given the name Sarah Bartmann. In Europe she was paraded in front of curious spectators as a kind of circus animal though a clothed one and later she was made to strip naked in front of teams of zoologists and physiologists. After her death, her genitals were dissected and preserved in a jar of formalin. Georges Cuvier, the French anatomist who performed the autopsy, declared in his memoirs that his investigations "left no doubt about the nature of her apron." But as the historian Londa Schiebinger comments in Nature's Body , the prurient obsession that Western men of science had with Hottentot genitals had less to do with the reality of hypertrophied labia (never proved and rightfully doubted) than with the desire to place African women in a phylogenetic: category closer to orangutan than to human.
Whatever the size of the labia, inner and outer, they sweat. The entire vulval area sweats, with the same insistence as the armpits. If you've ever worked out in a bodysuit, you've probably noticed after a good sweaty session that you have three fetching triangles staining your clothes, one under each arm and a third at the crotch. You probably have felt embarrassed and exposed, the Hottentot Venus in Lycra, or maybe you're worried that others will think you've peed in your pants. Don't be ashamed; be grateful. You need to wick away all that internal body heat if you're going to stay in the running, and frankly, a woman's armpits aren't as efficient as a man's at sweating. Be glad that the female crotch at least is more so.
The vulval area also secretes sebum, a blend of oils, waxes, fats, cholesterol, and cellular debris. The sebum serves as waterproofing, helping to repel with the efficiency of a duck's back the urine, menstrual blood, and pathogenic bacteria that might otherwise settle into the crevices of the mons veneris. The sebum gives the pelvis a sleek and slippery feel, as though everything, including the pubic hairs, had been dipped in a melted candle. Stationed at the outskirts of the genital habitat, the sebum acts as the first line of defense, the Great Wall of Vagina, to thwart disease organisms that seek to colonize the rich world within.
In my career as a science writer, I've encountered all sorts of noble zealots and missionaries, biologists who perform an important if queer sort of spin control. They sing the beauties of nature's rejected and
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despised. They speak with Demosthenean eloquence and a mother's love of spiders, flies, scorpions, roaches, vipers, sharks, bats, worms, rats. In each case, they are determined to reform the public image of their pet leper and to make us salute what before we might happily have squashed.
None has quite the task of Sharon Hillier, a gynecologist at Magee-Women's Hospital in Pittsburgh. She is out to buff the image of the vagina. I found her while looking for somebody who could tell me why the vagina has the odor it does. I was thinking human pheromones; I was thinking oil of musk and essence of civet small, silly, trendy things that lock us into the Darwinosphere and glib theories of mate attraction. Then I saw in a conference program the title of a talk she was giving: "The Ecosystem of the Healthy Vagina." I knew I'd found a woman who thought about the big picture, in an area most of us would rather not think about at all.
Hillier knows that people generally think of the vagina as dirty, in every sense of the term. The word vagina sounds both dirtier and more clinical than its counterpart, penis , while a curse like cunt has a much more violent sting to it than prick or dick , either of which would sound at home on primetime television. As we've seen, American doctors jestingly compare the vagina to the anus. "In Nairobi, the word for vaginal discharges translates as dirt ," Hillier told me. "Almost all of the women there try to dry the vagina, because a moist, well-lubricated vagina is thought to be disgusting.
"But really, anywhere you go, the story
Whatever the size of the labia, inner and outer, they sweat. The entire vulval area sweats, with the same insistence as the armpits. If you've ever worked out in a bodysuit, you've probably noticed after a good sweaty session that you have three fetching triangles staining your clothes, one under each arm and a third at the crotch. You probably have felt embarrassed and exposed, the Hottentot Venus in Lycra, or maybe you're worried that others will think you've peed in your pants. Don't be ashamed; be grateful. You need to wick away all that internal body heat if you're going to stay in the running, and frankly, a woman's armpits aren't as efficient as a man's at sweating. Be glad that the female crotch at least is more so.
The vulval area also secretes sebum, a blend of oils, waxes, fats, cholesterol, and cellular debris. The sebum serves as waterproofing, helping to repel with the efficiency of a duck's back the urine, menstrual blood, and pathogenic bacteria that might otherwise settle into the crevices of the mons veneris. The sebum gives the pelvis a sleek and slippery feel, as though everything, including the pubic hairs, had been dipped in a melted candle. Stationed at the outskirts of the genital habitat, the sebum acts as the first line of defense, the Great Wall of Vagina, to thwart disease organisms that seek to colonize the rich world within.
In my career as a science writer, I've encountered all sorts of noble zealots and missionaries, biologists who perform an important if queer sort of spin control. They sing the beauties of nature's rejected and
page_52
Page 52
despised. They speak with Demosthenean eloquence and a mother's love of spiders, flies, scorpions, roaches, vipers, sharks, bats, worms, rats. In each case, they are determined to reform the public image of their pet leper and to make us salute what before we might happily have squashed.
None has quite the task of Sharon Hillier, a gynecologist at Magee-Women's Hospital in Pittsburgh. She is out to buff the image of the vagina. I found her while looking for somebody who could tell me why the vagina has the odor it does. I was thinking human pheromones; I was thinking oil of musk and essence of civet small, silly, trendy things that lock us into the Darwinosphere and glib theories of mate attraction. Then I saw in a conference program the title of a talk she was giving: "The Ecosystem of the Healthy Vagina." I knew I'd found a woman who thought about the big picture, in an area most of us would rather not think about at all.
Hillier knows that people generally think of the vagina as dirty, in every sense of the term. The word vagina sounds both dirtier and more clinical than its counterpart, penis , while a curse like cunt has a much more violent sting to it than prick or dick , either of which would sound at home on primetime television. As we've seen, American doctors jestingly compare the vagina to the anus. "In Nairobi, the word for vaginal discharges translates as dirt ," Hillier told me. "Almost all of the women there try to dry the vagina, because a moist, well-lubricated vagina is thought to be disgusting.
"But really, anywhere you go, the story
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