The Wonder Down Under

The Biology, Anatomy, and Reality of the Vagina

Quercus

Contents

The Genitals

Our genital area is, perhaps, our most intimate body part. It is our close companion from the moment we burst into the world from our mother's womb and first see the light of day. In nursery school we delighted in comparing innie and outie "pee-pees" as we were first becoming aware of our bodies. Then, with the onset of puberty, came the first dark hairs on our pubic areas. We all remember our first period, whether the moment was filled with pride or terror. Perhaps you began to masturbate and found you could make your body curl up in pleasure. Then came your sexual debut, with all that entails in the way of vulnerability, curiosity, and desire. Perhaps you have had children and have experienced the enormous changes your sex organs undergo, and the miracles they are capable of performing. No matter your experience to this point, one thing is certain: your genitals are part of you. It's time you got to know them better.

Vulva — The Wonder Down Under

Stand naked in front of the mirror and take a good look at yourself. Your genital area begins low down on your belly, with a fatty area that covers the very front of your hipbone. This soft area is called the Venus mound, and it becomes covered in hair during puberty. The fatty cushion on the Venus mound is larger for some women than others, so some people's pubic areas protrude slightly from their belly, whereas others have flatter variants. Both are perfectly normal.

If you run your gaze down your Venus mound, you come to what we call the vulva, though it may also be called the pussy, hoo-ha, snatch, vag, cunt, and any number of other euphemisms. We Norwegians also call it the mouse. Vulva may not be the world's most commonly used word, but if you're a woman and take a look between your legs, what you'll find there is your vulva.

A lot of people think the visible part of the female sex organs is the vagina. "There's hair growing on my vagina," you might say, or "You have such a lovely vagina," but actually that's not right. The vagina doesn't have any hair and it isn't especially easy to see it, although it is of course totally lovely. Vagina is just the name for a part of your sexual apparatus, more accurately the muscular tube you use when you have penetrative sex or give birth — in other words, the tube that leads up to the uterus. The reason we're focusing on terminology is that our sex organs are about so much more than just the vagina, no matter how much pleasure we get out of it! Most people who refer to the female genitalia as the vagina actually mean the vulva, and it's the vulva we'll begin with in our description of the fantastic female sex organs.

The vulva is formed like a flower, with two layers of petals. And believe it or not, it wasn't us who came up with the flower metaphor. When looking at the different parts of the vulva, it makes sense to start from the outside and work our way in.

The purpose of the petals, or labia (the Latin word for lips), is to protect the sensitive parts that lie farther in. The outer labia, which are thicker than the inner ones, are full of fat and work a little like air bags or shock absorbers. Although they may be long enough to cover the inner labia, they can also be very short. Some people just have two small dents in their skin that frame the rest of the vulva on either side.

The outer labia are covered in regular skin. Like the rest of the skin on your body, it's full of sebaceous glands, sweat glands, and hair follicles. In addition to hair, which is a great thing, it is also possible to get pimples and eczema on your outer labia, which isn't so great. Sadly, skin will be skin.

The inner labia are often longer than the outer labia, although not necessarily. They may be full of crinkles and folds, like a skirt made of tulle. When you stand looking at yourself in the mirror, it's possible your inner labia may protrude markedly from your outer labia. Other people may have to spread aside their outer labia in order to see their inner labia.

In contrast to the fatty outer labia, the inner labia are thinner and highly sensitive. They aren't as sensitive as the clitoris, which is the most sensitive place on your body, but they are full of nerve endings, so it can feel very good to touch them.

The inner labia don't have regular skin. Instead, they are covered with a mucous membrane — you've seen mucous membranes before, for example on the outer surface of your eyeball and inside your mouth. These organs are simply covered with a protective and moistening layer of mucus. Regular skin is covered in a layer of dead skin cells, sort of like a duvet cover consisting of dead relatives. This dead layer provides protection, and regular skin thrives in dry conditions. However, mucous membranes do not have a protective layer of dead skin cells, and are therefore less resistant to wear and tear. For example, long inner labia may become sore if they chafe against tight jeans. Unlike regular skin, mucous membranes prefer to be moist. There is no hair on mucous membranes, which means that there isn't any hair on the part of the vulva inside your outer labia either.

