{"id":29011,"date":"2022-03-17T23:57:00","date_gmt":"2022-03-17T23:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=29011"},"modified":"2022-03-20T22:15:13","modified_gmt":"2022-03-20T22:15:13","slug":"from-healthy-births-to-sustainable-management-5-essential-reads-on-the-fascinating-and-complex-vagina","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/from-healthy-births-to-sustainable-management-5-essential-reads-on-the-fascinating-and-complex-vagina\/","title":{"rendered":"From healthy births to sustainable management, 5 essential reads on the fascinating and complex vagina"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Leah Samuel<\/a>, The Conversation<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the most common route for arriving into the world, the human vagina has, of course, existed for as long as there have been people. Despite the name, however, it\u2019s not so much a \u201csheath\u201d \u2013 the Latin meaning of \u201cvagina\u201d<\/a> \u2013 as it is a muscular tube<\/a> of varying shapes and lengths, contained unseen within the pelvis. The vagina is actually a hardworking organ in its own right, with its own ecosystem<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So The Conversation presents a selection of stories from the archive that offer insights into the once mysterious, often maligned and still misunderstood vagina.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Passing through a vagina can make you healthier<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019re a baby, that is. Newborns traveling the birth canal to their parents\u2019 homes instead of the hospital are exposed to more bacteria in the vagina, which could be beneficial to them, suggested Joan Combellick<\/a>, an assistant clinical professor of midwifery at Yale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hospital sterility measures eliminate a lot of the potentially helpful bacteria, Combellick suggested in her research, which showed that babies born at home<\/a> have more opportunity for exposure to their moms\u2019 vaginal microbiomes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Other species\u2019 vaginas can be just as beneficial<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Researchers have observed that the offspring of mice and other animals derive other health benefits<\/a> from passing through the vagina. Helen Vuong<\/a>, a postdoctoral scholar studying integrative biology and physiology at UCLA, shared her research on maternal microbiology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSpecifically, my study identified how a mouse mother\u2019s microbiome influences the formation of axons \u2013 long nerve fibers that project from a neuron \u2013 in her offspring, affecting its ability to sense its environment,\u201d Vuong wrote. Axons are important for relaying sensory information, such as sounds and scents, allowing the mice to hear a potential predator approaching or to smell when food is nearby. The study does not indicate whether humans benefit in the same way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Black
This MRI of the vagina shows it connected to the uterus via the cervix. The vagina aids the uterus in menstruation and likely gets assistance in providing sexual pleasure because of nerves in the cervix. Paul Biris\/Moment via Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

3. Vaginal role in menstruation can be managed sustainably<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

When the body finds that there\u2019s no baby on board this month, that in-case-of-pregnancy uterine buildup of blood and other material isn\u2019t needed after all. At that point the uterus tosses it all, quite literally, down the chute. Assisting with menstruation is one of the vagina\u2019s messier duties. Containing the mess, however, doesn\u2019t have to take a toll on the environment<\/a>, wrote Susan Powers<\/a>, a professor of sustainable environmental systems at Clarkson University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using numbers from a media survey<\/a>, Powers determined the average woman responding to the survey uses 240 tampons or maxi pads in a year, which is only 10% of a menstrual cup\u2019s 10-year lifespan. In addition to being reusable, however, the cup also has one-tenth of the overall manufacturing and disposal impact of tampons or pads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. Vaginas don\u2019t work alone<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

At the internal end of the vagina is the cervix, which could be a major source of vaginal sexual pleasure<\/a>, wrote Rutgers University-Newark psychologist Barry Komisaruk<\/a>. He and psychobiology professor Mar\u00eda Cruz Rodr\u00edguez del Cerro<\/a> highlighted the 1953 book \u201cSexual Behavior in the Human Female\u201d by Alfred Kinsey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Komisaruk and del Cerro pointed to one of the Kinsey researchers\u2019 lesser-known findings: When investigators stimulated women\u2019s cervixes with \u201cdistinct pressure\u201d using \u201can object larger than a probe,\u201d 84% of those women said they could feel it. The scholars suggested that nerve connections in the cervix and vagina could be the reason that women whose cervixes had been surgically altered or removed reported losing erotic feeling in their vaginas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. \u2018Vagina\u2019 is not the final word on gender identity<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Lots of people have vaginas. But not all vagina owners think of themselves as girls, women or even female, according to Boston University professor of medicine Carl Streed<\/a> and Harvard University assistant professor of gynecology Frances Grimstad<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They wrote that some people born with vaginas also have testes, or that they \u201cproduce significant amounts of testosterone,\u201d the hormone associated with male sexual development. Such cases, the professors wrote, suggest that sex designation exists on a spectrum<\/a> and that binary categories of male and female are \u201cincomplete and inaccurate\u201d for determining gender. So, a vagina alone can\u2019t determine who\u2019s a woman. Some women don\u2019t have vaginas, and some people who do aren\u2019t women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Editor\u2019s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation\u2019s archives.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leah Samuel<\/a>, Health + Equity Editor, The Conversation<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leah Samuel, The Conversation As the most common route for arriving into the world, the human vagina has, of course, existed for as long as there have been people. Despite the name, however, it\u2019s not so much a \u201csheath\u201d \u2013 the Latin meaning of \u201cvagina\u201d \u2013 as it is a muscular tube of varying shapes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":29012,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[42],"tags":[11513,2275,11514,7505,11518,6574,8562,493,162,11511,11512,11515,11510,11516,11517],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29011"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29011"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29011\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29040,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29011\/revisions\/29040"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}