Contrary facts can be annoying but objectivity is always my first choice. I made a small footnote of the remote possibility that the popularity of phallic worship wasn’t due to reverence or longing but only because they mistakenly assumed the yonic had more parts to carve or chisel.
Shoving a thick stick in the ground and dancing around it was much simpler than taking the time to whittle your way through rumples, puckers and pleats. I refused to believe they had just been taking the easy way out all along.
But didn’t that take me right back to my original study? How did the female end up with more arrows? Laziness? Favoritism? I was going to find out and put things right again.
Apparently the Egyptians took the first credible swipe at counting parts.
But, I could only find
and 
None of which had any arrows whatsoever pointing at them. They didn’t look like anything I’d seen in my modern medical journals so I reached out to my scientific community to ask if any of them had unique insight into what ancient Egyptian genitalia actually looked like. I got no help and chalked their reluctance to respond up to professional jealousy and kept going.
When I got to the Greeks I hit pay dirt. In paintings, sculptures and tapestries the male genitalia was on full display. I found no instance where female genitalia was being featured and admired at all. It was all tucked away, no detail whatsoever. But no arrows either so it was difficult to substantiate the nature of their admiration. Even a learned people can’t be right for no reason.
I needed clear proof and hustled off to the pre-Socratic. I quickly found it to be of lesser value than regular Socratic. I wondered if everyone except me already knew that. It may have more letters but it’s still not as good. Which, oddly enough is not the inverse of what I am trying to establish with my own work.
Feeling thwarted, the logical place to go next was pre-Hippocratic. It only made sense. At first I wasted valuable time chasing after that old red herring, Asclepius. When I found out he was the son of Apollo I knew I was way off course. Gods and sons of Gods would never have the patience to establish the nomenclature of genitalia. The Gods back then busied themselves doing other things with it.
The Gods nowadays never really share what they do with their own but spend a great deal of time instructing us on what to do with ours. I wondered why the change in attitude but left it unanswered and fought on.
Then I found Calliphon of Croton. An overworked physician of antiquity and friend of Pythagoras. It seems he was a pleasant fellow who for some reason busied himself warning people not to go near his donkey. But, it was here I found the documents of Kavliáris, the son of Calliphon of Croton’s oldest sister. Finally, the fountainhead!
As an indentured apprentice, Kavliáris was obligated to take on the mundane work Calliphon of Croton sloughed off on him. I was grateful for that because it was the drawings and arrows of Kavliáris that helped me begin to make sense of it all.
Even though it was sketched in a shaky hand the detail of the subject was still recognizable. Papyrus can make things look really wrinkled so I needed to invoke the acumen of a true scientist and pay close attention. His arrows were well done and the names he assigned interesting and descriptive. Τσαλακωμένο μέρος and κέλυφος αχιβάδα made perfect sense. I might have mistranslated τρύπα. Both the μεγάλη τρύπα and the μικρή τρύπα. But, for the sake of fairness I felt obligated to add them to the count nonetheless. Honest science is good science.
Here, I feel the need to take a moment to acknowledge a women of patience. Her name has been lost to history but her contribution to science certainly has not. It’s not every woman who would endure being placed in awkward positions and having a man point and ask, “What the hell is that thing?” and “What could you possibly use that for?” But because of her I have Kavliáris’ original part count. Female: 4, Male: 8.
So there it was. Now I had proof the part count started out being correct and the right genitalia was receiving the admiration it was due. So, where did it go wrong?
I found my answer when I ran across Agnodice. The first documented female physician of history who seemingly came along 800 years later merely to contradict Kavliáris. Her count was an astonishing Female: 18, Male: 1. Obviously, bias had not yet been discovered.
Racing back up the years to collect more data I found the arrow counts fluctuating wildly. The Constantine years repudiated Agnodice with their conclusions running an average of Female: 3, Male: 6. The Dark Ages nearly reversed it to 7:2 favoring the female. I was holding my own both going into and coming out of the Middle Ages. Average for that curious slug of time was Female: 4, Male: 6.
The Renaissance was generally discommodious but the drawings were more detailed and the arrows quite ornate. I set those aside for further inspection. The Enlightenment did little more than split hairs. And the dearth of decent drawings during the Victorian years continued right up to WWII.
Then I began to see the change that was going to tell me what I needed to know. There was a sudden upturn in available study material. But it was being aimed at the layman, not the scientist. The increase in what appeared to be a greater willingness on behalf of the female to place herself on full display for study was met with a significant decrease in arrows. None at all in fact.
And now in a reversal of the sacred ancient fertility rites the object of worship now appeared to be the female. But, this noticeable proliferation of available exhibits in contemporary times left the arrow and its assigned nomenclature far behind. Learning was being ditched for pleasure. Honesty now a thing of the past.
So, there it was. I had my answer. The scourge of modern marketing was to blame for the misplaced popularity of female genitalia. As with everything else they touch these peddlers of casuistry, these mass media sophists who cleverly redefine truth had once again purposely distracted us from the obvious.
They know damn well the part count is wrong. And through the sin of omission they fail time and again to disclose it by refusing to include arrows and nomenclature. They got their product out there first and saturated the market. Clever.
An entire generation was being hoodwinked by false advertising. Could it ever be put right again? Now that it has been taken out of the hands of experts, I doubt it. I didn’t want to end on a bitter note but I could not help but conclude, “Now that everyone knows everything about everything nobody knows nothing about anything at all.”