who would lose if it makes the opponent lose too.
Mixed school is a bane for men, for example. I’m full on with the Mollahs on this one.
> Respectfully, if we didn’t shutter men all the time,
Respectfully, what are you talking about?
Presumably, GP is referring to the crystal-clear attempt to do exactly that, in GGP.
Yes, yes, you're right, I see that on HN all the time.
And it is an order of magnitude more common for boys than for girls. And it’s legal to genitally mutilate boys in every single country on the planet.
(Nonconsensual) genital mutilation is bad no matter who you are or what parts you have.
Also: If pain becomes a contest, we're all losers.
Also: Thank you for complaining. There is much to complain about. There's so much to complain about that we can sit in a circle and take turns complaining and everybody will probably learn something.
Spot to complain that I missed a spot:
(P.S. you can also add a new thread)
Spot to complain about intersex genital mutilation:
Spot to complain about female genital mutilation:
Spot to complain about male genital mutilation:
My understanding is that (nonconsensual) circumcision of infants is quite common in some regions of the planet, and that some impacted individuals wish that this decision had not been made for them without their consent.
That seems bad.
*in the US
Not in Europe.
presumably you are referring to circumcision, which has recognized benefits.
Very weakly supported benefits, to be weighed against quite severe risks and frequent issues.
Circumcision is not one thing worldwide.
> Circumcision is prevalent among 92% of men in North Africa and around 62% in Sub-Saharan Africa. In western and northern parts of Africa it is mainly performed for religious reasons, whereas in southern parts of Africa it rarely performed in neonates, instead being a rite of passage into manhood.[22]
> Studies evaluating the complications due to traditional male circumcision have found rates varying from 35% (Kenya) to 48% (South Africa). Infection, delayed wound healing, glans amputation and injury, bleeding, loss of penile sensitivity, excessive removal of foreskin, and death are the major complications reported.[23]
...
> ...There are tribes, however, that do not accept this modernized practice. They insist on circumcision in a group ceremony, and a test of courage at the banks of a river. This more traditional approach is common amongst the Meru and the Kisii tribes of Kenya.[40] One boy in Meru County, Kenya was assaulted by other boys because they wanted him to be circumcised in a traditional ceremony as opposed to in a hospital.[44]
...
> Amongst the Maasai people of Kenya and Tanzania, male circumcision has historically been the graduation element of an educational program which taught tribal beliefs, practices, culture, religion and history to youth who were on the verge of becoming full-fledged members of society. The circumcision ceremony was very public, and required a display of courage under the knife in order to maintain the honor and prestige of the young man and his family. The only form of anesthesia was a bath in the cold morning waters of a river, which tended to numb the senses to a minor degree. The youths being circumcised were required to maintain a stoic expression and not to flinch from the pain.[40]
...
> In some South African ethnic groups, circumcision has roots in several belief systems, and is performed most of the time on teenage boys: "The young men in the eastern Cape belong to the Xhosa ethnic group for whom circumcision is considered part of the passage into manhood. ... A law was recently introduced requiring initiation schools to be licensed and only allowing circumcisions to be performed on youths aged 18 and older. But Eastern Cape provincial Health Department spokesman Sizwe Kupelo told Reuters news agency that boys as young as 11 had died. Each year thousands of young men go into the bush alone, without water, to attend initiation schools. Many do not survive the ordeal.[59]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcision_in_Africa (includes NSFW images).
[22]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5422680
[23]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3474774
[40]: https://web.archive.org/web/20080906115430/http://htc.anu.ed...
[44]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7dBMLHNxhg
[59]: https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3069491.stm
> I'm also shocked to see how prolific FGM is too (230 million women?!)
And talk to any gyn doc in the west: it's happening among those communities in the west too (but on a lesser scale). In several EU western countries the most common gynelogical surgery act is re-building the hymen (so that the woman can pretend she's a virgin once she marries, often forcibly by her family). You may not have gyn doctors friend but I do. And midwives. And they know.
