Science Vs - The G Spot: Come Again?

Episode Date: May 20, 2021

We’re heading into a big summer, with more places and — ahem — people opening up. So we’re revisiting one of our favorite episodes about feeling good. Maybe you’ve heard about this magic button in the vagina that can cause amazing orgasms. What’s going on with it? Join us on a hunt for the elusive G spot. Our guides: Prof. Beverly Whipple, who introduced America to the G spot in the 1980s, and Prof. Helen O’Connell, a urologist and expert on female sexual anatomy.  Get the transcript here: https://bit.ly/3bGtui5 Credits: This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman and Heather Rogers, with help from Austin Mitchell and Kaitlyn Sawrey. Edited by Caitlin Kenney, Blythe Terrell, Annie Rose Strasser and Alex Blumberg. Fact checking by Michelle Harris and Taylor White. Production Assistance by Dr. Diane Wu and Shruti Ravindran. An extra big thanks to Dr Lola Pellegrino, Andreas Montoya Castillo, Rose Reid, and Radio National’s The Science Show. Sound design by Matthew Boll, Martin Peralta and Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bobby Lord, Peter Leonard and Emma Munger.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. This is the show where we pit facts against foreplay. Many of us have been cooped up for months, but now it's spring. Birds are bonking, squirrels are all squirrely, and even flies are getting fresh. So over at Science Versus, we thought it was a great time to revisit one of our favorite episodes. It's about the great mystery of the G-spot. Does it exist or not? This episode is super fun. We talk a lot about genitals. Parents, if this will open up a conversation that you're not ready to have right now, you've been warned. All right, let's get into it. We're in 1981. Roger Moore was still James Bond. Sandra Day O'Connor was to become the first woman appointed to the US Supreme Court.

And the Phil Donahue show had been broadcasting to the nation for more than a decade. Today on that show, something that would change the way we talk about vaginas for decades to come. What we're about to discuss has to do with sexuality and it has to do with women and it has to do with orgasm. A nurse named Beverly Whipple was about to bravely tell the nation of something exciting inside the vagina. It was a spot that if pressed would give you an orgasm. If you stimulate this area what happens the orgasm occurs very rapidly usually within a minute and people often report that they have many orgasms, frequently. Many orgasms, frequently. Beverly called this magic button the G-spot.

And to find it, she said, someone could insert their fingers into your vagina, touching the front wall. But she told Phil Donahue and the rest of the United States... The best position is the female on top, where the angle of the penis will hit right into the interior wall. Missionary position just doesn't do it. Now, while Phil Donahue had a few stumbling moments... OK, now, where do we go from here? ..the audience was excited.

Honestly, I'm thrilled to think I'm here. Did you ever think the television would get to this place? No, I didn't. If my mother was alive, she dropped dead. Beverly Whipple and her talk of the G-spot were immediately shot into the limelight. Later, Cosmopolitan magazine would call Beverly one of 10 sexual revolutionaries that you should know. She was right up there with Alfred Charles Kinsey and Sigmund Freud. A lot of fanfare and a stamp of approval from Cosmo. But since that interview, many people have hunted for the G-spot. In their bedrooms and in laboratories.

And enough of them have come up empty-handed that it's raised the question, does the G-spot even exist? When it comes to sex, there's a lot of... OK, now where do we go from here? But then there's science. Science vs the G-spot is coming up just after the break. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey. No, too basic.

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It's season three of The Joy of Why, and I still have a lot of questions. Like, what is this thing we call time? Why does altruism exist? And where is Jan 11? I'm here, astrophysicist and co-host, ready for anything. That's right. I'm bringing in the A-team. So brace yourselves. Get ready to learn. I'm Jan 11. I'm Steve Strogatz. And this is... Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why. New episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February 1st. What does the AI revolution mean for jobs, for getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology, and what do they think? I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI, with the most human

issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. Hi, this is Taylor, Science Versus intern. After work, I catch up with my family and friends, and they're always asking me how can they help Science Versus. I constantly hear it from my mom. How do I promote Science Versus? My dad.

Ah, gee. Just say it. It's just one line. Oh, you just want me to say that only? Yes. How can I help Science Versus? Yes. Even my three-year-old cat, Jessica. And the answer is, listen to us on Spotify. It's free. We'd really appreciate it. Welcome back. It's pretty astonishing that there's still debate about whether an anatomical feature, any anatomical feature, exists. And yet, here we are. So let's jump in to bed with the woman from the Donoghue show, Beverly Whipple.