If you spread aside your inner labia, you'll find the area known as the vestibulum. Vestibulum comes from Latin and means "vestibule," which is the area between the entrance to a building and its interior. If you're the kind of person who goes to the theater or the opera, the vestibule is the place where you drink champagne during the intermission. It's the splendid entrance hall with columns and soft red velvet curtains. The female vestibulum doesn't have any columns to speak of, but it's an entranceway nonetheless, and we would argue that it has the same velvety grandeur. You'll find two holes here: the urinary and the vaginal openings. The urinary opening lies between the clitoris, which is located right at the front, where the labia meet, and the vagina, which is closer to the anus.

Few people have a conscious relationship to their urinary opening, even though we all use it multiple times a day. In fact, some people don't realize there is a separate hole for urine, and think that we're like men, who have just one hole for two things: in a man's case, sperm and urine. Be assured, that isn't the case: the urethra has its own opening. We don't pee with our vaginas, although it's easy to misunderstand this, even if you've seen your share of female genitalia. The urinary opening can be very difficult to find even if you look for it with a mirror. The urethra is quite tiny and there are often a lot of small folds of skin around the hole, but she who seeks shall eventually find.

Vagina — The Amazing Expanding Tube

Unlike the little urinary opening, the much larger vaginal opening should be easy to find. The vagina is a narrow, muscular tube seven to ten centimeters in length, which leads from the vulva to the uterus. Most of the time this tube is compressed so that the back and front walls are squeezed up against each other. This helps keep you waterproof. Imagine that!

When you get turned on, your vagina expands both lengthwise and breadthwise; it's also highly elastic in all directions. It's a bit like a pleated skirt. If you examine it with your fingers, you'll notice how ridged it feels.

The muscles around the vagina are strong, which you'll see if you stick a finger into your vagina and then clench it tight. Like other muscles, these — the pelvic floor muscles — get stronger when you exercise them.

The inside of the vagina is covered with a moist mucous membrane. Most of the moisture seeps straight through the vaginal walls from the interior of the body, rather than being produced in glands. There are no glands in the vaginal wall itself, although a small amount of secretion comes from glands in the cervix. There is always moisture present in the vagina, but when you get turned on, you become even wetter than usual because more fluid soaks in through the vaginal wall when extra blood flows to the whole of the genital area. You'll notice the increased blood supply to your genitals because your erectile tissue (yes, you have erectile tissue, more about that later) will become engorged. The fluid produced when you're aroused reduces the friction in your vagina when you masturbate or have penetrative sex. Less friction means less damage to the mucus membrane on the vulva and on the vaginal wall, which can often take quite a pummeling during sex. It's not unusual to feel a bit sore or to experience some bleeding from small tears in the vaginal wall after sex, but luckily, it's quite harmless. The vaginal wall is good at repairing itself.

In addition to the moisture that comes through the vaginal wall, some mucus also comes from two glands located in the vestibulum. They're behind the vaginal opening, toward your butt, with one on either side. They are called Bartholin's glands after the seventeenth-century Danish anatomist, Caspar Bartholin the Younger. They produce a slick fluid that helps lubricate the vaginal opening. Bartholin's glands are oval shaped, the size of peas, and can be troublemakers. If the little tube through which they dispatch their mucus gets blocked, it can result in a vulval cyst. This is detectable as a small, hard lump on one side of the vulva, like a little balloon. If this sort of cyst becomes infected, it can turn into a painful business, but the problem can be fixed with minor surgery. There is some disagreement over how important Bartholin's glands are for lubrication of the vagina. Women who have the glands removed as a result of problems with cysts and infections still experience an increase in vaginal moisture when they're turned on.

On the anterior vaginal wall, in other words toward the bladder, lies a spot that is popular in the sex columns of women's magazines. We're talking about the G-spot. The area got its name from the German gynecologist Ernst Gräfenberg, who discovered it. Although researchers have been discussing and searching for the G-spot since the 1940s, it's still pretty controversial — researchers are uncertain what it is, and its existence as a separate entity hasn't even been proven.

The G-spot is described as an extra-sensitive point in some women's vaginas, and certain women say they can achieve orgasm just by stimulating it. The G-spot apparently lies a bit into the vagina on the anterior vaginal wall, toward the stomach, and can be stimulated by making a "come hither" gesture with a finger. Imagine a Disney witch trying to lure you toward her — that's the movement you're after. According to some women's descriptions, stimulation of the G-spot feels better than or different from stimulation elsewhere in the vagina. As you may have noticed, the vagina itself is not particularly sensitive compared with the vulva and especially the clitoris. Sensitivity is highest in the vaginal opening and lessens farther up.

