AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Diferent vagina shapes1/1/2024 With the help of her husband they figured out how to use dental latex molds to create a vaginal cast. First she cast a cadaver, and when that went well she decided to move on to living humans.Īnd like many scientists before her, she started her study with a subject she knew well: herself. So she drummed up some interest from her advisors and a funding agency to try and do some casts. And she actually had the same question I did: what was the shape of the human vagina? And, like I had found, the papers out there were vague and conflicting. She got interested in the vagina after her own issues with fibroids. It all started when she was in medical school, she told me. But I tracked her down and called her up at her Arkansas home, to hear about her work. Which was slightly more difficult than I expected, since she’s now retired. That it might impact some fundamental parts of a woman’s life, and that there was simply nobody doing the work to find out. That there was this very fundamental thing about human vaginas that simply hadn’t been studied. Perhaps different shapes impacted drug delivery, perhaps they made certain sexual positions more or less pleasurable or comfortable, perhaps they impact how reliable a sponge contraceptive device might be.īut even if there was no clinical significance, think of it this way: if there were five distinct shapes of human penis, how many studies do you think there would be on it? My guess is more than a handful done by a single researcher. In her papers, Pendergrass pointed at some places why these vagina shapes might matter. Nothing.Īnd it’s not like this is purely a question of raw, unimportant anatomy. No one tried to cast more women to see if Paula’s preliminary finding that women from different ethnic backgrounds might have different shapes. Nobody continued to measure the shapes of the human vagina. I couldn’t find anything after her papers about this. What was even more surprising to me, was that there was that after Pendergrass stopped doing this work, that was it. But five different shapes? I had never heard of this before. This was a surprise to me, and I like to think of myself as someone who knows a lot about vaginas. And what she described in her work was actually a set of different vagina shapes: the conical, the parallel sides, the heart, the pumpkin seed, and the least fortunately named slug. Pendergrass published a handful of studies about the shape of the vagina, which she measured by doing plaster casts of willing women. So I was surprised when I couldn’t really find much on the average dimensions of the human vagina.Īll I could really dig up was a set of studies done in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s by a woman named Paula Pendergrass. There certainly are studies on this for penis size and shape (a lot of them, in fact). I knew that vaginas come in all shapes and sizes, but I thought that there must be some average set of dimensions out there. As part of the review, I was trying to figure out what the actual dimensions of the human vagina were. It all started when I reviewed tampons for The Sweethome. In February, I wrote about a story I never wrote.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |