Unexplainable - The Vagina Voyages
Episode Date: September 15, 2025Join our friends at The Longest Shortest Time for a deep dive into the misunderstood world of vaginas. We’ll learn about orgasm-chasing royalty, clitoral wingspans, vagina lollipops, wandering wombs..., and why we still know so little about the anatomy of half the people on Earth. Guests: Hillary Frank, host, The Longest Shortest Time; Rachel E. Gross, science writer For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscripts For more, go to vox.com/unexplainable And please email us! unexplainable@vox.com We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: vox.com/members Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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slash safety. This is
Unexplable. I'm Julie Longoria.
Today, we have an episode
from our friends at the podcast
The Longest Shortest Time.
I've been a long-time listener of the show.
Host Hillary Frank
tells fascinating and heartbreaking
stories about parenthood and
reproductive health, but you definitely
don't need to be a parent to listen.
In the episode, we'll share with you today,
Hillary talks to science writer
Rachel Gross about
vaginas.
Scientists know shockingly little about this part of the body.
So Rachel went on a mission to find out why.
Here's the host, Hilary Frank.
Rachel Gross has a vivid memory of sex ed in fourth grade.
Being in a dark room with all the other fourth grade girls and their moms learning about periods.
And my mom was not there because she was like a doctor on call.
But I remember like trying to understand and having nothing.
never heard about a period and like asking a question. And I asked, so is it like peeing where you can
control it and like hold it in? And they all laughed at me. Oh, that's such a good question.
Thank you. All the moms laughed at me. But I like never ever wanted to ask a question again
after that. And I was left with this impression that like sex stuff was something you should
already know. And if not, you shouldn't ask about it. But Rachel's need to ask about. But Rachel's need to
ask about it could not be suppressed. In fact, she's made a career of asking about it.
She's a science writer, and a lot of her work is about sex stuff, specifically the vagina.
Rachel wrote a whole book about vaginas. It's called vagina obscure an anatomical voyage. That's right,
a voyage. I was really thinking about, like, Miss Frizzle and her magic school bus and kind of
taking this deep dive into the human body as if it was like the, the, you know, the, you know,
core of the Earth or a planet out in space.
This is the longest, shortest time.
I'm Hillary Frank, and today you're in for a treat,
because Rachel Gross is here to take us on a vaginal voyage.
You're going to learn things you didn't know,
things I didn't know, things Rachel didn't know before writing this book.
Here at the longest shortest time, we love telling stories about stuff that's hard to
understand.
For example, our episode, Mama Don't Understand, about a mixed race
kid who tries to communicate to her white mom what it means to be black through a freestyle rap.
You can find it in your podcast feed. It's the episode right before this one.
Now when Rachel set out to write her book, her mission was to understand the vagina.
And she did learn lots of cool stuff.
But as I started to do the actual reporting and research, I realized that it was also a book
about these like gaps in our knowledge and why there was so much that we didn't know
about half the bodies on earth.
So we'll also talk about those gaps and the questions Rachel still has about vaginas.
So your book, Vagina Obscura, walks us through female reproductive anatomy from the outside in.
And I thought we could do something similar here.
So let's start with the outside, the stuff we can see.
Let's start with the clitoris.
My favorite.
Before I read your book, I thought the clitoris was the lyrus.
was the little nub above the opening of the vagina.
Me too.
And I have gone and asked, like, my male editor, my husband,
what do you think the clitoris is?
Amazing.
And they both were like, oh, it's the little nub, right?
So can you describe what the clitoris actually is?
Yeah.
And I love that you just went and, like, asked them that.
And that's something I really admire, actually.
Yeah.
So the actual clitoris, let's start with, you know, I don't love calling it like that nub, but
because we all know where that is, we all can like see or touch it. We'll just start with that.
That's kind of like the beak of the clitoris. It's kind of the tip of the iceberg.
The beak.
Yeah. Well, I think of the clitoris often as sort of a like bird-like or alien-like structure.
So if you think of that as a beak, there's also a shaft.
that's internal. And then from there, it kind of splits off. So there are these two arms that kind of
arc out into the pelvis, and they have a wingspan of about nine centimeters on average. And there's
two bulbs like teardrop-shaped bulbs that hugged the vagina underneath that. And the bulbs and the arms
are both made of erectile tissue, exactly the same as the columns of erectile tissue and the penis,
which just means that they can also fill with blood and grow erect when you're aroused.
And that whole structure is really, like, connected to a lot of parts of the pelvis,
including the vagina and the labia, the inner and outer labia.
And it all, like, works together.
And I think often we're kind of made to, like, fragment the parts of the female genitals
and think of them as separate.
So the clitoris to me is like this great connector that is this like majestic structure
that's just like entwined and like can't be like separated from all the parts around it.
And I basically kind of think of the penis and a clitoris as like exact same ingredients,
different configuration.
So like taco burrito.
So we know we know.
know, we now know the general bird-like shape of the clitoris, right?
Yeah.
Sorry.
Can't help myself.
What did science know about the clitoris before that was all revealed?
For centuries, actually millennia, if medicine had anything to say about the clitoris,
It was that it was like this small piece-sized structure, the nub idea.
And that it was like inappropriate to talk about.
So the first word I could find for the clitoris was like a Greek word that Hippocrates use, that I will butcher.
That's like to addion.
It means the shame part.
And anatomist following that would continue to give names basically like that.
So there was a French name that meant the shame.
member and today in like Dutch and German you still have sham lippin which is the shame lips
and refers to the labia so as you look at like the 1700s and 1800s you actually find
the anatomists come very close to describing the full clitoris so like the internal structure
that we talked about but either their discoveries are like lost or no one pays attention
or scientists criticize them and say like well these bulbs can't possibly be part of the
clitoris because the clitoris is something like tiny and diminutive. Well, maybe we should talk about
function also. What is the function of the clitoris? Yeah, right. Great point. The function of the clitoris
is to experience pleasure. I guess it's the only organ in the human body whose sole function is pleasure.
And it is very good at that. Have you ever seen that tweet that's like the clitoris has a
thousand nerves and still isn't as sensitive as a white man on the internet.
Classic tweet.
So yeah, the clitoris is very nerve dense.
However, fun fact, actually, there's more like 10,280 nerves, which is something we learned
in 2022.
Until then, we were relying on studies from the 70s on cows, possibly just one cow.
So that, to me, is a quite revealing kind of back.
story of like, wow, it really took that long to decide that it was worth doing this research
on human women and people with clitorises to understand that.
How do they do that research?
Actually, I'm glad you asked.
It's kind of amazing.
It was a gender affirmation surgeon named Dr. Blair Peters and a vulva specialist named
Dr. Maria Uloko.
And they actually used extraclytural tissue from bottom surgeries done on trans men,
which does mean the clitoris were treated with testosterone.
But, like, it was still human clitoris.
So, you know, like the exact number of nerve fibers is it that important, maybe not so much.
What's important is that this is an incredibly, like, sensitive and dense organ that
that experiences a great amount of pleasure.
And what's kind of crazy is that throughout history, a lot of thinkers, but particularly Freud,
have been convinced that people with the genesis and clitoris should only feel one kind of orgasm,
and it was the vaginal orgasm, which he basically coined.
And is biologically not really a thing?
Like, every orgasm comes in some way from the clitoris, whether it's like internally or externally
stimulated.
And for most people, clitoris, it doesn't happen much.
from missionary. So there's a lot of misinformation about, I guess, the science of sexual pleasure.
And it made me pretty enraged, I guess, writing this book to realize how many generations
were given the impression that their bodies were uniquely broken and they couldn't conform
to, like, social pressures telling them exactly how they should experience pleasure.
There's this fascinating story you tell in the book about a woman named Marie Bonaparte who plays a big role in our understanding of the clitoris. Can you tell us who Marie Bonaparte was and why was she obsessed with the clitoris and what did she learn?
