Writing in The Conversation, Spear describes the exact feeling a lot of us experience in the gauntlet of massive holiday meals that end every year. Specifically, she examines them through the lens of the Japanese word “betsubara,” or “separate stomach.”

The Japanese have not discovered a second cow-like stomach in humans. The term is a silly colloquial way of describing the sudden and seemingly inexplicable desire to find room for dessert when there previously was no room for anything else. The sensation is real, Spear argues, but there’s nothing especially fascinating going on in our stomachs that makes room for sweet treats.

While our stomachs find a way to accommodate any desserts we put in them, our brains play a bigger role than you’d think.

The human stomach isn’t a rigid container that hits max capacity when it fills to the brim. It’s kind of elastic-y. When you eat, it relaxes through a process called gastric accommodation and expands without dramatically increasing pressure. Dessert is usually soft and mushy, low on fiber and protein, so it doesn’t take up a whole lot of space and doesn’t require much mechanical effort to digest. Ice cream is easier to make room for than a second steak, for instance.

Hunger doesn’t shut off once you’re physically full. What takes over is “hedonic hunger,” the urge to eat for pleasure rather than necessity. This is where your brain takes over. Desserts activate the brain’s reward system, releasing dopamine and temporarily quieting signals that tell your stomach you’ve had enough.

You may not need dessert, but your brain wants it — and it will perform all the complicated mental gymnastics necessary to convince you that it’s not just a good idea, but the best idea.

As you eat one type of food, your brain gradually finds it less rewarding. Switching to something sweet or creamy or both refreshes that response. That’s why someone who can’t finish their main course might still be able to find a little room for dessert. Their bellies may not be full, exactly, but they may be experiencing a kind of overstuffed sensory response that needs a little novelty to reset interest.

Fullness signals from hormones like GLP-1 and peptide YY take 20 to 40 minutes to fully kick in. Dessert decisions often happen before that system has caught up. Restaurants know this instinctively, offering menus while our natural reward system can still be exploited. Add cultural aspects, like how dessert is often seen as a celebratory act or part of a ritual, and then toss in a little bit of emotional eating when we need a sugary pick-me-up, and it’s easy to understand why, especially during the holidays, there’s always room for dessert.

The post Humans Have Grown a ‘Second Stomach’ Just for Desserts, Scientist Says appeared first on VICE.

VICE: Hi Tulsi, so how did you become a nude art model?
Tulsi: My mother was a nude art model. And her mother before her. My sister is a model too. She’s the one who got me into this. I was extremely hesitant at first. I used to think of it as something bad; I was a child and didn’t understand it. When my mother would bring me along for sessions, I would run to the other end of the building and avoid being anywhere near her. In fact, even when I modelled for the very first time, I cried for hours before. But after that, I got comfortable with it. I forgot all my inhibitions, and now it doesn’t bother me at all.

Considering the job description heavily involves staring at one spot for hours, how do you get through it?
It definitely gets boring. Sitting for hours in one position is tough and if I move around or reach to scratch an itch, the artists can get annoyed. But I don’t hold back and if they say something, I tell them I am a real person and not a katputli (puppet), which usually makes them give me some leeway. It’s easy to get lost in what you are doing. What goes through my mind is just my family, my husband and my children. The fear that they will find out is strongest during the sessions and I can’t help but worry. I know I am not doing anything wrong but I also know they won’t see it that way. It makes me really sad but I don’t let it show on my face, ever. I just do my job.

Are you a nudist in other parts of your life too?
No way! My family has no idea I do this. The day my husband finds out, he will divorce me. I have told him I work as a sweeper at this art school. Once, he mentioned that he’d heard that this place employs nude models. I told him I’d never heard of such a thing. I can’t tell my children either. There’s no way they would understand.

Have artists who paint you gotten turned on during a session?
I don’t think so. The artists look at me from a study point of view. Like a doctor would look at his patient. I have never felt their gaze to be sleazy or sexual in nature—they do what they do for the sake of art. A layperson won’t understand but the painters’ way of seeing is completely different. I have a great relationship with the students. We are constantly laughing and joking around. They’ve never made me feel uncomfortable—even the men.

