Gross Anatomy

by Mara Altman

  It’s true; he does. Because of that, I’d always believed my navel size was due to heredity. I had a genetic outie.

  Harmon told me that I was wrong, too.

  To describe what happens, he used balloon analogies and words like gradient and began with a very unrelatable statement. “It’s related to the presence of space between the skin and abdominal wall when you’re born,” he explained.

  After a much longer conversation, I began to understand. In a fetus, a wad of skin forms at the mouth of the navel. Now, think of your abdomen as a balloon and the navel opening as the part of a balloon you would tie off to keep all the air inside. Most of the time, that knot stays tucked inside. “An outie happens because there is so much pressure in the abdominal cavity that it pushes the skin outward to where it kind of pops out of that top part of the balloon,” Harmon said.

  So after all this time, I found that the difference between me and an innie was a mere air pocket. No more than a fart bubbling up in a pool. A bit of carbonation. It was underwhelming. Then again, there was something equalizing about this information: All of us are outies—innies are just outies that haven’t been ejected yet.

  * * *

  My whole life, I suspected that the navel was purely aesthetic, a stand-alone nodule existing only on the surface, but it actually has deeper roots. “Unlike what most people would assume,” Harmon said, “the underside of the navel is not a flat surface.”

  When the umbilical cord passes through the navel and into the abdomen, it fans out from the cordlike structure into a network of arteries, which, while in utero, keep us pumped with blood and nutrients. When the cord is cut, all those underlying structures remain. They dry up, close off, and turn into ligaments, but they remain attached to organs such as the liver and bladder. These ligaments are like condemned buildings—they still stand but no longer have purpose.

  In fact, your belly button, as you read this, is attached to your bladder via a defunct structure called the urachus. “When I open up the abdominal wall of a cadaver,” Harmon explained, “it looks like four to six hairs of pasta are coming out of the back of the belly button.”

  Our navels are only the tip of an underground weblike iceberg. And guess who’s not going to eat spaghetti this month? Me!

  In extremely rare cases, these abandoned ligament structures don’t seal up after birth. If that happens, a condition may occur where you can pee through your belly button. Can you imagine the convenience (and the adorable tiny urinals)? Unfortunately, this is not something that you can learn to do on your own. Doctors actually consider the ability to pee through your belly button a problem.

  There is another surprising thing the button can do: A sudden onset of belly button pain might signal that you have appendicitis. This is because nerves from the navel share the same part of the spinal cord as the sensory neurons that supply the appendix.

  In other words, when the appendix hurts, the brain gets confused and first sends pain to your navel. This is the lesser-known ugly duckling stepsister to the more popular “referred pain” experience that occurs just before a heart attack—people first feel a pain in their left arm. It may be a tad dramatic, but I think it’s defensible to say that a belly button can actually save your life.

  I was feeling pretty satisfied with this onslaught of information, but Harmon even had a scientific answer to what I thought was my mysterious and possibly supernatural lifelong queasy sensation.

  “It’s such a sensitive area,” he began.

  Though the belly button, as discussed earlier, suffers a gargantuan demotion after birth, the umbilical cord was once our lifeline—if anything happened to disrupt the connection, our fetal lives would be in peril. Because of this, the area is saturated with abundant nerves—rigged like a supersensitive alarm system. “If the nerves were tripped,” said Harmon, “they’d warn your brain, ‘Hey, something is going wrong. Watch it!’”

  Though there has been no formal study, Harmon suspects that as we grow, the nerve connections can make for unpredictable sensations—hence the reason I can feel nausea while someone else, from the same navel touch, can feel pain, ticklish, turned on, or even nothing at all.

  “I hate my belly button getting touched, too,” Harmon admitted.

  My queasiness then was not a fluke. The feeling was because of an anachronistic warning system, like a land mine still buried long after a war, which was blindly doing its best to help win the battle for life. My body—behind by more than three decades—still didn’t want anyone screwing around with my no-longer-existing cord.

  While the navel can mean many different things to different people—a spirit gateway, a chakra, a symbol of fertility—it is also undoubtedly, Harmon told me, and across the board, our first scar. Whether we have an overpressurized outie or a vaginal echo of an innie, when we are born, the area begins as a wound that must heal. It’s not just a retired body part or a handy landmark used to identify the abdomen; the belly button is actually our first flaw. It’s our body’s way of telling us we’re only human.