"... surveys show that the practice of FGM is highly concentrated in a swath of countries from the Atlantic coast to the Horn of Africa, in areas of the Middle East such as Iraq and Yemen and in some countries in Asia like Indonesia, with wide variations in prevalence. The practice is almost universal in Somalia, Guinea and Djibouti, with levels of 90 per cent or higher, while it affects no more than 1 per cent of girls and women in Cameroon and Uganda"
Now from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_on_female_geni...
"FGM is practised predominantly within certain Muslim societies,[13] but it also exists within some adjacent Christian and animist groups.[14] The practice is not required by Islam and fatwas have been issued forbidding FGM,[15] favouring it,[16] or leaving the decision to parents but advising against it."
Let's call a cat: of these 230 mutilated women, a vast majority are muslims. There are 900 million muslim women on earth and nearly 1/4th of them have been mutilated by their community.
Ponder this.
> Let's call a cat: of these 230 mutilated women, a vast majority are muslims. There are 900 million muslim women on earth and nearly 1/4th of them have been mutilated by their community.
If the point here is that this is an Islamic/Muslim issue, then you'd find this in other Muslim populations. It's an Africa issue. Ethiopia is 60% Christian, yet had a 65 percent rate of FGM. Look at Pakistan, and the levant in general. Very Muslim populations yet very low levels of FGM.
> In several EU western countries the most common gynelogical surgery act is re-building the hymen (so that the woman can pretend she's a virgin once she marries, often forcibly by her family).
Can you source that claim?
Saudi Arabia does not do FGM. What does that tell you?
I am not the person you are asking, but (to me personally) it just says that Saudi Arabia had made massive strides to become a modern 21st century society, as opposed to some of their regional neighbors who still practice FGM on a notable scale.
The fact that SA recently (past ~15 years) passed quite a few reforms that significantly lax old theocracy rules (e.g., women are now legally allowed to drive, they are no longer obligated to wear hijab outside, no male chaperone requirements, western-tier public music festivals and concerts can now be hosted, etc.) only solidified that opinion.
> I am not the person you are asking, but (to me personally) it just says that Saudi Arabia had made massive strides to become a modern 21st century society, as opposed to some of their regional neighbors who still practice FGM on a notable scale.
That assumes that Saudis did use to do FGM.. and that's not true either.
Surgery is essentially mutilation, just with a lot of effort to get the patient a positive outcome. Hopefully, this information will help.
I don't see how this provides any useful context.
The information for where nerve endings are likely to be will probably help surgeons give their patients a better outcome.
You understand you're replying in a thread about female genital mutilation?
Dumb question, why do “sensitive” spots on the body need more nerves? Couldn’t you just have the normal touch-sensing nerves and map signals from specific spots on the body to stronger/pleasurable qualia in the brain?
Not a dumb question. The shortest (and at a glance unsatisfactory) answer is because it works, and therefore it evolved that way.
Going in detail, first consider that for a feature to be evolutionarily selected for two things have to be true:
1. It must increase the fitness of the organism that carries it, i.e. the likelihood of its carrier having descendants as compared to non-carriers ( or be a side effect of another feature that improves fitness enough to be a net positive, etc etc )
2. It must be inheritable (and, in sexually reproduced organisms, mutually compatible during embryonic development).
One such a feature has reached dominance in a given population, as long as it continues to be important for fitness it cannot really be deprecated in favour of an alternative from scratch, even if that alternative is arguably better.
That's why, for instance, vertebrate ocular nerves connect to our retinas on the inside of our eyeball, resulting in us having a blind spot. Cephalopods, on the other hand, evolved their eyes independently the "reasonable" way, connecing their nerves from behind the eyeball. There's no way a vertebrate could mutate from scratch for its optical nerve to connect to the retina from behind without causing absolute mayhem in embryonic development. Our hacky solution for the blind spot? Let the brain hide it in software.
Going back to your question, some spots of the body being more sensitive than others became critical for evolutionary fitness long before nervous systems were complex enough to generate conscious qualia, let alone enough for them to be consistently involved in decision making. Furthermore, mapping of specific nerves to intensity of feeling on the CNS would imply complex hardcoding of something which is much easier to solve with "this place important, have more nerves", and maybe would even conflict with the fitness benefit of a CNS with enough neuroplasticity to learn anew during the development and lifetime of an organism.