How do you feel about how your body has changed over the years you’ve been doing this?
Well, I do think I’ve become quite fat over the years. When I was younger, I was fitter but now, there are rolls of fat everywhere. But that doesn’t make me conscious. Any body is a body and every painting of me makes me happy. In fact I even joke about it with the artists. Some of them say, “Tulsi, you’ve become so big you aren’t fitting in my canvas anymore!” I tell them, “Don’t blame me if you don’t know how to paint!”

What’s the weirdest pose you have had to hold for long?
Weird poses are actually better; you get to hide the important bits if you’re not feeling it that day, especially if you get to sit. It’s standing that’s the worst. All the weight is usually on one leg and after a while, it starts to hurt. Once, I almost fainted just from standing. It might look easy but any standing pose is the weirdest.

Can body hair get in the way of your work?
It depends on the artist. If they have any request, then I comply. Otherwise I come as I am. There’s no preparation as such. I feel anybody can do this.

Have you ever been slut-shamed?
If my relatives and neighbours come to know what I do then I probably will be. Some people have the wrong idea about this profession. Thankfully, they haven’t found out. On the other hand, my artists have never shamed me. They treat me with a lot of respect. They talk to me, make me laugh, make me feel like I am doing a big thing.

Is this a way to make good money?
Not nearly enough. I get just Rs 1,000 ($14) for a day, in which I would have one or two shifts of three hours each. Also, work is seasonal and scanty. I could have bookings for a few weeks, but then not get work for months. I have to keep going to different colleges and art schools. But not enough places are open to nude art, so this isn’t enough to sustain me. I have to do other work like washing dishes to sustain myself, but I still like doing it because the students get to learn. I feel happy for them when they make a good painting and get a commendation for it.

What’s the funniest thing that’s happened to you during a session?
Once I was in the middle of a posing session, and I got a call from my mother-in-law saying that they were at CST (the railway station right next to the college). They had come down from the village to roam the city and surprise me—out of nowhere. I literally had to drop everything and run. I’ve never worn my clothes faster. When I finally got there, they asked me why I looked so stressed and I told them I was doing so much sweeping at work I was tired. They believed me and even sympathised. I couldn’t help but laugh about it later. But if they came to know I was butt-naked in the middle of a classroom less than an hour ago, there would be anything but sympathy.

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Instead of the usual organ placements in human anatomy, Jamaluddin’s heart is on the right side of his body, while his gallbladder and liver are all the way on the left. This is because Jamaluddin has an extremely rare condition called Situs Inversus, in which key visceral organs of the body are reversed. While this is super uncommon, someone suffering from it can go through their whole life without realising that their organs are actually flipped. Some prominent examples of those who have lived with it include Spanish singer Enrique Iglesias and American actress Catherine O’Hara. However, it can lead to complications if the condition is accompanied by other irregularities or the person requires surgery.

“We found stones in his gallbladder. But it is extremely difficult to take out the stones if the gallbladder is located on the left side”, Dr Shashikant Dixit, who a bariatric laparoscopic surgeon who examined Jamaluddin, told IANS. “We had to take the help of three-dimensional laparoscopic machines to perform the surgery.” He also mentioned that the first such case of organs on the wrong side of the body had come up in 1643.

Luckily, Jamaluddin made it through the operation and is now slowly recovering, so even though the placement of his organs is all wrong, it looks like things are going to be all right.

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This is Design Bias, a Motherboard column in which writer Rose Eveleth explores the products, research programs, and conclusions made not necessarily because any designer or scientist or engineer sets out to discriminate, but because to them the “normal” user always looks exactly the same. The result is a world that’s biased by design. -the Editor

Before it was a television show, Grey’s Anatomy was a textbook. Published in 1858, Gray’s Anatomy (spelled with an “a”) quickly became the gold standard in medical illustration, featuring detailed diagrams of everything from the tiny bones in the hand to the internal structure of the eye.

