Vagina Obscura Book Club: Rebranding our Shame Lips

We dive into Rachel E. Gross’s fascinating book Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage. We explore how little science and society still know about female anatomy, from the clitoris’s sole purpose of pleasure to outdated treatments like boric acid (basically rat poison), and the long history of treating women’s bodies as mysterious “shame parts."Along the way, we talk serious business like the time one of us inserted a tampon in the wrong hole, questionable “sushi lover” t-shirts, and awkward euphemisms like “front butt” and “marital vegetables." We talk about the daddy of medicine, Hippocrates, naming lady parts without ever properly studying them, duck vaginas that evolved for reproductive control, the unsurprisingly recent start of dedicated women’s health research at the NIH, and why female pleasure has been so overlooked for centuries. We wrap up with a quick tangent on the recent Chappell Roan hotel drama involving Jude Law’s daughter (...it wasn’t even her security).Grab Vagina Obscura, laugh or cringe along with us, and remember: we don’t talk about vaginas enough, but we’re changing that...one quickie at a time.