The Vagina Voyages

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This is Unexplainable.

I'm Julia Longoria.

Today, we have an episode from our friends at the podcast, The Longest, Shortest Time.

I've been a longtime listener of this show.

Host Hillary Frank tells fascinating and heartbreaking stories about parenthood and reproductive health, but you definitely don't need to be a parent to listen.

In the episode we'll share with you today, Hillary talks to science writer Rachel Gross about vaginas.

Scientists know shockingly little about this part of the body.

So Rachel went on a mission to find out why.

Here's the host, Hilary Frank.

Rachel Gross has a vivid memory of sex ed in fourth grade.

Being in a dark room with all the other fourth grade girls and their moms learning about periods.

And my mom was not there because she was like a doctor on call.

But I remember like trying to understand and having never heard about a period and like asking a question and I asked, so is it like peeing where you can control it and like hold it in?

And they all laughed at me.

Oh, that's such a good question.

Thank you.

All the moms laughed at me.

But I like never ever wanted to ask a question again after that.

And I was left with this impression that like sex stuff was something you should already know.

And if not, you shouldn't ask about it.

But Rachel's need to ask about it could not be suppressed.

In fact, she's made a career of asking about it.

She's a science writer, and a lot of her work is about sex stuff, specifically the vagina.

Rachel wrote a whole book about vaginas.

It's called Vagina Obscura, an anatomical voyage.

That's right, a voyage.

I was really thinking about like Miss Frizzle and her magic school bus and kind of taking this deep dive into the human body as if it was like the core of the earth or a planet out in space.

This is The Longest Shortest Time.

I'm Hillary Frank and today you're in for a treat because Rachel Gross is here to take us on a vaginal voyage.

You're gonna learn things you didn't know, things I didn't know, things Rachel didn't know before writing this book.

Here at The Longest Shortest Time, we love telling stories about stuff that's hard to understand.

For example, our episode Mama Don't Understand, about a mixed-race kid who tries to communicate to her white mom what it means to be black through a freestyle rap.

You can find it in your podcast feed.

It's the episode right before this one.

Now when Rachel set out to write her book, her mission was to understand the vagina and she did learn lots of cool stuff.

But as I started to do the actual reporting and research, I realized that it was also a book about these like gaps in our knowledge and why there was so much that we didn't know about half the bodies on earth.

So we'll also talk about those gaps and the questions Rachel still has about vaginas.

So your book, Vagina Obscura, walks us through female reproductive anatomy from the outside in.

And I thought we could do something similar here.

Ooh.

So let's start with the outside, the stuff we can see.

Let's start with the clitoris.

My favorite.

Before I read your book, I thought the clitoris was the little nub above the opening of the vagina.

Me too.

And I've like, I have gone and asked like

my male editor, my husband, what do you think the clitoris is?

Amazing.

And they both were like, oh, it's the little nub, right?

And so can you describe what the clitoris actually is?

Yeah.

And I love that you just went and like asked them that.

And that's something I really admire, actually.

Yeah.

So

the actual clitoris, let's start with, you know, I don't love calling it like that nub, but because we all know where that is, we all can like see or touch it.

We'll just start with that.

That's kind of like the beak of the clitoris.

It's kind of the tip of the iceberg.

The beak.

Yeah.

Well, I think of the clitoris often as

sort of a like bird-like or alien-like structure.

So if you think of that as a beak, there's also a shaft that's internal.

And then from there, it kind of splits off.

So there are these two arms that kind of arc out into the pelvis.

they have a wingspan of about nine centimeters on average.

And then there's two bulbs, like teardrop-shaped bulbs, that hug the vagina underneath that.

And the bulbs in the arms are both made of erectile tissue,

exactly the same as the columns of erectile tissue in the penis, which just means that they can also fill with blood and grow erect when you're aroused.

And like that whole structure is really like connected to a lot of parts of the pelvis including the vagina and the labia, the inner and outer labia.

And it all like works together.

