Owned by half the human race yet often shrouded in shame, secrets and lies, the (mostly) female sexual anatomy finally gets the scrutiny and plain talk it deserves. Author Zoe Mendelson discusses the heroic, misunderstood p***y. * FULL TRANSCRIPT * TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in. BOB GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt, I'm Bob Garfield. Once there was the encyclopedia. The digital age gave us Wikipedia and a whole mess of other online information repositories from Investopedia, to Baby Names Pedia, to Pancreapedia, for one stop shopping on all things pancreas, to Conservapedia, for evangelical Christians sick of being brainwashed with science and facts. MAN: Wikipedia has become unsuitable because it's become very biased. It's become very anti-American. It's become very anti-Christian. GARFIELD: After four years of online collaboration by 200-some contributors on three continents, we now have a hardcover book titled Pussypedia, about the anatomy, physiology, culture and fraught history of the mostly female organs and structures for reproduction, urology and pleasure. The book is learned, informative, poignant, often infuriating, and often also very funny. But what most distinguishes Pussypedia is that it's an FAQ for questions that have been answered incorrectly suppressed, deemed taboo, gone bizarrely uninvestigated and/or steeped in shame off and on for most of human history. Just for one meager example, this 1969 educational film strip from a right-wing organization agitating against sex education. NARRATOR: Every emotional and psychological aspect of sex is presented. But without the introduction of any moral concepts of right and wrong. Sexual intercourse between unmarried young people is presented as acceptable. Masturbation is not only acceptable, but a desirable means of relieving tension. Having an illegitimate baby is nothing to be ashamed of. Youths are instructed in use of every manner of contraceptive device and may obtain them without cost. But moral concepts of right and wrong rejected. GARFIELD: To my knowledge, there is no comparable screed associated with pancreas information. Into this environment enters Pussypedia, illustrated by Maria Conejo and written by Zoe Mendelson, who joins me now. Zoe, welcome to Bully Pulpit. ZOE MENDELSON: Thank you. Thanks for having me. GARFIELD: OK, let's start with the title. It isn't Vaginapedia, although that is the body part most associated with the slang word p***y. Isn't that like calling every Baltic state Lithuania? MENDELSON: Yes, it is. Yes, totally. The vagina is only the tube that connects the, the uterus to the outside. It's only the vaginal canal. So when we call the whole thing a vagina, leaving out a lot of really important parts. Also it means swordholder. So we're really calling our vaginas like that thing that's made to hold a penis. GARFIELD: It only exists in relationship to male equipment. MENDELSON: Right. And it's not an object of service to the penis. GARFIELD: The book itself is part sex manual, part comprehensive Mendelson's anatomy of XX plumbing and part history of suppression. You cite just absolutely infuriating examples of misogynistic superstition, religious orthodoxy, sexual repression and a sort of moral fascism that has come in waves over the centuries to inflict shame and to propound ignorance. Can you give me just some lowlights? MENDELSON: I think that the best example is the history of the erasure of the clitoris, and that can mean erasure conceptually, it can mean clitoridectomies becoming popular. As late as in the 20th century, people were performing clitoridectomies because masturbation was being blamed for all sorts of health ailments. GARFIELD: And you're talking about in the West, you're not talking about sub-Saharan Africa. MENDELSON: In Europe and in the United States. I mean, the clitoris has been known about since ancient times. And there was many times throughout the history of medicine where people said, well, what's this thing? And authorities in anatomy said, nothing, nothing. Don't ask about it. For a long time it was because the clitoris didn't fit into this model that we, that we had, which was that the vagina was just an inside out penis. When a fetus is growing, the genital clump either becomes a penis or a clitoris and they're made of the exact same parts. A clitoris is about nine centimeters flaccid on average, which is the same for a penis. But they thought that the vagina was an inside out kind of messed up penis gone wrong. So it didn't fit into that model, which is why for a long time they didn't want to acknowledge its existence even though they knew it was there. GARFIELD: Who's they? MENDELSON: Authorities on anatomy and biology. One of my favorite texts from a guy that dug it up — in 17-something — he wrote that he was really surprised that it hadn't been priorly documented since it was so perceptible to sight and