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.

The word of the day is "kunyaza". Kunyaza is a Rwanda-Rundi language word for a traditional sexual practice in Rwanda and regions around the Great Lakes which focuses on pleasure, and is said to result in squirting 90% of the time. According to myth, kunyaza started with a third dynasty queen of the Kingdom of Rwanda. Unsatisfied while her husband was away at war, the queen instructed one of her guards to have sex with her.

Once again, we'd like to thank every single one of you who was invested (emotionally and financially!) in our fundraising campaign. In a week, we reached our £85,000 target, an almost quim-possible feat! So what happens next? gofundme.com/f/9um7y First and foremost, thanks to everyone who contributed to this campaign, the Vagina Museum has a future. We're not going to lie, it really was touch-and-go. If we didn't reach the target, we would have had to wind up.

Some of you sharp-eyed eager beavers spotted something unexpected in these 17th century illustrations: what appeared to be clitorises floating around next to it. How can this be if the internal clitoral anatomy wasn't published until the 1990s?

https://twitter.com/vagina_museum/status/1660325076443488256

The answer often given to this question is "suppression of knowledge" but the full story is a bit more complicated than that...

Menopause is incredibly rare in nature. Aside from humans, only four species of wild animal are known to go through a form of menopause: orcas, narwhals, beluga whales and pilot whales. These animals might shed light on why menopause exists at all. Most animals die soon after their reproductive capability comes to an end.

Next, he noted that unmated males masturbate: "Sometimes we saw these birds... stand motionless and rigid upon the ground, then stiffening themselves.... go through the motions characteristic of the sexual act, in some cases actually ejecting their semen on to the ground." "This, however, was the least depraved of the acts which we saw." Levick warns after his scientific description of penguin wanking.

The Vagina Museum first came into the physical world as a crowdfunded project, back in 2019. But times have changed since then. Here's a thread about the impact of the last few years on our fundraising, and what you can do to help the Vagina Museum gofundme.com/f/9um7y Back in 2019, when we launched our start-up crowdfunding campaign, 580 people donated almost £50,000. This enabled us to open our doors for the first time.

Today, as we crowdfund for a new space, 750 people have donated a little over £20,000. gofundme.com/f/9um7y

Who wants some really BAD advice on contraception from the mid-19th century?

Promise you're not going to try this at home, because it's spectacularly bad advice. OK here goes. Remember, don't try this at home. The prevailing scientific attitude in the mid-19th century was that sex during your period would be when you'd get pregnant, and any other time of the month was probably fine.

Last week saw Kanamara Matsuri (Festival of the Steel Phallus) - colloquially called the penis festival - in Kawasaki. Despite its very phallic focus, many of the stories behind the festival are in fact very vagina-centric, so let's tell you about those... Kanamara Matsuri is held at the Kanayama Shrine, which venerates a pair of gods, brother and sister Kanayama-hiko and Kanayama-hime. They are gods of blacksmiths and metalworking, and also prayed to for safe, easy childbirth and protection from STIs.