And I think often we're kind of made to like fragment the parts of the female genitals and think of them as separate.

So the clitoris to me is like this great connector that is this like majestic structure that's just like entwined and like can't be like separated from all the parts around it.

And

I basically kind of think of the penis and a clitoris as like like exact same ingredients, different configuration.

So like taco burrito.

So we know we know

we now know the general bird-like shape of the clitoris, right?

Sorry.

Can't help myself.

What did science know about the clitoris before that was all revealed?

For centuries, actually millennia,

if medicine had anything to say about the clitoris, it was that it was like this small piece-sized structure, the nub idea,

and that it was like inappropriate to talk about.

So

the first word I could find for the clitoris was like a Greek word that Hippocrates used that I will butcher.

That's like to

it means the shame part.

And anatomists following that would continue to give names basically like that.

So there was a French name that meant the shameful member.

And today in like Dutch and German, you still have Schamlippen, which is the shame lips and refers to the labia.

So as you look at like the 1700s and 1800s, you actually find that anatomists come very close to describing the full clitoris, so like the internal structure that we talked about.

But either their discoveries are like lost or no one pays attention, or scientists criticize them and say like, well, these bulbs can't possibly be part of the clitoris because the clitoris is something like tiny and diminutive.

Well, maybe we should talk about function also.

What is the function of the clitoris?

Yeah, right.

Great point.

The function of the clitoris is to experience pleasure.

I guess it's the only organ in the human body whose sole function is pleasure.

And it is very good at that.

Have you ever seen that tweet that's like the clitoris has 8,000 nerves and still isn't as sensitive as a white man on the internet?

Classic tweet.

So yeah, the clitoris is very nerve dense.

However, fun fact, actually there's more like 10,280 nerves, which is something we learned in 2022.

Until then, we were relying on studies from the 70s on cows, possibly just one cow.

So

that to me is a quite revealing kind of backstory of like,

wow, it really took that long to decide that it was worth doing this research on human women and people with clitorises to understand that.

How do they do that research?

Actually, I'm glad you asked.

It's kind of amazing.

It was a gender affirmation surgeon named Dr.

Blair Peters and a Fulbright specialist named Dr.

Maria Uloco.

And they actually used extra clitoral tissue from bottom surgeries done on trans men, which does mean the clitorises were like treated with testosterone, but like it was still human clitorises.

So, you know, like the exact number of nerve fibers, is it that important?

Maybe not so much.

What's important is that this is an incredibly like sensitive and dense organ that

experiences a great amount of pleasure.

And what's kind of crazy is that throughout history, a lot of thinkers, but particularly Freud, have been convinced that people with vaginas and clitorises should only feel one kind of orgasm, and it was the vaginal orgasm, which he basically coined and

is biologically not really a thing.

Like

Every orgasm comes in some way from the clitoris, whether it's like internally or externally stimulated.

And for most people with clitorises,

it doesn't happen magically for a missionary.

So there's a lot of misinformation about,

I guess, the science of sexual pleasure.

And

it

made me pretty enraged, I guess, writing this book to realize like how many generations were given the impression that their bodies were uniquely broken and they couldn't conform to like social

pressures telling them exactly how they should experience pleasure.

There's this fascinating story you tell in the book

about a woman named Marie Bonaparte, who plays a big role in our understanding of the clitoris.

Can you tell us who Marie Bonaparte was and

why was she obsessed with the clitoris and what did she learn?

Yeah,

so Marie Bonaparte was a princess and a noblewoman, and she was the great-grandniece of Napoleon.

And she, in her 40s, became a patient of Freud and then a bestie of Freud, which is important to the story.

She actually ended up helping smuggle him out of France when the Nazis invaded, and he was buried in a Grecian urn that she gave him as a gift.

Oh, wow.

So, like, there was, it's just like a fascinating kind of connection that I was never aware of.

