March 4, 2025 • 48 mins
For much of history, female reproductive anatomy has been studied only in the context of or in comparison to male reproductive anatomy. This shows in clinical trial design, in healthcare disparities, in the research questions we ask (or fail to ask), it’s even apparent in our language - the word “vagina” means “sheath”, as if vaginas only exist to sheathe penises. Only recently have researchers begun to close this gap in our knowledge when it comes to half the humans on this planet. In Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage, award-winning journalist and author Rachel Gross takes readers through the origins of this information gap, examining how preconceived notions about sex and gender underlie the bias that still exists today. She then delves into the fascinating research that seeks to confront this bias and address the vast health inequities that limit care for so many. Tune in for a truly enlightening odyssey through the only recently charted world of female anatomy.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:44):
Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh and this is this podcast Will
Kill You. Welcome back to another episode of the tp
w k Y book Club where we interview some of
the coolest people ever to ask them about the amazing
work they do and the fascinating books they've read. This
is the last book club episode for this season. Don't worry,
(01:05):
there'll be more for next season, and it is such
a great one. I think you all are going to
love it. Over the course of this season, we've gotten
to have some incredible conversations and if you would like
to check out those books that we've already covered, head
on over to our website this Podcast will Kill You
dot com, where you can find a link to our
bookshop dot org affiliate account, which has all sorts of
(01:28):
TPWKY related lists, including of course a list that contains
the book club books for this and last season. And
if you still got room on your bookshelves, check out
our other bookshop lists, where we include the books that
we use to research our regular episodes, plus disease or
epidemic themed fiction books which I feel like could be
so much fun to use as a starting point for
(01:49):
another book club on how disease is used in fiction.
Let me know what you think. As always, we love
hearing from you about how you're enjoying these book club episodes,
what questions you win. You could ask recommendations for future
books to cover. Just send your thoughts our way. The
best way to do that is through the contact us
form on our website. And one last thing before I
(02:10):
introduced this week's book club selection, the last one of
the season, and that is a simple request to rate,
review and subscribe. It really helps us out. Okay, enough
podcast business, onto the business of books, and the business
of vaginas and uteri and clitterises and ovaries and so
(02:30):
many other crucial and amazing parts of human anatomy that
really don't receive the attention they deserve. In this book
club episode, I am joined by award winning science journalist
and author Rachel Gross to chat about her book Vagina
Obscura and Anatomical Voyage. Frequent listeners of the podcast probably
won't be surprised to learn that female anatomy, which I
(02:52):
acknowledge is not the most precise or accurate term, is
remarkably understudied compared to the reproductive system of males. This
disparity has incredibly deep roots going all the way back
to the earliest medical texts, and how women were perceived
to be essentially a lesser form of men. Of course,
this didn't translate into just ignoring female bodies and finding
(03:14):
them uninteresting, although to be clear, that absolutely did and
does happen. It also influenced the language used for genitalia,
the research questions that we ask, the scientific narratives we create,
and the roles that males and females are forced into.
Sperm trying to get past the defensive shield of the egg,
giving sperm all the credit and fertilization, and hailing it
(03:36):
as the strong hero that breached the walls of the fortress.
The endometrium described as a waste of energy and tissue
during menstruation, rather than recognized for its incredible regenerative abilities.
Vagina is seen as relevant only in the context of penises.
Even the word vagina means sheath. We cannot escape this
(03:58):
gendered and misogynistic framing. It's a part of our everyday lives,
and so what can we do. We can learn to
recognize the roots of this misogynistic framing of female bodies.
We can appreciate vaginas not just in relation to penises.
We can re examine the research questions we ask about
genitalia to seek out assumptions with a cultural but not
(04:20):
biological basis, and we can try to identify the questions
that we're not asking. And one of the best ways
to start is by reading Vagina Obscira. This book is
simultaneously captivating, inspirational, beyond infuriating, and enlightening. In each chapter,
(04:41):
Gross takes readers through a different part of female anatomy,
and she doesn't stick to just humans either, and explores
how our cultural history and attitudes towards women inform our
perspective on quote unquote female anatomy today, highlighting the work
of some truly incredible researchers and medical professionals today who
are revolutionizing how we understand and treat our bodies not
(05:04):
just in relation to males, but as independent and deserving
of interest, attention, and care. Plus, the artwork in Vagina
Obscura is simply incredible, so let's get into it right
after this break. Rachel, thank you so much for joining
(05:42):
me today. I am beyond thrilled to talk about your
amazing book, Vagina Obscura.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
Thank you so much, for having me.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
It's such a pleasure, and I'm always thrilled to talk
about Vagina's.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
I mean, same, same, I'm always curious too about the
origin story of a book, you know, I'm always asking, like,
what inspired you, how did you become interested in a
certain topic, And in the intro of Vagina Obscura, you
tell that story, and you tell it in a great way,
but it's also a terrifying story, and I was wondering
(06:15):
if you would mind taking our listeners through that.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
Absolutely, So I'll just mention that this was a topic
I had been thinking about a while before this particular
inciting incident. I was an editor at Smithsonian Magazine covering science,
and I was kind of assigning a lot more reproductive
health stories, stories about like medical training and why it
was taking so long to learn these really basic facts
(06:40):
about female anatomy. And at the same time, I was
running this column on like unsung female scientists and history,
and I was starting to put the two and two
together that maybe the lack of representation science had something
to do with the lack of basic knowledge about female bodies.
So that's the prologue. So there at Smithsonian Magazine doing
(07:02):
my thing and I get this wild vaginal infection, which
I talk about in the intro of the book, and
it's very unpleasant and itchy.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
I describe it as my burning bush.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
And I go to the gynecologist and I keep going
back and all they can give me is the same antibiotics.
They think it first it's a UTI, then they think
a yeast infection. I think many of us have gone
through this horse and pony show. And eventually, basically my
gynocologists said, I'm sorry, it looks like it's it's something
(07:35):
called BV bacterial vaginosis, which is a disruption in the
ecosystem of the vagina, and it's super common. One in
three people with vaginas get it. I had no idea,
had never heard of it. Now I know, like a
whole cohort of people. But she said, although it's so common,
there's actually no good cure for it. So the best
we can offer you as like a last resort is
(07:57):
rat poison. She literally use the word rat poison, but
she said, like you'll if you look it up on
the internet, that's what it'll say. So I just want
to warn you, and like I'll always remember picking up
a little toobe with a skull and crossbones that said
poison on it, which I still have, and just feeling ashamed.
And then you have to go home and take this.
It's a vaginal suppository, so it looks like a pill,
(08:18):
but you put it up there and you just lay
on your back and think.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
About what you've done. So I did that four or
ten days.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
And then here's the part where I kind of go
off the rails. I like had a long night, woke
up in the middle of the night, went to my
bathroom and had like a pill in my hand. Basically
it was like I forgot to do something, forgot to
take my medication, and then I swallowed the rat poison,
the boric acid, and so basically I end up in
(08:46):
the hospital thinking I'm going to get my stomach pumped
and not knowing whether it's going to kill me, because
like if you look up boric acid and ingestion, you
do get a ton of studies that find death by
injection and like call poison controle and like kids shouldn't
have this. So it fortunately was not enough to do
(09:06):
anything except give me gas, said the doctor. But it
was a scare, and as I write in the book,
it was one of these moments where I kind of
was pushed back upon myself to kind of question what
I knew about my own body, Like why was I
taking this medication that I had no idea what it was,
what it was doing, what the infection was. And here
(09:29):
I am someone who writes about reproductive health and things,
they know a lot about vagina's and like has a
mother who's a doctor. And it just made me question, like,
if I have access to all this knowledge and I
know so little and don't even know how much I
don't know, then certainly there are millions of other people
who could use some more knowledge, and I should look
into that.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
It was I feel like that's such a great example
of we don't have a better treatment than rat poison,
Like are we looking into I'm sure people are. There
are enough people looking into this. Like how you know
there's no funding? Right and when you decided okay, I
want to tackle this topic, how did that book that
(10:14):
you first envisioned sort of turn into the book that
you eventually wrote.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Oh? I like that question.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
I think from the very beginning, I knew that it
wanted to be that it wanted to be that the
book desired to be a wondrous journey into the female body,
and like I was initially thinking like two thousand leagues
under the sea, journey to the center of the Earth.