touch. Kind of saying: This thing, it's right there. Nobody ever noticed this big organ? What? GARFIELD: Now, when you say text, you're not talking about SMS. You're talking about medical literature, medical clitoriture. See what I did there? MENDELSON: Clitoriture. Exactly. And then it was taken out of Gray's Anatomy like 1948. Which was like what? They just took it out, you know, and I suppose that's because it was profane. It is back in a lot of medical textbooks. But for example, when little kids learn about the reproductive system in school, little girls are shown images of the quote unquote female reproductive system and it has no clitoris. It's just this like, this huge organ missing. And it's like, well, God forbid little kids with pussies should know that their bodies are capable of producing pleasure. Like, what's going to happen? Is society going to implode? I remember in school learning about boys having wet dreams as part of puberty and stuff, but nothing was ever mentioned about pleasure in the p***y at all. GARFIELD: This is a thought to which will return. But meantime, I want to play you a clip from a movie around the time where there was no clitoris in Gray's Anatomy. It's The Night of the Hunter from 1955. It's set, though, in the 30s, somewhere in the Ohio River Valley. And in this scene, an older married woman is talking about marital sex. OLDER WOMAN: That wasn't love. That was just flapdoodle. Have some fudge lambs. When you’ve been married to a man 40 years, you know, all that don't amount to a hill of beans. I've been married to my Walt that long and I swear in all that time, I just lie there thinking about my canning. GARFIELD: Now, Zoe, that is pretty much the definition of low expectations. MENDELSON: It's no expectations because her pleasure’s not even part of the equation at all. It's not implied that she should be enjoying it. GARFIELD: And this goes to the heart of what you're battling. You didn't undertake Pussypedia to be ironic or snarky or transgressive, but out of meaning and purpose. Which purpose begins with the little girl Zoe Mendelson? Can you tell me about her? MENDELSON: The book starts by saying I was a horny kid. I was, and I remember really clearly, slowly learning to be ashamed of that. I remember eventually becoming very embarrassed about those feelings and thinking that there was something wrong with me. And I'm not alone in that. I think that a lot of people with pussies are taught to be very ashamed of their sexual desire, that their sexual desire is profane, that it's immoral, that it's gross, that it's slutty, taught not to masturbate. You know not my parents. They didn't teach me not to masturbate. They said that's something you do when you're alone in your room, which was pretty reasonable of them to say. GARFIELD: Well, unless you write for The New Yorker. MENDELSON: Exactly. But a lot of people with pussies are taught that masturbating is wrong implicitly. Even if it's not something that they're taught, they somehow end up thinking that. GARFIELD: Conquering shame is an admirable mission. But I do want to ask you about your journey. Watergate began when Carl Bernstein had to cover a burglary at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. The Pentagon Papers were published after a government contractor decided to leak a classified report on the history of American intervention in Vietnam. And Pussypedia began how? MENDELSON: I was Googling whether or not all women can squirt. I was in a relationship with an a*****e who was really, really intent on making me squirt and insisted that every woman that he'd been with could squirt, that every woman could squirt. And so I just Googled it and everything I found was crap. It was geared towards cis men: How to make a woman squirt! And I thought that was really sad. And so I started reading these medical journal articles and I have no science background at all. And so it's really hard to understand. And I had to look up the definitions of a lot of words. And I just thought this is a huge problem, that this content is so inaccessible. That quality information about our bodies in general is inaccessible because even sort of the good sources were contradictory. And so I thought I should tackle the p***y. GARFIELD: What did you discover about female ejaculation, which is a staple of porn and I believe every issue of Cosmopolitan since about 1979? MENDELSON: Well, first of all, there's two kinds of female ejaculation, and squirting is not considered by the scientists who record, first recorded female ejaculation and established it as a real thing, as ejaculation. I consider it ejaculation because it's shooting liquid out of you when you're aroused or orgasming. To me, that's ejaculation. But the truest form of female ejaculation is what is created by the periurethral glands. And it's just like a small amount of milky liquid, just a very small amount usually. And squirting is clea