Producer Heather Rogers and I drove out to Beverly's house in New Jersey. These days, she's an emeritus professor of nursing at Rutgers, and she lives in a gated community. There's cookie-cutter houses and bright white fences. This is not the neighbourhood that I would have expected the G-spot to be born in. No, this is where I would expect June Cleaver to live. We walked up to her house.

Hello. Thank you so much. Beverly's sitting room is filled with family photos and books about sex. Multiple orgasmic couple, multiple orgasmic man, any man can. Oh, I don't know, sexual fitness. Next to the only retirement guide you'll ever need. We sat down and she told us her path to G-Spot fame.

It started in the 1970s. Beverly was teaching nursing when a student asked her Hey, what can a patient do sexually after having a heart attack? This answer wasn't part of the nursing curriculum But Beverly thought that it should be She wanted to add it to her course So she and her team did a bunch of work We really did a real good job and we were all excited But to get all this sex stuff added to the nursing curriculum,

it had to go through the college's board of trustees. And they told us we couldn't implement it because we'd be talking about, now listen to my word, masturbation and all those awful things. They couldn't even say masturbation correctly. Masturbation. Masturbation. Masturbation. Beverly was proud of what she'd done. And when the board said no, she ultimately quit.

Her next job would introduce her to a group of patients who were suffering from their own kind of anxiety about sex, women who peed while they were orgasming. And these women were very bothered by it. They stopped having orgasm because this occurred with orgasm and they wanted to make sure that they wouldn't have this. They thought they weren't normal and they were embarrassed. That's right, they were very embarrassed.

Some women talked about taking towels to bed with them and all these different things. And these women were about to become super important to the G-spot story. OK, so Beverly had been taught that women who couldn't control their bladders properly were supposed to have weak pelvic floor muscles. But these women didn't have that problem. Their pelvic floor muscles were fine. So she started studying these women, looking for why they might be pained during sex.

And while she was looking, she found something else. Something she wasn't expecting. So we had a nurse practitioner, myself who was a nurse practitioner or a physician, examine 400 women. And we found this sensitive area in all of the women. So when you say you examined 400 women and we found this sensitive area in all of the women. So when you say you examined 400 women, what did you do?

Can I have your vagina for a minute? All in the service of journalism. No. Beverly took producer Heather's hand for a moment and she curved Heather's finger and palm into a cylinder to look like a vagina kind of you put your fingers into the vagina and you push up with quite a bit of pressure I think you've described it as a come here motion with your hand with your fingers you use a come here motion you go all around the vaginal wall going around the vagina looking

for areas of sensitivity from 12 o'clock to one o'clock to 3 o'clock to 6 o'clock, etc., saying, how does this feel? How does this feel? And between 11 and 1 o'clock, we got a lot of smiles. Well, that feels good. Beverly says that when her team pressed that spot in the vagina of these women, it swelled. And the women, they liked it. What was it like to see the smile on women's faces and no one...

Wonderful, but we didn't know what was happening yet. Beverly scoured the literature, searching for another scientist who had spotted a similar spot. And she found one article that described what she'd seen. It was published in this pretty obscure journal in 1950 by a Dr Ernst Grafenberg, who, side note, was the inventor of the world's first IUD, the Grafenberg ring. In his paper, Ernst wrote that by his, quote, own experience of numerous women, end quote, he could always find an erotic zone on the front or anterior wall of the vagina

along the urethra. That's where you pee out of. He wrote that when pressed, this zone would give women an orgasm. And he also wrote that occasionally during their orgasms, these women would produce a fluid that is, quote, so prof matched exactly what Beverly had seen. The spot was in the same place, there was that fluid produced, and so much fluid that women were bringing towels to bed, just like Beverly's patients. She wrote up the research and presented this discovery at a meeting with her colleague, John Perry. At the presentation, there was, understandably, some excitement in the room. A colleague came up to her with an

intriguing suggestion. Said, Bev, you should call that the Whipple Tickle, which is immediately when I said to John, we're going to name this something. Sadly, she didn't go with Whipple Tickle, which is immediately when I said to Joan, we're going to name this something. Sadly, she didn't go with Whipple Tickle because, historical side note, at the time, there was this really popular ad for toilet paper from the Charmin Company. And the main character in the ad was this hapless man called Mr. Whipple, who just couldn't stop squeezing the Charmin toilet paper. Mr. Whipple, please don't squeeze the shaman. You're probably too young to remember that. But our son would hear that all the time. Hey, Mr. Whipple, don't squeeze the shaman.