  On Belly Button Lint

  I don’t produce belly button lint. Nothing. Never. I am therefore quite jealous of people whose buttons do collect lint—soft little navel pearls, slowly assembled from the finest grains of weird and random shit.

  I asked my husband how he feels when he finds that his button is fully loaded.

  “It feels like an accomplishment,” he said. “I didn’t necessarily plant the seeds, but I get to harvest.”

  The few times that he let me pluck the fuzz, I felt like he won me a stuffed animal at the county fair, only it was much better because I could throw away the lint instead of pretend that I was excited to have a gigantic stuffed anthropomorphic banana take up the majority of my bed for the next two years.

  That being said, I did not think there was much mystery behind belly button lint: There’s a hole and crap gets stuck in holes. No different from how trash collects in highway potholes.

  But there happens to be researchers who weren’t satisfied without knowing the specifics (e.g., why do some potholes collect more trash than others?), so they decided to study exactly how atmospheric dreck gets lodged inside the belly’s black hole.

  Spoiler: Lint is not, as you might have hoped, a tiny blanket knitted by your navel microbes.

  Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki, who hosts a science show in Australia, launched an informal study in which there were 4,799 people who responded to various questions about the status of their lint. When Dr. Karl calculated all the answers, he found that the most prolific lint producers tend to be hairy overweight middle-aged men with innies. In other words, if we were to start a belly button lint factory, we would want to do most of our recruitment at all-you-can-eat buffets and the Rotary Club.

  Dr. Karl found that body hair, most likely, acts as a vast network of railways that channels debris toward the navel depot. Some lint may even be traveling from as far as the underwear region, where it catches a nonstop ride upward on the “happy trail.”

  Meanwhile, all the way across the world in Vienna, Georg Steinhauser was busy studying his own lint production—collecting and weighing each piece—for three painstaking years. He came to the same conclusion and published his navel-fluff findings in the journal Medical Hypotheses. “The scaly structure of hair firstly enhances the abrasion of minuscule fibers from the shirt and secondly directs the lint into one direction—the navel—where it accumulates,” he wrote.

  To test his hypothesis, Steinhauser shaved his stomach and thereby destroyed the lint’s vast transportation network. He was, in fact, onto something: Until his hair grew back, not one piece of lint came by for a visit.

  Steinhauser went one step further (some might say too far) and analyzed the chemical makeup of his lint. He found that it was made up not only of cotton fibers but also of house dust, cutaneous scales, fat, proteins, and sweat. He surmised, perhaps a bit self-servingly, that lint producers (i.e., hairy fat men) have more hygienic belly buttons. “Lin
t helps sweep it clean,” he concluded.

  So a navel full of lint, it turns out, is not gross; it’s actually in self-cleaning mode.

  The

  Bottom

  Half

  8

  The Air Down There

  When I brought home my new puppy a year ago, I quickly discovered that she was drawn to one thing more than all the other things. She was a crotch junkie. From every corner of the house, she’d be called forth spontaneously to come and sniff my vulva.

  Chucho is not the only dog that has been fascinated by my crotch. I have been confronted by quite a few crotch-sniffers in my life. The time I recall most clearly was when I went to interview a woman for an article and her dog spent the first five minutes of our sit-down with its head between my legs. It’s hard to appear sophisticated and professional when a large shepherd mix is trying to inhale your ovaries through your jeans. I wanted to point to my crotch and tell my interviewee, “I just want you to know, there is nothing odd or overtly pungent about this crotch,” but I wasn’t sure that was true. I had no idea what made a dog go for one crotch over another, so instead I tried to pretend the whole thing wasn’t happening as I shoved my notebook down there, turning the block of paper into a makeshift chastity belt.

  No matter how awkward those encounters have been, it had been easy to ignore the phenomenon because it happened only sporadically and always outside my home. I could get in my car, drive away, and be in denial about it ever having occurred. I didn’t have to ask what it meant about me or ponder the greater subject of vulvicular (not a word, but it should be) aromas and how they fit into the smell-scape of modern urban life.

  When I got Chucho, though, I could no longer ignore the situation. A dog snout was near my groin so often that it seemed like I’d acquired a new genital attachment. I couldn’t even safely sit on the toilet anymore. Three weeks into her tenure at our apartment, she charged into the bathroom when I was at my most vulnerable and locked her jaws onto the crotch portion of my underwear. She dug her front paws into the bath mat as she tried her hardest to pull my underwear free from my ankles. I tried to shake her loose, but only so much movement is advised in that situation. Plus, I’m bad at multitasking.

