The Wikipedia page for the clitoris is extremely comprehensive.
It runs to nearly 20,000 words and has a bibliography of more than 100 books, alphabetized from J.N. Adams’ The Latin Sexual Vocabulary to Rachel Wood’s Consumer Sexualities: Women and Sex Shopping.
It was here, maybe somewhere between subsections ‘Bulbs’ and ‘Spotted Hyenas’, that animator Lori Malépart-Traversy decided to make this the subject of her next film.
Le Clitoris (2016) was her final project at Concordia University in Montreal, with the modest aim of impressing her friends and tutors.
In just three minutes she takes us on an anatomical and socio-historical tour of the clitoris. It’s charming and pointed. Informative and funny. She shows how men have made it their duty to explain and legislate its uses.
And wow did her film strike a chord.
Viewed more than 13 million times, it won several awards and was screened at festivals around the world, launching Lori’s career in the process.
But perhaps best of all, it’s now cited on that same Wikipedia page that sparked her idea (under Society and Culture > Contemporary Art).
From Wikipedia we came, and unto Wikipedia we shall return.
I spoke with Lori over Zoom from her home in Canada. You can see more of her work on her Instagram and her Etsy shop.
Why did you want to tell this story?
I wanted to do something about sexuality, and something feminist, but I wasn’t sure exactly what. We were only working on it for eight months, so it needed to be straight to the point.
During my research I found the Wikipedia page of the clitoris and I was really surprised that I didn’t know anything about the anatomy and the history.
First I wanted to show my classmates what I had just learned, and I thought they should know about it too.
It started making sense when I saw the images of the clitoris, and one image looked like a character with little legs.
So I started to doodle and I thought, ok, I have something here. It’s not just the story of the clitoris – the clitoris itself can become the main character in the film.
What were the biggest challenges?
Choosing what information to keep.
The Wikipedia page is very long ,and I found a good book written by a French sexologist which talked about the history, how it disappeared and reappeared in the medical books. There were a lot of subjects I could have touched on.
I wanted to show that in Western society, there was some wrong stuff about the clitoris that happened. It was hard to write a narration that made sense.
And also I wanted it to be funny, which is why there are little metaphors in there. Being funny is always harder than you think.
What would you do differently if you made the film again?
I would have been a bit more inclusive about gender.
I start my film saying, “Women are lucky…” but now I’m more aware, I know that it’s, “People with a vulva,” or, “People with a clitoris are lucky.”
So I would change the phrasing of that first sentence. At that time I didn’t know much about gender diversity, but it’s something I know much more about today.
What are you most proud of?
I can’t lie, I’m very proud of the number of views that it’s got.
That’s not common for a student film, and an animation short, so it’s quite special.
It means that many people saw it, many people enjoyed it, but also many people learned stuff about the clitoris while watching it.
How did making this film change you?
It made me a filmmaker. I learned from scratch how to make a film from start to finish, and after that how to distribute it.
Normally you grow in your career and have a big success after a few years. So this created an enormous pressure, and I found it really hard to work on the projects I did after that, to make something as good, and as successful.
It was very hard – there was a lot of procrastination caused by that pressure and self-doubting. It can be dangerous and it burned me out for a bit.
But it gave me the opportunity to start another project at the National Film Board, so it brought me into the animation world. I could more easily talk with filmmakers who have many years of experience.
It made me see that even the filmmakers I have admired for a long time are very approachable people.
I think the animation community is very friendly. We are more quirky, all socially awkward in a way.
We are all a bit crazy with our techniques, spending so much time on just a few seconds. That gives us a way to connect.
You often hear creative people despair at clients whose main ambition is for something to “go viral.” The success of Lori’s film shows that it’s almost impossible to predict what will tickle the internet’s fancy. An animated history of the clitoris (in French, with subtitles)? Yeah, that’s a surefire winner…
Huge thanks to Lori, and to Jessica Best for editing this interview.
And thanks as ever for reading. I’m always looking for great short documentaries to feature, so please let me know if there is a film I need to be all over.
Next week, we’re shooting hoops (not sure I can pull that off) with an Oscar winner…
Long live “Le Clitoris”! A joy to watch with an audience full of strangers. Can’t wait for “Queen of Basketball” ❤️🏀