Gray’s Anatomy is still in print today, in its 41st edition, but if you open the book up and flip through the pages you might notice something. Or really, the dearth of something: women. And it turns out it’s not just Gray’s Anatomy that has this problem—almost all medical textbooks are heavily biased towards depicting male bodies.

In 2014, Rhiannon Parker, a researcher at the University of Wollogong in Australia, set out to quantify just how bad that bias actually is. By analyzing more than 6,000 images from 17 anatomy textbooks published between 2008 and 2013, Parker and her colleagues found that only 36 percent of the anatomical images with an identifiable sex were female.

Even more discouraging is the results weren’t all that different from a study done in 1994, in which 32 percent of images represented female bodies. “I expected there to be a much bigger improvement on representation,” Parker told me.

Not all books were equally biased. General Anatomy, 2nd ed., had the highest proportion of male bodies at 5:1, while Human Anatomy and Physiology, 9th ed. was the only textbook to have the same proportion of male and female bodies. Gray’s Anatomy for Students—a condensed version of Gray’s Anatomy—has nearly three times more men as women.

“The textbook with the worst ratio was edited solely by men”

Interestingly, the editors of Human Anatomy, the textbook with parity, are Elaine N. Marieb and Katja Hoehn, both women, while the textbook with the worst ratio was edited solely by men.

Madelene Hyde, the vice president for content and education at Elsevier, which publishes several top anatomy books including Gray’s Anatomy, said they are “trying more and more to be as balanced as possible with our textbook images.”

“We take gender and racial diversity seriously and are working to include more diverse images in our textbooks,” she told Motherboard in an email.

Read More: The Design Bias of Heart Failure

In some cases, showing a female body makes sense, if the content is specifically about female health. But Parker found that even in cases where there is no reason to show one sex over another, men are more likely to be depicted as the “normal body.” This lines up with previous research from 1992 that found that even when it comes to medical imagery around reproduction, men outnumbered women in textbooks 2.5 to 1.

“For the anatomy titles that do not solely focus on surgical anatomy (interior rather than exterior), we do our best to provide images of diverse subjects,” Hyde said in her email. “When possible, we try to replace older images of rare clinical conditions. As a provider of a significant volume of global health content, we try more and more to be as balanced as possible with our textbook images.”

Parker also saw other trends in her dataset. Even though she was looking for images where the body being depicted might be identified by readers as male or female (whether by genitalia or by traditional gender markers), she also found that bodies were also overwhelmingly white, slim, and young. Of the images of women she did find, 86 percent of them were white (compared to 76 percent of identifiably male bodies).

Male bodies are almost always muscular, while female bodies are drawn thin. Only 2.7 percent of the images the team analyzed depicted visibly disabled bodies. And only 2.2 percent of the textbook images depicted elderly patients. “You don’t have any elderly in these textbooks even though the elderly need more healthcare,” Parker said. “I think that was quite surprising to me, that those types of representations weren’t really in there.”

Parker has also researched the impact the images might have on medical students. In a survey of 456 anatomy students studying at the School of Medicine at the University of Wollongong in 2018, she found that the disparity in bodies didn’t affect their explicit bias, but it increased their scores on implicit bias tests that measure more subtle attitudes.

“People know what they should be saying, what they should be thinking” when it comes to gendered assumptions, Parker said. “But that doesn’t stop the insidious impact of biased images. The way they normalize certain images and body types, you can’t necessarily stop that from impacting your biases.”

There is plenty of research to suggest that biases held by doctors have real, negative impacts on patients. “Coronary heart disease is seen as a male disease,” Parker said. Another study found that many textbooks don’t address the differences in the way coronary heart disease presents in women, opting to show men only, which could contribute to women being misdiagnosed at higher rates than men.

It’s not just coronary heart disease, either. Parker notes that fatphobia among doctors leads to people not seeking medical attention when they need it, and that Black women in America are three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women, which many experts say is largely due to doctor bias against Black women.