So I knew about that quality. I guess what I
didn't realize was that each chapter would also end up profiling,
(10:44):
usually a female or LGBT scientist or even patient who
was investigating this organ and reimagining what it could be,
and that that would be tied in with the history
and science of the organ, and that it would go
organ by organ, kind of from the outside in. Roughly,
and initially I settled on the name Lady Anatomy, which
(11:06):
I was convinced would work, and it quickly became apparent
that it needed too much explanation and that I thought
it was tongue in cheek, and I was actually referring
to a lady anatomist who was called the Lady Anatomist
in the eighteen hundreds in Italy, and I was referring
to kind of the like the term lady doctor. But
it became so clear that the book was about so
(11:28):
much more than women. It was about anybody with these
body parts. It really expanded quickly to include trans women
and men, intersex people, non binary people, so that was
not going to work in the title.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
And when you told people I'm writing a book about vaginas,
I'm writing a book about vaginas at all, or that
you had written this book, what kind of reactions did
you get. I expect you got reactions from like all
different ends of the you know, expected reactions.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
You would be correct.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
The people in my life were just like, yeah, of
course you're writing vagina book.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
I love that, like not a surprise.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
My mom was very excited, Like I said, she's a doctor,
but she was like reading my draft as I went along,
and she was learning all new stuff that she'd never
heard of, and she was very excited about that, and
she ended up being my biggest stand when the book
came out. She really loved putting the cover out and
giving it to all of her senior friends like in
the neighborhood and making sure that everybody saw it and
(12:35):
talking about She called it her first grandchild, her only grandchild.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
So there was that. I definitely people did laugh, and
I actually like that.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
I think that getting someone to laugh gets them to
be open, to be surprised and kind of like knocks
them off kilter for a second. So I don't mind that,
but I do think there's an obvious discomfort in our culture,
a squeamishness, sometimes a prudishness that like people don't know
how to react. And then I think there were times
(13:11):
where I was in a more academic setting or talking
to like a real buttoned up, like old school researcher,
where I found myself kind of censoring my language and
just being like, oh, it's a book on reproductive health
and history. And that was really interesting because we did
face a lot of censorship of the word vagina and
did have to take alternate roots.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
Oh, very interesting, And you mentioned the cover of your
book and the artwork. I just have to say is
I'm obsessed. I want it all over my walls. I
love it.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
I do have it all over my walls behind my couch,
and I might get a tattoo soon.
Speaker 4 (13:51):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
That is by Armando VeVe, an award winning illustrator that
I've been a huge fan of for a while, and
we were pair together for a piece on the history
of the birth control pill for the New York Times,
and since then I basically was stalking him for a
year until I could get a grant to help bring
him in and do these interior illustrations, and we were
(14:12):
actually thinking initially of like Alice in Wonderland. I think
at the beginning of each chapter there's like a little
quote and then often a little sketch of what's to come.
So there are themed sketches and I really enjoy them.
The clitteris is this really powerful structure with these deep
roots in the soil that I love. And then the
cover of it was really supposed to look nothing like
(14:34):
any vagina book you've ever seen, because I was just
really sick of all of these pink covers with like
a zipper unzipping or like a flower, you know, Georgia O'Keeffe,
like we've seen that. And I also really didn't want
to give the impression that this was just a women's book.
It was really important to me that people felt welcomed
in and maybe surprised, like this is more the cover
you'd expect from a sci fi novel.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Let's take a quick break here, we'll be back before
you know it. Welcome back, everyone, I'm here chatting with
(15:19):
the wonderful Rachel Gross about her book Vagina Obscura. Let's
get into some more questions. In your book, you discuss
sort of the power of words and how a word
sometimes is just a word, but other times it carries
with it a deeper meaning, or it reveals a history
that explains so much about our perspective or our current biases.
(15:42):
How is shame just carved into the words that we
use for our genitalia or our reproductive anatomy.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
Who I think it's very interesting you use the word
carved there, because it does suggest that some violence is
being done, and sometimes that is literally the case. And yes,
I do think that the concept of shame is bound
up in the language we use to talk about our bodies.
And I encountered this so much in my research, Like
literally the first time that Hippocrates decided to name the genitals,
(16:15):
he named them the shame parts in ancient Greek. And
from then on it was just like over and over again,
male anatomis would continuously name usually the clitorists or the
vulva the shame part, so like in the fifteen hundreds,
a French anatomist names it mombre anteau, like the shame member,
and then we get pudendum, which means the part for
(16:37):
which you should be ashamed, and that is a Latin
term that is actually in gynecology textbooks today. So I
kept encountering it and being like, what the hell, And
then there'd be a footnote and the bottom it would
just say the shame parts, as if that explained the term,
like no, so which I ended up following that because
it became a debate in anatomy whether to get rid
(16:58):
of the term. And and by the way, this was
all going on at the same time that the discussion
about Confederate monuments and taking down problematic monuments and names
was going on, so it was very much top of mind.
And you know, it's not lost on me that there
are monuments in the body and the organs were born
with that are named after generally elite white men, and
(17:19):
there are quite a lot of them, and a lot
of them are in the pelvis, and that is weird.
That's just one example. This isn't a name, but another
example of how language can kind of shape the conversation
is that the ovaries didn't have their own name until
the sixteen hundreds. They were just called female testicles, and
that really kind of reflected this idea that the female
(17:41):
body was a lesser version of the male body and
it didn't really even need its own name, and so
things like that were always kind of aha moments, like
this little language fact I'm learning reinforces the other research
I'm doing, Like there has to be a qualification, Lady
in Eda, me, yes, exactly.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
So now I actually write a column about medical language
for the New York Times. It's called body Language, and
it talks about the origins and history of these little
terms in medicine and how they affect patients and doctors today.
Because what I found was so talking about pudendum and
the pudental nerves, which are still a term often like
(18:22):
patients might not be aware of that term, but they
do have a lot of shame around that area. And
when doctors are aware of kind of the weightedness of
the language they use, they can really help patients be
at ease. Like there are actual outcomes to the way
we talk about this, like in large surveys in Britain,
(18:45):
like a huge percentage of women just avoid going to
the gynecologist out of shame or embarrassment, and others don't
want to say the word vagina to their gynecologist because
they are ashamed, which obviously affects medical communication. Actually, the
most horrifying example this that I remember is I gave
a talk once and a science student came up to
(19:05):
me and said that his grandma had had she'd had cancer,
and she'd had like a reproductive cancer and treatment for it,
and was at one of those benefits where you pick
a ribbon based on the type of reproductive cancer you have,
and she didn't know much color to pick, and he
was like, Grandma, what kind of cancer did you have?
And she said, I don't know. The doctor told me
(19:26):
it was down there cancer. Like if doctors literally can't
name our body parts using I don't know, neutral objective terms,
and how are we supposed to think about our bodies.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
It just reinforces the shame and silence surrounding it.
Speaker 4 (19:43):
Oh that's horrifying, and I feel like, my god. Yeah,
And your book is full of so many surprising and
fascinating and kind of like revelatory bits of information.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
What thing did you.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Learn that surprised you the most or that contradicted what
you thought you knew?
Speaker 3 (20:05):
Ooh, well, one thing that just really like literally contradicted
what I was taught was in a later chapter on
this kind of cutting edge research on the ovaries and eggs.
I learned that there was research being done that suggested
that maybe the ovaries don't stop making eggs when when
(20:25):
you're born, before you're born actually, so you know, there's
that line at the beginning of biology textbooks and papers
that says women are born with all the eggs they'll
ever have, and this process of attrision begins before birth,
when she's a fetus in the womb, and from then
on the eggs trickle away like an hourglass.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
And I was.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
Really surprised to see that there were obarian biologists who
were challenging this idea, and they were finding there were
stem cells in the ovaries as there are in most organs,
that had this regenerative power and that potentially could be
making more eggs under certain circumstances. And like this is
research us ongoing, So it's something where there's a lot
of caveats, but just the idea, I think, challenge my
(21:05):
idea of what the female body could do, what our
organs were capable of, in a way that made me
realize I'd never even questioned that. I just took that
as a gospel. Oh, I mean same here.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
We have a menopause episode from our last season where
I'm pretty sure we say that exact you know, opener
to the biology textbook. You know, you are born with
all the eggs, et cetera, et cetera. And so I
was really fascinated to read your chapter on quote unquote
restoring ovaries postmenopause. What does it mean to revitalize or
(21:38):
restore ovarian function after menopause? And what data do we
have about this quite controversial research?
Speaker 3 (21:46):
Right, So when we talk about restoring or revitalizing quote
unquote the ovaries, that idea comes with some heavy baggage.
That is one potential application of this kind of research,
and again like this has not been well. Actually, there
is some interesting ovarian cortex transplants that have been done
in women that are supposed to again kind of recharge
(22:08):
the ovary and delay menopause. But what I talk about
in that chapter, what I really do is kind of
ground this in historical context and say like, hey, we've
been here before, and the history of revitalizing the ovaries
goes back to like the nineteen tens when snake oil
salesmen were trying to grab monkey ovaries onto women's ovaries,
promising them eternal youthfulness and femininity and sexuality. And this
(22:33):
comes back again and again in this history to the
nineteen sixties where you have this book Feminine Forever by
a gynecologist funded by pharma who is saying that estrogen
is now like the key to maintaining your good looks
and your youth forever, which is just a poisonous, toxic
message that you would need this, and that femininity is
(22:55):
something that wilds or needs to be revived. So when
I hear these words, I do kind of twitch. And
I also think of certain types of like plastic surgeries,
like g spot surgery or whatever, badginal tightening that really
give me the dick.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
So that's one thing.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
However, I think the basic idea of the research is
that if the ovaries are more regenerative then we've given
them credit for, then it is possible to find tools
to manipulate them. And for some who want to, that
might mean adjusting your menopause timeline, which is a very
(23:32):
controversial thing to say.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
Yeah, absolutely, yeah, we visited that book and quotes from
that book and just quotes from like the early days
of hormone replacement therapy and the advertisements that were geared
towards husbands, and it's just likely wonderful.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
The girl you met, Yes, she'll make you dinner again.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
I just think we always need to be mindful of
that kind of cultural con text when we, I don't know,
get excited about new technologies. I think there's like a
lack of sense of history with a lot of this
where it's just like, ooh, new tools for feminism. Let's
change our bodies parameters to fit like our capitalists workplace
or demands that we be sexually available and attractive for
(24:16):
our entire lives without questioning like why right, why? And
also like let's look at where we came from, and
let's look at how we may be looking.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
Back on this moment right now. Yeah, exactly, Yes, a
long view. So you begin your book with a discussion
on the clitterists. First, what is the clitterists?
