Woman: An Intimate Geography (12 page)

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Authors: Natalie Angier

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BOOK: Woman: An Intimate Geography
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Fish! I cried. It's not fishy! My friend replied, "Well, you've got to admit it's closer to tuna than to, say, roast beef." Yes, all analogies to meat must be reserved for a different sort of organ. In any event, men may well think of a vagina as smelling fishy, for as it happens, sperm is one of the ingredients that can make a good thing go bad.
The crux of the vaginal ecosystem, said Hillier, is symbiosis, a mutually advantageous and ongoing barter between macroenvironment and microorganism. Yes, the vagina is full of germs, in the sense of bacteria; it swims with life forms, and you hope it stays that way. But there are germs and germs. When conditions are healthy, the germs, or rather bacteria, in the vagina do a body good. They are lactobacilli, the same bacteria found in yogurt. "A healthy vagina is as clean and pure as a carton of yogurt," said Hillier. (Why do I suspect that we're not likely to see Dannon picking up on this slogan anytime soon?) And so the smell: "A normal vagina should have a slightly sweet, slightly pungent odor. It should have the lactic acid smell of yogurt." The contract is simple. We provide lactobacilli with food and shelter the comfort of the vaginal walls, the moisture, the proteins, the sugars of our tissue. They maintain a stable population and keep competing bacteria out. Merely by living and metabolizing, they generate lactic acid and hydrogen peroxide, which are disinfectants that prevent colonization by less benign microbes. The robust vagina is an acidic vagina, with a pH of 3.8 to 4.5. That's somewhat more acidic than black coffee (with a pH of 5) but less piquant than a lemon (pH 2). In fact, the idea of pairing wine and women isn't a bad one, as the acidity of the vagina in health is just about that of a glass of red wine. This is the vagina that sings; this is the vagina with bouquet, with legs.
Nor is ordinary vaginal discharge anything to be mortified about. It is made up of the same things found in blood serum, the clear, thin, sticky liquid that remains behind when the solid components of blood, like clotting factors, are separated away. Vaginal discharge consists of water, albumin the most abundant protein in the body a few stray white blood cells, and mucin, the oily substance that gives the vagina and cervix their slippery sheen. Discharge is not dirt, certainly, and it is not a toxic waste product of the body in the sense of urine and feces. No, no, no. It is the same substance as what's inside the vagina, neither better nor worse, pulled down because we're bipedal and gravity exists, and

 

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because on occasion the cup runneth over. It is the lubricant beneath the illusion of carapace, reminding us that physiologically we are all aquatic organisms.
But, gals, there's no denying it: sometimes we stink, and we know it. Not like strawberry yogurt or a good Cabernet but like, alas, albacore. Or even skunk. How does this happen? If you haven't bathed for a week, I'll let you figure it out for yourself. But sometimes it's not a question of hygiene; it's a medical issue, a condition called bacterial vaginosis. For a number of reasons, the balance of flora within the vagina is upset, and the lactobacilli start to founder. In their stead, other organisms proliferate, particularly anaerobic bacteria, which thrive in the absence of oxygen. These microbes secrete a host of compounds, each fouler than the last. Here is where the unflattering comparison to seafood comes in. Distressingly, the microbes make trimethylamine, which is the same substance that gives day-old fish its fishy odor. They make putrescine, a compound found in putrifying meat. They make cadaverine, and I need not tell you from whence that chemical was named. The amount and combination of these rank byproducts depends on the severity of the vaginosis.
In other words, if you're having a problem with unspeakable "feminine odor," that syndrome so coyly referred to in all the ads for douches and feminine deodorants, you could have an infection, often a low-grade, chronic one, with no symptoms beyond the odiferous. Some of the causes of such infections are known. Among the biggest is . . . douching. In an effort to get fresh 'n' clean and to look like the dewy, virginal women pictured on the packages of Massengill, women can make themselves dirtier than ever. Douching kills off the beneficial lactobacilli and paves the way for infestation by anaerobes and their trails of cadaverine. So while I rarely dispense medical advice, this one is easy: don't douche, ever, period, end of squirt bottle.
Vaginosis can also arise in the wake of other infections, such as pelvic inflammatory disease. Moreover, some women are born with an unfortunate predisposition toward imbalances of vaginal flora, just as some women are susceptible to acne. Even the generally desirable lactobacilli differ in their potency, with certain strains more able than others to generate hydrogen peroxide and thus more efficiently fend off contending microorganisms. Some women have "lucky lactos," said Hillier, and

