A question of possibilities and relevance Why was the knowledge about the external female sexual organs that was already known in the 19th century forgotten? Haag-Wackernagel: We have already talked about the difficulty of dissecting and studying the external female sex organs. Nevertheless, much was recognized and understood already in the 19th century. In earlier times, mortality among younger women, especially in childbirth, was very high, and scientists—exclusively men at that time—had a large number of cadavers at their disposal. There is an example in which a researcher took tissue from a young woman just 30 minutes after she died and was able to show that the finest nerve fibres of the genital corpuscles showed postmortem changes within a very short time. He must therefore have waited at the bedside for death to occur, which would be completely unthinkable today. Happily, nowadays younger women die only rarely. And they are therefore not available for anatomical research. That is why the depictions from earlier times are so valuable. Scientists were already developing procedures in which they injected resins or mercury into the blood vessels, for example, and were thus able to make the vascular tissues of the clitoral erectile tissue visible for the first time. For example, Kobelt10 recorded in 1844 that he was able to see certain blood vessels only after they had been injected. Or also in the 1930s: the Austrian Eduard Pernkopf was an outstanding anatomist who, among other things, worked out the structures of the clitoris in detail and also depicted them.11 Pernkopf was an avowed National Socialist and many of the corpses he dissected were proven to be murder victims of the Nazis. To this day, there are therefore considerable reservations about working with his anatomical illustrations, even though they are of excellent quality by today's standards. Besides the changed conditions for dissectors today, are there other reasons? Haag-Wackernagel: Yes, the fact that recently deceased body donors are not available to us to the same extent today is not the decisive reason, in my estimation. The scientific realization from the 19th century that a woman does not need an orgasm to become pregnant certainly played a major role. Gynaecology is predominantly focused on reproduction. And so knowledge about female pleasure, as well as the description of the organ responsible for it, largely disappeared from the medical literature. In the meantime, however, recent publications have shown that the female orgasm does indeed have a fertility- promoting influence. In addition, sexual pleasure plays an important role in partner bonding, which in turn has a positive effect on the flourishing of progeny. Furthermore, the emancipation of women from the beginning of the 20th century has certainly had a great influence on the suppression of female sexuality. It would be worthwhile to analyse this in detail. This also has a lot to do with the male perspective that still dominates science and society today. The myth of the vaginal orgasm, which is attributed to Sigmund Freud, goes in the same direction. Freud says in his transmission hypothesis12 that there is an immature infantile orgasm and a mature vaginal orgasm. This would mean, however, that it would be the male penis alone that could provide female pleasure. This view did not originate with Freud, but goes back to the Danish gynaecologist Rudolph Bergh, who at the end of the 19th century rejected the importance of the clitoris for female pleasure. In 1906 Worthmann13 was then able to prove that the vagina is too weakly sensory innervated to explain the generation of female pleasure and that it must be the clitoris that is responsible for it. When did perspectives change? Haag-Wackernagel: The fact that female pleasure has received more and more attention since the middle of the 20th century cannot be credited to science. Rather, the recognition of female sexuality has been demanded by society. In the past decades, there has been much more of a media discussion than a scientific discussion one. Science was not the driver of a societal development here, but is only now slowly following along. Fortunately, several important papers on the function of the genital corpuscles have appeared in recent years. This shows that the topic of female pleasure is being taken seriously again in science. What kind of feedback do you receive regarding “your” topic? Haag-Wackernagel: When I started developing my clitoris models, I realized that the subject is still enormously taboo. As a scientist, you are quickly assigned a dubious image, especially as an “old white man”. I have been called out by individual women who say that a man should not work on female pleasure, that the topic belongs to women. On the contrary, I am of the opinion that men in particular still have a great deal of catching up to do with regards to the structure and function of the female genitalia. In general, however, I have received a lot of positive feedback on my work, which motivates me to continue. Many women feel misunderstood when it comes to their desire and cannot talk about it with their partner because they lack the language and the terms to do so. There is probably no medical topic that encroaches so strongly on people's private lives as sexuality and where there is still so much to be done.