The Last Word On Nothing

In February, I wrote about a story I never wrote. This is another one of those.

It all started when I reviewed tampons for The Sweethome. As part of the review, I was trying to figure out what the actual dimensions of the human vagina were. I knew that vaginas come in all shapes and sizes, but I thought that there must be some average set of dimensions out there. There certainly are studies on this for penis size and shape (a lot of them, in fact). So I was surprised when I couldn’t really find much on the average dimensions of the human vagina.

All 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. Pendergrass published a handful of studies about the shape of the vagina, which she measured by doing plaster casts of willing women. 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.

This was a surprise to me, and I like to think of myself as someone who knows a lot about vaginas. But five different shapes? I had never heard of this before.

What was even more surprising to me, was that there was that after Pendergrass stopped doing this work, that was it. I couldn’t find anything after her papers about this. Nobody continued to measure the shapes of the human vagina. No one tried to cast more women to see if Paula’s preliminary finding that women from different ethnic backgrounds might have different shapes. Nothing.

And it’s not like this is purely a question of raw, unimportant anatomy. In her papers, Pendergrass pointed at some places why these vagina shapes might matter. 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.

But 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.

So this was the story I pitched. That there was this very fundamental thing about human vaginas that simply hadn’t been studied. That it might impact some fundamental parts of a woman’s life, and that there was simply nobody doing the work to find out.

Great, story sold.

Step one: contact Pendergrass. Which was slightly more difficult than I expected, since she’s now retired. But I tracked her down and called her up at her Arkansas home, to hear about her work. It all started when she was in medical school, she told me. She got interested in the vagina after her own issues with fibroids. 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.

So she drummed up some interest from her advisors and a funding agency to try and do some casts. First she cast a cadaver, and when that went well she decided to move on to living humans.

And like many scientists before her, she started her study with a subject she knew well: herself. With the help of her husband they figured out how to use dental latex molds to create a vaginal cast. (One thing she learned through that trial and error cast: make sure to put a tampon into the cast with the string hanging out so you can get the thing out of your vagina.)

Once she had the method down, she started studying more women.

She told me about how the work progressed, what she learned, her funding issues, and then ultimately that she retired after a long career as a doctor and researcher. All of it was super interesting, I thought. And then I asked her: okay, so, why hasn’t there been more work on this since you stopped doing it? And she had a few answers. There’s no market for this data. Companies that manufacture vaginal products are looking only to confirm that things like tampons fit inside. They don’t care much about the specifics beyond that.

But the big reason she highlighted was the one that made me both sad and angry. When she was doing the work, people were grossed out by it. “It’s off-putting to a lot of people, and I’ve had trouble with it since I started,” she said. “People who were embarrassed I was doing this, They said I was a  a dirty old woman doing this.” A dirty old woman. For wanting to know the shape and size of the human vagina. I was sad, and angry, and ready to finally tell her story.

Okay, step two: talk to outside sources. And, as you probably expected, this is where it all fell apart.

To get an outside take, I talked to two OBGYNs. And I showed them the papers. And they basically just shrugged. “Vaginas are changing shape all the time, depending on musculature,” said Dr. Ruth Ann Crystal, an OBGYN. You could cast the same vagina twice and get different looking shapes. And having a baby can stretch the vagina in new dimensions, so casting a person before and after they’ve given birth will result in different measurements too.

Crystal says she’s not surprised that different ethnicities might have differently shaped vaginas either, just like eyes and noses vary between people. Sure, different women might have different shapes, but she just didn’t think it mattered much.

Neither did Dr. Jen Gunter, another OBGYN. “I’m not sure it would be clinically relevant,” she said. “People can fit seven pound babies, and at some point the baby’s head is in there, and the shoulders, and the body, and the vagina can fit them all. It’s more like a stocking, it’s meant to stretch.”

The one thing that both Crystal and Gunter said might be impacted is which positions are best, but they both pointed out that sex is more than just figuring out the “optimal” angle for which a penis can go into a vagina.

Essentially, there are probably different vaginal shapes, but what shape you have probably doesn’t matter.

So, there’s not really a story here. I told my editor. We agreed it was a dead end.

But I still feel somehow… sad. Not about my story, although that paycheck would have been nice since I did all the reporting. But more that Pendergrass was shamed for even thinking about doing this work. That people called her a dirty old woman for just wanting to know what the shape and size of the human vagina was.

So this story has, a coda I guess. I read through Pendergrass’s papers enough times, and thought about the process enough and it dawned on me: I could do this. I could cast my own vagina, and at least carry on some of Pendergrass’s legacy. So I went online and i ordered a dental casting kit from a medical supply outlet. It’s sitting on my desk here. And this weekend I’ll enlist my very patient (and far less impulsive) partner to help me figure out what the inside of my vagina looks like. Wish me luck.

Top image from Wellcome Images.