The media often treats the G-spot as if it were a separate anatomical structure. It is especially easy to gain this impression if you read sex columns or sexual self-help books. A British article from 2012 reviewed the existing research on the G-spot as a separate area of the vagina and concluded that the proof was sparse. Most G-spot research is based on questionnaires in which women describe it themselves. The article also showed that many of the women who believe in the G-spot have difficulty pointing it out on themselves. The researchers also reported that studies based on imaging techniques have failed to find any separate structure capable of producing orgasm or sexual pleasure in women, other than the clitoris.

One hypothesis about the G-spot is that, in fact, it is not a separate physical structure but simply a deeplying inner part of the clitoris that is stimulated during sex, directly through the vaginal wall. In 2010, a group of researchers published a study in which they had observed the anterior vaginal wall of a woman while she had vaginal sex with her partner. They used ultrasound to see what was happening and search for the G-spot. They didn't find it, but concluded that the inner parts of the clitoris lie so close to the anterior vaginal wall that the clitoris may be the answer to the G-spot mystery.

Some studies claim that the G-spot is important for achieving a squirting orgasm, and this leads us to another theory. The G-spot may be linked to a group of glands that are located between the urethra and the anterior vaginal wall. Known as Skene's glands, they are the female equivalent of the male prostate, a walnut-size gland that surrounds the urethra between the bladder and the penis. Skene's glands are associated with female ejaculation, or squirting orgasms, as they produce liquid that may be released during orgasm — just like the prostate.

It's odd that an area as accessible as the vaginal wall should be so shrouded in mystery — especially when there's so much speculation about the G-spot. We wait with bated breath for more high-quality research on the female body.

Clitoris — An Iceberg

Perhaps you were surprised just now to read about the "inner parts" of the clitoris. What inner parts? After all, as we usually describe it, the clitoris is the size of a raisin and is located on the uppermost part of the vulva, neatly positioned at the point where the inner labia meet. But this little button is actually just the tip of an iceberg. In the deep darkness of the pelvic area, an organ lies hidden that exceeds all your wildest imaginings.

Although anatomists have known since the 1800s that the clitoris is a largely subterranean organ, this is far from general knowledge. While the male penis is described in detail in anatomies and textbooks, the clitoris has remained a curiosity. As late as 1948, the influential medical textbook Gray's Anatomy chose not to label the clitoris. Nor has the male-dominated medical world been particularly interested in conducting further research on that particular organ. There is still disagreement over what actually forms the parts of the clitoris and how it works. In a medical context, this is startling.

What we do know is that what most people describe as the clitoris is only a fraction of a large organ that extends into the pelvis and down along either side of the vulva. If we had X-ray glasses, we would see that the clitoris complex is shaped like an upside-down Y. The little raisin, called the glans or "head" of the clitoris, is right at the top. It may be from 0.5 to 3.5 centimeters long, but it appears smaller because it is partly covered by a little hood. The head of the clitoris is its only visible part. Below that is a shaft, which descends through the body at an angle, like a boomerang, before the shaft splits into two legs, which lie on either side of the genital area, buried beneath the labia.

Each of the legs contains erectile tissue, the corpus cavernosum, which fills with blood and becomes engorged during arousal. Between these two legs there are two extra bodies of erectile tissue, the bulbi vestibuli or "vestibular bulbs," which surround the vaginal and urinary openings.

For those of you who were especially attentive in your high school health class, this description may be ringing some bells — but wasn't it the man's penis that had a head, shaft, and erectile tissue? The principal source of female pleasure, the clitoris, is a well-kept secret, in stark contrast to the erect penis, which is conspicuous, to say the least. It may therefore seem surprising that the clitoris and the penis are two versions of the same organ.

Up until about the twelfth week in the uterus, the genital tracts of male and female embryos are exactly alike, dominated by a kind of mini-penis (or gigaclitoris!) known as the genital tubercle. It has the potential to develop into either a female or male sexual organ. Since the penis and the clitoris both develop from the same basic structure, the two organs share many similarities of form and function.

The head of the penis is actually the same as the clitoral button, and that is why both are given the same name, glans. The glans is the most sensitive spot on both the female and male body. It is estimated that the female and male glans both contain more than eight thousand sensory nerve endings. A sensory nerve ending receives information about pressure and touch, and sends signals onward to the brain, where the information is interpreted as either pain or pleasure. The more nerve endings there are, the more nuanced and powerful the signals the brain receives. Nonetheless, the head of the clitoris is a great deal more sensitive than the head of the penis because the nerve endings are concentrated into a much smaller area — in fact, the concentration is fifty times higher!