Yeah, so Marie Bonaparte was a princess and a noble woman and she was a great, great.
grand-niece of Napoleon, and she, in her 40s, became a patient of Freud and then a bestie of Freud,
which is important of the story. She actually ended up helping smuggle him out of France when the Nazis
invaded, and he was buried in a Grecian urn that she gave him as a gift. Oh, wow. So, like,
there was, it's just, like, a fascinating kind of connection that I was never aware of,
and just, like, the kind of the mythology of Freud.
often doesn't mention this, like, pretty important connection relationship in his life.
And so Marie always wanted to be a doctor, but her father basically forbade that because he needed
her to focus on marrying rich because the family inheritance was not doing so well.
But she was always very, like, sexually adventurous, actually, especially after she got married.
She described her affairs pretty openly, including one with the French prime minister.
She wrote a lot about them in her journals and in letters that I was able to read at the Library of Congress.
So she basically rarely possibly never had an orgasm when she was having these sexual encounters.
And she really, really wanted to.
And as she started reading Freud, she thought she figured out her problem.
And she basically said that her clitoris seemed to be this center of her power and pleasure.
but also it was like inappropriately masculine.
And Freud had written that at some point, like a woman needs to give up her clitoris as her source of pleasure and transfer her orgasm to the vagina, which like, again, is scientifically impossible and makes no sense.
Why did he say that?
This is kind of the root of penis envy.
So, yeah, the idea of penis envy was like at some point a little girl.
realizes that she doesn't have what a little boy has and that she's kind of like envious for the
rest of her life. Okay, so back to Marie Bonaparte. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So she felt like she was
too masculine and this made her frigid in the parlance of the time. And she wanted to know how other
women were handling the situation. So she actually ended up like fulfilling her lifelong dream of being a
researcher, a medical researcher, and she started doing research. She followed around like hundreds of
women to their gynecology appointments, and she would ask them very like intimate sexual questions.
I would love to know how she did this, but she did it. And what she concluded was that women
who were having regular orgasms during intercourse had clitoris that were closer to their vagina.
Was she measuring?
Yes, sorry.
She was also taking measurements of the distance between the clitoris and the urethra or clitoris and vagina.
Like at their gynecology appointments?
Dude, there are not details in the methodology on this paper, but I would love to see.
I don't know if she's like asked the gynecologist, but she does have diagrams.
Yeah, incredible.
And she published these in a medical journal under a pen name.
A male pen name?
A male pen name, yes.
So she basically did this research and then she decided, like, you know, Freud had famously said anatomy is destiny.
And she was like, well, I disagree. I'm not okay with this situation. What if I just changed my anatomy and therefore changed my destiny?
So she decided to get genital surgery to move her clitoris closer to her vagina.
Wow, because of her hypothesis that the shorter distance meant you were.
were more likely to have an orgasm.
Exactly.
So, spoiler, that did not turn out well for her.
She had it done a few times, and it was not good.
I mean, this was the 1920s.
Any sort of surgery is not going to be fun, let alone that one.
But it didn't give her the outcome that she wanted.
It seems so obvious that surgically cutting and moving the most nerve-downs,
part of your body would not result in pleasurable feelings.
Yet another example of how following misguided medical advice can lead to a terrible outcome.
More on that later.
But when we come back, Rachel will share some amazing research being done on vaginas and what she says we still need to understand.
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Okay, let's move on in our journey and our voyage and talk about the vagina.
First, let's define what that is.
Yeah, the vagina is like the muscular tube that connects the vulva, which is like the outside genitalia, the stuff that you can see in touch with the uterus and the cervix.
And the cervix is, people hate when I say this, but it's like the muscle.
muscular donut that like keeps the uterus closed, I guess. So it's the connecting tube. It's a
stretchy tube. So you found that the penis has been studied far more than the vagina,
which sadly is not surprising. But there's an amazing passage from your book about this,
and I'd like to have you read it. Okay. So can you open your book to page?
63.
Yeah.
And then this is the paragraph starting with biologists love penises.
Great.
Biologists love penises.
And with good reason, there's some of the most wildly varying organs in the animal kingdom.
There are penises that can taste, smell, and sing.
Ones that look like corkscrews, crowbars, and glowing blue lightsabers.
A penis can stretch up to nine times your body length, if you're a bone.
barnacle, be a detachable tentacle covered in suckers, if you're an argonaut octopus, or even
sea, using light-sensing cells that guide it to its destination, if you're a Japanese yellow swallow-tail
butterfly. They're also easy to study. Penises kind of just hang out, in contrast to the more
internal female apparatus. So that is like beautiful writing. It's very poetic. It's clear that penises are
fascinating. But it seems like vaginas would be too. So why haven't they been studied as much?
Great question. Side note, took my fact checker and I, like, two hours to confirm the glowing
blue lightsabers. Description, it's a form of like tropical slug, but she was like, that can't be
true. So we were like sending Google images back and forth, and they do exist. So happily,
that statement could remain.
Amazing.
Yeah.
I mean, that is the question.
And if you talk to biologists, many male biologists, they will often say that the female genitals are internal and that makes them harder to study.
And I don't know, I just wasn't buying that.
Like, we put like a rover on Mars.
Like you're telling me, we really can't study vaginas.
So I ended up talking to the vagina biologist, I guess.
Her name is Patty Brennan, and she's a Colombian biologist at Mount Holyoke University in Massachusetts.
And she was, I guess, the first person to really dissect a duck vagina.
And she had been looking actually at penises and birds, which are only in like one to two percent of birds.
and they get a lot of attention because there are these really crazy structures that are like corkscrew shaped,
like torture devices that just like spring out of the mail.
Ouch.
Yeah.
I mean, both ouch and also like, I guess they deserve a lot of attention because they're wild.
But until her basically no one that said like, okay, so that penis is not like just for show.
It's interacting with a vagina.
so what is the vagina doing? And when she started looking, she found that the vagina was like equally
complex and crazy and kind of was like this like roller coaster that had all these curves and turns
and even like blind alleys where sperm went to die. So it was very complex and it was like in conversation
with that penis. So this researcher, Patty Brennan, who you've been talking about,
She told you that she makes vagina lollipops for a living. Can you explain what that means?
Yes. So I just want to mention that the technique itself is kind of amazing. She wanted to make molds of vaginas, which are internal structures. So you would have to like put something up there and take it out, like a cast. And so she talked to a dentist about how to use dental latex. So the same way they might make like a mold of your,
teeth to make a retainer. And so she invited me to make vagina lollipops with her on snakes. And so snakes
have two vaginas because the males have kind of this forked penis, the hemipine. So we were
putting the dental latex up there, letting it harden, and then like gently removing it with a toothpick.
And the result was this like two-headed lollipop. Wow. On a lot of stuff.
snake or? Oh no. Very dead snake. Yeah, it was pretty gross. To me, like, actually I was really
amazed because I was like kind of gagging a little bit and there were all these like parasites
and they were like getting on her iPhone, but she was so excited. She was like taking all these
photos and she wasn't like noticing because she was just like so engaged. I was like, damn.
I also found out then that snakes have clitorises.
They have clitorises, which she wrote a paper about later.
Oh, ha-ha.
Sorry.
So sorry.
So like in addition to making a lot of vaginal molds, she was kind of trying to find clitoris
in almost every type of animal.
So she was kind of like remapping the genital landscape of life on earth.
Earlier, you read your list of the variations in penises across different species.
After meeting Dr. Brennan, do you have a vagina equivalent list?
That's great.
Yes.
She had looked at dolphin clitorises, which are like the size of a double-A battery, and like bonobos have massive clitoris that can have erections up to 2.5 inches long.
but I'm pretty sure that my favorite is the kangaroo vagina because kangaroo's actually
have three vaginas.
So they have like, I know, I just love this fact.
And I love that if you look it up, like there are a lot of diagrams online because people
were just like, what?
So, yeah, I don't know.
I think about this at least like once a week.
There's like one common portal and then it splits off.
There's like one middle vagina and two side vaginas.
and the side ones are for sperm uptake, and the middle one is for Joey ejection.
Joey ejection, where the baby is born?