 

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some have so-so lactobacilli. The so-sos are more susceptible to vaginosis, as well as to infection with yeast, another type of microbe that thrives in highly anaerobic conditions.
To rectify any imbalance, you can try eating a lot of yogurt to derive the benefit of lactobacilli in yogurt culture, but very few ingested bacteria are likely to find their way to your genitalia, and any postprandial improvements in the pelvic ecosystem will probably be transitory. Chronic cases of vaginosis can be treated with antibiotics, the course of action usually suggested for pregnant women, in whom the infection raises the risk of a premature delivery. Better than antibiotics, which are indiscriminate when taken systemically, will be a type of suppository now under development, which can provide the lucky lactos exactly where they are needed.
Another cause of vaginosis is sleeping around with men who don't use condoms. Even a single shot of semen will temporarily disturb the ecosystem of the vagina. Sperm can't swim in the biting climate of a healthy vagina, so they're buffered in a solution of acid's biochemical yang, alkaline. Semen is highly alkaline, with a pH of 8. It is more alkaline than any other body fluid, including blood, sweat, spit, and tears. For several hours after intercourse, the overall pH of the vagina rises, momentarily giving unsavory bacteria the edge. Usually the change is fleeting and the woman's body has no trouble readjusting the pH thermostat back to status quo. The restoration is particularly easy when the sperm looks familiar that is, when it belongs to the woman's regular partner. But in a woman who is exposed to the semen of multiple partners, the homeostatic mechanism sometimes falters, for reasons that remain unclear and probably have to do with an immunological reaction to all that strange sperm.
Thus, even though a woman with catholic tastes in sex may be exposed to no more semen overall than a woman who sleeps regularly with a husband, her vagina is at greater risk of becoming chronically alkaline. She loses her wine-and-yogurt tartness. So maybe it was not mere misogyny that prompted the authors of the
Kama Sutra
to describe licentious women as smelling like fish.
Are you a masochist? Do you like to look for patterns in life, morals to the story? You can think of this as another case of divine justice. If you sleep around a lot, your vagina becomes more alkaline. It becomes

 

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fishy, yes, but worse than that, an alkaline vagina is less able to defend itself against pathogens, including agents of venereal disease. Women with bacterial vaginosis are more susceptible to gonorrhea, syphilis, and AIDS. At the same time, if you sleep around a lot, you'll be exposed to a greater load of such venereal microbes. In sum, just when you need an acidic vagina the most, yours is turning alkaline. Is this not an argument for monogamy, or abstinence? Doesn't this suggest that Somebody is watching, keeping track of the notches on your lipstick case?
To me, the association is not fraught with moral or ironic underpinnings, but rather merely confirms what is ancient, prehominid news. Sex is dangerous. It always has been, for every species that engages in it. Courting and copulating animals are exposed animals, subject to greater risk of predation than animals who are chastely asleep in their burrow; not only do mating animals usually perform their rituals out in the open, but their attention is so focused on the particulars of fornication that they fail to notice the glint of a gaping jaw or the flap of a raptor's wings. Pregnancy, disease, threat of death by stoning yes, sex has always been chancy. Momentum is chancy, and sex is nothing if not momentous. Let us not forget that. Let us not be so intimidated by overwork or familiarity or trimethylamines that we forget the exquisite momentum of sexual hunger.
The vagina is both path and journey, tunnel and traveler. Seeing beyond it requires invasion, which is why most women have only the vaguest sense of what their interior design is like, the appearance of the long-exalted, often-overrated womb and its tributaries. Again O'Keeffe has given us a visual translation of the uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries, evoking them through the cattle's skull and horns stripped bare on the desert floor, again a reverie of life-in-death. I think instead of water and coral reefs, where the rosy fingers of sea pens and feather anemones brush hungrily from side to side, enlivened as though with wills of their own.