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Well, I'm glad you asked. The clitterists is.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
The only organ in any human body that is dedicated
just to pleasure as far as we know, and it
is a substantial organ. I think I mentioned that it
is kind of deeply rooted, and it's often referred to
as an iceberg by people who handle it a lot
in science. So it is often thought of as the
no that you can see or touch, which is one
(25:02):
of the fun parts. But that nub is actually less
than ten percent of the entire organ, and it has
these kind of tulip bulbs that actually hug the vagina
and the urethra, and then it has these arms that
flare back against the pelvic bones, and they're all composed
of a rectile tissue exactly the same as in the
penis that basically is like porous or spongy and fills
(25:23):
up with blood when you get aroused and essentially erects.
And the glitterist has been like much discussed, maligned, neglected, ignored,
omitted in the history of anatomy and medical education. It's
a very long story, but we now have pretty accurate
maps of it and we can definitely say that it
(25:45):
is a substantial organ and it is the center of
orgasm for people who have it.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Can you talk about this relatively recent paradigm shift in
our understanding of the role that the clitterist plays in
the anatomy of pleasure.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
Yeah, there's definitely been a paradigm ship. I mean It's
so funny that this is new or fresh to me,
because like, come on, as long as we've had clitterists,
we've known that they feel great, and we've known what
they're for, Like you just need to ask us. But
I think I often think about the G spot, and
the G spot means a lot of things to a
(26:21):
lot of different people, but to me, I grew up
seeing it in women's magazines all the time as this
like secret mysterious button that if you found it, you
would have like intense secret orgasms and it would be great.
And so I was always like, man, I can't find it.
I don't know if I'm broken. And so as I
started researching the clitterists, and specifically a urologist in Australia
(26:45):
named Helen O'Connell who grows up, I mean, comes up
in medicine studying a lot of penises and realizes that
the same medical attention has never been given to the clitterists,
to the point that when she does a surgery in
the pelvic region on women, she's not taught to spare
them the nerves or like know where the nerves are,
compared to penile surgeries, where that's always considered. So she's
(27:06):
the one who's kind of credited with mapping the iceberg
with modern tools. I mean a lot of people did
a lot of work before her, but people definitely started
asking her what's the G spot?
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Is it real? Is it a myth?
Speaker 3 (27:17):
And so she actually went in and was like try
to find it, and what she realized was that the
G spot is probably the front of the clitterists because
it's such an internal organ and remember it kind of
hugs the vagina, so where those arms and bulbs come together,
kind of the root that is. Sorry, it is so
(27:37):
much easier with like diagrams and pictures, but it's basically
about an inch or two up the vagina on the
belly side. It's like a it's just part of the
glitterists that for some people might be more sensitive or
feel a little different, just depending on your anatomy, how
thick your skin is, and like where it is.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
So basically it's all the clitterists.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
And maybe that's the paradigm shift, is that the clitterists
is central. And for so many years we've been like
carving up women and their sexual experiences into these individual boxes,
like talking about faginal orgasms, which I go into why
those don't exist, and the G spot and the clitterists
as if these things are somehow like competing or like
(28:18):
different parts. But to me, the important thing is that
they all are interconnected and work as a system. Like
our body knows what it's doing and it's all meant
to be there, and it all connects to the other.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Parts, like split up in ways where it's like, oh,
it's so confusing and overwhelming. There are so many moving parts,
and it's just like, well, right, well.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
We are constantly The female body is described as more complex, confusing,
and obscure, hence the final title, and like it's not
you're just looking at it wrong, I would suggest, And unfortunately,
I think that the result of for instance, like the
G spot rhetoric I was reading, is to make you
feel inadequate or broken, And the same thing with the
(29:00):
vaginal orgasm idea. You have generations of women feeling like
they are somehow incomplete or their bodies don't work the
right way because they're not working the way that men
said they should work, and the male interpretation of their
body is not lining up with their felt experience.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
There was a really interesting part in your book where
you discuss how as the glitterists began to get more
attention and this long overdue recognition, the vagina was kind
of like shoved to the side, so to speak. How
did that happen or why did that happen? And why
does the vagina deserve a bit more of the spotlight
(29:37):
than maybe it's getting.
Speaker 3 (29:40):
I love that you caught that, Actually not many people do.
There was definitely a vagina versus clitterist moment going on.
It was kind of in second wave of feminism, and
it was definitely a response to Freud, who is the
one who came up with the idea of the vaginal orgasm.
And the reason why I get so annoyed with this
concept is like you could have you can feel an
(30:00):
orgasm anywhere. You can experience it anyway, including the vagina.
But he said that there's two things. There's a baginal
orgasm and a clteral orgasm, and one is good and
one is bad. And to become a mature, healthy woman,
you have to transfer your clitteral orgasm to your vagina,
because your clitteral orgasm is your vestiges of masculinity that
you're holding on to that you need to let go
(30:22):
of so he kind of is the root of all
of this feeling that your body has broken, which is
not It works perfectly. So second wave feminists were the
one who challenged this idea. And there's this great speech
by Anacote that's called it's called the Myth of the
Vaginal Orgasm and yeah, and so basically they say that
(30:43):
for so long we've been elevating the vagina, and the
vagina represents like male pleasure and reproduction, and the clitterist
represents female pleasure and like independence and wholeness.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
And so we're going to champion the clitterists.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
And this continues, like there's a lot of great glitterist imagery.
I mean, I myself have clitterous jewelry and we love
this organ However, I guess I was saying that to me,
the important thing is that this is all part of
the same system, and it's super interconnected, and through your
vaginal walls, you of course feel the clitterists in beautiful,
(31:21):
specific ways that are related to your own particular anatomy.
And they work together as a team. They are not enemies,
they are friends. It's an enemy.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
It's a lover story. Oh yes, love those.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
As someone with a background in ecology, I loved your
discussions on the incredible vaginal diversity in the animal world.
What does our new recognition of this diversity or relatively
recent recognition tell us not only about vaginas, but also
about our research bias super recent, actually shockingly recent. First
(31:57):
of all, weirdly, that chapter.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
Like the one that addresses the vagina, was maybe the
last chapter I wrote, and for some reason it was
it was I don't know if it's the most It
wasn't the most difficult, but I thought it'd be super easy.
I was like, this is a book about vagina science,
Like we're going to talk about the human vagina and that.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Should be central.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
So it surprised me that the vagina chapter ended up
being more about animal vaginas than human vaginas, but it was.
It was incredibly fun journey. I follow a biologist named
Patty Brennan who became known as the duck penis and
vagina researcher, but she is so much more than that.
She also does dolphins and snakes. I dissected a snake
(32:38):
clitteris with her, which has two prongs because snakes have
two penises and they match up and we made a
little silicone lollipop out of it using dental latex. So yes,
animal vaginas were very understudied, and like this one was
just really blatant compared to in some of the some
(32:59):
of the history, they are these more subtle cultural assumptions
going on. But here I call up the male researcher
who like first described as crazy duck penis and ask him,
do you look at the duck vagina? He's like, no,
we didn't bother And literally a lot of male scientists,
it seems, described the penis of certain species and just
(33:20):
extrapolated that to the female and didn't bother to look.
So doctor Brennan is basically the first person to fully
dissect a duck vagina, which seems shocking. They are pretty plentiful,
pretty easy to do. I mean it did sound difficult, actually,
but so like it almost didn't sound plausible to me
(33:42):
that no one had bothered to look at these vaginas.
But if you look in the literature, female animal vaginas
are literally described as passive and almost boring. A literal
quote in one of the textbooks was that females are
the field upon which males compete. So there really considered
just like the medium upon which the real action happens,
(34:04):
and that sort of gave me context for why the
super basic research wasn't done. And it turns out vaginas
are fascinating and they're doing a lot. They can store
and reject sperm in some cases depending on which animal.
I'm not saying we can do this, unfortunately, but there
are ones that look like corkscrews, there are ones that
(34:25):
look like labyrinths. And if you're looking at vaginas, you
end up looking at a lot of clitterises. So Patty
ended up looking at dolphin clitterises, which are huge and
very frontal facing, so they get a lot of action
and is like I mentioned, looking at clitterises and snakes
things that were really surprising to people. But I think
(34:46):
it's kind of because they didn't think about it and
didn't bother looking. So it really is very unexplored terrain.
So to your question of what this says about male bias,
I think it says that there are a lot of
assumptions about female bodies and their relevance to the science
and how much we should dedicate to studying them that
(35:08):
turn out not to be true, and I think part
of the answer is just getting in voices into science
who can ask different questions, in some case very obvious questions,
and giving them the resources and power to follow them.
Just looking at the questions alone, like what research questions
are we asking not just about animals but also about humans,
(35:29):
and how even today it can reveal this historical bias
that has such incredibly deep roots. And I won't ask
you to like take us through all of that, because
that's what the book is for. People can go find
that yet, But I was wondering if you had anything
anything in mind about some of the research questions today
(35:50):
we're failing to ask about human vaginas, clitteruses, uteruses, and demetrium,
you know, like all of these different things.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Are there patterns that you're seeing in bias?