And that's all I could think of was. So we immediately called it the Grafenberg spot. After Dr. Ernst Grafenberg, it soon got shortened to the G-spot. Part of the work was published in the Journal of Sex Research and from there it was picked up by the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Tribune, and that's how Beverly ultimately ended up on the Phil Donahue show. A year later, she published her first book called The G Spot and Other

Discoveries of Human Sexuality. And from there, she was invited by television network after television network to tell the world about the G Spot. The book says there is a spot inside a woman that when it is stimulated sexually, gives a woman tremendous pleasure. Today, we'll find out more about it. Won't you please welcome one of the authors of The G-Spot, Beverly Whipple.

She was introduced to famous people. At a conference, she said she rubbed shoulders with President Gerald Ford and his wife, Betty. After the conference was over, I'm walking down the beach in Maui in a bathing suit, and all of a sudden somebody goes, Beverly, Beverly, can you come here? It was Betty Ford.

She wanted to talk to me. What did she want to talk to you about? Anyway, it's just interesting to me. You brought it up. You brought it up. Yeah, but I don't have to say it. I just said she knew me in a bathing suit. She knew my name was Beverly and she called me. Was she particularly interested in your work?

She was interested in a lot of my work, yeah. She says thousands of women wrote to her, grateful for the work she was doing. People saying, thank you, you're helping me to feel normal. How did it feel to get those letters? It was wonderful. It was so affirming. It just felt great.

But with the growing fame came some controversy. After all, some people didn't want orgasms discussed so out in the open. Why do we need this? Why do we need to know there's a G-spot? You're dirty-minded little people working in a back room someplace with weird women. Enough already. I mean, enough talk about what should be a very private, personal matter. But this controversy wasn't just happening in the media.

It was also happening in labs. Because amidst all of this was this big scientific question. What exactly is the G-spot? Like, is it a bundle of nerves or an organ or a gland or something else? Because even Beverly, the G-spot's biggest cheerleader, she didn't know. In her appearance on Donahue in 1981, Beverly had a 3D model of the vagina with all the structures

around it, all in anatomical detail. I brought a model here. But the actual G-spot was literally just a green dot stuck on her model. It might as well have been a question mark. What did you think was there? I didn't know. This spot that Beverly had found to reliably and regularly produce orgasms. She had no idea why it worked or what it even was.

But once she announced it, people all around the world started looking for it. First in private, and then in public at universities. And after the break, we're going on the hunt for the G-spot. Welcome back. So Beverly Whipple has just unleashed the G-spot on the world, inspiring untold numbers of books and magazine articles and blogs and vlogs, all telling you how to find your G-spot. How do you hit a girl's G-spot? Magic.

You've got to find it. You've got to find it. You've got to work for it. Every woman has a G-spot. Magic. Good practice. You've got to find it. You've got to find it. You've got to work for it. Every woman has a G-spot. Every woman does. God bless them. Even today, people have this sense that the G-spot is kind of like a magic orgasm button. And all sorts of people have been poking around looking for it,

including Helen O'Connell, a professor of urology at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia. Testing, testing. Do you want to tell me what you had for breakfast? Some really exciting kiwi fruit, Wendy. Helen is an important part of this story, but she didn't start out looking for the G-spot. Around the time that all the news about the G-spot was breaking,

Helen was a medical student on the other side of the world, in Australia, and she was studying anatomy. the news about the G-spot was breaking, Helen was a medical student on the other side of the world, in Australia, and she was studying anatomy. And like Beverly, she was frustrated that there wasn't good information about the vagina out there and all the fun stuff around it. And Helen saw this problem really clearly every time she looked at her anatomy textbook. We had to use this book called Last's Anatomy. It did actually completely omit anatomy of the clitoris. So as a young woman... Would you say completely like there was just like a blank spot? Pretty much a blank spot. For four years running, she was using the same anatomy textbook. I had to immerse myself in this hideous book.