Yeah, for delivering the baby.
But that basically means that a kangaroo can be pregnant at all times because she has two uteruses,
so I feel really bad for those kangaroos.
So all of this research that Dr. Brennan has done, it's really cool and interesting.
Does it apply to humans?
What Dr. Brennan told me was that when she was looking into, I think, dolphin vaginas
and having this idea of making the kind of lollipops or latex casts,
she was looking at what we know about the anatomy of human vaginas
and realized that we actually know a lot less than we know about even some animal vaginas.
I think there was one tampon company that had started to kind of measure vaginal sizes and shapes,
but then I think ran out of funding. So there's kind of been this assumption in gynecology
that if a vagina can stretch and incorporate a penis and deliver a baby that's good enough,
we don't really need to know the exact anatomy.
So we don't have a good understanding of the diversity of human vaginas.
This tampon study, by a now-defunct company called Tam Brands,
was supposed to determine whether they should modify their tampon design to better fit most vaginas.
This study actually used the dental latex technique 10 years before Patty Brennan.
It's where she got the idea to make vagina lollipops in the first place.
It turned out that vagina shape didn't matter for something like a tampon because a tampon can expand to fit any vagina.
But Rachel says the same kind of research would have been helpful for tailoring vaginal devices and medications
and for having reference models for vaginal reconstructive surgery, which we still don't really have.
And like I've talked to doctors who say that like in their field, the vulva is basically like a small city in the Midwest.
And OBGYN's like, they drive through it to get to their real destination, which is the uterus where like real medicine happens because that's where you do like pap smears and IUDs and childbirth.
Rachel also wishes we knew more about the vaginal microbiome, which would teach us about how to prevent and battle long-term vaginal infections and STIs and pregnancy problems like preterm birth.
She says she's hopeful because there are some studies in progress that could help with these kinds of.
issues. But for now, like an OBGYN on a mission, we're going to head to the uterus, which,
and this will shock you, has been understudied as well.
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So take us deeper on our voyage.
Let's go to the uterus and ovaries.
First, can you just remind us what these organs are?
For sure.
So the ovaries are the two like kind of almond-sized glands on either side of the uterus.
And they do produce eggs.
But I think like almost more importantly, they're these hormone powerhouses
that help power almost like every organ in the body for most of your life.
So like your bone health, your blood, your brain help.
Like ovaries are supporting all of those by producing estrogen, some testosterone,
and other hormones as well.
And even after menopause, they may be producing some.
And the uterus is a very muscular organ that's like the size of a fist.
and it's most famous for creating and delivering babies,
but it also is really dynamic throughout a person's life.
It is creating a new lining every month and then shedding it and then starting over,
which is menstruation.
So there are some really wild myths about the uterus that doctors and scientists used to believe.
Can you name what some of those are?
Yeah, I think the most well-known myth is that of like the wandering womb. And that was an idea in like ancient Greece that the uterus was kind of an animal that like wander throughout the body in search of like sex and blood. And if he wasn't getting those things, then it would like wreak havoc and cause like health issues and like asphyxiation and face.
which got tied in with this idea of hysteria. So hysteria, the idea that women are uniquely
neurotic and prone to like nervous breakdown was often connected with their reproductive organs,
either the uterus or the ovaries. So very common surgery in the late 1800s was the removal
of healthy ovaries in the thought that it would cure forms of like insanity as it was thought of
at the time, including hysteria. And I write a lot in the book about endometriosis, which is a disorder
in which, like, bits of tissue start growing throughout the pelvis, usually, that are very
similar to the lining of the uterus, and they try to grow and then shed in a way that can be
immensely painful and, like, harmful to your other organs. And, like, very little was known
about this disorder for centuries, even though about one in ten people with uteruses have it.
And it was sometimes described as like the new hysteria.
And part of the reason was that doctors were just kind of like, huh, happens to women,
a lady thing, like mysterious pain that they thought kind of made them look crazy or emotional.
because they hadn't looked at the biological basis of it.
And I talked to women who were told that they should just get pregnant
in order to fix their endometriosis.
