VAGINA OBSCURA
An Anatomical Voyage
Rachel E. Gross
Your vagina is a mystery. It is an enigma. A world that has been misunderstood, underestimated, and largely uncharted since the beginning of humankind. It is more mysterious than the Sphinx. It can seem farther away than Mars and more unknown than the ocean floor. Because, until recent decades — when people with vaginas have made painstaking headway into the realms of science and health — the pursuit of such knowledge has been left to men. They blew it, to put it mildly.
As Rachel E. Gross proves in “Vagina Obscura,” the impact of this neglect cannot be overstated. Gross takes readers on a journey across continents and cultures, as well as centuries and species, to reveal a shocking disparity in Western medicine, academia, and Western medicine: While much effort is put into understanding penises, the female anatomy is ignored. This shame and misinformation are still being passed on to girls today, just like lore.
Gross experienced this “knowledge gap” firsthand at 29, when she was prescribed what was “basically rat poison” to treat a bacterial infection in her vagina. It was then that she realized “I knew almost nothing about how my vagina worked” — and that no one else really does either.
She cites Darwin’s journal entry declaring that a woman’s purpose was to be “a nice soft wife,” “an object to be beloved and played with. Better than a dog anyhow.” Freud, who admitted he knew little about womankind (that “little creature without a penis”), would influence gynecology through the 20th century, and even today.
Not until 1993 did a federal mandate require that “women and minorities” be included in clinical trials. The National Institutes of Health only established a branch for studying vulvas, vaginas and uteruses in 2014. And in 2009, the bioengineer Linda Griffith opened America’s first and only lab (at M.I.T.) to research endometriosis. “My niece who’s 16 was just diagnosed,” Griffith says in the book. “And there’s no better treatment for her — 30 years younger than me — than there was for me when I was 16.”
In the 1980s, medical textbooks called endometriosis “the career woman’s disease” — language that had been recirculated for generations. A century earlier, coinciding with first-wave feminism in Europe, doctors — buttressed by Freud’s 1895 “Studies on Hysteria” — suggested that higher education and careers “might siphon blood from their uteruses to their brains.” In the 1870s, higher education was thought to “shrivel a woman’s ovaries and keep her from her motherly duties.”
Of course, the word “hysteria” — derived from the Greek Hysteria, or womb — has been used to degrade women for centuries, as one of the first mental health conditions attributed only to them. Gross adds to this story the argument that hysteria is endometriosis. If true, “this would constitute one of the most colossal mass misdiagnoses in human history,” according to a 2012 paper by Iranian endometriosis surgeons, one that “has subjected women to murder, madhouses and lives of unremitting physical, social and psychological pain.”
Gross undertakes a monumental task by exploring female anatomy from a historical, medical, and social perspective in eight chapters. The topics range from the glans-clitoris to egg cells to the vaginal biome to the microbiome. Some passages are too medically dense and may make some people feel uncomfortable. Gross manages to make the sawing and injecting silicone into the vaginas of two-pronged snakes palatable without reducing the gravity of the resulting revelations.
This is achieved through personal stories such as Miriam Menkin’s, who was the first researcher to fertilize a human embryo outside the body; Ghada Hatem, an OB-GYN who performs clitoral reconstruction surgery on women who have had genital cut; Aminata, a young Frenchwoman whose clitoris has been removed when she was a baby Mali; and Marci Bowers, a gynecologist who has elevated gender-affirming surgeries to an art form by prioritizing the creation of a functioning, delicate clitoris.
And it is no wonder that the clitoris has been “demonized, dismissed and left to the trash heap of history.”An organ that exists almost entirely beneath the body’s surface, it was termed “membre honteux,” or “the shameful member,” by a French anatomist in 1545. It is, in fact, the only organ of the human body whose primary function it is pleasure.
VAGINA OBSCURA
An Anatomical Voyage
Rachel E. Gross
Illustrated. 307 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $30.
Source: NY Times
