HAPPY SHAKESPEARE'S BIRTHDAY! Here at the VM, we love a good pun, but Will was the master of pussy puns. Today, we'd like to be the cool English teacher sitting backwards on the chair, and present to you an annotated guide to some of the Bard's best sneaked-in vagina jokes...
every actor lives for the day where they can play the Dane and flat-out scream the word CUNT on stage
the original "see you next tuesday" pun
if Much Ado was made today, there's a strong case to be made for calling it A Great Big Hoo-ha About Hoo-Ha
we're not sure if there's a world record for how many rude jokes you can get into one paragraph, but this is a contender, and we pity poor Mistress Quickly's vag.
Hamlet again, because you have to remember Hamlet was a young guy, and therefore somewhat preoccupied, and also the play is pretty long and depressing so you need to cheer it up in places
and finally, a sad one. even in one of the most tragic dramatic climaxes in the history of theatre, Will manages to get a vagina pun in there
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Today in AI Is Not A Good Source For Learning About The World's Most Misunderstood Body Part, meet this ChatGPT gem.
Funnily enough, we're actually going to talk about how most of this is kinda sorta right (for small values of right), as a cautionary tale about generative AI.
Generative AI products like ChatGPT work by scanning data, and then concocting a response which sounds like the data. In other words, it's always making something up, and giving an answer that sounds right based on what it has "learned". This is how we got here.
We'll start with the foetus in the uterus, chilling out in there in a head-up position with neither an umbilical cord nor a placenta (foetuses very much need those).
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...
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"
We've been receiving a lot of requests for us to answer this crucial question, and we are delighted to attempt to provide you with the information you need as to whether you can read braille with your clit.
First of all, it is important to establish parameters on the scope of this question. It is in fact two questions: can you read braille with your clitoris, and does this impact reading speed?
For the purpose of answering this question, we will assume that the OP means the clitoral glans. The glans is the only part of the clitoris which sticks out. The rest of it is beneath the skin of the vulva. Here's what the whole organ looks like; the glans is at the top.
Being a Vagina Museum, we run up against a lot of myths about the world's most misunderstood body parts. Heck, we even dedicated an entire exhibition to the topic.
One myth we encounter fairly frequently is that dogs have periods. Today, we're going to address that...
Having a menstrual cycle is very rare in nature. A period is a phase in the ovarian cycle where the endometrium - the lining of the uterus - is shed. It will then regenerate each cycle, because for whatever reason, embryos only implant in fresh endometrium.
Only a handful of animals shed the endometrium and have a menstrual cycle. For all other mammals, they get rid of old endometrium in a different way: they reabsorb it if they don't get pregnant.
Rana temporaria is the taxonomic name of the common frog. They're very, very common in Europe and parts of Asia. Except they have a way of determining sex which is (so far) very, very uncommon...
Some animals determine sex based on genes - there's multiple approaches to this, including the XY system (most common in mammals); the XO system (many invertebrates) the ZW system (most common in birds); and the XYXYXYXYXY system (pretty much just platypuses and echidnas).
Under these systems, if an embryo has one type of chromosome set, it will develop as female; the other and it will develop as male (most of the time).
Ever wondered what a menstrual cup is doing in there during use? Thanks to science, we now know where it sits: pretty close to the cervix, turns out. In this MRI scan, the cup is coloured in green, blue shows the vagina, the cervix is outlined in yellow and the uterus in orange.
The reason this research was done is rather interesting. Maria Friburg and colleagues (2023) needed to know exactly where a menstrual cup sits in the body to answer a related question: can bacteria that causes Toxic Shock Syndrome grow on a menstrual cup?
To answer this question, the researchers needed to know, first of all, whether the test environment for growing bacteria was aerobic (containing oxygen) or anaerobic. If the cup was lower, it would hold the vagina open, letting air in.