Um, and just like the kind of

the

mythology of Freud often doesn't mention this like pretty important connection relationship in his life and

so Marie always wanted to be a doctor but her father basically forbade that because he needed her to focus on marrying rich because the family inheritance was not doing so well but she was always very like sexually adventurous actually especially after she got married um she described her affairs pretty openly including one with the french prime minister.

She wrote a lot about them in her journals and in letters that I was able to read at like the Library of Congress.

So she basically rarely, possibly never had an orgasm when she was having these sexual encounters.

And she really, really wanted to.

And as she started reading Freud, she thought she figured out her problem.

And she

basically said like that her clitoris seemed to be this like center of her power and pleasure, but also it was inappropriately masculine.

And Freud had written that at some point, a woman needs to give up her clitoris as

her source of pleasure and transfer her orgasm to the vagina, which again is scientifically impossible and makes no sense.

Why did he say that?

This is kind of the root of penis envy.

So yeah, the idea of penis envy was like

at some point a little girl realizes that she doesn't have what a little boy has and that she's kind of like envious for the rest of her life.

Okay, so back to Marie Bonaparte.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So

she felt like she was

too masculine, and this made her frigid in the parlance at the time.

And she wanted to know how other women were handling the situation.

So she actually ended up like fulfilling her lifelong dream of being a researcher, a medical researcher, and she started doing research.

She followed around like hundreds of women to their gynecology appointments and she would ask them very like intimate sexual questions.

I would love to know how she did this, but she did it.

And what she concluded was that women who were having regular orgasms

during intercourse had clitorises that were closer to their vagina.

Was she measuring?

Yes, sorry.

She was also taking measurements of the distance between the clitoris and the urethra or clitoris and vagina.

Like at their gynecology appointment?

Dude, there are not details in the methodology on this paper, but I would love to see.

I don't know if she asked the gynecologist, but she does have diagrams.

Yeah, incredible.

And she published these in a medical journal under a pen name.

A male pen name?

A male pen name, yes.

So

she basically did this research and then she decided, like,

you know, Freud had famously said anatomy is destiny.

And she was like, well, I disagree.

I'm not okay with this situation.

What if I just changed my anatomy and therefore changed my destiny?

So she decided to get genital surgery to move her clitoris closer to her vagina.

Wow, because of her hypothesis that the shorter distance meant you were more likely to have an orgasm.

Exactly.

So spoiler, that did not turn out well for her.

She had it done a few times and it was not good.

I mean, this was the 1920s.

Any sort of surgery is not going to be fun, let alone that one.

But it didn't give her the

outcome that she wanted.

It seems so obvious that surgically cutting and moving the most nerve-dense part of your body would not result in pleasurable feelings.

Yet another example of how following misguided medical advice can lead to a terrible outcome.

More on that later.

But when we come back, Rachel will share some amazing research being done on vaginas and what she says we still need to understand.

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Okay.

Let's move on in our journey and our voyage and talk about the vagina.

First, let's define what that is.

Yeah, the vagina is like the muscular tube that connects the vulva, which is like the outside genitalia, the stuff that you can see and touch, with the uterus and the cervix.

And the cervix is, people hate when I say this, but it's like the muscular doughnut that like

keeps the uterus closed, I guess.

So it's the

connecting tube.

It's a stretchy tube.

So you found that the penis has been studied far more than the vagina, which sadly is not surprising.

But there's an amazing passage from your book about this, and I'd like to have you read it.

Okay.

So can you open your book to page 63?

Yeah.

And then this is the paragraph starting with, biologists love penises.

Great.

Biologists love penises, and with good reason.

They're some of of the most wildly varying organs in the animal kingdom.

There are penises that can taste, smell, and sing, ones that look like corkscrews, crowbars, and glowing blue lightsabers.

A penis can stretch up to nine times your body length if you're a barnacle, be a detachable tentacle covered in suckers if you're an argonaut octopus, or even see using light-sensing cells that guide it to its destination, if you're a Japanese yellow swallowtail butterfly.