And so I'm a little bit probably even angry that it's so bad. And then a colleague of Helen's gave her a very different kind of book to read. She said, you won't believe this book I've got. Oh, what is it? Anyway, she said this bunch of feminists had created this set of diagrams and descriptions called A New View of a Woman's Body. The book had drawings of fingers pulling back the lips of the vagina, revealing details that Helen had never seen in her anatomy textbook. The women had made these drawings by observing each other, sometimes during sexual arousal.

But they wrote in their book that they didn't have access to dissection rooms, so they had no way to dissect cadavers and see what the vagina or clitoris looked like from the inside. They did acknowledge that they didn't have access to that and that that would have been preferable. So I remember tucking away at that age, wow, that's something we could do. After all, Helen was in medical school. She had access to cadavers. And so once she finished her

training as a urologist, Helen convinced her university to let her use their cadavers so that she could finish the work that this feminist collective had started and dissect the clitoris once and for all. This was the final frontier. Helen put on her gloves and went to work. And then I could see what the anatomy of the clitoris was like and thought, well... What Helen found might not come to mind when you think of the clitoris, that bit that you see.

It's only part of this organ. It's literally the clit of the iceberg. What Helen found was that the clitoris is this large, complicated organ with two arms that extend down. They're called the bulbs. And then two legs that go back for up to nine centimetres. That's three and a half inches down. They're called the bulbs. And then two legs that go back for up to nine centimetres. That's three and a half inches down. They're called the crura.

You want to see a photograph? I do want to see a photograph. It is a hell of a photograph. So this is a fresh cadaver. So look at the amazing colour. Isn't that incredible? The sort of blue-purple. You know, you could imagine that when aroused that they would

really engorge. It is a huge structure. It's pretty big. Yeah. The shape of the entire super clitoris is actually quite hard to describe. Helen gave it a go. So there's kind of long, you know, that's a sort of wishbone shape, the crura. Okay, okay, let me have a crack, let me have a crack.

All right, so you're lying on your back. So imagine that the opening of the vagina is a mouth, kind of like a pursed little mouth. Okay. So flanked around that mouth is like a thick mustache, kind of like a Burt Reynolds mustache, you know, those handlebars. Okay. So that is the bulbs. And then draped along the top of the handlebar mustacheoustache is this longer moustache, like a ninja moustache. Yes, okay, so that is the crura. Right, so two moustaches on top of each other, vagina is the mouth. Exactly, now we know what the clitoris looks like. Bottom line, the clitoris is big and much more complex than a lot of people, even researchers and doctors, had thought.

And once Helen saw the clitoris and all its various parts up close, her personal experience and scientific understanding at last came together. To her, the idea that all the amazing sensations that you can get during orgasm could come anatomically from a little spot, it just seemed wrong. If all you see is that external view, so all you see is kind of the tip of the clitoris, but you know from the inside that there's much more happening

in your experience, you know, the pleasurable feelings come from more than the glance. It was taking the focus from a kind of illogical place to a more logical place. So it's sort of married with people's experience much more. Helen published her detailed descriptions of the clitoris in 1998. And at the time, oh boy, did it get people's attention. Both in Australia. What's the difference between a clitoris and a pub? Well, the answer is an Australian bloke can always find the pub.

Dr. Helen O'Connell is a urological surgeon. And around the world. Headlines on Helen's work about the clitoris included The Purr Factor, Sexist Science Misses a Mountain, and the very classy Men's Health magazine went with Guess What She Has. But guess what she didn't have. There was something that Helen didn't find in all her research.

The G-spot. As part of researching the anatomy of the clitoris, I had a good opportunity to look at vaginal anatomy and our studies, these early studies particularly, did not seem to show anything in the vaginal wall that would be a direct anatomical structure leading to that experience. So nothing special inside the vagina where the G-spot should be.

And Helen, she should know. She's looked at a lot of vaginas in her time. How many cadavers, how many vaginas do you think you've looked at in a cadaver in your career? I think we're probably, in terms of these dissections, probably getting close to 50. That's not that many, right? Yeah, that's, I would have thought that's a reasonably big experience.