Pregnancy is a bonkers prescription for any disease,
but especially for endometriosis,
where infertility is a known complication.
And to make things even more confusing,
another common remedy doctors have prescribed for endometriosis
is hysterectomy, removing the uterus,
a surgery that leaves you incapable of becoming pregnant.
These approaches are opposite and extreme.
And it's kind of like, what's that phrase about like just using a hammer to do some like tiny job?
It's kind of like the nuclear option.
In her reporting, Rachel found plenty of examples of doctors taking extreme actions for all sorts of issues surrounding the vagina.
If you've got a vagina, chances are you've got your own version of this story.
I've got mine. Like when a doctor suggested that in order to cure my pain from my episiotomy scar,
she would just graft skin from inside my vagina and pull it to the outside. Or when another told me
the answer was to have a second baby so my scar would blow open and heal better.
Rachel has her own nuclear option story. Well, I often tell this story about how when I was 29,
I was once prescribed rat poison for my own vagina.
Like literal rat poison.
Like literal rat poison.
Like the gynecologist told me that if I looked it up on the internet, it was going to say this is rat poison.
It's called boric acid.
So this was like a last resort prescription after I'd had this like months long bacterial infection.
And they tried like antifungals, anti-bacterial.
materials and nothing had worked. So my gynecologist told me go to the pharmacy and get boric acid,
and it came in these big plastic capsules that looked basically like antibiotics. And they were actually
suppository, so you had to put them up in your vagina every night and then like lay on your back.
But one night I was like very exhausted and I woke up in the middle of the night and I was in the
bathroom and, like, remember that I had to take this pill, and I got confused, and I swallowed it.
So I swallowed my vagina poison, and I ended up in the ER, and at that point, I have to tell the
doctors that I have swallowed rat poison that was supposed to go on my vagina.
Rachel wound up being fine.
She hadn't swallowed enough boric acid for it to be lethal or even that harmful, and the infection
eventually went away.
though she's not sure the rat poison helped.
But after her long vaginal voyage,
talking to doctors and patients and scientists,
one thing is clear.
We need more research on female anatomy.
We still are not capable of seeing sperm enter the uterus
and unite with an egg,
or the fertilized eggs journey down the fallopian tube to the uterus.
We haven't seen what it looks like
when endometriosis legions take root.
All we have are fuzzy snapshots from,
ultrasounds or views of cells outside the body under a microscope.
Not doing these studies means that like we continue to have worse health care and shitty solutions
like boric acid. And I mean, like look at our maternal death rate. Like we clearly need
more studies even in fertility. And we just like don't fully understand how all these parts work
together and the vast variation of anatomies. There are myths like the idea that the G-spot
is this magic button that you can just press and we know where it is. And really, everyone's
anatomy is different in a beautiful way. How is it different? Nobody knows. We haven't done those studies.
What we do know is that we've been studying female anatomy in a really narrow way that I would argue
mostly has to do with disease and reproduction.
And that leaves so much by the wayside that has to do with, like, quality of life and pleasure
and pain.
And a theme of a lot of what I write is, like, that really warps the kind of scientific knowledge
you're going to get and has actually resulted in, like, worse health care for millions of people.
Rachel says things are improving slowly, especially with treatment around end of
And she kind of wishes we didn't call reproductive organs, reproductive organs, because
them we're not recognizing that creating babies is only one function of these organs.
They also provide pleasure, and they play an active role in overall health, including the
brain and moods and neurological conditions.
So sometimes I say like the vagina at all or the vagina and friends, the pelvic organs
is a super clinical way of looking at it.
Rachel's book about the vagina and friends is called Vagina Obscura.
You can find a link to it in the show notes or at our website,
Longest Shortest Time.com.
We've also got links to other incredible writing she's done
and depictions of the vagina and friends that are better than any images you saw in SexEd,
including 3D models of the clitoris and its bird-like structure.
This episode was produced by me, Hillary Frank,
with support from Elizabeth Nakano.
Our technical director is Michael Rayfield, music composed by Allison Layton Brown and performed by hotmoms.gov.
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