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.

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.

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?

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.

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).

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?

Museum collaborations are a great opportunity for exchanging knowledge and best practice. We would like to share some of our learning from our residency at the Crab Museum. So who wants to hear about the mind control barnacle that feminises and impregnates its victims? Sacculina carcini, also known as the crab hacker barnacle, is a parasitic barnacle which infects crabs - usually the green crab (although sometimes others).

It's been a while since we've shown you a weird fad in medieval Christian art, so here's one you might enjoy - Lactatio Bernardi: The Lactation of St Bernard. Now it's important to note that St Bernard of Clairvaux isn't the one doing the lactating. He's the kneeling guy. That's the Virgin Mary right there doing the lactating, with baby Jesus on her lap.

The Cholmondeley Ladies (circa 1600-1610) is a painting raising many questions. Today we're not going to talk about the puzzle in pegging down the identities of the women - we will focus on a different, more mundane puzzle...

Image courtesy of Tate Britain. The Cholmondeley Ladies painting is accompanied by an inscription, which says "Two Ladies of the Cholmondeley Family, Who were born the same day, Married the same day, And brought to Bed the same day."

A hundred years ago, there was a research centre, archive, clinic and museum space dedicated to sexuality whose work might seem ahead of its time, even now.

This is the story of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute of Sexology #LGBTHistoryMonth Founder of the Institute of Sexology Magnus Hirschfeld was a German Jewish gay man, a qualified doctor. Born in 1868, Hirschfeld's interest in using his skills to advocate for LGBT+ rights was sparked when he noticed many of his gay patients were dying by suicide.

Have you ever wondered what's going on in there during penis-in-vagina sex? Where do the pelvic organs go? What stretches where?

Scientists have. At length. And here's what they thought and how they finally found out. One of the first scientists to take a guess at what's going on anatomically during PiV sex was Leonardo da Vinci himself, who drew this anatomically incorrect diagram in around 1493.

Image courtesy of the Royal Collection.

Okay muff-lovers, you'll probably know the answer to this one. How many holes are there in the vulva?

The answer may surprise you. Yes, even you. The hole you'll definitely know about if you follow us is the vaginal entrance, which leads to the vagina. That one's easy.

Reindeer are a little unusual among deer. In most species, only males grow antlers, but in reindeer, these big old head bones are a perfectly normal feature for females, too! And how and why they grow antlers is rather interesting... Antlers in reindeer are deciduous. They're not a permanent fixture on the head of the animal, but rather, antlers grow and are cast in cycles.

We do our best to make the Vagina Museum accessible for all. Let's talk a bit about accessibility in our new home at Poyser Street, and what we're trying to do to create a welcoming space. Our new home is across two floors. We have an upstairs and a downstairs. We're getting a lift installed so our visitors can access both levels, but it won't be ready by 4th November. Because of this, we're not opening our upstairs galleries to the public until the lift is in.

September is #GynaecologicalCancerAwarenessMonth. There are five types of gynaecological cancer: vulval, vaginal, cervical, uterine and ovarian. There are also five Fridays this month, so each week we'll tell you about one of these cancers and how you can recognise the symptoms. We'll start on the outside and work our way inwards over the coming weeks so let's talk about vulval cancer: cancer starting on the labia majora, labia minora, clitoris or greater vestibular glands (Bartholin's glands).

How did dinosaurs do it? What did a dino-vagina look like? We're going to attempt to answer your questions beyond the boring answer of "nobody really knows"... The reason that nobody really knows how dinosaurs had sex or what their genitals looked like is that genitals and reproductive organs are notoriously squishy, so we don't have the fossils.

Normally when we post patents, they're late 19th/early 20th century objects for interfacing with vaginas.

This is neither, but we're going to tell you about it anyway.

This is the Apparatus For Facilitating The Birth Of A Child By Centrifugal Force, patented in 1965. You may be reading this and wondering "Surely this isn't an elaborate centrifuge designed to make the baby fly out? Surely?"

That's exactly what it is (and stop calling us Shirley).

Pooping during a vaginal birth is very, very normal. Between hormones in late pregnancy and labour, and the work the pelvic floor is doing during delivery, it's almost inevitable.

Not only is it nothing to be embarrassed about, it might even be good for the baby. Here's why... The human gut has its own ecosystem: the gut microbiome. Bacteria lives in the gut, and helps out with digestion as well as other functions which aren't well-understood yet - a suboptimal gut microbiome has been linked to health conditions such as autoimmune diseases and ME/CFS

The first research study testing the absorbent qualities of menstrual products with actual blood was published... last week.

Literally, last week. Previous testing tended to use liquids such as saline or water.

Let's take a look and see what they found... The study, by Emma DeLoughrey and colleagues was published in the BMJ last week. If you'd like to read it, you can find it here (it's paywalled) srh.bmj.com/content/early/…

Barbie is a polymath, but in the circles we move in, she is perhaps better known for her hairless, featureless vulva than her myriad achievements.

Here's a very brief history of "Barbie Crotch" - labia-less, hairless, featureless vulvas in art. So we all begin on the same page, here's some of human vulvas. While everyone looks a little different, from the front you will see pubic hair (unless it's been removed), a "pudendal cleft" where the labia majora meet, and in 50% of people some labia minora and/or clitoral hood.

Someone with a claim to being the first gynaecologist in the world was a woman: 12th century physician and author Trota of Salerno.

But the healer's name was forgotten for centuries and her legacy almost lost. Here's how Trota was lost and found again.

📷:Wellcome Collection. Little is known of Trota's life, including precise dates - she was thought to have lived in the first half of the 12th century. She studied at the medical school of Salerno, and later appears to have taught there. She also practiced medicine.