This Is the First-Ever International Clitoral Awareness Week

 
In case you missed it, this is the first-ever International Clitoral Awareness Week. Long overdue, if you ask me. The clitoris has been shafted by the penis since Adam warned Eve: “Better step back—I don’t know how big this thing gets.”

I am on very good terms with my clitoris. In fact, it’s a real love match. No matter how I’m feeling, my clitoris makes me feel better. Best of all, my clitoris never asks me what I’m thinking.

Clitoris Awareness Week is the brainchild of Clitoraid, an organization that usually focuses on helping worldwide victims of female genital mutilation. Clitoraid is based in Las Vegas, of all places. (Suggested bumper sticker: “I lost all my money in Vegas, but I came home with my clit intact!”)

The stated aim of Clitoris Awareness Week is to raise pubic, er, public consciousness of the clitoris as well as to celebrate the oft-misunderstood nexus of female sexuality.

“We’ve noticed that the clitoris has not gotten its spot in the limelight,” Clitoraid rep Nadine Gary told the Huffington Post. “It makes people feel uncomfortable.”

Uncomfortable? Only if it’s being touched like a jackhammer instead of a butterfly. The clitoris doesn’t require much help, you see. The only organ in the human body designed purely for pleasure, it houses 8,000 nerve endings—twice that of your garden-variety penis.

As Eve Ensler says in The Vagina Monologues: “Who needs a handgun when you’ve got a semi-automatic?”

Despite its firepower, the clitoris is not always easy to find. Unlike the penis, it does not unfurl like an American flag in a windstorm. Its proportions are far more modest, even when fully erect, although an Australian urologist found that a clitoris can reach eight inches in length. That is a clitoris I would not want to meet at a masquerade party.

Given that the clitoris can require some effort to locate, try to think of the journey as an erogenous treasure hunt. In extreme cases, a clitoral GPS can be quite helpful, as can a Clit App for your smartphone. These aids are not real, but they should be. Stay tuned.

Ladies, be extra nice to your clitoris this week. Take it to lunch. Buy it a hat. Give it a happy ending.

Speaking of happy endings, it’s only fitting that the first International Clitoral Awareness Week falls in May, which happens to be National Masturbation Month, as if you didn’t know.

That particular celebration began in 1995 in San Francisco (where else?), in response to the forced resignation of then-U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, a vocal proponent of self-love.

My suggestion is to commemorate them simultaneously, perhaps with a ladies-only masturbation party and potluck supper. All hail to the clitoris, wherever you find it.