No disrespect, of course. You're not impressed. There's years of work in that, Wendy. So 50 dead vaginas and no G-spot. But Helen has also looked at alive vaginas too, vaginas that have been scanned with an MRI. And it's this work in particular that makes Helen very sceptical of a G-spot inside a wall of the vagina.

You see, Helen says that if you were looking for something that could give you an orgasm, a good candidate would be an area with a lot of blood vessels, something that would swell. Swelling might help activate nerve endings, making an area more sensitive. What we do know is that regardless of gender, a sure sign of sexual arousal is increased blood flow to the genitals. And you can see this on an MRI. You can set up a scanner so that white on an area means a lot of blood vessels and black

means not a lot of blood vessels. The clitoris would become white. That's got a lot of blood flow. So where the G-spot is doesn't have the look of it, of that really sort of uniformly white structure. Now, if there was a G-spot inside the vagina, it should show up as white too. But it didn't.

Other scientists looking for the G-spot also weren't having much luck. One review of a bunch of studies on the G-spot, published in 2001, called it, quote, a sort of gynecological UFO, much searched for, much discussed, but unverified by objective means, end quote. A decade later, another review of the work looking at dozens of trials concluded that studies, quote, still fail to provide irrefutable evidence for the G-spot's existence.

And when we take a close look at Beverly's original research, it is very far from irrefutable. In fact, it's somewhat contradictory. One of her first studies in this, published in 1981, was on just one woman. A second study of 47 women found that they all had this sensitive spot, but pressing it in a lab didn't reliably produce orgasms. For any of them. A year later, she wrote a book and described 400 women who had this spot. That's what she talked about on The Phil Donahue Show.

OK, I've examined about 400 women. I found it in every single one. But this sample of 400 women was never published in a peer-reviewed journal. A later experiment in 1983 tested 11 women and found a spot in only four of them. As for that fluid that Beverly talked about when some women orgasmed? Well, studies have found that it's perfectly normal and the fluid is essentially urine with a little bit of secretions from glands around the urethra.

So, what we can see from all of this is that the so-called G-spot does nothing for some people, but for others, it does give them smiles. So, how come? but for others it does give them smiles. So how come? The consensus that Helen and other researchers have now arrived at is that what Beverly Whipple first identified as the G-spot isn't really a spot at all. It's not some second magical clitoris on the inside of the vagina. It actually is the clitoris on the inside of the vagina. It actually is the clitoris,

which is just much bigger than we had thought. So it goes all the way down from that little nub you can touch to the inside of the vaginal wall. And important to note, this super clitoris, it might not be acting alone. It could be working with the other parts around it, like the urethra and the vagina. And it's kind of, it's like a core to a pyramid. Yeah, it's sort of wrapped around the urethra and vagina. So what Helen also discovered was that the urethra and walls of the vagina share some of the same nerve

supply, and preliminary work, often using small studies, suggest that during sex the clitoris, urethra and vagina kind of push and prod and excite each other, a bit like wrestlers on a mat or puppies in a basket. So interconnected are all of these parts that Helen and others now argue that they should get their own name. Spot is out. Complex is the new word. Helen calls it a clitoral complex. Others call it a clitoral urethral vaginal complex or CUV. Catchy, huh? As catchy as it is, Helen says that we really should start using this anatomically correct term because it is anatomically correct, but also because when you use the term the G-spot, it makes it sound like all you have to do is press a button and whammo, multiple orgasms. And it's just not as easy as the mother of the G-spot, Beverly Whipple, first made it sound.

I don't have any doubt that Beverly Whipple's intentions were honourable and her findings faithful. But, you know, the upshot, if you're not enjoying this full range of experience, you know, the upshot, if you're not enjoying this full range of experience, you should be rather than just enjoying what you're enjoying, particularly if you do enjoy your sexual activity and that's not good enough somehow, you've got to go for some other level or something.

And when you call it a spot, it's like, really, you just feel like you've got to go for some other level or something. And when you call it a spot, it's like, really? You just feel like you've got to find that spot. Yeah, that somehow if you, you know, touch it enough or thrust it harder, that somehow magic's going to occur. Well, that's just a really bad paradigm. And this obsession with finding the G-spot is something that Beverly Whipple regrets unleashing on the world. Looking back at her legacy, she said she wishes she hadn't used the word spot because ultimately

it made the vagina, clitoris and orgasms just seem less complicated than they can be. Producer Heather Rogers and I asked her about what she would have done differently. I guess we've misled people because it's more than one little spot. It's a whole area. But at that point, you know, that's what we called it. So why not, like, officially change the name? How do you do that? How would you officially change the name?