 

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4
The Well-Tempered Clavier: On the Evolution of the Clitoris
At some point when I was an infant, a friend of my mother's asked her to babysit for her little girl, whom I'll call Susan. My mother already had an older daughter as well as my newborn self, so she thought she was pretty well versed in the appearance of a female baby's genitals. Thus she was taken aback, while changing Susan's diaper, to see the girl's clitoris protruding from between the rounded mounds of her labia. It didn't quite look like a penis my mother had a son and knew what to expect on that score but it wasn't strictly girlish either. It looked like the tip of a nose or a pinkie, and when my mother wiped it with a cloth, it stiffened slightly, to my mother's embarrassed amusement. My mother didn't care for the look of Susan's prominent, inflatable clitoris. She thought of her own daughters and how much she preferred their genitals, neatly packed and contained as they were, the clitoris subsumed by the chubby vulva and any tactile sensitivity it may have obscured from view.
It is an assumption universally held that men know more or less where they stand relative to other men when it comes to the dimensions of their genitals. As teenagers, they may compare organs directly. As mature adults, they may resort to a variation of their breast-appraisal mechanism, a southward flickering of the eyes while standing at a public urinal or sauntering through the men's locker room, where the rule of thumb seems to be that towels should be draped over the shoulder, not around the waist. (For the record, the average penis is about 4 inches long when flaccid, 5.7 inches when erect. That's a bit bigger than the gorilla's 3-inch erection, but then

 

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there's the blue whale, the world's largest mammal, who has, yes, a 10-foot pole).
Women may think they know the clitoris pretty well. They count it as an old friend. They may even believe there is a goddess out there somewhere named Klitoris, Our Lady of Perpetual Ecstasy. They never bought Freud's idea of penis envy: who would want a shotgun when you can have a semiautomatic? But ask most women how big their clitoris is, or how big the average clitoris is, or whether there are any differences at all from one woman to the next, and they probably won't know where to begin or what units to talk about. Inches, centimeters, millimeters, parking meters? Men worry that penis size matters to women, and women vigorously assure them that it doesn't. But does clitoral size matter to a woman? The girl I called Sue is now about my age. Assuming that she kept her enlarged clitoris and she may not have, as I'll discuss is she a superorgasmic adult, stimulated by the slightest rub, mistress of her pleasure no matter how inept her partner? Or does mass again not matter, and is there something else about the clitoris that gives it its kick?
The clitoris is usually spoken of as the homologue of the penis, and embryonically that's true: it arises from the same region of the fetal genital ridge as the shaft of the penis. But the comparison is not wholly accurate. A woman doesn't pee or ejaculate through her clitoris, of course. No urethra runs through it. She does nothing practical at all with her clitoris. The clitoris is simply a bundle of nerves: 8,000 nerve fibers, to be precise. That's a higher concentration of nerve fibers than is found anywhere else on the body, including the fingertips, lips, and tongue, and it is twice the number in the penis. In a sense, then, a woman's little brain is bigger than a man's. All this, and to no greater end than to subserve a woman's pleasure. In the clitoris alone we see a sexual organ so pure of purpose that it needn't moonlight as a secretory or excretory device. For this reason, maybe it's best that the clitoris normally is hidden within the vulval cleft: it is, in its way, a private joke, a divine secret, a Pandora's box packed not with sorrow but with laughter.
The clitoris is a good package, and so it is small, and best thought of metrically. Its fetal growth is complete by the twenty-seventh week of gestation, at which point it looks like what it will look like on the girl

 

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