The Clitoral Truth: The Secret World at Your Fingertips [Hardcover]

Rebecca Chalker (Author), Fish (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 2000

The clitoris has been dismissed, undervalued, unexplored, and misunderstood for hundreds of years, but the truth is out there, and internationally celebrated sex educator Rebecca Chalker has found it. In The Clitoral Truth, Chalker offers the only mainstream, in-depth exploration devoted solely to women's genital anatomy and sexual response. Women readers everywhere--be they straight, gay, or bisexual--will learn about the countless sexual sensations and discover how to enhance their sexual responses in a more concrete way than ever before. Enhanced with personal accounts, comprehensive illustrations, and a thorough appendix of female sexuality resources, this book helps women and their partners understand and expand their sexual potential and work toward becoming independent sexual beings.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

REBECCA CHALKER is the author of The Clitoral Truth: The Secret World At Your Fingertips and A Woman's Book of Choices. She teaches Women's and Gender Studies at Pace University in New York City where she teaches a course on the cultural history of sexuality.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press (August 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1583220380
• ISBN-13: 978-1583220382
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 7.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #557,480 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Quite adequite, although possibly excessive., April 11, 2003

By 

Deceit (Sarasota, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Clitoral Truth: The Secret World at Your Fingertips (Hardcover)

This is quite an interesting book. Its central basis surrounds the clit but also describes it as the central pleasure point to pretty much everything else. It provides all the information necessary along with many anatomical and entertaining hand-sketched pictures, describing all the various muscles and functions and spots of the entire female genetalia. On this, I could not complain or ask for anything more.

Indeed, the author has done her homework in writing this book, but I say excessive in the title because of how the material is presented along with the many accompanying details. Many a page are filled with backround information on the "Adventure of the Clitoris!"(no, they don't actually word it like that in the book). Strongly written in the female perspective, although it doesn't demean usefulness for the male readers, it gives the history of the clitorus all the way back to greek times as well as various stories and such. Although it does give the book some color, ideas throughout this 200-page book are often revealed slowly. I believe the same effect could have been established with half the space.

The chapters, from female ejaculation to beyond intercourse, do cover quite a bit. I stand firmly by my 5-stars. Choose as you wish: Fulfilling/excessive, colorful/cumbersome, but I thoroughly enjoyed the book myself, though.

163 of 202 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Dr Ruth she's not., July 24, 2002

By 

danw (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Clitoral Truth: The Secret World at Your Fingertips (Paperback)

Suffice to say this book comes across as more than a bit harsh toward heterosexual males like myself, and thus it is difficult to give a truly unbiased review of it (or to formulate an unemotional opinion on it for that matter). But the bottomline is the book falls far short of it's promise. The author spends too much time and energy bashing all manner of feminist favorite targets, and too little truly attempting to create an equitable model of sexuality that both genders can embrace. In truth her repeated references to penis in vagina intercourse as the apogee of male sexual experience does little to advance the argument that maybe there is a better model of sexuality out there for all of us.

The book obviously does provide an extensive review of female genital anatomy; although, I found it ironic that after maligning all modern sex manuals as showing "cartoon genitals" for women, that the author chose a cartoonist (Fish) to provide the book illustrations. The real disappointment though is that there is very little is the way of detailed information about sexual practices. Ms Chalker may "mention" masturbation and outercourse but truth be told she does not "discuss" them in a fashion sufficient to educate the reader to any degree. As a case in point she repeatedly makes mention of women using vibrators to enhance their sexual pleasure, yet never does she describe their most appropriate application or model choice in the way Betty Dodson has. Similarly for many other "mentions", the reader must already understand the mechanics of the topic or be left to pursue further research. So it is really quite a stretch to describe this as a sex workshop in book form - it is not. It is as much as anything a book on sexual politics, which is fine, if only it had been marketed as such.

So I would caution the heterosexual male population to not be misled by the appealing nude female torso on the cover or the jacket notes suggesting this book is intended for a mainstream audience. Recognize this book for what it is and proceed at your own risk. Personally I found Felice Newman's "Whole Lesbian Sex Book" to be far more sex positive and inclusive, even though I am obviously not the intended audience in that case. Go figure!

Postscript (9/6/02)
Upon further review it would appear that this author has made a rather basic error in her purportedly updated anatomy - namely she classifies the clitoral body (or shaft) and crura (legs) as spongy tissue analogous to the male corpus spongiosum surrounding the urethra, and distinct from the corpus cavernosa that they are more obviously analogous to. She further identifies the vaginal bulbs as cavernosa when in fact they are spongy erectile tissue. While this may seem like a minor point to some, it certainly confuses the issue of male/female homology. Interestingly this was easily cleared up by a quick reference to the online version of Gray's Anatomy, which would seem to invalidate a very basic premise of the book, that the information on the clitoris is simply not available. While "marriage manuals" may indeed lack a good anatomical foundation, this information has not been "lost" by the medical community, and the tissue in question is clearly identified as erectile which would suggest a sexual function. So one is left to wonder whether this author is suffering from some sort of self-serving myopia when it comes to her interpretation of what the medical establishment knows and doesn't know.

Finally having now seen the original drawings from Suzann Gage's book, A New View of a Woman's Body, (in Betty Dodson's video Viva La Vulva) I can certainly say the diagrams in this book are truly poor, being as I indicated earlier, of cartoon quality. A shame Ms Chalker could not negotiate use of the original drawings from her friend and coworker, and had to rely instead on a longwinded reference to Ms Gage's work to give the vague impression they were included.

47 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Buy this book. And a mirror., October 17, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Clitoral Truth: The Secret World at Your Fingertips (Hardcover)

Yes, this is indeed a feminist book (although since a "feminist", by definition, is simply someone who believes that women are equal human beings too, I'm not quite sure why some people have a problem with that).

But to be honest, it's pretty hard to discover how ignorant most women are about this fairly crucial part of our bodies and NOT come to the conclusion that something's wrong with the way our society deals with women's sexuality. I thought I was well-informed, but I learnt important stuff about my body from this book that I'd never known before.

If substantial numbers of men grew up not knowing they had a penis ... or not knowing where it was ... or how it worked ... or thinking that it was "dirty" to touch it ... or feeling ashamed of needing their lover to touch it in order for them to come ... I think you'd agree that something was wrong. Well, despite all the progress we've made, that's where far too many women are still at right now. Most sex ed classes still use diagrams that don't feature the clitoris at all, or at best show a tiny squiggle floating somewhere in space, and certainly don't give any information on what it actually *does*.

And you don't have to be "man-hating" or believe in some vast conspiracy to feel that this situation doesn't do women any favours - or men either. Personally, I've never heard a straight man say "God, I just wish I could meet a women who is totally ignorant about her body and never has an orgasm! Then I'd have to nag her into sex and she'd just lie there feeling depressed! That'd be so HOT!".

Buy this fun and fascinating book (I particularly love the cartoon illustrations - meticulously detailed and informative, but the opposite of the sterile diagrams so many books feature). And learn all the stuff you should have been taught in sex ed.