  I yelled to Dave for help. Even when you’re married and you’ve shared just about everything, you don’t necessarily want him to see you on the toilet, but I was out of options. When Dave saw me in my predicament, instead of helping, he started laughing so hard that he was paralyzed. I haven’t seen him that enthralled since The West Wing became available on demand.

  “Help me!” I yelled.

  He couldn’t get it together. That dickwad was enjoying the struggle.

  The whole fiasco wasn’t worth the teachable moment I’d wanted it to be for my puppy, so I finally gave up and let her have my underwear so that I could finish my dump in peace.

  She dashed—underwear between her teeth—toward her green zone, which was the unreachable back corner beneath our bed.

  I could have taken my pup’s crotch addiction as a compliment, but as I’ve watched her grow, I’ve noticed that her other favorite scents include feces, vomit, rotting garbage, and dead rodents. I feel like she is passive-aggressively communicating to me: “Your vagina smells divine . . . just like decomposing possums.”

  Being constantly reminded that between my legs there was an odor, something potent enough to attract furry animals, brought up both the insecurity and the fascination I’ve had about vaginal scents over the years.

  When I take a whiff of myself, I think it smells, well, vagina-y. Like it’s supposed to, I guess. I actually think it’s rather impressive, considering it’s an open orifice and only inches away from an active butthole. That being said, it is an open orifice and only inches away from an active butthole! I wanted to know the role, if any, vag scent played in my life.

  * * *

  I jumped off on this exploration exactly where my interest first became piqued: What was it about the human vulva that attracted dogs?

  Believe it or not, it wasn’t easy to find any trained scientists who were open to sharing their knowledge about why a dog might like to huff vaginas, but after a few false leads—“No, I have not conducted research about human crotches as an attractant to canines”—I finally found one.

  George Preti is a chemist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, and in his long and illustrious career, not only has he studied armpit secretions, but he has also trained dogs to sniff out ovulating cows to help ranchers more successfully inseminate the heifers. Currently, he’s training dogs to detect cancer.

  He graciously took time away from saving people’s lives to let me ask him some questions. “Why does my dog go gonzo about my crotch?” I asked. There was something embarrassing about this occurrence. I didn’t know if it was because my crotch was more overtly pungent than other crotches or if my crotch was like a sunset to her—she finds it so beautiful that each day she can appreciate it anew.

  I was partial to the latter interpretation and was hoping that Preti would validate my theory. I’m reluctant to admit it, but it was also hard not to wonder if Chucho was exploring pansexualism and had an interest in cross-species relationships.

  “It’s the most odiferous body part available to dogs,” Preti said. “If you were sitting down, they might be sniffing your armpits or your ear.”

  While his answer wasn’t exactly flattering, at least he didn’t say because your crotch smells like garbage and dogs love garbage.

  He explained that those three areas of our bodies produce our individual odor profiles. “They communicate who you are, which sex you are, and probably even where you’re at in your cycle.”

  In essence, every time my dog sniffs me, in her head she’s thinking, “That’s Mara.” Ten minutes later: “That’s Mara.” Thirty-five minutes later: “Yep, that’s still Mara.” In that sense, my dog is like a kid looking across the playground every once in a while to see if her mom is still there, only except for innocently looking, she has to smash her snout against the most private and sensitive part of my body.

  Then Preti said something awful. “There’s urine there, too. There’s always a bit of urine, and urine is very informative for a dog.”

  All I could think about was how I was probably going to cut this part out of the interview because I pride myself as a champion wiper and therefore there is obviously no way that urine could be part of the equation.

  “So are they drawn to the strongest-smelling vagina or the one that is most intriguing to them?”

  “I’m not a dog behaviorist,” he said. “I don’t know what they are thinking.”

  “But you’re saying it’s typical—that women shouldn’t be embarrassed when a dog comes in for a whiff, right?”

  “I’m a chemist,” he said, “not a psychologist.”

  Preti was not being nearly as Liberal Arts Major as I wanted him to be, but what I gathered from our conversation was that we could certainly interpret a dog’s interest in our crotches as a compliment. The dog wants to get to know us better. It’s like a person who asks, “How are you?” but who won’t just take a perfunctory “Fine” for an answer. They really want to know how you are—so much that they need to sniff your vulva.

  * * *

  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 lin
ked 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.