Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage

When Freud chose the vagina as his symbol of proper womanhood, he was drawing on what we knew from biology. This organ, he believed, had one job: to receive the penis. Its name reflects this: coined by Italian anatomist Gabriele Falloppio, “vagina” derives from the Latin for “scabbard,” “sheath,” or “close covering,” suggesting that its main function is to house a sword. (Although, oddly, the word penis comes from the Latin for “tail.”) For women to center their sexual desire on the vagina, therefore, meant to accept their role as penis recipients and baby-makers.

Your vagina is another planet. If you could shrink down to the size of a grain of sand and go between your own legs, you'd find a wondrous realm of humid jungles, cool caves, and viscous pits of mucus created by your teeming ecosystem of microscopic life. Like your gut or your mouth, your reproductive tract is home to billions of microbes, which work together to repel disease and create the ideal conditions for you. Its landscapes are populated by clusters of long, thin rods and hordes of tiny round balls that cling to its contours. These microbes live together in a delicate balance, spewing acid to stop would-be colonizers from worlds far-off (tampons, toys, penises) or nearby (the anus).

In 2004, the French parliament decided to cover reconstruction under the national health service for women who experience pain related to their cutting; it has since expanded to cover women wishing to improve their physical appearance or sexual sensation. That the surgery is free is important.

Darwin's attitudes toward women were a direct outgrowth of his ideas about other animals—or, rather, each reinforced the other. Throughout his career, he insisted that female animals were less capable and intelligent than the male of the species. In nearly every species, "it is the males that fight together and sedulously display their charms before the females; and those which are victorious transmit their superiority to their male offspring.

What if we looked beyond reproduction altogether? After all, genitalia, contrary to Darwin’s claim, do far more than just fit together mechanically. They signal, symbolize, and titillate—not just to a potential mate, but to other members of a group. In humans, dolphins, and beyond, sex serves richer and more complex purposes than solely the transfer of sperm from one party to another. It can be used to strengthen friendships and alliances, make gestures of dominance and submission, and as part of social negotiations like reconciliation and peacemaking, argues ecologist and evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden, author of the 2004 book Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People.

Medicine is supposed to be unbiased," she says. "But when we look at the bigger picture of it, we can see that it is far from that.