They're also easy to study.

Penises kind of just hang out in contrast to the more internal female apparatus.

So that is like beautiful writing.

It's very poetic.

It's clear that penises are fascinating, but it seems like vaginas would be too.

So why haven't they been studied as much?

Great question.

Side note, it took my fact checker and I like two hours to confirm the glowing blue lightsabers

description.

It's a form of like tropical slug, but she was like, that can't be true.

So we were like sending Google images back and forth and

they do exist.

So happily that statement could remain.

Yeah, I mean, that is the

question.

And if you talk to biologists, many male biologists, they will often say that the female genitals are internal and that makes them harder to study.

And I I don't know I just wasn't buying that that's like we put like a rover on Mars like you're telling me we really can't study vaginas so I ended up talking to the the vagina biologist I guess

her name is Patty Brennan and she's a Columbian biologist at Mount Holyoke University in Massachusetts and

she

was I guess the first person to really dissect a duck vagina.

And she had been looking actually at penises in birds, which are only in like 1 to 2% of birds.

And they get a lot of attention because there are these really crazy structures that are like corkscrew-shaped, like torture devices that just like spring out of the mail.

Ouch.

Yeah.

I mean, both ouch and also, like, I guess they deserve a lot of attention because they're wild.

But until her, basically, no one had said, like,

okay, so that penis is not like just for show, it's interacting with the vagina.

So what is the vagina doing?

And when she started looking, she found that the vagina was like equally complex and crazy and kind of was like this like roller coaster that had all these curves and turns and even like blind alleys where a sperm went to die.

So it was very complex and it was like in conversation with that penis.

So this researcher, Patty Brennan, who you've been talking about, she told you that she makes vaginal lollipops for a living.

Can you explain what that means?

Yes.

So, she, I just want to mention that the technique itself is kind of amazing.

She wanted to make molds of vaginas, which are internal structures.

So, you would have to like put something up there and take it out, like a cast.

And so, she talked to a dentist about how to use dental latex.

So, the same way they might make like like a mold of your teeth to make a retainer.

And so, she invited me to make vagina lollipops with her on snakes.

And so, snakes have two vaginas

because the males have kind of this forked penis, it's a hemi-pene.

So, we were putting the dental latex up there, letting it harden, and then like gently removing it with a toothpick.

And the result was this like two-headed lollipop.

Um, so on a live snake, or

oh no, okay, very dead snake, yeah,

it was pretty gross.

Um, to me, like, actually, I was really amazed because I was like kind of gagging a little bit, and there were all these like parasites, and they were like getting on her iPhone.

But she was so excited, she was like taking all these photos, and she wasn't like noticing because she was just like so engaged.

I was like, damn.

Um, I also found out then that snakes have have clitorises.

They have clitorises, which she wrote a paper about later, but she was, sorry,

so sorry.

So like, in addition to making a lot of vaginal molds, she was kind of trying to find clitorises in almost every type of animal.

So she was kind of like remapping the genital landscape of life on Earth.

Earlier, you read your list of the variations in penises across across different species.

After meeting Dr.

Brennan, do you have a vagina equivalent list?

That's great.

Yes.

She had looked at dolphin clitorises, which are like the size of a double-a battery.

And like bonobos have massive clitorises that can have erections up to 2.5 inches long.

But I'm pretty sure that my favorite is the kangaroo vagina because kangaroos actually have three vaginas.

So they have like...

I know, I just love this fact, and I love that if you look it up, like there are a lot of diagrams online because people were just like, what?

So, yeah, I don't know.

I think about this at least like once a week.

There's like one common portal, and then it splits off.

There's like one middle vagina and two side vaginas.

And the side ones are for sperm uptake, and the middle one is for joey ejection.

Joey ejection where the baby is born?

Yeah, for

delivering the baby.

But that basically means that a kangaroo can be pregnant at all times because she has two uteruses.

So I feel really bad for those kangaroos.