So, in summary, the solution of having more nerves where it matters is simple, good enough, and has no reason to be rolled back in favour of a radically different alternative.
>1. It must increase the fitness of the organism that carries it, i.e. the likelihood of its carrier having descendants as compared to non-carriers
This isn't necessarily true. If you map out changes through the history of species, you'll find no significant changes but a lot of diversity for long periods, followed by big changes and low diversity for a short period. That's because during "abundant" times, the population will develop diversity as long as it doesn't significantly hinder reproductive rates. When an environnemental pressure comes up, the diversity dies down because the ones lucky enough to have adaptations that suddenly become useful and reproduce more.
So an animal might get a longer neck, but that doesn't significantly increase reproduction because food is aplenty. It's only when there's a drought that longer necks become an advantage and the trait is now selected for.
What you say is correct, and that is why I was referring specifically for what's necessary for "features" (the term I used for "phenotypes" to make it more HN) to become ubiquitous. It is a general rule of thumb in evolutionary biology that the more diversity is observed in a given population for a particular phenotype (e.g. hair colour, height, blood group, etc.) the less relevant it is for fitness within its observed range. When a phenotype is strongly selected for in a given population (e.g. bipedalism, opposable thumbs, the ability to speak) it soon becomes dominant and there is much less diversity.
As to your example about, for instance, neck length during abundant times, that follows the same rule: during abundant times neck length simply does not matter for fitness, therefore (all else being equal) there can be phenotypic diversity in the population.
One caveat though as to how a given phenotype may become ubiquitous without favourable selection is of course genetic drift[0], given a small enough population which is isolated for a long enough timeframe. Eventually that phenotype may become selectively "advantageous" inasmuch as it is no longer compatible with alternatives, and individuals from the isolated population who this phenotype can no longer have successful offspring with individuals of a different phenotype, resulting in speciation. That's what I meant with regards to a "make nerves on important places generate more pleasure/pain in brain" genotype being incompatible with a "have more nerves on important places" one. A hypothetical hybrid creature would be a mess.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_drift
Nice post. Just this bit:
> Our hacky solution for the blind spot? Let the brain hide it in software.
I would say the solution is just having two eyes, since their respective blind spots don't overlap in the visual field.
I would also say that the brain doesn't hide the blind spots, but rather doesn't pay any attention to them in the first place. There's just a lack of information from them, and this deficit isn't normally noticeable because the other eye makes up for it. I think Dennett explains it that way somewhere, probably in Consciousness Explained
The blind spot still isn't noticeable if you close one eye, though. You have to look for it carefully with a specific setup that allows you to detect the discrepancy between what you see and what's actually there.
As a software dev, I think this is actually quite a satisfying and sensible answer. A simple reliable hardware solution in favour of a brittle “clever” software one
> mapping of specific nerves to intensity of feeling on the CNS would imply complex hardcoding of something which is much easier to solve with "this place important, have more nerves"
Not saying your answer is right or wrong, but I don't think this is a sufficient explanation. If the body can differentiate areas enough to produce more nerves in one area, then it could plausibly instead produce fewer nerves which inherently produce a stronger signal - just as we have nerves which respond differently to different stimuli (e.g. heat, light, etc). Also it could be neither and we kinda randomly ended up with what we have because no option was strongly disadvantageous at the time.
Having more independent samples helps filter out noise. If you had individual sensory neurons with outsized influence, then misfiring of such neurons would also have outsized influence.
This makes a lot of sense, thx!
Sounds plausible at least, but I think the question isn't necessarily making a valid assumption. Why do men have to have nipples? Why is our retina installed backwards? Why do sinuses drain upwards? It's just a path evolution took, it doesn't jump to some optimal design.
male nipples are developmental vestiges, the male condition is derived from response to embryonic testosterone, and is a developmental variation from default.
early stage embryos of both sexes are not easily distinguishable by genitalia, they look morphologically similar. later developmental events culminate in morphological rearrangement to male form.
lack of response to testosterone during development results n a curious state of affairs, where a person is genetically male, having x, and y chromosomes, develops according to a female plan. external appearances are female, with loss of secondary sex development in puberty.
