Your feet help you walk and jump. Your eyes help you see. Female ejaculation, male nipples, and the hymen? They don’t have a specific “purpose” in the body. They are byproducts of biology. They’ve been mistaken in their purpose in the past, and cause for curiosity in the present.

In the book Come as You Are, Dr. Emily Nagoski briefly discusses the oddity of these features and how they’ve effected out present perception of sex and ourselves. Still wondering about female ejaculation, male nipples, and the hymen? Here’s what you need to know about how they’ve shaped our culture.

 

1. Female Ejaculation

“Squirting,” while having been banned from porn in the UK in 2014, has recently come into the limelight in America through this same interphase. Women don’t need to implant their DNA anywhere to make a baby, unlike males, and they don’t exactly have a penis to ejaculate from. What exactly is it then?

Squirting is female ejaculation, also called “gushing,” and consists mostly of urine, while the “real” female ejaculation is actually comparable to male semen (minus sperm). It’s thick, white fluid that is expelled from the prostate when a female orgasms. Not every woman is able to ejaculate. It’s not even for certain what the percentage of women who are able to is.

While there is speculation that this helps protect women from UTIs, there’s just not enough scholarship on the subject. The research that is there hasn’t been able to draw a clear reason as to why this phenomenon happens, and why it only happens to some women.

 

2. Male Nipples

When an embryo is six weeks old, there is a “washing” of masculine hormones. The genetically male blastocyst responds to the washing while the biological female doesn’t. This is when the penis and testicles develop on the male and ovaries and such develop on the female. This is called biological homology. This concept is why males have nipples, even if they don’t serve a standard purpose like female nipples do. They were formed at the beginning of fetal development, and stayed there because it’s easier to leave them be than use hormones, energy, or whatever would be used to suppress them on a male, to overpower them.

 

3. The Hymen

This piece of membrane that may or may not be around/covering your vaginal opening is called the hymen. It’s different for everyone that has one, and not every woman has one. It could stretch out or tear long before sex (tampons, masturbation, biking) and it definitely doesn’t define whether or not the owner of said hymen is a virgin. There’s actually no medical definition for virginity. The idea emerged when the anatomist Andreas Vesalius went searching for a reason why some females bleed during sex during the 16th century.

All that being said, hymens can grow back. They’re like your hair and your nails. You can cut them (tear or stretch in the context of your hymen) and they’ll grow back. However, due to the variability in hymens, they also may not grow back. While they may have been able to keep germs out of the vagina of an embryo, the medical purpose they serve after is a scientific mystery.

 

While most of our anatomy serves a specific function, other parts just happen to be there. The mystery surrounding them deemed them foreign, and people continuously struggle to confine them into a box. For example, this made the hymen a cause for anxiety for a long time and led to lots of misinformation.

Some parts of the body, like female ejaculation, male nipples, and the hymen, don’t need a purpose. Giving them a purpose can do more harm than good, but it’s important to know how they came to be and what they are.

 

Cover image courtesy of Shutterstock.

By Jacqueline Wostrel on March 29, 2016
Jacqueline (Jackie) Wostrel is an editorial intern at HelloFlo, founder of the book blog No Bent Spines, and illustrator of the children’s book Hearts and Butterflies. She enjoys long walks to the book store, political debates, cheese plates, and dreaming of all the countries she has yet to explore. In the fall she’ll go to the University of Houston for Journalism and Hotel Restaurant Management.