If you have a way of doing it, it's fine with me. But this was way back. Nobody was doing anything. I don't know why we said Spot. I really don't. You know, John and I were talking about it. We've got to name this after Grafenberg, because look at what he did back in 1950. and it just happened. Right now, yes, I'd like to call it a sensitive area. And the thing is, Beverly says that from the beginning, she never wanted people to go searching for a spot

or hunting for magical orgasms. It's true that as far back as the early 1980s, Beverly was telling people that they shouldn't be obsessed with getting an orgasm. But instead, she always wanted people to just focus on the fun stuff around it. Sometimes holding hands or touching, whatever it is, that feels good to you, is an end in itself.

Same as some people like someone to blow on their ears. If my husband comes near my ears, even to whisper or to barf. I mean, don't, don't, don't. I love for him to suck on my big toe. That's like... But we're all different. And going back to Helen. After she described this complex clitoris,

she couldn't believe that she was the first one to have ever seen this. So Helen dug into the history books and found out that she wasn't. Centuries ago, anatomists were onto this. In 1561, Gabriel Fallopio, who named the Fallopian tubes and was a professor of anatomy at Pisa and Padua, wrote about the clitoris. He noted, quote, modern anatomists have entirely neglected it and do not say a word about it, end quote. Fallopia wrote that almost 500 years ago. Then anatomists in the 17th and 19th centuries said similar things.

In 1901, Grey's Anatomy, which is a Bible for anatomists, it had a label for the clitoris. By 1948, that label was gone. It had been totally rubbed out. By the way, we checked a recent edition. It's back. Helen says these are probably not accidents of history. People were actively deleting the clitoris from anatomy books

and those deletions ultimately created a gap that made it possible for ideas like the G-spot to take hold. Why would you start off with a good anatomy? So why wouldn't they become like the mainstay, repeat those images rather than inadequate images? Why, indeed. It's almost as if there's a power structure which throughout history has marginalised women and their experiences. But I guess we'll just never know.

Maybe it's the lizard people that aren't giving me my diagrams of the clitoris. That's science versus. There are 61 citations in this episode, and if you want to read more about the G-spot and the vagina and the clitoris, then you should head to our show notes and you'll see a link to the transcript there. And in that transcript are all of our citations. Also, remember that awesome feminist collective that wrote that anatomy book about the vaginas, but they didn't have cadavers, so they were just kind of using themselves. Well, it turns out the group of women that wrote that book were doing way more than just drawing pictures. And if you want to hear more about that, then you should go and listen to our episode called The Abortion Underground.

We'll pop a link in the show notes too. This episode was produced by me, Wendy Zuckerman, and Heather Rogers with help from Austin Mitchell and Caitlin Sorey. Edited by Caitlin Kenney, Blythe Terrell, Annie Rose Strasser, and Alex Bloomberg. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Taylor White. Production assistance by Dr Diane Wu and Shruti Ravindran. An extra big thanks to Dr Lola Pellegrino, Andreas Montoya-Castillo, and Taylor White. Production assistance by Dr Diane Wu and Shruti Ravindran. An extra big thanks to Dr Lola Pellegrino,

Andreas Montoya-Castillo, Rose Reid, and Radio National's The Science Show. Sound design by Matthew Ball, Martin Peralta, and Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bobby Lord, Peter Leonard, and Emma Munger. Now, we actually struggled for some time to describe what the clitoris looks like. I was going for a praying mantis for some time until I discovered that great moustache analogy, of course. But at some point, we did turn to the gimlet hive mind,

and here's what they thought. This looks like a pterodactyl that's been hit by a truck. It's just, like, flattened. Yeah, I mean, pterodactyl's not that crazy. You know, it almost looks like a coat hanger. Very bike rack, like a fleshy coat hanger. All of that like schoolyard terminology for a vagina, like slash dog boot. I'm Wendy Zuckerman.

I'll back you next time. It looks like one of those magic eye pictures or like the inkblot, like a cave system. And this section here, which is like looks like frozen lava flow