Even beyond the bias it could engender, depicting the same body over and over again as white, male, and athletic isn’t the best way to teach future doctors. “I think we all fall into [the idea] we want to draw pretty people; everybody is attracted to pretty people,” said Jill Gregory, a medical illustrator and associate director of instructional technology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “But especially when you’re illustrating a disease of older people, you shouldn’t have a 20-year-old with coronary artery disease.”

Stock image sites and online medical resources fall into the same trap. Gregory was recently asked to do a series of medical illustrations for an anatomy class at Mount Sinai. To depict breast health, “the professor had gotten random images off of Google,” she said, which mostly showed a very specific kind of breast—perky, white, mostly with implants. “They’re like these little balls on your chest. Most people don’t have breasts like that,” Gregory said.

So Gregory created an illustration of an elderly breast instead, collapsed with the nipple facing down. She said that students in the course were much more likely to encounter breasts that looked like her illustrations than the ones commonly depicted in books or stock images.

“It takes time for people to say, ‘I should use diverse skin tones, maybe someone in a wheelchair'”

And sometimes illustrators are explicitly told to not include certain kinds of bodies. Parker said that in her research, she heard stories from illustrators who reported being asked not to show female nipples unless the illustration had something to do with breast health, for example.

By using past books as examples, illustrators are also perpetuating the bias. “Frank Netter, the father of medical illustration—his work is 100 percent white people,” said Gregory. “It’s a matter of not being lazy thinkers and starting to be, like, ‘I shouldn’t just default to the same skin tone.'”

This is exacerbated by the fact that the majority of medical illustrators are white (85 percent of people who responded to an Association of Medical Illustrators survey in 2018 identified as such), a problem that the association started tackling head on a few years ago with a special diversity committee (which Gregory is a member of).

The solution lies in the hands of publishers and illustrators. Gregory says that it’s crucial to explain to people working in the field why this bias is harmful. “It’s really about awareness. It takes time for people to say, ‘Oh right, I should use diverse skin tones, maybe someone in a wheelchair, different kinds of people.'”

But are things getting better? Parker isn’t so optimistic. She points out that doctors have a really rigid idea of what a healthy body looks like, and that’s a hard thing to change. “No, I don’t think it’s changing,” she told me. “I do think that maybe the gender disparity is slowly changing. But the intersections with ethnicity and body type, I don’t think they’re being paid attention to, and are getting worse.”

Gregory, on the other hand, sees progress, even if it’s been slow. She says that even she has changed her methods around this issue over the years. “Ten or 15 years ago I was maybe throwing something in for the heck of it, but now every time I approach an illustration I think about how I can include diversity in my images.” Between that and recruiting a more diverse set of illustrators in the field, Gregory has hopes that things will get better.

Correction: In the original version of the story, Frank Netter’s name was spelled incorrectly.

The post Medical Textbooks Overwhelmingly Use Pictures of Young White Men appeared first on VICE.

As detailed in a paper published in Nature Metabolism , the newly-identified vessels cross the surface of bones to their interior. Bones are organs, too, after all, and have a system for blood circulation not unlike our squishier organs.

The researchers dubbed the new vessels “trans-cortical vessels,” or TCV, because in mice they cross the entire hard outer shell of bone known as corticalis.

“It is really unexpected being able to find a new and central anatomical structure that has not been described in any textbook in the 21st century,” study co-author Matthias Gunzer, a professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, said in a statement.

The scientists first found evidence of TCVs in mice long bones, they report in their study. Previously, scientists had only identified a handful of blood vessels entering and exiting mice bones. In mice, TCVs account for the majority of blood flowing through long bones, the study said.

The researchers also found evidence of similar TCV-like structures—although thicker than in mice—in small parts of human limb bones.

According to the study authors, the discovery of the vessels is a “missing link in the search for a fully functional closed circulatory system” that explains how blood flows in and out of bones.

Humans have looked inwards to unlock the many mysteries of our own bodies for millennia, but our anatomy still has its secrets.

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The post Scientists Discover New Type of Blood Vessels In Our Bones appeared first on VICE.

The 28-year-old man from Upper Hutt pilfered two toes from a preserved corpse. It’s not clear how he attempted to get away with it, but I assume it was by plucking them from one of the unprotected bodies.

