What is visible from the outside is under a tenth of the organ.
Photo:
Virtual-Pano
· CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
The part anyone can see is the glans — roughly the size of a pea. The rest continues inward as a wishbone: a body, two crura up to nine centimetres long, and two bulbs of erectile tissue that wrap around the vaginal canal. In total the organ is about ten centimetres of erectile tissue, and roughly nine tenths of it never appears in a textbook diagram.
The full structure was described in detail only in 1998, by the Australian urologist Helen O'Connell, who noticed that anatomy textbooks devoted pages to the penis and a footnote to the clitoris. Earlier editions of Gray's Anatomy had simply left most of it out — not because it was unknown, but because nobody had thought it worth drawing.
