Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage

"This book is about female anatomy, and also the unsung heroes who have worked in these topics: the hidden figures of female health. For example, there was a laboratory technician Miriam Menkin who discovered how to do IVF. We thought this was an important book. It showed how sexist a lot of the discussion of reproduction has always been. Well, if you were educated the way I was, you learn that sperm are on this voyage to meet the egg. It’s like a Western cowboy. There’s a damsel in distress and it goes to find her. This book turns that on its head. It says, actually, the vagina came first. Males are just trying to keep up. It’s like: which came first, the chicken or the egg? The penis or the vagina? Well, the vagina definitely came first. The most important thing for mammals is that they have to give birth, so foremost, the vagina has to accommodate this cantaloupe-sized head coming out of it while also obtaining sperm. That has driven all sorts of different male ways to deal with the vagina. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter As a result, the penis can have all these different shapes. It has to fit the vagina. She talks about duck vaginas, which are spiral-shaped, and duck penises, which are spiral-shaped in reverse. There’s also this thing called ‘cryptic female choice’: all the ways female animals have developed to decide who the father of their children are going to be. Some can make chemicals that lead particular sperm to the egg, some can just get rid of the sperm and the egg—spontaneous abortion—and all these other ways to decide who is going to be the father. It’s called cryptic because the male doesn’t know, nobody knows what’s happening on the inside. All of these are evolutionary traits that basically trick the penis. These evolved to give the female animal more ability to evade poor mates and choose the best ones. She also talks about amazing reconstructive surgeries; women who have had their clitoris removed as part of genital mutilation can undergo surgeries to reconstruct it. Luckily around 90% of the nerves are still under the surface, so they bring those back up. And she talks about gender affirming surgeries, in which they invert penises and turn them into vaginas—surgeons can take out the testicles and use the skin to make the labia. Oh, and—ovaries are also there for generating hormones like oestrogen. Oestrogen is not just something that women need, men need it too; if you don’t have oestrogen, you never stop growing. We also thought it was special because it tackled a topic that people hadn’t written that much on before. And it was pretty funny as well. It felt like a book that needed to be published, and it was chock full of information."