Male ignorance of female anatomy is quite arresting, it appears, particularly when you consider how keen men are to get to know it in other respects. A survey of a thousand men, conducted in conjunction with a campaign called Gynecological Cancer Awareness Month, found that the majority could not reliably define or identify most of a female’s private parts—vulva, clitoris, labia, and so on. Half could not even find the vagina on a diagram. So perhaps a brief rundown is in order here.
The vulva is the complete genital package—vaginal opening, labia, clitoris, and so on. The fleshy mound above the vulva is called the mons pubis. At the top of the vulva itself is the clitoris (probably from a Greek word for “hillock,” but there are other candidates), which is packed with some eight thousand nerve endings—more per unit of area than any other part of the female anatomy—and exists, as far as can be told, only to give pleasure. Most people, including females, are unaware that the visible part of the clitoris, called the glans, is literally only the tip of it. The rest of the clitoris plunges into the interior and extends down both sides of the vagina for about five inches. Until the early twentieth century, “clitoris” seems generally to have been pronounced “kly-to-rus.”
The vagina (Latin for “scabbard”) is the channel connecting the vulva to the cervix and uterus beyond. The cervix is a doughnut-shaped valve that stands between the vagina and the uterus. “Cervix” in Latin means “neck of the womb,” which is precisely what it is. It serves as a gatekeeper, deciding when to let substances (like sperm) in and when to let others (like blood during menstruation and babies during birth) out. Depending on the size of a man’s organ, the cervix is sometimes hit during sex, which some women find pleasurable and others find uncomfortable or painful.
The uterus is simply a more formal name for the womb, where babies grow. The uterus normally weighs two ounces, but at the end of a pregnancy it may weigh two pounds. Flanking the uterus are the ovaries, where eggs are stored, but they are also where hormones like estrogen and testosterone are produced. (Women produce testosterone, too, just not as much as men do.) The ovaries are connected to the uterus by Fallopian tubes (properly called oviducts). These are named for Gabriele Falloppio (sometimes spelled “Fallopio”), the Italian anatomist who first described them in 1561. Eggs are usually fertilized in the tube and then pushed outward into the uterus.
And there you have, very briefly, the principal pieces of sexual anatomy that are unique to women.
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Male reproductive anatomy is considerably more straightforward. It consists essentially of three external parts—penis, testicles, and scrotum—with which nearly everyone is familiar, at least conceptually. For the record, however, I will note that the testicles are factories for producing sperm and some hormones; the scrotum is the sac in which they are housed; and the penis is the delivery device for sperm (the active part of semen), as well as outlet for urine. But behind the scenes in supporting roles are other structures, known as accessory sex organs, that are much less familiar but nonetheless vital. Most men, I daresay, have never heard of their epididymis and would be a little surprised to learn that they have twelve meters of it—that’s forty feet, the length of a Greyhound bus—tucked inside their scrotal sacs. The epididymis is fine tubing, neatly coiled, in which sperm mature. The word is from the Greek for “testicles” and, a touch surprisingly, was first used in English by Ben Jonson in his play The Alchemist in 1610. He was presumably showing off because no one in the audience was likely to know what he meant by it.
Similarly obscure but no less important are the other accessory sex organs: bulbourethral glands, which produce a lubricating fluid, and are sometimes also known as Cowper’s glands after their seventeenth-century discoverer; seminal vesicles, where semen is in large part produced; and the prostate, which everyone has at least heard of, though I have yet to meet a layman under fifty who knows quite what it does. The prostate, it might be said, produces seminal fluid throughout a man’s adulthood and anxiety in his later years. We shall discuss this latter attribute in a later chapter.
One perennial mystery of male reproductive anatomy is why the testicles are on the outside, where they are exposed to trauma. It is usually said that it is because testicles function better in cooler air, but this overlooks that many mammals get along perfectly well with their testicles on the inside: elephants, anteaters, whales, sloths, and sea lions, to name but a few. Temperature regulation may indeed be a factor in testicular efficiency, but the human body is perfectly capable of dealing with that without leaving the testicles so disconcertingly vulnerable to harm. Ovaries, after all, are kept safely hidden away.
There is also a great deal of uncertainty over what is normal in terms of penis size. In the 1950s, the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research recorded the average length of the erect penis at 5 to 7 inches. By 1997, a sample of over a thousand men put it at 4.5 to 5.75 inches, a fairly notable demotion. Either men are shrinking, or there is a great deal more variability in penis size than has traditionally been allowed. The bottom line is that we don’t know.
Sperm appears to have enjoyed (if that is the word) more careful clinical study, almost certainly because of concerns about fertility. Authorities seem to be universally agreed that the average quantity of semen released at orgasm is 3 to 3.5 milliliters (about a teaspoonful), with an average spurt distance of seven to eight inches, though according to the British scientist and writer Desmond Morris a launch of three feet has been scientifically recorded. (He does not specify the circumstances.)
The most interesting experiment involving sperm was almost certainly that undertaken by Robert Klark Graham (1906–97), a California businessman who made a fortune manufacturing shatterproof lenses for eyeglasses and then in 1980 founded the Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank that promised to stock the sperm only of Nobel laureates and others of exceptional intellectual stature. (Graham modestly included himself among the select worthies.) The idea was to help women produce babies of genius by giving them the very best sperm modern science could provide. Some two hundred children were born as a result of the bank’s efforts, though none, it seems, proved to be an outstanding genius or even an accomplished eyeglass engineer. The bank closed in 1999, two years after the death of its founder, and, all in all, does not seem to have been greatly missed.
*1 For most of his career, he was just plain Wilhelm Waldeyer. The more effusive title came in 1916, near the end of his life, when he was ennobled by the German state.
*2 Other geneticists, it is worth noting, have suggested that the extinction could happen in as little as 125,000 years or as much as 10 million.
18 IN THE BEGINNING: CONCEPTION AND BIRTH
To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born.