What the 17th Century Can Teach Us About Vaginas

[ismnotwasm]

Think back to the last time you heard a hymen or a scrotum lovingly described. Have you ever? There’s a lamentably utilitarian slant to the way we talk about genitals these days. Our language might be clinical or obscene, but it’s rarely interesting or companionable; one rarely hears the hymen described as “the great Clove Gilly-flower when it is moderately blown” (as Helkiah Crooke did in 1615) or imagines the cervix the way 17th-century midwife Jane Sharp did, as “the head of a tench, or of a young kitten.” Our language for sex is impoverished, but so is our language for the relevant parts.

Things could be otherwise, and in 16th- and 17th-century England, they were: The anatomy books and midwifery guides of the period are rife with weird, creative, wonderful formulations for the reproductive organs. The key difference between then and now is that male and female genitals were imagined as identical parts, just somewhat rearranged. Jane Sharp — the midwife who sees young kittens in cervixes — puts it best, I think: “The Matrix is like the Yard turned inside outward, for the neck of the womb is as the Yard … and Stones are like the Cods, for the Cods turned in have a hollowness, and within the womb lie the Stones and seed vessels.” In other words, the vagina and uterus were basically an inside-out penis, with testes and ovaries reconfigured accordingly. (If that’s unclear, here’s an NSFW illustration of this account of the female reproductive system — its phallic qualities will be obvious.) That’s a major conceptual shift in what we talk about when we talk about sex. If you consider a vagina a penis turned inside out (rather than just a hole for a penis to fill), sex becomes symbolically different, and gender gets a lot more flexible. Men and women are no longer opposites — they become variations on a single gender.


Natural philosophy was coming into its own during this period: Andreas Vesalius published his definitive guide to human anatomy with its famously dramatic poses in Italy in 1543. The Royal Society was founded in 1660. All over Europe, curious pioneers were making observations, conducting experiments, and trying to generate not just explanations but metaphors that explained the relationship between nature and society — bees, for instance, were nature's argument for the monarchy as a system of government. Above all, though, the natural philosophers were trying to come up with a set of scientific best practices and reconcile new discoveries with classical wisdom.

The idea of men and women as inverted versions of each other — or warmer and cooler products of the same basic ingredients in the womb — dates back to the Greeks. That understanding of gender survived even as knowledge of anatomy increased, and its symbolic and cultural consequences in early modern England were huge. If men and women both had essentially the same parts, they both produced “seed.” If they both needed to achieve orgasm in order for that seed to be released and conception to occur, then female desire was essential to the human race. So was female pleasure, the pursuit of which formed a significant component of 16th- and 17th-century guides to anatomy and obstetrics. That logic shaped the cultural understanding of how sex worked. (It wasn’t until the 18th century, with the unhappy discovery that women could get pregnant while unconscious, that female pleasure fell out of our modern understanding of reproduction.)

http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/09/describing-a-vagina-the-16th-century-way.html

[theHandpuppet]

1. Fascinating.

Thanks for posting this.

[jakeXT]

2. They rediscovered the clitoris in the 17th century

The work of De Graaf indicates that clitoral anatomy was
rediscovered again in the 17th century. In 1672 he wrote,
“We are extremely surprised that some anatomists make no
more mention of this part than if it did not exist at all in the
universe of nature. In every cadaver we have so far dissected
we have found it quite perceptible to sight and touch.”
The work by De Graaf in the 17th century seems to be the first
comprehensive account of clitoral anatomy.

Thus, for periods as long as 100 years anatomical knowl-
edge of the clitoris appears to have been lost or hidden,
presumably for cultural reasons. The work of Kobelt men-
tions yet other claimants for the discovery of the clitoris.

Kobelt and De Graaf.
The 2 most influential and detailed descriptions of clitoral anatomy have been those
of De Graaf and Kobelt, both of which have been translated
into English. De Graaf described the bulbs, calling them
plexus retiformis: “The constriction of the penis (by the fe-
male) previously mentioned is assisted in a wonderful way by
those bodies which, when the fleshy expansions arising from
the sphincter have been removed.”
Lowry attributed the discovery of the bulbs to De Graaf.
The account of De Graaf is the only one ascribing a physiological role to the clitoral bulbs.

Kobelt provided a clear perspective of clitoral anatomy as it was in the 1840s.
“In this essay, I have made it my principal concern to show that the female possesses a structure
that in all its separate parts is entirely analogous to the male;

http://www.firenode.net/sexualite/sources/oconnell-etal-clitoris.pdf

And Leonardo da Vinci's interlocking theory from the 15/16th century caused some misconceptions even centuries later, although I'm not so sure what I'm seeing in his drawings.
http://discoveringdavinci.tumblr.com/post/56644213305/leonardo-was-the-first-to-realize-the-function-of

As a sexual anatomist, the late 19th-century gynaecologist Robert Latou Dickinson was car lengths ahead of his time. The earliest anatomists could study cadavers to learn what sex organs looked like, but cadavers couldn't tell you how male and female organs fit together and what exactly they got up to inside the woman. One of the earliest theorists was Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo's coition figures showed the penis pushed clear through the opening of the cervix. Marriage manual author Marie Carmichael Stopes had the two interlocking and many of her contemporaries held that infertility was due to a faulty coupling.

Dickinson laid the hokum to rest by sliding test tubes up the vaginas of agreeable patients and peering through with a headlamp. Wielding his test-tube spyglass, Dickinson ascertained that head-on penis to cervix contact was rare and interlocking highly unlikely. A century later, magnetic resonance imaging put the notion to rest for certain. A pair of Dutch street acrobats named Jupp and Ida were scanned in the act inside an MRI tube at the University of Groningen, by Willibrord Weijmar Schultz and Pek van Andel, who claimed Leonardo's coition figures as their inspiration.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/appointments/probing-questions/story-e6frgckf-1111116528006

[awoke_in_2003]

3. Sex in an MRI...

I bet the MRI tech never expected to see such things while in school

[jakeXT]

6. I bet they had to figure out how to fit two people in there

[nomorenomore08]

4. "Men and women are no longer opposites — they become variations on a single gender."

I've always thought that there were greater differences among the sexes than between them. Men and women are more alike than they think they are.

Fascinating article. Thank you for posting.

[seabeyond]

5. over the years of research and listenin. i am having a harder and harder time finding the difference

[nomorenomore08]

7. You know what "just-so stories" are, right? When people would make up improbable stories to explain

e.g. why zebras have stripes? A lot of this evo-psych/"men are from Mars..." stuff reminds me of that. It's modern-day mythology.