Your Clitoris May Have More Nerve Endings Than Previously Realized, Over 10,000

The nerve of your clitoris. If for whatever reason in the past, you’ve urgently Googled, the question, “how may nerve endings does your clitoris have,” chances are the number 8,000 has surfaced. That’s been the number, for example, listed on the Cleveland Clinic website. However, it’s been ironically hard to find a scientific study to support this 8,000 clitoris number. That’s because no one seems to have taken the time to actually officially count the number of nerve endings in that part of the body until a study that was recently presented on October 27 at the joint meeting of the Sexual Medicine Society of North America and the International Society for Sexual Medicine. And the results from that study suggest that in the end, your clitoris may have a lot more going on than initially thought.

If you’re wondering, “what is this clitoris thing that you are referring to,” you may be missing out in more ways than one. In fact, you may be missing out in over 10,000 ways. But more on that later. Many people may have trouble finding the clitoris, not because it doesn’t appear on Google maps, but because they may not be familiar with female genital anatomy. The clitoris, which rhymes with liquorice, thesaurus, and slow loris, is a female sex organ that sits where your two labia minora converge in the front part of your genital region. Your labia majora are the inner lips of your vulva, which is the entrance to your vagina.

If you do have a clitoris, it’s likely the most sensitive part of your body. That’s sensitive from a sexual standpoint rather than a feelings standpoint. The head or glans of your clitoris resembles a pea in size and shape but has nothing to do with pee. Pee is what comes out of your urethra, which should be located directly behind your clitoris if you are standing up or South to your clitoris if you are lying down on a bed.

Now any part of your body that’s sexually sensitive tends to have a lot of nerve endings because nerves are what tells your brain, “I like it like that.” Your clitoris typically has two DNC’s. In this case, DNC does not mean Democratic National Convention but instead stands for dorsal nerve of the clitoris, the nerves that transmits sensations that ultimately end up in your brain.

This brings us to the study presented at the joint meeting. At the meeting, Blair Peters, MD, an Assistant Professor specializing in plastic and reconstructive surgery at the Oregon Health and Science University’s School of Medicine, presented the study that he had conducted with Maria Uloko, MD, an Assistant Professor of Urology at the University of California, San Diego, and Paige Isabey, MD, an OB-GYN at the University of Manitoba. For the study, Peters and his team obtained DNC samples from seven transmasculine patients who were undergoing gender-affirming phalloplasty surgery. If your doctor is telling you that you will undergo phalloplasty tomorrow, it’s best to know what the surgical procedure is. Phalloplasty is when you use flaps of skin to create a penis. This obviously is a complex surgical procedure and not like creating something on a pottery wheel like Demi Moore did in the movie Ghost. It involves moving and adjusting the DNCs to create a sensory nerve running through the created penis. Thus it wasn’t unusual for Peters and his team to take samples of the DNC’s during surgery.

The team used a microscope and image analysis software to count the number of nerve fibers seen in the DNC samples from the patients. In each of the DNCs from the seven samples, they found an average of 5140 nerve fibers, ranging from 4926 to 5543. With each clitoris having two DNCs, the average number of myelinated nerve fibers innervating a clitoris would then be double these numbers or 10,281, ranging from 9852 to 11086. No matter how you may be at math, you probably realize that these number are significantly higher than 8,000.

Now, this number may be useful in a trivia contest or something to put on your dating profile or your Facebook page. But that’s not the only benefit of knowing how nervous your clitoris may be. The abstract for the study indicated that better understanding the number of axons in the DNC is “an important step in our understanding of clitoral innervation and sexual response with implications for many fields of medical practice.” This could help not only with gender-affirming genital surgery but clitoris reconstruction surgery when that portion of the body has been damaged.

Plus, it’s good to add to the scientific “cliterature.” Compared to the penis, the clitoris has remained fairly understudied. If you put the word “penis” into PubMed, you get around 53,800 results. By comparison, plug in “clitoris” and you find only 2,613 results. That’s quite a penis-clitoris divide. Better understanding the structure of the clitoris may help provide more insights into female sexuality. Your clitoris may be the size of a pea but looks like it’s got a lot of nerve.