According to the New Zealand Herald, he’s been charged with theft and “improperly interfering with the dead body of an unknown person.” The digits, each valued at $5,500 (approximately $3,800 US), have since been returned.

The Body Worlds Vital exhibit “celebrates the potential of the human body and the body in motion,” according to its website. Here, visitors can see examples of conditions such as smoker’s lungs and arthritis.

The cadavers on display have been preserved via plastination, developed by the German anatomist Gunther von Hagens. Through this process, a body’s water and fat are replaced with a type of liquid plastic. Von Hagens has even succeeded in creating a “sex plastinate,” or a display of two people having sex.

Body Worlds is among several traveling human anatomy shows. One Body Worlds exhibit was seen in the James Bond movie Casino Royale. But it’s perhaps better known for controversially using the corpses of executed Chinese prisoners (evidenced by the bullet holes in two of the individuals’ skulls)—a revelation that resulted in the return of seven bodies to China in 2004.

According to its website, Body Worlds states that all of its current cadavers were donated with consent.

The man appeared today in the Auckland District Court before a Community Magistrate to face his charges. He was remanded on bail and set to reappear in the Wellington District Court later this year.

The post A Man Was Caught Stealing Human Toes From a ‘Body Worlds’ Exhibit appeared first on VICE.

Alice Roberts, an anthropologist and professor of public engagement in science at the University of Birmingham in the UK, went on a mission to test all the ways human bodies could be improved, inspired by other species that do it better. The result: A conglomeration of creatures that turn the human form freakishly alien. It’s really hard to look at, but here it is:

Roberts and an effects team, including virtual sculptor Scott Eaton and SFX model maker Sangeet Prabhaker, replaced all the weak-ass parts of our human form with parts borrowed from animals. Roberts’ “perfect” body gets powerful emu legs, reptilian skin, huge ears and eyes, and giant three-toed feet. Calling it human after all this is barely passable.

Oh, and a creepy goddamn baby head peers out from a kangaroo pouch on its stomach.

The team unveiled its Frankenlady in front of Roberts and a small crowd at the London Science Museum for a BBC program Can Science Make Me Perfect? It was received with a mix of squeals, forced laughter, and pained smiles. No one wants to say this thing is repulsive, but their discomfort is obvious. It’s like something from The Island of Dr. Moreau.

The most bizarre aspect of this new and improved body isn’t even its oversized eyeballs or pointed ears, or emu-like legs, but that fucking baby head peeking out of its pouch. So, I guess in the perfect human scenario, babies are born the size of jelly beans, like kangaroo young? And then the tiny baby crawls up this hairless body and into the pouch to continue growing? This thing only gets weirder the longer you think about it. I’m done with it. Burn it with fire.

The post Science Has Gone Too Far: This Is Apparently the ‘Perfect Human Body’ appeared first on VICE.

There’s something disturbing about this placid-faced android doing sit-ups and calf flexes, but the possibilities that this technology creates are actually pretty inspiring. Traditional humanoid robots have been developed for lots of different priorities but for this research, roboticists Yuki Asano, Kei Okada, and Masayuki Inaba wanted to design robots that could mimic human physical movement more accurately.

This required designing a skeletal structure, joints, muscles, body proportions, and even a sort of central nervous system more analogous to a human being. They ended up creating two, which they named Kenshiro and Kengoro, according to a study published Wednesday in Science Robotics.

With this more biologically correct analog, researchers were able to have the androids perform movements never before seen. And they believe this research could have some significant real-world applications, such as helping to build better prosthetics to allowing a deeper understanding of the human body itself.

With that understanding, it makes Kenshiro and Kengoro’s workout a little less menacing. But I still don’t want to spend a lot of time staring at this:

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The post Watch This Humanoid Robot Doing Pushups and Crunches and Reckon with Your Own Mortality appeared first on VICE.

