Miakoda
@vagina_museum This thread reminded me of that jackass politician... "If it's a legitimate rape, the woman has a way to shut that whole thing down."
Somehow, men who know less about the vagina than mankind knows about the ocean floors of the inhabitable planets in the next solar system got to write laws about vaginas.
I think it shoukd be a consitutional amendment that you must have whatever body part you wish to write legislation about.
Vagina Museum
In O'Keeffe and Brennan's 2023 vagina primer paper, the authors adopt a broader definition of vaginas to include non-mammalian vaginas. They examine functional similarities which transcend whether or not the creature has a spine. You can read the entire thing here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982223006061
Vagina Museum
The thing is, vaginas, female genitals, spermathecae, copulatory ducts, whatever you want to call them, have been horribly under-researched. Science's understanding of them is nowhere near as strong as it could be. And to really define "vagina", we need to know more about them.
So to conclude, we cannot define "vagina". And neither can you, not just yet.
Vagina Museum
Now, we're going to take a little digression to celebrate duck vaginas. Ducks, we hope we don't need to tell you, are not mammals. Ducks also have *fascinating* internal genitalia, which comprise of a corkscrewing maze full of blind alleys wherein an unwanted penis can be sent into a dead end.
Is this cool bit of kit a vagina?
Vagina Museum
There are in fact lots of parts in lots of animals which are given various names, but *could* all meaningfully be called a vagina. Rachel M. Keeffe and vagina research rockstar Patricia Brennan have compiled this helpful table on various names given to these organs.
Vagina Museum
(in the interests of fairness, we'll mention that in its secondary definition, Merriam-Webster tautologically concedes that "vagina" could mean "a canal that is similar in function or location to the vagina and occurs in various animals other than mammals")
Vagina Museum
Now, all of these dictionary definitions have elements that we could spend days picking apart, such as "does a vagina inherently need to be moist?" and "does it cease to be a vagina after a hysterectomy?" but what we're really going to focus on is something they all have in common: the assertion that the vagina is a mammalian structure.
Vagina Museum
We'll start at the place that people go for a nice simple definition which absolutely misses all nuance and isn't a great place to learn biology: the dictionary.
Merriam-Webster gives us this: "a canal in a female mammal that leads from the uterus to the external orifice of the vulva"
Cambridge gives us this prounoun-laden definition: "the part of a woman or other female mammal's body that connects her outer sex organs to her uterus"
Vagina Museum
Collins really goes hog wild on description with its definition of vagina: "the moist canal in most female mammals, including humans, that extends from the cervix of the uterus to an external opening between the labia minora"
Vagina Museum
What is a vagina? Finally, you sigh with relief, the Vagina Museum is out there answering a *simple* question.
We regret to inform you it's not that simple. It's actually fairly complicated, and here's why...
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