So

all of this research that Dr.

Brennan has done

is really cool and interesting.

Does it apply to humans?

What Dr.

Brennan told me was that when she was looking into, I think, dolphin vaginas and having this idea of making the kind of lollipops or latex casts, she was looking at what we know about the anatomy of human vaginas and realized that we actually know a lot less than we know about even some animal vaginas.

Like,

I think there was

one like tampon company that had started to kind of measure vaginal sizes and shapes, but then I think ran out of funding.

So, there's kind of been this assumption in gynecology that if a vagina can like stretch and like incorporate a penis and deliver a baby that's like good enough, we don't like really need to know the exact anatomy.

So

we don't have a good understanding of the diversity of human vaginas.

This tampon study by a now defunct company called Tambrands was supposed to determine whether they should modify their tampon design to better fit most vaginas.

This study actually used the dental latex technique 10 years before Patty Brennan.

It's where she got the idea to make vagina lollipops in the first place.

It turned out that vagina shape didn't matter for something like a tampon, because a tampon can expand to fit any vagina.

But Rachel says the same kind of research would have been helpful for tailoring vaginal devices and medications and for having reference models for vaginal reconstructive surgery, which we still don't really have.

And like I've talked to doctors who say that like in their field, the vulva is basically like a small city in the Midwest and OBGYNs like they drive through it to get to their real destination, which is the uterus where like real medicine happens because that's where you do like pap smears and IUDs and childbirth.

Rachel also wishes we knew more about the vaginal microbiome, which would teach us about how to prevent and battle long-term vaginal infections and STIs and pregnancy problems like preterm birth.

She says she's hopeful because there are some studies in progress that could help with these kinds of issues.

But for now, like an OBGYN on a mission, we're going to head to the uterus, which, and this will shock you, has been understudied as well.

So take us deeper on our voyage.

Let's go to the uterus and ovaries.

First, can you just remind us what these organs are?

For sure.

So the ovaries are the two like kind of almond sized glands on either side of the uterus.

And

they do produce eggs, but I think like almost more importantly, they're these hormone powerhouses that help power almost like every organ in the body for most of your life.

So like your bone health, your blood, your brain health, like ovaries are supporting all of those by producing estrogen, some testosterone, and other hormones as well.

And even after menopause, they may be producing some.

And the uterus is a very muscular organ that's like the size of a fist, and it's most famous for creating and delivering babies, but it also is really dynamic throughout a person's life.

It is creating a new lining every month and then shedding it and then starting over, which is menstruation.

So there are some really wild myths about the uterus that doctors and scientists used to believe.

Can you name what some of those are?

Yeah, I think...

The most well-known myth is that of like the wandering womb.

And that was an idea in like like ancient Greece that the uterus was kind of an animal that like wandered throughout the body in search of like sex and blood.

And if it wasn't getting those things, then it would like

wreak havoc and cause like health issues and like asphyxiation and fainting,

which got tied in with this idea of hysteria.

So hysteria, the idea that women are uniquely like neurotic and prone to like nervous breakdown, was often connected with their reproductive organs, either the uterus or the ovaries.

So

very common surgery in the late 1800s was the removal of healthy ovaries in the thought that it would cure forms of like insanity, as it was thought of at the time, including hysteria.

I write a lot in the book about endometriosis, which is a disorder in which like bits of tissue start growing throughout the pelvis, usually that are very similar to the lining of the uterus.

And they try to grow and then shed in a way that can be immensely painful and like harmful to your other organs.

And like very little was known about this disorder for centuries, even though about one in ten people with uteruses have it.

And it was sometimes described as like the new hysteria.

And part of the reason was that doctors were just kind of like, huh, happens to women, a lady thing.

Like mysterious

pain that they thought kind of made them look crazy or emotional

because they hadn't looked at the biological basis of it.

And I talked to women who were told that they should just get pregnant in order to fix their endometriosis.

