The #MeToo campaign against sexual abuse of women went viral in 2017. Soon after, women had what I’d call an #AnatomyToo moment, when a toxic anatomical label was erased from women’s genitals.
“Pudendum”, a long-standing term for “vulva”, the name for female external genitalia, was no more. Pudendum was emblematic of prejudicial attitudes to women among the traditionally male-dominated medical profession. Because, astonishingly, “pudendum” is from the Latin word pudere, meaning “to be ashamed”. Anatomists designated this most intimate part of a woman’s body as her most shameful.
But that isn’t all. For hundreds of years, pudendum applied equally to women’s and men’s external genitalia. With time, men unburdened themselves of the label, leaving the naming and shaming especially for women.
In this context, it is hardly surprising many women feel insecure about their genitals. A UK survey found 65 per cent of young women had a problem saying “vulva” or “vagina”. Body parts that dare not speak their name.
Names matter, as the gendered evolution of pudendum’s usage illustrates. Hence, its purging from official anatomical terminology in 2019.
But pudendum is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to male dominance of the female anatomy. Inside a woman, there is a veritable frat club of distinguished gentlemen, in the form of anatomical eponyms: body parts named after people, almost exclusively long-dead men.
A review of 700 body parts named after 432 people found 424 were male physicians. The eight eponyms that weren’t male physicians comprised five gods, a king, a hero and just one woman: Raissa Nitabuch, a 19th-century Russian pathologist whose name is attached to a layer where the placenta separates from the uterus wall after delivery of a baby.
This bodily patriarchy isn’t surprising, given the average date the parts were named was 1847, when women didn’t get much of a look-in on our innards. Including women’s reproductive real estate, where men particularly hold sway.
Gabriele Falloppio is memorialised in the tubes connecting the uterus and ovaries. Skene’s glands – Alexander Skene – secrete female ejaculate into the urethra. The “G” in G-spot is Ernst Gräfenberg’s while Bartholin’s glands – Caspar Bartholin the Younger – are close to the vagina’s opening and make fluid for sexual lubrication.
The masculine hegemony within the feminine is one reason why there have been calls for doctors to avoid eponyms in favour of more technically accurate terminology. Bartholin’s glands are greater vestibular glands. Skene’s glands are paraurethral glands. Fallopian tubes are uterine tubes.
However, anatomical eponyms are still commonly used, by doctors and the public. “Fallopian tube” won’t be exiting the vernacular any time soon. And even if eponyms are frog-marched out of the relevant bodily orifices, other unfortunately named anatomical parts would remain.
While pudendum is kaput, the equally problematic “pudendal” is still a feature of the female, and male, anatomy, in the form of pudendal nerves, arteries, veins and canals. Not that many of us are intimately acquainted with them.
Unlike the vagina. Only a man could have named it “vagina”, from the Latin for “scabbard”. Admittedly a vagina rebrand isn’t on the cards, but there aren’t many who would miss the league of gentlemen that calls a woman’s other reproductive parts home, if they were firmly requested to leave.
As for the pudendal nerves, arteries etc. well, there is only one word to describe their persistence in the anatomical lexicon. Shameful.
Adam Taor is the author of Bodypedia: A brief compendium of human anatomical curiosities
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