Speaker 2 (36:03):
There?
Speaker 3 (36:05):
Absolutely, the female reproductive organs are often seen as not
doing so much and as mainly meant for reproduction or
prone to disease for some reason. The uterus is the
origin of all diseases, was one of the ancient Greek texts,
and that's a very particular lens. And if you come
(36:26):
in thinking that that's what you're going to find, and
there are now researchers coming in saying, I think that
the female body is more regenerative than that. I think
that this body part plays a role in more of
overall health than we give it credit for. So the
vaginal microbiome, which was my problem with my little infection,
(36:47):
was just not really appreciated for being essentially an extension
of the immune system and a really rich ecosystem similar
to the gut microbiome, although technically quite different. But once
we started looking at that, like new solutions emerge instead
of just thinking, like, women are prone to infection, this happens,
(37:09):
It's fine, we don't need to solve this problem that
affects one third of women. Just give them rat poison. Instead,
you might say, hey, there are solutions we use for
gut microbiome problems. So fecal transplants became really big in
the twenty tens, and they were found to solve some
deadly gut infections. And basically what happens is usually you
(37:32):
end up you start by transplanting a healthy ecosystem into
one that's struggling, and then science moves on to kind
of synthesizing a formula that's more standardized and does the
same thing, and so finally, like ten years later, vagina
science is beginning to catch up, and I write about
these trials to do vaginal ecosystem transplants essentially from women
to women that likely will end up being like synthesized
(37:56):
microbiome supplement kind of thing. This to me, is both
obvious and is solving a problem that is so common
and causing much distress because many of these infections are
actually a lot more serious than what I dealt with.
So that's an example. Another example I go into a
lot is the uterus and endometriosis. So endometriosis for a
(38:17):
long time has been viewed as this like disease of infertility,
and that's actually mainly how it's funded through infertility research,
and most women only discover they have it when they
get an infertility work up. And you know, scientists are
beginning to reconceive this as a body wide disease that's
not just to do with the uterus. It actually has
to do with the immune system and body wide inflammation.
(38:40):
And it turns out like we already we have tools
and we have researchers who study those things who could
be looking at the uterus and when you bring them in,
you get new solutions and possibly new medications. So similar
to the way that endometriosis has been looked at as
purely a disease of the uterus, purely like a reproductive disease,
the uterus itself has often been looked at as just
(39:01):
like not doing anything when it's not making a baby,
like that's its main purpose. The rest of the time,
it's just like sitting fallow waiting to be spermed or something.
But actually, when you menstruate, which many of us do
every month, your uterus is essentially building up a new
organ and new lining every single month with its own
blood vessels. And then it's the body is telling it
(39:23):
that it has to self destruct, which is very bloody,
which we know, but like it's a very regenerative process
full of immune cells, full of stem cells. That's pretty
unique in the whole human body. This amount of like
constant regeneration building up every month.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
And if you.
Speaker 3 (39:40):
Study that, you actually learn a lot about like just
regeneration in general, scarless wound healing. You find stem cells
that you might be useful elsewhere. So looking at it
from a lens of regeneration, I think opens up new
possibilities and then just like another example of looking at
the female body of the different lens, it's not a
(40:00):
really promising avenue to getting that diagnosis for endometriosis is
menstrual blood and looking at the unique biomarkers in it
to find out if you have this kind of inflammation
that might suggestive endometriosis, and that is easy and plentiful
and free and non invasive, unlike surgery.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
I loved your chapter so much on gender affirming surgery
and how far we've come over the years. How has
the approach or construction of neovaginas changed over this time.
Speaker 3 (40:31):
Yeah, and I do use that word in the book
because it's sort of like the medical term that you'll
often see in research, so but people can use whatever
terms they prefer. So that chapter brought together so many
themes for me when I looked at the history of
gender affimation surgery, which goes back surprisingly far. Was happening
in the nineteen thirties in Germany, but when it hit
(40:54):
the US, it was done like very institutionally, after being
done underground.
Speaker 2 (40:59):
So JOHNS.
Speaker 3 (40:59):
Hopkins was the first to open a clinic that was
offering this to trans women, and it was very, very selective,
and it made very explicit that its goal was not
to help people reach their own goals with their body,
but to end up with women who disappeared into society
and had husbands and essentially were feminine and didn't rock
(41:19):
the gender binary. So basically, make anyone who's a problem
in society invisible. And if you go with that approach,
then the point of a vagina is to do what
you think women's vagina should do, which in this case
was have penetrative sex with your husband. So the surgeon
I follow doctor Marcy Bauers, who is herself one of
(41:40):
the first trans women to be a gender reformation surgeon.
She would give a presentation where she basically put like
like a hole and a cliff on the screen, and
everyone laughs because she's like, essentially the goal in the
past was make a hole.
Speaker 2 (41:54):
It's good enough.
Speaker 3 (41:55):
And then she goes on to talk about how in
her practice the clitterist is so central. It used to
be an afterthought, if it was a thought at all.
Now it's about your experience, your pleasure, what you want
out of your body. It's really about your internal experience,
not what society expects of you. And that really is
a paradigm shift because it starts with the patient's goals
instead of society's understanding of the female body.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
So one of the things you talked about too, is that,
you know, we've come a long way in these gender
affirming surgeries, but there are still some challenges just in
terms of like the fact that we've been you know,
not really thinking about this in these terms for you know,
as long as we should. What are some of the
challenges in constructing or surgically creating these these vaginas.
Speaker 3 (42:41):
Yeah, who we're talking about them. I'm like picturing vaginas
like floating untether. But yeah, so it's really interesting. Again,
Doctor Bauers is like pretty explicit about it. She's like,
we essentially contain all the same parts except the uterus,
and like by understanding deeply as a gynecologist in her case,
what the female body parts, the body parts of the
(43:02):
vulva are, and what the parts of the penis are,
she can really reconstruct using homologues because the penis and
glitterists come from the exact same embryological structures. You have
a rectile tissue, you have like a head or a glands,
So that actually makes a lot of sense surgically and
makes the surgery easier. However, the vagina does a lot
(43:24):
of cool things that are pretty difficult to replicate, and
one is that vaginal microbiome that we talked about, so
that is kind of like specific to the vagina, and
usually if you surgically create a vagina, it will have
its own microbiome that will be more similar to the
part of the body that you use to create it,
for instance, the skin, so that might be different. The
(43:44):
vagina also self lubricates, which is pretty unique and involves
a crazy process of liquid transfer, so that is also
very difficult to recreate.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
There is so much in your book that really highlights
the different biases that we've had over the years, and
you know, both in medicine or in ecological or evolutionary research,
but also just like how that has kind of spilled
into societal or cultural understandings of these different parts of
(44:17):
our bodies. And it kind of made me wonder that
although bias has gotten reduced or hasten, we've gotten better
at at least identifying the bias that is there and
tracing its roots. There is still bias present, But it
also made me wonder like, what will we look back
on potentially, what do you think we will look back
(44:39):
on in fifty years time, one hundred years time, something
like that, And go, I cannot believe we were approaching
it this way. And it's a little bit like asking
you to predict the future. But yeah, I wondered if
you had thoughts on that.
Speaker 3 (44:53):
Yeah, I definitely think we're going to look back and
say that the way that we treated or didn't treat
women in menopause for the past fifty years has been
grossly inadequate. That the idea of at first giving one
hormone to address like superficial things, which took forever to
actually look at the systemic overall health effects. And when
(45:16):
we did look at that, we did it wrong in
a way that meant millions of women didn't get vaginal estrogen.
I think that is just like a huge misstep in
the history of women's health or reproductive health. And I
think it has a lot to do with the fact
that when you're past your reproductive age, gynecology doesn't see
you as much or in the past that was the case,
(45:36):
and that is changing. One thing that I hope that
society really reconsiders is the amount of plastic surgeries that
are done on the volva and the vagina. I guess
I would say I'm thinking like vaginal tightening, g spot rejuvenation,
and I'm using all these words in air quotes. But
I didn't talk about this too much in the book,
(45:58):
but it goes back to the exact same themes we're
talking about. Is your body for you or is it
for someone else? Or is it to meet some societal
standard or fit some ideal? And where does that ideal
come from? Does it reflect your values? Obviously, we all
have individual choice and people can do whatever they want,
but I hope that there's more questioning of the proliferation
(46:19):
of surgeries that promise to make you look younger or
increase your sex life, or basically that continue to reinforce
shame around our natural genitals.
Speaker 1 (46:48):
Rachel, I just I have no words. That was so
much fun, one of my favorite conversations so far, and
I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me.
I know that you all enjoyed that as much as
I did and want to read more, So you should
definitely head to our website. This podcast will kill You
dot com. We're all post a link to where you
(47:10):
can find Vagina Obscura and Anatomical Voyage, as well as
a link to Rachel's website, which includes links to some
of her other incredible writing which has been published in
The New York Times, Scientific American, The Guardian and others.
And don't forget you can check out our website for
all sorts of other cool things, including but not limited to, transcripts,
(47:33):
Quarantinian placeburrita recipes, show notes and references for all of
our episodes, links to merch our bookshop dot Org, affiliate account,
our Goodreads list, a first hand account form, and music
by Bloodmobile. Speaking of which, thank you to Bloodmobile for
providing the music for this episode and all of our episodes.