Pregnancy is a bonker's prescription for any disease, but especially for endometriosis, where infertility is a known complication.

And to make things even more confusing, another common remedy doctors have prescribed for endometriosis is hysterectomy, removing the uterus, a surgery that leaves you incapable of becoming pregnant.

These approaches are opposite and extreme.

And it's kind of like

what's that phrase about like just using a hammer to do some like tiny job.

It's kind of like the nuclear option.

In her reporting, Rachel found plenty of examples of doctors taking extreme actions for all sorts of issues surrounding the vagina.

If you've got a vagina, chances are you've got your own version of this story.

I've got mine.

Like when a doctor suggested that in order to cure my pain from my episiotomy scar, she would just graft skin from inside my vagina and pull it to the outside.

Or when another told me the answer was to have a second baby so my scar would blow open and heal better.

Rachel has her own nuclear option story.

Well, I often tell this story about how when I was 29, I was once prescribed rat poison for my own vagina.

Like literal rat poison.

Like literal rat poison.

Like the gynecologist told me that if I looked it up on the internet, it was going to say this is rat poison.

It's called boric acid.

So this was like a last resort prescription after I'd had this like months long bacterial infection.

And

they tried like antifungals, antibacterials,

and nothing had worked.

So my gynecologist told me go to the pharmacy and get boric acid.

And it came in these like big plastic capsules that look basically like antibiotics

and they were actually suppositories, so you had to put them up in your vagina every night and then like lay on your back.

But one night I was like very exhausted and I woke up in the middle of the night and I was in the bathroom and like remembered that I had to take this pill and I got confused and I swallowed it.

So

I swallowed my vagina poison and I ended up in the ER

and at that point I had to tell the doctors that I have swallowed rat poison that was supposed to go in my vagina.

Rachel wound up being fine.

She hadn't swallowed enough boric acid for it to be lethal or even that harmful and the infection eventually went away, though she's not sure the rat poison helped.

But after her long vaginal voyage talking to doctors and patients and scientists, one thing is clear.

We need more research on female anatomy.

We still are not capable of seeing sperm enter the uterus and unite with an egg, or the fertilized egg's journey down the fallopian tube to the uterus.

We haven't seen what it looks like when endometriosis lesions take root.

All we have are fuzzy snapshots from ultrasounds or views of cells outside the body under a microscope.

Not doing these studies means that we continue to have worse healthcare and shitty solutions like boric acid.

And I mean, like, look at our maternal death rate like we clearly need more studies even in fertility and we just like don't fully understand how all these parts work together and the vast variation of anatomies there are myths like the idea that the G spot is this magic button that you can just press and we know where it is and really

Everyone's anatomy is different in a beautiful way.

How is it different?

Nobody knows.

We haven't done those studies.

What we do know is that we've been studying female anatomy in a really narrow way that I would argue mostly has to do with disease and reproduction.

And that leaves so much by the wayside that has to do with like quality of life and pleasure and pain.

And

a theme of a lot of what I write is like that really

warps the kind of scientific knowledge you're going to get and has actually resulted in like worse health care for millions of people.

Rachel says things are improving slowly, especially with treatment around endometriosis.

And she kind of wishes we didn't call reproductive organs reproductive organs, because then we're not recognizing that creating babies is only one function of these organs.

They also provide pleasure and they play an active role in overall health, including the brain and moods and neurological conditions.

So sometimes I say like the vagina et al.

or the vagina and friends.

The pelvic organs is a super clinical way of looking at it.

Rachel's book about the vagina and friends is called Vagina Obscura.

You can find a link to it in the show notes or at our website, longestshortest time.com.

We've also got links to other incredible writing she's done and depictions of the vagina and friends that are better than any images you saw in SexEd, including 3D models of the clitoris and its bird-like structure.

This episode was produced by me, Hilary Frank, with support from Elizabeth Nakano.

Our technical director is Michael Raphiel.

Music composed by Allison Layton Brown and performed by HotMoms.gov.

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