Ask Mira: Nobody Taught Us about Female Pleasure. Here’s What They Left Out.

Ask Mira · The Pleasure Professor ·

SheSight Sexual Wellbeing Series #1

Let me open with a fact that genuinely stopped me in my tracks the first time I encountered it.

The full anatomy of the clitoris, the only human organ that exists entirely for pleasure, was not published in scientific literature until 1998. Not 1898. 1998. The year Google launched. The year Titanic was winning Oscars. And science had still not bothered to formally document how female pleasure actually works.

I don’t say this to shock you. I say it because everything that follows in this column, and in your own life, makes a lot more sense once you understand that the gaps in what you know about your own body are not your fault. They were built in. Deliberately.

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

So What Exactly Did They Leave Out?

Most of us received some version of sex education that covered reproduction, maybe contraception, possibly a vague and terrifying overview of STIs. What it almost certainly did not cover: what actually produces pleasure for women, how female arousal works, what the clitoris actually is and does (it extends internally, by the way, much further than most people realise), or the simple fact that your desire and your pleasure are things you are entitled to understand.

A 2019 review of sex education curricula across multiple countries found that the word “pleasure” appeared in fewer than 3% of materials aimed at girls. Three percent. So if you feel like you have spent years figuring things out by accident, through trial and error, through partners who also had no idea, through magazines or whispered conversations: yes. That tracks. That was the system working exactly as designed.

Why Was It Designed That Way?

Here is the part that gets interesting, and a little infuriating.

Controlling female sexuality has, across history and across cultures, always been about controlling women. Full stop. When a woman’s sexual behaviour is tied to inheritance, social standing, family honour, and political alliance, female desire becomes inconvenient. A woman who understands and owns her pleasure is a woman who is harder to manage. So the knowledge gets removed. The anatomy gets left out of textbooks. The conversation gets marked as inappropriate.

This is not ancient history either. Sigmund Freud, whose ideas still quietly shape how many of us think about sex and psychology, declared that clitoral orgasms were “immature” and that healthy women should transition to vaginal orgasms. This was presented as clinical fact for decades. It told generations of women that the pleasure they were actually experiencing was somehow wrong or incomplete. The damage from that single idea alone is genuinely hard to overstate.

The Celebrity Moment That Said Everything

When Jane Fonda, in her 70s, publicly shared that she did not experience her first orgasm until her 40s, the response was extraordinary. Not because it was scandalous, but because it was honest in a way that felt almost transgressive. Here was one of the most celebrated, most scrutinised women of her generation saying: I was in the dark too. Me too.

That kind of candour does something that academic papers cannot. It gives women permission to name their own experience without shame. It says: this gap is not personal failure. It is a shared condition. And shared conditions have shared solutions.

What You Can Actually Do With This

First: give yourself genuine credit for how much you have figured out despite the system, not because of it.

Second: get curious. Not in a homework way, in a genuinely interested way. Learn your own anatomy. There are now excellent, evidence-based resources (the work of researchers like Emily Nagoski is a great starting point) that explain female desire and arousal clearly, warmly, and without making you feel like you are studying for an exam.

Third: normalise the conversation. With your friends. With your partner. With your daughters, if you have them. The silence was constructed over centuries. It does not dismantle itself. It dismantles when women start talking.

You were not given this information. That was not an accident. But you can choose to go and get it now. And that, genuinely, changes everything.

Ask Mira’s quick tips:

• Read “Come As You Are” by Emily Nagoski. It is the book most women wish they had been given at sixteen.
• Look up accurate anatomical diagrams of the clitoris. Yes, actually. You deserve to know what your own body looks like.
• Next time you are with a friend you trust, try saying: “Did anyone actually teach us anything useful about this?” Watch what happens.

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