(47:53):
Thank you to Leana Squaacci and Tom Bryfogel for our
audio mixing, and thanks to you listeners for listening. I
hope you liked this episode and our loving being part
of the TPWKY book Club. And a special thank you,
as always to our wonderful, fantastic patrons. We appreciate your
support so very much. Well, until next time, keep washing
(48:18):
those hands,
Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh and this is this podcast Will
Kill You. Welcome back to another episode of the tp
w k Y book Club where we interview some of
the coolest people ever to ask them about the amazing
work they do and the fascinating books they've read. This
is the last book club episode for this season. Don't worry,
(01:05):
there'll be more for next season, and it is such
a great one. I think you all are going to
love it. Over the course of this season, we've gotten
to have some incredible conversations and if you would like
to check out those books that we've already covered, head
on over to our website this Podcast will Kill You
dot com, where you can find a link to our
bookshop dot org affiliate account, which has all sorts of
(01:28):
TPWKY related lists, including of course a list that contains
the book club books for this and last season. And
if you still got room on your bookshelves, check out
our other bookshop lists, where we include the books that
we use to research our regular episodes, plus disease or
epidemic themed fiction books which I feel like could be
so much fun to use as a starting point for
(01:49):
another book club on how disease is used in fiction.
Let me know what you think. As always, we love
hearing from you about how you're enjoying these book club episodes,
what questions you win. You could ask recommendations for future
books to cover. Just send your thoughts our way. The
best way to do that is through the contact us
form on our website. And one last thing before I
(02:10):
introduced this week's book club selection, the last one of
the season, and that is a simple request to rate,
review and subscribe. It really helps us out. Okay, enough
podcast business, onto the business of books, and the business
of vaginas and uteri and clitterises and ovaries and so
(02:30):
many other crucial and amazing parts of human anatomy that
really don't receive the attention they deserve. In this book
club episode, I am joined by award winning science journalist
and author Rachel Gross to chat about her book Vagina
Obscura and Anatomical Voyage. Frequent listeners of the podcast probably
won't be surprised to learn that female anatomy, which I
(02:52):
acknowledge is not the most precise or accurate term, is
remarkably understudied compared to the reproductive system of males. This
disparity has incredibly deep roots going all the way back
to the earliest medical texts, and how women were perceived
to be essentially a lesser form of men. Of course,
this didn't translate into just ignoring female bodies and finding
(03:14):
them uninteresting, although to be clear, that absolutely did and
does happen. It also influenced the language used for genitalia,
the research questions that we ask, the scientific narratives we create,
and the roles that males and females are forced into.
Sperm trying to get past the defensive shield of the egg,
giving sperm all the credit and fertilization, and hailing it
(03:36):
as the strong hero that breached the walls of the fortress.
The endometrium described as a waste of energy and tissue
during menstruation, rather than recognized for its incredible regenerative abilities.
Vagina is seen as relevant only in the context of penises.
Even the word vagina means sheath. We cannot escape this
(03:58):
gendered and misogynistic framing. It's a part of our everyday lives,
and so what can we do. We can learn to
recognize the roots of this misogynistic framing of female bodies.
We can appreciate vaginas not just in relation to penises.
We can re examine the research questions we ask about
genitalia to seek out assumptions with a cultural but not
(04:20):
biological basis, and we can try to identify the questions
that we're not asking. And one of the best ways
to start is by reading Vagina Obscira. This book is
simultaneously captivating, inspirational, beyond infuriating, and enlightening. In each chapter,
(04:41):
Gross takes readers through a different part of female anatomy,
and she doesn't stick to just humans either, and explores
how our cultural history and attitudes towards women inform our
perspective on quote unquote female anatomy today, highlighting the work
of some truly incredible researchers and medical professionals today who
are revolutionizing how we understand and treat our bodies not
(05:04):
just in relation to males, but as independent and deserving
of interest, attention, and care. Plus, the artwork in Vagina
Obscura is simply incredible, so let's get into it right
after this break. Rachel, thank you so much for joining
(05:42):
me today. I am beyond thrilled to talk about your
amazing book, Vagina Obscura.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
Thank you so much, for having me.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
It's such a pleasure, and I'm always thrilled to talk
about Vagina's.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
I mean, same, same, I'm always curious too about the
origin story of a book, you know, I'm always asking, like,
what inspired you, how did you become interested in a
certain topic, And in the intro of Vagina Obscura, you
tell that story, and you tell it in a great way,
but it's also a terrifying story, and I was wondering
(06:15):
if you would mind taking our listeners through that.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
Absolutely, So I'll just mention that this was a topic
I had been thinking about a while before this particular
inciting incident. I was an editor at Smithsonian Magazine covering science,
and I was kind of assigning a lot more reproductive
health stories, stories about like medical training and why it
was taking so long to learn these really basic facts
(06:40):
about female anatomy. And at the same time, I was
running this column on like unsung female scientists and history,
and I was starting to put the two and two
together that maybe the lack of representation science had something
to do with the lack of basic knowledge about female bodies.
So that's the prologue. So there at Smithsonian Magazine doing
(07:02):
my thing and I get this wild vaginal infection, which
I talk about in the intro of the book, and
it's very unpleasant and itchy.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
I describe it as my burning bush.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
And I go to the gynecologist and I keep going
back and all they can give me is the same antibiotics.
They think it first it's a UTI, then they think
a yeast infection. I think many of us have gone
through this horse and pony show. And eventually, basically my
gynocologists said, I'm sorry, it looks like it's it's something
(07:35):
called BV bacterial vaginosis, which is a disruption in the
ecosystem of the vagina, and it's super common. One in
three people with vaginas get it. I had no idea,
had never heard of it. Now I know, like a
whole cohort of people. But she said, although it's so common,
there's actually no good cure for it. So the best
we can offer you as like a last resort is
(07:57):
rat poison. She literally use the word rat poison, but
she said, like you'll if you look it up on
the internet, that's what it'll say. So I just want
to warn you, and like I'll always remember picking up
a little toobe with a skull and crossbones that said
poison on it, which I still have, and just feeling ashamed.
And then you have to go home and take this.
It's a vaginal suppository, so it looks like a pill,
(08:18):
but you put it up there and you just lay
on your back and think.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
About what you've done. So I did that four or
ten days.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
And then here's the part where I kind of go
off the rails. I like had a long night, woke
up in the middle of the night, went to my
bathroom and had like a pill in my hand. Basically
it was like I forgot to do something, forgot to
take my medication, and then I swallowed the rat poison,
the boric acid, and so basically I end up in
(08:46):
the hospital thinking I'm going to get my stomach pumped
and not knowing whether it's going to kill me, because
like if you look up boric acid and ingestion, you
do get a ton of studies that find death by
injection and like call poison controle and like kids shouldn't
have this. So it fortunately was not enough to do
(09:06):
anything except give me gas, said the doctor. But it
was a scare, and as I write in the book,
it was one of these moments where I kind of
was pushed back upon myself to kind of question what
I knew about my own body, Like why was I
taking this medication that I had no idea what it was,
what it was doing, what the infection was. And here
(09:29):
I am someone who writes about reproductive health and things,
they know a lot about vagina's and like has a
mother who's a doctor. And it just made me question, like,
if I have access to all this knowledge and I
know so little and don't even know how much I
don't know, then certainly there are millions of other people
who could use some more knowledge, and I should look
into that.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
It was I feel like that's such a great example
of we don't have a better treatment than rat poison,
Like are we looking into I'm sure people are. There
are enough people looking into this. Like how you know
there's no funding? Right and when you decided okay, I
want to tackle this topic, how did that book that
(10:14):
you first envisioned sort of turn into the book that
you eventually wrote.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Oh? I like that question.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
I think from the very beginning, I knew that it
wanted to be that it wanted to be that the
book desired to be a wondrous journey into the female body,
and like I was initially thinking like two thousand leagues
under the sea, journey to the center of the Earth.
So I knew about that quality. I guess what I
didn't realize was that each chapter would also end up profiling,
(10:44):
usually a female or LGBT scientist or even patient who
was investigating this organ and reimagining what it could be,
and that that would be tied in with the history
and science of the organ, and that it would go
organ by organ, kind of from the outside in. Roughly,
and initially I settled on the name Lady Anatomy, which
(11:06):
I was convinced would work, and it quickly became apparent
that it needed too much explanation and that I thought
it was tongue in cheek, and I was actually referring
to a lady anatomist who was called the Lady Anatomist
in the eighteen hundreds in Italy, and I was referring
to kind of the like the term lady doctor. But
it became so clear that the book was about so
(11:28):
much more than women. It was about anybody with these
body parts. It really expanded quickly to include trans women
and men, intersex people, non binary people, so that was
not going to work in the title.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
And when you told people I'm writing a book about vaginas,
I'm writing a book about vaginas at all, or that
you had written this book, what kind of reactions did
you get. I expect you got reactions from like all
different ends of the you know, expected reactions.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
You would be correct.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
The people in my life were just like, yeah, of
course you're writing vagina book.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
I love that, like not a surprise.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
My mom was very excited, Like I said, she's a doctor,
but she was like reading my draft as I went along,
and she was learning all new stuff that she'd never
heard of, and she was very excited about that, and
she ended up being my biggest stand when the book
came out. She really loved putting the cover out and
giving it to all of her senior friends like in
the neighborhood and making sure that everybody saw it and
(12:35):
talking about She called it her first grandchild, her only grandchild.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
So there was that. I definitely people did laugh, and
I actually like that.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
I think that getting someone to laugh gets them to
be open, to be surprised and kind of like knocks
them off kilter for a second. So I don't mind that,
but I do think there's an obvious discomfort in our culture,
a squeamishness, sometimes a prudishness that like people don't know
how to react. And then I think there were times
(13:11):
where I was in a more academic setting or talking
to like a real buttoned up, like old school researcher,
where I found myself kind of censoring my language and
just being like, oh, it's a book on reproductive health
and history. And that was really interesting because we did
face a lot of censorship of the word vagina and
did have to take alternate roots.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
Oh, very interesting, And you mentioned the cover of your
book and the artwork. I just have to say is
I'm obsessed. I want it all over my walls. I
love it.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
I do have it all over my walls behind my couch,
and I might get a tattoo soon.
Speaker 4 (13:51):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
That is by Armando VeVe, an award winning illustrator that
I've been a huge fan of for a while, and
we were pair together for a piece on the history
of the birth control pill for the New York Times,
and since then I basically was stalking him for a
year until I could get a grant to help bring
him in and do these interior illustrations, and we were
(14:12):
actually thinking initially of like Alice in Wonderland. I think
at the beginning of each chapter there's like a little
quote and then often a little sketch of what's to come.
So there are themed sketches and I really enjoy them.
The clitteris is this really powerful structure with these deep
roots in the soil that I love. And then the
cover of it was really supposed to look nothing like
(14:34):
any vagina book you've ever seen, because I was just
really sick of all of these pink covers with like
a zipper unzipping or like a flower, you know, Georgia O'Keeffe,
like we've seen that. And I also really didn't want
to give the impression that this was just a women's book.
It was really important to me that people felt welcomed
in and maybe surprised, like this is more the cover
you'd expect from a sci fi novel.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Let's take a quick break here, we'll be back before
you know it. Welcome back, everyone, I'm here chatting with
(15:19):
the wonderful Rachel Gross about her book Vagina Obscura. Let's
get into some more questions. In your book, you discuss
sort of the power of words and how a word
sometimes is just a word, but other times it carries
with it a deeper meaning, or it reveals a history
that explains so much about our perspective or our current biases.
(15:42):
How is shame just carved into the words that we
use for our genitalia or our reproductive anatomy.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
Who I think it's very interesting you use the word
carved there, because it does suggest that some violence is
being done, and sometimes that is literally the case. And yes,
I do think that the concept of shame is bound
up in the language we use to talk about our bodies.
And I encountered this so much in my research, Like
literally the first time that Hippocrates decided to name the genitals,
(16:15):
he named them the shame parts in ancient Greek. And
from then on it was just like over and over again,
male anatomis would continuously name usually the clitorists or the
vulva the shame part, so like in the fifteen hundreds,
a French anatomist names it mombre anteau, like the shame member,
and then we get pudendum, which means the part for
(16:37):
which you should be ashamed, and that is a Latin
term that is actually in gynecology textbooks today. So I
kept encountering it and being like, what the hell, And
then there'd be a footnote and the bottom it would
just say the shame parts, as if that explained the term,
like no, so which I ended up following that because
it became a debate in anatomy whether to get rid
(16:58):
of the term. And and by the way, this was
all going on at the same time that the discussion
about Confederate monuments and taking down problematic monuments and names
was going on, so it was very much top of mind.
And you know, it's not lost on me that there
are monuments in the body and the organs were born
with that are named after generally elite white men, and
(17:19):
there are quite a lot of them, and a lot
of them are in the pelvis, and that is weird.
That's just one example. This isn't a name, but another
example of how language can kind of shape the conversation
is that the ovaries didn't have their own name until
the sixteen hundreds. They were just called female testicles, and
that really kind of reflected this idea that the female
(17:41):
body was a lesser version of the male body and
it didn't really even need its own name, and so
things like that were always kind of aha moments, like
this little language fact I'm learning reinforces the other research
I'm doing, Like there has to be a qualification, Lady
in Eda, me, yes, exactly.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
So now I actually write a column about medical language
for the New York Times. It's called body Language, and
it talks about the origins and history of these little
terms in medicine and how they affect patients and doctors today.
Because what I found was so talking about pudendum and
the pudental nerves, which are still a term often like
(18:22):
patients might not be aware of that term, but they
do have a lot of shame around that area. And
when doctors are aware of kind of the weightedness of
the language they use, they can really help patients be
at ease. Like there are actual outcomes to the way
we talk about this, like in large surveys in Britain,
(18:45):
like a huge percentage of women just avoid going to
the gynecologist out of shame or embarrassment, and others don't
want to say the word vagina to their gynecologist because
they are ashamed, which obviously affects medical communication. Actually, the
most horrifying example this that I remember is I gave
a talk once and a science student came up to
(19:05):
me and said that his grandma had had she'd had cancer,
and she'd had like a reproductive cancer and treatment for it,
and was at one of those benefits where you pick
a ribbon based on the type of reproductive cancer you have,
and she didn't know much color to pick, and he
was like, Grandma, what kind of cancer did you have?
And she said, I don't know. The doctor told me
(19:26):
it was down there cancer. Like if doctors literally can't
name our body parts using I don't know, neutral objective terms,
and how are we supposed to think about our bodies.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
It just reinforces the shame and silence surrounding it.
Speaker 4 (19:43):
Oh that's horrifying, and I feel like, my god. Yeah,
And your book is full of so many surprising and
fascinating and kind of like revelatory bits of information.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
What thing did you.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Learn that surprised you the most or that contradicted what
you thought you knew?
Speaker 3 (20:05):
Ooh, well, one thing that just really like literally contradicted
what I was taught was in a later chapter on
this kind of cutting edge research on the ovaries and eggs.
I learned that there was research being done that suggested
that maybe the ovaries don't stop making eggs when when
(20:25):
you're born, before you're born actually, so you know, there's
that line at the beginning of biology textbooks and papers
that says women are born with all the eggs they'll
ever have, and this process of attrision begins before birth,
when she's a fetus in the womb, and from then
on the eggs trickle away like an hourglass.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
And I was.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
Really surprised to see that there were obarian biologists who
were challenging this idea, and they were finding there were
stem cells in the ovaries as there are in most organs,
that had this regenerative power and that potentially could be
making more eggs under certain circumstances. And like this is
research us ongoing, So it's something where there's a lot
of caveats, but just the idea, I think, challenge my
(21:05):
idea of what the female body could do, what our
organs were capable of, in a way that made me
realize I'd never even questioned that. I just took that
as a gospel. Oh, I mean same here.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
We have a menopause episode from our last season where
I'm pretty sure we say that exact you know, opener
to the biology textbook. You know, you are born with
all the eggs, et cetera, et cetera. And so I
was really fascinated to read your chapter on quote unquote
restoring ovaries postmenopause. What does it mean to revitalize or
(21:38):
restore ovarian function after menopause? And what data do we
have about this quite controversial research?
Speaker 3 (21:46):
Right, So when we talk about restoring or revitalizing quote
unquote the ovaries, that idea comes with some heavy baggage.
That is one potential application of this kind of research,
and again like this has not been well. Actually, there
is some interesting ovarian cortex transplants that have been done
in women that are supposed to again kind of recharge
(22:08):
the ovary and delay menopause. But what I talk about
in that chapter, what I really do is kind of
ground this in historical context and say like, hey, we've
been here before, and the history of revitalizing the ovaries
goes back to like the nineteen tens when snake oil
salesmen were trying to grab monkey ovaries onto women's ovaries,
promising them eternal youthfulness and femininity and sexuality. And this
(22:33):
comes back again and again in this history to the
nineteen sixties where you have this book Feminine Forever by
a gynecologist funded by pharma who is saying that estrogen
is now like the key to maintaining your good looks
and your youth forever, which is just a poisonous, toxic
message that you would need this, and that femininity is
(22:55):
something that wilds or needs to be revived. So when
I hear these words, I do kind of twitch. And
I also think of certain types of like plastic surgeries,
like g spot surgery or whatever, badginal tightening that really
give me the dick.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
So that's one thing.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
However, I think the basic idea of the research is
that if the ovaries are more regenerative then we've given
them credit for, then it is possible to find tools
to manipulate them. And for some who want to, that
might mean adjusting your menopause timeline, which is a very
(23:32):
controversial thing to say.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
Yeah, absolutely, yeah, we visited that book and quotes from
that book and just quotes from like the early days
of hormone replacement therapy and the advertisements that were geared
towards husbands, and it's just likely wonderful.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
The girl you met, Yes, she'll make you dinner again.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
I just think we always need to be mindful of
that kind of cultural con text when we, I don't know,
get excited about new technologies. I think there's like a
lack of sense of history with a lot of this
where it's just like, ooh, new tools for feminism. Let's
change our bodies parameters to fit like our capitalists workplace
or demands that we be sexually available and attractive for
(24:16):
our entire lives without questioning like why right, why? And
also like let's look at where we came from, and
let's look at how we may be looking.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
Back on this moment right now. Yeah, exactly, Yes, a
long view. So you begin your book with a discussion
on the clitterists. First, what is the clitterists?
