Gross Anatomy by Mara Altman

Author:Mara Altman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

If what Preti said was true—that the scent of my vagina, in an olfactory sense, is who I am—then I wanted to know what the composition was behind my particular aroma.

In other words, what exactly is responsible for making me smell like me?

To find out, I contacted Tiffanie Nelson, a vaginal secretion expert and crotch genius. She is currently a research fellow at the Geelong Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases and has spent many years investigating vaginal tract microbiota. “What makes us smell?” I asked Nelson. She deals exclusively with vaginas, so I didn’t even have to distinguish which body part.

“Hold up a moment,” she said. She explained that we had to start a bit further back. She said that our vaginal scent is closely linked with the billions of animals that couch surf down there. A healthy vagina is teeming with bacteria, the majority of which are lactobacilli—the same kind of bugs we use to make sauerkraut and yogurt. “They perform the same function as they do when we ferment foods,” she said, “but instead they do it in vaginas.”

She explained that our vaginas are like an all-you-can-eat buffet for our bacteria. Our vaginal skin constantly excretes sugars—think Slurpee machine stuck in the on position. The bacteria chow down, turning the Slurpee into lactic acid.

“So, wait—are the bacteria pooping inside of our vaginas?” I asked.

“They don’t have buttholes.”

“Then how does the lactic acid come out?”

“The sugars come through one side of the cell membrane, and then the lactic acid comes out the other side,” she said. “I’d call it a ‘flow-through.’”

“That sounds like a euphemism for pooping.”

At that moment, it seemed crucial to know whether or not my genitalia moonlit as a toilet—that would be so meta.

“If you really want,” she said, “you can call it ‘pooping,’ but that’s not what it is.”

I suddenly felt transparent about my psychological obsessions. “I might need to,” I said.

She went on to explain that while we supply the lactobacilli with food and a place to live, we depend on their lactic acid to protect us—the acidic environment shields our crotch from the colonization of undesirable bacteria. Evil bacteria, entering a properly acidic environment, would meet a similar end as an astronaut who went to the moon without a spacesuit.

“So what does that have to do with scent?”

Though Nelson isn’t interested in normal vaginal scent—she studies vaginas that are out of whack and smell like a pod of dying river dolphins—she said that when our vaginas are balanced, meaning a pH of 3.5 to 4.5 (within the range of apples and dill pickles), we have an “everyday vaginal odor.” She couldn’t go into detail about this scent because it doesn’t even register on her smell-O-meter.

To find out what “everyday vaginal odor” meant, I interviewed many women, but most had trouble describing their scent to me. At least four women paused, looked up toward the ceiling, and then said something along the lines of, “I don’t have the words.” There were a few others who ventured a description: “Metallic.

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