Jeong trained in acting and choreography, launching her career as a performer in 2004. Tall and willowy, she moves with a determination that can feel ponderous—until she gets into character. Her performances are inspired by puppet theater and animation— she studied the latter at the Korean Academy of Film Arts in Seoul. Watching her move feels like entering into a kind of live-action cartoon, as she appears to morph into a range of life forms, shifting from a beautiful young woman into the stuff of nightmares. As a solitary performer, she often resembles a lonely child, kept company only by her playthings. “I want to make them alive from my body,” she tells me, “and to make a duet.” This process of transference can produce scenes of a strikingly sexual cast, although the artist maintains that her male-female interactions are not conceived of as erotic.

As the audience at the Tanks filed into the space, Jeong sat at the edge of a square of white flooring with costumes and props that included a mannequin veiled in a pink pashmina, and a vacuum cleaner sprayed with silver paint. Removing her street clothes and donning a black hooded puppeteer’s costume, she stuck her foot into a mask of a male head and launched into a compelling 75-minute action. The audience was rapt.

Beginning in a corpselike pose, she allowed the impaled head to come to life, her leg snaking upwards, the folds of her trouser leg hanging loose. Suddenly, a creature was born, a ‘he’ with empty eye sockets and an impassive expression. Crawling on three legs, it resembled nothing more than a cephalopod from Bosch’s The Last Judgement. ‘He’ made his way towards the mannequin and pulled off the scarf to reveal a separation between upper and lower halves. ‘He’ eventually dragged the two parts of the mannequin off the plastic crate and abruptly reunited them, culminating in a violent shudder and a post-orgasmic collapse. In this first of the work’s seven “ways,” Jeong used her body as both puppeteer and puppet. Stark under theatrical lighting, her appearance became hard to pinpoint as she shifted ceaselessly from performer to performed.

Across town at the Delfina Foundation, where Jeong completed a residency earlier this year as part of a thematic season titled “Collecting as Practice,” a more in-depth exhibition includes videos of past performances and a range of Jeong’s “unperformed objects.” She’s shown her collection before, at the Atelier Hermès in Seoul in 2016, when she was the recipient of the Hermès Foundation Missulsang Award, but she adds to it with every new project. Items included may already have been used in performances, or may have as-yet unreleased performative potential. But everything is infused with sex.

The objects at Delfina are organized into loose taxonomies and displayed, clinically, on white pedestals. On one are a selection of anatomical models, a head, eye, and brain, plus a range of dildos and fake vaginas and mouths. Another presents tracheotomy tubes, foot pump pipes, and catheter tubes. “The objects produce the idea for the performance,” Jeong tells me. Another, low, pedestal supports a range of flying objects, from frisbee-sized drones to delicate remote-controlled helicopters with blades like apple stems. On a high shelf, models of human heads are lined up like guillotine trophies, from the rudimentary top of a CPR doll to a gory cranium of a generic angry man (it bears an uncanny resemblance to musician Dave Grohl). Some of the heads have had eyes gouged out, others are coated in tar-like substances—all were, or will be, performance props. It’s hard not to think of the iconic work of ‘doll art’ here, Hans Bellmer’s profoundly unsettling La Poupée (The Doll) (c. 1936).

Jeong’s genius lies in the way she complicates gender imbalance in archetypal dynamics between puppeteer and puppet. In some instances, she controls a male character who assaults an inert female form, effectively performing the attack herself. But things get really interesting when she controls the male puppet while also performing the female submissive. Later in 7ways, Jeong removed her jumpsuit and pulled on a bright pink halter-neck dress. She tied her long black hair into a ponytail and slid her left arm into a black cloth tube. The sturdy vacuum cleaner now came into its own; Jeong lay back over it like a sacrificial virgin, her spine arched dramatically.

At the end of the hoover pipe was a grizzled head topped with a shock of grey hair, whose mouth formed a gaping ‘O.’ Rising up from behind Jeong’s prostrate body, this began to nuzzle at her, then shoved her off the machine, helped her up again, and repeated the action. Finally it was turned on, sucking hungrily at her chest, stomach, and crotch before flopping to one side. By maintaining control over her props and movements, Jeong overturns the overwhelming tendency in the history of art to represent women as passive objects. Yet paradoxically, the situations she engineers also involve her playing a victim. And in the context of our current anxieties over the potential threats posed by A.I., such scenes act to remind us that fantasies about living machines are nothing new. Jeong’s erotic power-play demonstrates that the post-human has always been with us, but that we remain in control. For now.