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Well, I'm glad you asked. The clitterists is.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
The only organ in any human body that is dedicated
just to pleasure as far as we know, and it
is a substantial organ. I think I mentioned that it
is kind of deeply rooted, and it's often referred to
as an iceberg by people who handle it a lot
in science. So it is often thought of as the
no that you can see or touch, which is one
(25:02):
of the fun parts. But that nub is actually less
than ten percent of the entire organ, and it has
these kind of tulip bulbs that actually hug the vagina
and the urethra, and then it has these arms that
flare back against the pelvic bones, and they're all composed
of a rectile tissue exactly the same as in the
penis that basically is like porous or spongy and fills
(25:23):
up with blood when you get aroused and essentially erects.
And the glitterist has been like much discussed, maligned, neglected, ignored,
omitted in the history of anatomy and medical education. It's
a very long story, but we now have pretty accurate
maps of it and we can definitely say that it
(25:45):
is a substantial organ and it is the center of
orgasm for people who have it.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Can you talk about this relatively recent paradigm shift in
our understanding of the role that the clitterist plays in
the anatomy of pleasure.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
Yeah, there's definitely been a paradigm ship. I mean It's
so funny that this is new or fresh to me,
because like, come on, as long as we've had clitterists,
we've known that they feel great, and we've known what
they're for, Like you just need to ask us. But
I think I often think about the G spot, and
the G spot means a lot of things to a
(26:21):
lot of different people, but to me, I grew up
seeing it in women's magazines all the time as this
like secret mysterious button that if you found it, you
would have like intense secret orgasms and it would be great.
And so I was always like, man, I can't find it.
I don't know if I'm broken. And so as I
started researching the clitterists, and specifically a urologist in Australia
(26:45):
named Helen O'Connell who grows up, I mean, comes up
in medicine studying a lot of penises and realizes that
the same medical attention has never been given to the clitterists,
to the point that when she does a surgery in
the pelvic region on women, she's not taught to spare
them the nerves or like know where the nerves are,
compared to penile surgeries, where that's always considered. So she's
(27:06):
the one who's kind of credited with mapping the iceberg
with modern tools. I mean a lot of people did
a lot of work before her, but people definitely started
asking her what's the G spot?
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Is it real? Is it a myth?
Speaker 3 (27:17):
And so she actually went in and was like try
to find it, and what she realized was that the
G spot is probably the front of the clitterists because
it's such an internal organ and remember it kind of
hugs the vagina, so where those arms and bulbs come together,
kind of the root that is. Sorry, it is so
(27:37):
much easier with like diagrams and pictures, but it's basically
about an inch or two up the vagina on the
belly side. It's like a it's just part of the
glitterists that for some people might be more sensitive or
feel a little different, just depending on your anatomy, how
thick your skin is, and like where it is.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
So basically it's all the clitterists.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
And maybe that's the paradigm shift, is that the clitterists
is central. And for so many years we've been like
carving up women and their sexual experiences into these individual boxes,
like talking about faginal orgasms, which I go into why
those don't exist, and the G spot and the clitterists
as if these things are somehow like competing or like
(28:18):
different parts. But to me, the important thing is that
they all are interconnected and work as a system. Like
our body knows what it's doing and it's all meant
to be there, and it all connects to the other.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Parts, like split up in ways where it's like, oh,
it's so confusing and overwhelming. There are so many moving parts,
and it's just like, well, right, well.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
We are constantly The female body is described as more complex, confusing,
and obscure, hence the final title, and like it's not
you're just looking at it wrong, I would suggest, And unfortunately,
I think that the result of for instance, like the
G spot rhetoric I was reading, is to make you
feel inadequate or broken, And the same thing with the
(29:00):
vaginal orgasm idea. You have generations of women feeling like
they are somehow incomplete or their bodies don't work the
right way because they're not working the way that men
said they should work, and the male interpretation of their
body is not lining up with their felt experience.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
There was a really interesting part in your book where
you discuss how as the glitterists began to get more
attention and this long overdue recognition, the vagina was kind
of like shoved to the side, so to speak. How
did that happen or why did that happen? And why
does the vagina deserve a bit more of the spotlight
(29:37):
than maybe it's getting.
Speaker 3 (29:40):
I love that you caught that, Actually not many people do.
There was definitely a vagina versus clitterist moment going on.
It was kind of in second wave of feminism, and
it was definitely a response to Freud, who is the
one who came up with the idea of the vaginal orgasm.
And the reason why I get so annoyed with this
concept is like you could have you can feel an
(30:00):
orgasm anywhere. You can experience it anyway, including the vagina.
But he said that there's two things. There's a baginal
orgasm and a clteral orgasm, and one is good and
one is bad. And to become a mature, healthy woman,
you have to transfer your clitteral orgasm to your vagina,
because your clitteral orgasm is your vestiges of masculinity that
you're holding on to that you need to let go
(30:22):
of so he kind of is the root of all
of this feeling that your body has broken, which is
not It works perfectly. So second wave feminists were the
one who challenged this idea. And there's this great speech
by Anacote that's called it's called the Myth of the
Vaginal Orgasm and yeah, and so basically they say that
(30:43):
for so long we've been elevating the vagina, and the
vagina represents like male pleasure and reproduction, and the clitterist
represents female pleasure and like independence and wholeness.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
And so we're going to champion the clitterists.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
And this continues, like there's a lot of great glitterist imagery.
I mean, I myself have clitterous jewelry and we love
this organ However, I guess I was saying that to me,
the important thing is that this is all part of
the same system, and it's super interconnected, and through your
vaginal walls, you of course feel the clitterists in beautiful,
(31:21):
specific ways that are related to your own particular anatomy.
And they work together as a team. They are not enemies,
they are friends. It's an enemy.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
It's a lover story. Oh yes, love those.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
As someone with a background in ecology, I loved your
discussions on the incredible vaginal diversity in the animal world.
What does our new recognition of this diversity or relatively
recent recognition tell us not only about vaginas, but also
about our research bias super recent, actually shockingly recent. First
(31:57):
of all, weirdly, that chapter.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
Like the one that addresses the vagina, was maybe the
last chapter I wrote, and for some reason it was
it was I don't know if it's the most It
wasn't the most difficult, but I thought it'd be super easy.
I was like, this is a book about vagina science,
Like we're going to talk about the human vagina and that.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Should be central.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
So it surprised me that the vagina chapter ended up
being more about animal vaginas than human vaginas, but it was.
It was incredibly fun journey. I follow a biologist named
Patty Brennan who became known as the duck penis and
vagina researcher, but she is so much more than that.
She also does dolphins and snakes. I dissected a snake
(32:38):
clitteris with her, which has two prongs because snakes have
two penises and they match up and we made a
little silicone lollipop out of it using dental latex. So yes,
animal vaginas were very understudied, and like this one was
just really blatant compared to in some of the some
(32:59):
of the history, they are these more subtle cultural assumptions
going on. But here I call up the male researcher
who like first described as crazy duck penis and ask him,
do you look at the duck vagina? He's like, no,
we didn't bother And literally a lot of male scientists,
it seems, described the penis of certain species and just
(33:20):
extrapolated that to the female and didn't bother to look.
So doctor Brennan is basically the first person to fully
dissect a duck vagina, which seems shocking. They are pretty plentiful,
pretty easy to do. I mean it did sound difficult, actually,
but so like it almost didn't sound plausible to me
(33:42):
that no one had bothered to look at these vaginas.
But if you look in the literature, female animal vaginas
are literally described as passive and almost boring. A literal
quote in one of the textbooks was that females are
the field upon which males compete. So there really considered
just like the medium upon which the real action happens,
(34:04):
and that sort of gave me context for why the
super basic research wasn't done. And it turns out vaginas
are fascinating and they're doing a lot. They can store
and reject sperm in some cases depending on which animal.
I'm not saying we can do this, unfortunately, but there
are ones that look like corkscrews, there are ones that
(34:25):
look like labyrinths. And if you're looking at vaginas, you
end up looking at a lot of clitterises. So Patty
ended up looking at dolphin clitterises, which are huge and
very frontal facing, so they get a lot of action
and is like I mentioned, looking at clitterises and snakes
things that were really surprising to people. But I think
(34:46):
it's kind of because they didn't think about it and
didn't bother looking. So it really is very unexplored terrain.
So to your question of what this says about male bias,
I think it says that there are a lot of
assumptions about female bodies and their relevance to the science
and how much we should dedicate to studying them that
(35:08):
turn out not to be true, and I think part
of the answer is just getting in voices into science
who can ask different questions, in some case very obvious questions,
and giving them the resources and power to follow them.
Just looking at the questions alone, like what research questions
are we asking not just about animals but also about humans,
(35:29):
and how even today it can reveal this historical bias
that has such incredibly deep roots. And I won't ask
you to like take us through all of that, because
that's what the book is for. People can go find
that yet, But I was wondering if you had anything
anything in mind about some of the research questions today
(35:50):
we're failing to ask about human vaginas, clitteruses, uteruses, and demetrium,
you know, like all of these different things.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Are there patterns that you're seeing in bias?
Speaker 2 (36:03):
There?
