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vagina obscura
An Anatomical Journey
by Rachel E. Gross
Your vagina is a mystery, an enigma, a world largely unexplored, underestimated and misunderstood since the beginning of humanity. It holds more secrets than the Sphinx and may seem farther from Mars, more alien than the ocean floor. Because until the last decades – when people with vaginas made painstaking progress in science and health – the pursuit of such knowledge was left to men. To put it mildly, they blew it.
The impact of this neglect cannot be underestimated, as Rachel E. Gross proves in “Vagina Obscura.” Taking readers on an extensive journey across continents, cultures, centuries, and even species, Gross reveals a striking disparity in Western medicine and academia: Huge sums of money and dedication are poured into understanding the penis, while the female body is ignored. Like knowledge, this misinformation and shame is still passed on to girls today.
Gross experienced this “knowledge gap” firsthand when, at age 29, she was prescribed “basically rat poison” to treat a bacterial infection in her vagina. It was then that she realized that “I knew almost nothing about how my vagina works” – and that no one else really knew either.
He quotes Darwin’s journal entry, which states that a woman’s purpose is to be “a nice, gentle wife”, “an object to be adored and to be played with.” Better than a dog anyway.” Confessing to know very little about the female species (“little creature without a penis”), Freud would influence gynecology throughout the 20th century and even today.
Until 1993, a federal mandate did not require the inclusion of “women and minorities” in clinical trials. It was only in 2014 that the National Institutes of Health opened a branch to examine the vulva, vagina, ovaries, and uterus. And in 2009, bioengineer Linda Griffith opened America’s first and only lab (at MIT) to study endometriosis. “My 16-year-old niece has just been diagnosed,” Griffith says in the book. “And for him, who is 30 years younger than me, there is no better treatment than for me when I was 16.”
In the 1980s, endometriosis was called the “career gynecological disease” in medical textbooks – a language that has been circulating for generations. A century ago, coinciding with first-wave feminism in Europe, doctors – backed by Freud’s 1895 “Studies on Hysteria” – suggested that higher education and careers could “pull blood from their wombs into their brains.” In the 1870s, higher education was thought to “dry up a woman’s ovaries and distract her from her maternal duties”.
Of course, the word “hysteria” – is derived from the Greek. hysteria, or womb—it has been used for centuries to humiliate women, as one of the first mental health conditions attributed to them alone. Gross adds to this history the latest argument that hysteria is endometriosis from the start. If true, “it would constitute one of the most colossal mass misdiagnoses in human history,” according to a 2012 article by Iranian endometriosis surgeons that “exposed women to lives of murder, asylum, and endless physical, social, and psychological suffering.” ”
Gross takes on a herculean task by exploring female anatomy from a medical, social and historical perspective in eight chapters, ranging from the glans clitoris to the egg cell and the vaginal microbiota. Some passages are medically intense and can be frightening for the nauseous. But Gross manages to make it palatable to cut up cadavers and inject silicone into the vaginas of two-pronged snakes without diminishing the seriousness of the revelations.
It achieves this through personal stories, such as those of Miriam Menkin, the first researcher to fertilize a human egg outside the body; OB-GYN Ghada Hatem, who performed clitoral restoration surgery on women with genitalia; Aminata Soumare, a young French woman whose clitoris was cut off as a baby in Mali; and Marci Bowers, a gynecologist who elevates gender-affirming surgery to an art form, prioritizing the construction of a functioning, sensitive clitoris.
And it is not surprising that the clitoris was “demonized, sacked and left in the dustbin of history.”member honteux” or “embarrassing member” by a French anatomist in 1545. Because, extraordinarily, it is the only human organ whose primary function is pleasure.
vagina obscura
An Anatomical Journey
by Rachel E. Gross
illustrated. 307 p. W. W. Norton & Company. 30 dollars.
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