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Comment by ptsneves | Hacker News Reader

I find it a mystery why so many nerves are there, as well as why they were positively selected for. Enough so that human women have them with huge variation in shapes and sizes but they are there.

The idea of it being a pain killer for birth but requiring a vibrator is interesting, because I don’t think any culture developed clitoris stimulation as a child birth helper. If it did help I would expect it to change birth outcomes and thus being a source of positive selection.

The only thing that bothered me is that gender affirming is in fact an amputation, because they gave their clitorises to science. It even took me a while to understand what the term “gender affirming surgery” meant.

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The explanation I was once given (by an elderly female librarian at a bar, long story) is that all the nerves in the clitoris are just there to provide the same pro-mating pleasure signals as all the nerves in the male penis. But if they were spread throughout the entire ring of the vagina, (as they are throughout the penis) they would be extra painful during childbirth when the whole opening is stretched and torn. Extra nerves mean more exquisite pain signals (think paper cuts on the fingertips vs elsewhere.) It might even damage them long-term. Concentrating all the most sensitive nerves in a tiny spot at the top makes them available for pleasure during sex but minimizes damage and pain during childbirth.

Good point on the first paragraphs. The why seems to be that it’s mostly about pleasure.

Although not essential for survival, pleasure seems to be programmed in us as a species, so the body evolving this to give women the balance of a complex pleasure organ to make up for the pain — in so many levels — they go through during birth.

So maybe nature was like “they suffer a lot during birth and pregnancy, let’s give them a clitoris that gives them REALLY good pleasure that the male counterpart won’t be able to ever experience or comprehend.”

Pleasure is essential for - generational - survival. Species would've died out already if there was no upfront benefit to sex.

I’ve thought this in the past but then there are fish that go through either a mass spawning that involves no physical contact or salmon that force themselves through agonies to return to a spawning place.

Also there is rape.

So pleasure is definitely not required for procreation.

Pleasure is not only about sex, it can take many forms, and us humans re the ones that really learned how to get pleasure from a lot of sources.

I like this observation: "The idea of it being a pain killer for birth but requiring a vibrator is interesting, because I don’t think any culture developed clitoris stimulation as a child birth helper. If it did help I would expect it to change birth outcomes and thus being a source of positive selection."

except ... well, "women's mysteries" often either didn't get recorded at all, or were excluded in far too many histories. So "we don't know if this was used" would be my assumption. (I am fascinated by histories and read far too many history papers and records, that said, professionals would be able to answer, maybe).

I thought that the clitoris contains all the nerve endings that would be in the male penis, just in the smaller area vs being spread out over the entire penis and penis nerves are selected for to encourage male mating.

In a penis the nerve endings are also mostly in the glans (head) so the difference isn't that big. Most of the parts of these two organs match somehow, just shifted around a bit.

Regarding

> The only thing that bothered me is that gender affirming is in fact an amputation, because they gave their clitorises to science.

one of the linked articles reads

> Peters collected samples from one side of dorsal nerve tissue, a small amount of which is typically trimmed during gender-affirming phalloplasty procedures.

which suggests the situation was perhaps less bothersome than you thought. (It sounds like the outcome was identical from the perpsective of the transmasculine individuals getting surgery- the only difference was the choice to analyze medical waste).

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