Speaker 3 (36:05):
Absolutely, the female reproductive organs are often seen as not
doing so much and as mainly meant for reproduction or
prone to disease for some reason. The uterus is the
origin of all diseases, was one of the ancient Greek texts,
and that's a very particular lens. And if you come
(36:26):
in thinking that that's what you're going to find, and
there are now researchers coming in saying, I think that
the female body is more regenerative than that. I think
that this body part plays a role in more of
overall health than we give it credit for. So the
vaginal microbiome, which was my problem with my little infection,
(36:47):
was just not really appreciated for being essentially an extension
of the immune system and a really rich ecosystem similar
to the gut microbiome, although technically quite different. But once
we started looking at that, like new solutions emerge instead
of just thinking, like, women are prone to infection, this happens,
(37:09):
It's fine, we don't need to solve this problem that
affects one third of women. Just give them rat poison. Instead,
you might say, hey, there are solutions we use for
gut microbiome problems. So fecal transplants became really big in
the twenty tens, and they were found to solve some
deadly gut infections. And basically what happens is usually you
(37:32):
end up you start by transplanting a healthy ecosystem into
one that's struggling, and then science moves on to kind
of synthesizing a formula that's more standardized and does the
same thing, and so finally, like ten years later, vagina
science is beginning to catch up, and I write about
these trials to do vaginal ecosystem transplants essentially from women
to women that likely will end up being like synthesized
(37:56):
microbiome supplement kind of thing. This to me, is both
obvious and is solving a problem that is so common
and causing much distress because many of these infections are
actually a lot more serious than what I dealt with.
So that's an example. Another example I go into a
lot is the uterus and endometriosis. So endometriosis for a
(38:17):
long time has been viewed as this like disease of infertility,
and that's actually mainly how it's funded through infertility research,
and most women only discover they have it when they
get an infertility work up. And you know, scientists are
beginning to reconceive this as a body wide disease that's
not just to do with the uterus. It actually has
to do with the immune system and body wide inflammation.
(38:40):
And it turns out like we already we have tools
and we have researchers who study those things who could
be looking at the uterus and when you bring them in,
you get new solutions and possibly new medications. So similar
to the way that endometriosis has been looked at as
purely a disease of the uterus, purely like a reproductive disease,
the uterus itself has often been looked at as just
(39:01):
like not doing anything when it's not making a baby,
like that's its main purpose. The rest of the time,
it's just like sitting fallow waiting to be spermed or something.
But actually, when you menstruate, which many of us do
every month, your uterus is essentially building up a new
organ and new lining every single month with its own
blood vessels. And then it's the body is telling it
(39:23):
that it has to self destruct, which is very bloody,
which we know, but like it's a very regenerative process
full of immune cells, full of stem cells. That's pretty
unique in the whole human body. This amount of like
constant regeneration building up every month.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
And if you.
Speaker 3 (39:40):
Study that, you actually learn a lot about like just
regeneration in general, scarless wound healing. You find stem cells
that you might be useful elsewhere. So looking at it
from a lens of regeneration, I think opens up new
possibilities and then just like another example of looking at
the female body of the different lens, it's not a
(40:00):
really promising avenue to getting that diagnosis for endometriosis is
menstrual blood and looking at the unique biomarkers in it
to find out if you have this kind of inflammation
that might suggestive endometriosis, and that is easy and plentiful
and free and non invasive, unlike surgery.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
I loved your chapter so much on gender affirming surgery
and how far we've come over the years. How has
the approach or construction of neovaginas changed over this time.
Speaker 3 (40:31):
Yeah, and I do use that word in the book
because it's sort of like the medical term that you'll
often see in research, so but people can use whatever
terms they prefer. So that chapter brought together so many
themes for me when I looked at the history of
gender affimation surgery, which goes back surprisingly far. Was happening
in the nineteen thirties in Germany, but when it hit
(40:54):
the US, it was done like very institutionally, after being
done underground.
Speaker 2 (40:59):
So JOHNS.
Speaker 3 (40:59):
Hopkins was the first to open a clinic that was
offering this to trans women, and it was very, very selective,
and it made very explicit that its goal was not
to help people reach their own goals with their body,
but to end up with women who disappeared into society
and had husbands and essentially were feminine and didn't rock
(41:19):
the gender binary. So basically, make anyone who's a problem
in society invisible. And if you go with that approach,
then the point of a vagina is to do what
you think women's vagina should do, which in this case
was have penetrative sex with your husband. So the surgeon
I follow doctor Marcy Bauers, who is herself one of
(41:40):
the first trans women to be a gender reformation surgeon.
She would give a presentation where she basically put like
like a hole and a cliff on the screen, and
everyone laughs because she's like, essentially the goal in the
past was make a hole.
Speaker 2 (41:54):
It's good enough.
Speaker 3 (41:55):
And then she goes on to talk about how in
her practice the clitterist is so central. It used to
be an afterthought, if it was a thought at all.
Now it's about your experience, your pleasure, what you want
out of your body. It's really about your internal experience,
not what society expects of you. And that really is
a paradigm shift because it starts with the patient's goals
instead of society's understanding of the female body.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
So one of the things you talked about too, is that,
you know, we've come a long way in these gender
affirming surgeries, but there are still some challenges just in
terms of like the fact that we've been you know,
not really thinking about this in these terms for you know,
as long as we should. What are some of the
challenges in constructing or surgically creating these these vaginas.
Speaker 3 (42:41):
Yeah, who we're talking about them. I'm like picturing vaginas
like floating untether. But yeah, so it's really interesting. Again,
Doctor Bauers is like pretty explicit about it. She's like,
we essentially contain all the same parts except the uterus,
and like by understanding deeply as a gynecologist in her case,
what the female body parts, the body parts of the
(43:02):
vulva are, and what the parts of the penis are,
she can really reconstruct using homologues because the penis and
glitterists come from the exact same embryological structures. You have
a rectile tissue, you have like a head or a glands,
So that actually makes a lot of sense surgically and
makes the surgery easier. However, the vagina does a lot
(43:24):
of cool things that are pretty difficult to replicate, and
one is that vaginal microbiome that we talked about, so
that is kind of like specific to the vagina, and
usually if you surgically create a vagina, it will have
its own microbiome that will be more similar to the
part of the body that you use to create it,
for instance, the skin, so that might be different. The
(43:44):
vagina also self lubricates, which is pretty unique and involves
a crazy process of liquid transfer, so that is also
very difficult to recreate.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
There is so much in your book that really highlights
the different biases that we've had over the years, and
you know, both in medicine or in ecological or evolutionary research,
but also just like how that has kind of spilled
into societal or cultural understandings of these different parts of
(44:17):
our bodies. And it kind of made me wonder that
although bias has gotten reduced or hasten, we've gotten better
at at least identifying the bias that is there and
tracing its roots. There is still bias present, But it
also made me wonder like, what will we look back
on potentially, what do you think we will look back
(44:39):
on in fifty years time, one hundred years time, something
like that, And go, I cannot believe we were approaching
it this way. And it's a little bit like asking
you to predict the future. But yeah, I wondered if
you had thoughts on that.
Speaker 3 (44:53):
Yeah, I definitely think we're going to look back and
say that the way that we treated or didn't treat
women in menopause for the past fifty years has been
grossly inadequate. That the idea of at first giving one
hormone to address like superficial things, which took forever to
actually look at the systemic overall health effects. And when
(45:16):
we did look at that, we did it wrong in
a way that meant millions of women didn't get vaginal estrogen.
I think that is just like a huge misstep in
the history of women's health or reproductive health. And I
think it has a lot to do with the fact
that when you're past your reproductive age, gynecology doesn't see
you as much or in the past that was the case,
(45:36):
and that is changing. One thing that I hope that
society really reconsiders is the amount of plastic surgeries that
are done on the volva and the vagina. I guess
I would say I'm thinking like vaginal tightening, g spot rejuvenation,
and I'm using all these words in air quotes. But
I didn't talk about this too much in the book,
(45:58):
but it goes back to the exact same themes we're
talking about. Is your body for you or is it
for someone else? Or is it to meet some societal
standard or fit some ideal? And where does that ideal
come from? Does it reflect your values? Obviously, we all
have individual choice and people can do whatever they want,
but I hope that there's more questioning of the proliferation
(46:19):
of surgeries that promise to make you look younger or
increase your sex life, or basically that continue to reinforce
shame around our natural genitals.
Speaker 1 (46:48):
Rachel, I just I have no words. That was so
much fun, one of my favorite conversations so far, and
I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me.
I know that you all enjoyed that as much as
I did and want to read more, So you should
definitely head to our website. This podcast will kill You
dot com. We're all post a link to where you
(47:10):
can find Vagina Obscura and Anatomical Voyage, as well as
a link to Rachel's website, which includes links to some
of her other incredible writing which has been published in
The New York Times, Scientific American, The Guardian and others.
And don't forget you can check out our website for
all sorts of other cool things, including but not limited to, transcripts,
(47:33):
Quarantinian placeburrita recipes, show notes and references for all of
our episodes, links to merch our bookshop dot Org, affiliate account,
our Goodreads list, a first hand account form, and music
by Bloodmobile. Speaking of which, thank you to Bloodmobile for
providing the music for this episode and all of our episodes.
(47:53):
Thank you to Leana Squaacci and Tom Bryfogel for our
audio mixing, and thanks to you listeners for listening. I
hope you liked this episode and our loving being part
of the TPWKY book Club. And a special thank you,
as always to our wonderful, fantastic patrons. We appreciate your
support so very much. Well, until next time, keep washing
(48:18):
those hands,
Hosts And Creators
Erin Welsh
Erin Allmann Updyke
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