Androgen insensitivity syndrome:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgen_insensitivity_syndrom...
Asking “why” questions about our body / evolution often (not always) gives informative answers. As in the example you gave: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-purpose-of-ou...
Interesting finding, though it doesn't explain animals with properly-wired retinas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod_eye
(Scientific American is throwing up a paywall even though they're only republishing https://theconversation.com/look-your-eyes-are-wired-backwar... At least they link to the original.)
Correct, though interestingly apropos to the discussion is that sex is one of the ways evolution is able to get around local maximums.
Fingers, for instance, not only have higher sensitivity, but also much higher spatial resolution due to the more dense nerve network.
I can't tell why other areas may have needed higher spatial resolution; maybe it was evolutionary important in the past, and remains today. Or maybe just adding more nerves due to a random mutation correlated with better reproductive outcomes due to a stronger signal, or higher sensitivity, so more nerves are present for no other reason.
Wait, so what you’re saying is, we can use our genitals in a pinch that could be as good as fingers for finesse?
Yes. And the (thought) experiment of reading braille with your clitoris exists. Except youl'ld get horny really quickly.
Hence the phrase, "Can I use your dictaphone?"
Nerve density isn’t mainly about intensity, it’s about spatial resolution. More nerve endings per square centimeter means you can distinguish finer details of touch, texture, and pressure. The brain can’t invent spatial detail that isn’t in the incoming signal. Amplifying a sparse signal centrally would be like zooming into a low-res photo.
The brain does do some of what you’re describing though. The somatosensory cortex gives disproportionate space to certain body parts (the sensory homunculus). So there is central amplification, but it works on top of peripheral density, not instead of it. Without the dense nerve input, you’d basically have an on/off switch instead of nuanced sensation.
> Dumb question, why do “sensitive” spots on the body need more nerves? Couldn’t you just have the normal touch-sensing nerves and map signals from specific spots on the body to stronger/pleasurable qualia in the brain?
Think of a television. What gives you a better picture, quadrupling the number of pixels or making the existing pixels 4x as intense?
Perhaps encoding "software" is more expensive in terms of codons? So it's cheaper/more likely to "implement" physically.
Sensing nerves aren't especially energy hungry when considering their volume in the human body, so evolution doesn't have much reason to minimize them.
I think you have it backwards. The brain doesn't "know" what's supposed to be sensitive or pleasurable. It boots up with no training data after all. It machine learns what's sensitive due to a combination of nerve density and other factors. We haven't figured out all the other factors yet. But that's why there's a correlation between nerve density and sensitivity: density means sensitivity.
This is just wrong. The brain does instinctively know that some things are good and bad.
Go take a picture in a dark room and edit the photo to try to make it like you've got the lights on in photo editing software. You get a noisy grainy mess and little to no detail.
It's not like evolution would leave a significant amount of signal/noise ratio on the table for all other nerves.
Presuming nerves are already optimized if you want more signal you have to add nerves.
That 4chan pretends its Hacker News thread still lives in my head.
I still remember "Show HN: Clitly, my app for finding the Clitoris".
https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/48696148
Thanks for sharing. Hilarious and somewhat accurate...
Thanks! It must have been the r/programming parody thread I was thinking of as I couldn't find the reference here.
https://archive.is/CEfWE
https://periscope.corsfix.com/?https://www.theguardian.com/s...
> her colleagues used high-energy X-rays to create 3D scans of two female pelvises that had been donated through a body donor organ programme.
Would be really interesting to get a few dozen of these and map out the variability. Gotta start somewhere though
I remember that Matteo Realdo Colombo (1515-1559) [1] described the clitoris. There is a novel about the story [2] which was the finalist on one of the top Spanish literary prizes [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realdo_Colombo
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Anatomist-Federico-Andahazi/dp/038549...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premio_Planeta_de_Novela
>Many of the contributions made in De Re Anatomica overlapped the discoveries of another anatomist, Gabriele Falloppio, most notably in that both Colombo and Falloppio claimed to have discovered the clitoris.
Lol. Hard to take that statement serious.