Vaginas are an unfair source of widespread
confusion and embarrassment: Plenty of us don’t know how they work or what they
look like. But it’s not just popular culture that gets vaginas
wrong.
Scientific and medical minds long misunderstood female anatomy. We
didn’t even fully know how the cli**ris worked until 2009, and even today, many
textbooks still misrepresent female s*xual anatomy.
Of course, we have it
better than women in centuries past, when blatant misogyny shaped much of the
mainstream cultural and medical understanding of women’s bodies. Early
mansplaining about women’s bodies were used to validate sexist legal policies,
keep women out of school and generally make humankind squeamish about the female
form. Here are some of history’s craziest myths about vaginas:
1. Watch
out, some women’s vaginas have teeth!
The myth of the toothed v**ina,
called v**ina dentata, was a legitimate anxiety expressed in cultural folklore
everywhere from Russia to Japan to India. In many of these myths, brave men
needed to remove or break these vaginal teeth before safely sexing up their lady
friends.
2. Women’s vaginas are just penises that got cold.
Galen,
a second-century Greek physician, believed that the body was ruled by “humor”
fluids. Men typically had “hot and dry” humors while women had inferior “cold
and wet” humors.
Under his theory, women and men had the same s*xual
system, but because women were “cold,” their s*xual organs had simply moved
inside their bodies to keep warm. In early medical illustrations, women’s s*xual
organs were labeled in comparison to their male counterparts; ovaries were
“female testicles.”
3. Educate a woman, and you’ll ruin her lady
parts.
This theory is brought to you by 19th-century Harvard Medical
faculty member Henry H. Clark who spent his life fighting the good fight to keep
women out of school.
He said that women’s brains couldn’t handle the same
strain as men’s, and that ladies who pursued a college education risked
stressing their brains and destroying their wombs.
Other scientists of
the time also cautioned that over-developing the feminine brain would make the
uterus shrivel up. In this sexist fantasy world, women especially needed to
avoid thinking while on their period. Ugh.
4. Women can’t get pregnant
unless they have consensual s*x.
In 2012, former House Representative
Todd Akin and his merry band of anatomically-confused Republicans helped revive
this terrible myth. Maybe they were inspired by the 13th-century British legal
text, Fleta, which said that “without a woman’s consent she could not conceive,”
and thus could be used to invalidate a woman’s r*pe accusation if she had become
pregnant. The belief lived on through [terrible]CUT 19th century medical books,
to misguided politicians today.
5. Sideways vaginas = a
thing.
Think of this as early “bro-natomy.” The rumour that Asian women
had sideways vaginas originated as racist humour amongst gentlemen visiting
Chinese prostitutes in California brothels in the mid-1800s. The rumour was part
of the larger cultural fetishizing of Asian women, and persisted through the
Korean War, because some people enjoy their misogyny with a side of
racism.
6. Beware: Woman’s menstrual blood is potentially life
threatening to men.
Menstrual blood has been considered dangerous to men
in a number of cultures. A first century Roman Encyclopedia notes that Roman
Pliny observed that “hailstorms, they say, thunder, and even lighting will be
scared away” by a menstruating woman, while “meat will become sour and fruit
will fall from the tree beneath which she sits.”
Period-shaming
continued, and in the 19th century, it was commonly thought that a man could
contract gonorrhea from having s*x with a woman who was on her
period. |
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