Ellen Mara De Wachter is a writer and curator based in London. Her book Co-Art: Artists on Creative Collaboration is published by Phaidon.

Geumhyung Jeong’s 7ways, was performed at Tate Modern, London, on October 5.

Geumhyung Jeong: Private Collection: Unperformed Objects is on view at Delfina Foundation, London, until November 11.

The post Geumhyung Jeong’s Uncanny Performance Pries Sex from Machinery appeared first on VICE.

If you’re a man who falls on the wrong side of that statistic, the vagina is a muscular canal, usually between six to seven inches, and runs from the cervix to the outside of the body. The vulva, on the other hand, is external and is comprised of the labia, the clitoris and other parts.

So is it really true that half of all men aren’t aware of this? To find out, we went for a walk around east London, found some men and tested their vagina knowledge by asking them to draw one.

Magnus, 25

VICE: Hi mate can you draw a vagina for me please?
Magnus: You want me to draw one?

Yeah, I’d like you to draw one please.
Okay, so… I just need to think. I mean, they’re all different aren’t they?

I guess so.
So you got the clit up here… and some stuff coming off here. I know some people have got sort of different things going on here… and then, like, the labia – it really varies, doesn’t it? I dunno. Obviously you’ve got a bit of hair.

Yeah. Can you point to the vagina in your drawing?
Isn’t just all of it the vagina? I dunno. The inside? Isn’t, like, the vulva the outside? I feel like you know – you’ve done your research. Okay. There we go.

Ben, 32

Would you fancy drawing a vagina for me?
Ben: Yeah, sure, mate. I’m just trying to get my bearings.

Sure, take your time.
I’m just trying to make it a subtle… leg shot.

Okay.
Ah. This is gonna look horrific.

Going all in with the legs?
Yeah… bit of cheek there, too. Looks a bit like bollocks that actually, doesn’t it?

I see what you mean.
Might just draw a handbag here too, maybe. Right – I’m not gonna add to that ’cause it’ll make it look more worse.

Dan, 33

Aright, fancy drawing a vagina for me?
Dan: Okay, mate. Here we go. This is a confusing start. Looks a bit like a nose.

I see what you mean.
It’s quite a wide vagina. I want to keep it really neat, to be honest.

Yeah.
Is this quite a scientific drawing? What do you think?

It’s not bad .
Yeah, that’s as good as it’s gonna get, mate. My hand’s shaking, though. Man, this actually looks a bit like an angry face.

Adam, 32

Hi there. Just getting the lads to draw vaginas, if you fancied a shot?
Adam: [Laughs] Yeah. My artistic talent is shit, though, mate.

God loves a trier.
I mean, I’ve not seen one, to be honest.

Just give it your best shot.
Okay, I’m just gonna go for it.

Wow, what is that? Are they… legs?
Yeah… I mean, maybe they could go down here a bit more? And then… there we go. That’s mine. I need to sign that actually, just in case it becomes something.

Andy, 33

Hi. Can you try to draw a vagina for me please?
Andy: Ah, go on then. It won’t take long will it?

Depends how much you want to get into it.
I mean, how much scale do you want here?

Whatever you think’s best.
Alright. I’m gonna start with the legs. Warm myself up to it. Here’s a waist. Oh, these are weird legs.

That’s not too bad
It almost looks like a penis.

Yeah, you might want to add some detailing.
Okay. I think that’s quite good.

So there we go: only one guy got it right; the rest of them drew vulvas. Maybe the percentage of men unable to locate the vagina is higher than we thought.

More on VICE:

I Steam Cleaned My Vagina

Five Guys and a Girl Talk About the First Time They Touched a Vagina

We Talked to Women About Their Vaginas

The post We Asked Men to Draw Vaginas appeared first on VICE.