The Tits Out History Of Women’s Bodies (with Helen King)

Breasts, clitoris, hymen, and womb. Across history, these body parts have told women who they are and what they should do. Although knowledge of each part has changed through time, none of them tells a simple story. Author Helen King is here to tell all, as we discuss her new book Immaculate Forms: A History of the Female Body in Four Parts.

Buy a copy of Immaculate Forms by Helen King.

RSVP to the Vulgar History meetup in Fort Myers, Florida!

Sign up for the Vulgar History mailing list!

Get 15% off all the gorgeous jewellery and accessories at common.era.com/vulgar or go to commonera.com and use code VULGAR at checkout

Get Vulgar History merch at vulgarhistory.com/store (best for US shipping) and vulgarhistory.redbubble.com (better for international shipping)

Support Vulgar History on Patreon 

Vulgar History is an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which means that a small percentage of any books you click through and purchase will come back to Vulgar History as a commission. Use this link to shop there and support Vulgar History.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Vulgar History Podcast

The Tits Out History of Women’s Bodies (with Helen King)

January 22, 2025

Hello and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster, and today I’m going to be sharing with you a conversation I had with author Helen King about her new book, Immaculate Forms: A History of the Female Body in Four Parts. So, just to give you an idea of what this book is like, it’s a very readable book for just a general audience, it’s not an academic book at all. Dr. Jennifer Gunter, author of The Vagina Bible, says, “Never has medical history been more entertaining,” and I absolutely concur. This book, it’s really readable, it’s really interesting. 

What Helen does in this book is she goes through four body parts; each, sort of, chapter is about either breasts, clitoris, hymen and womb. And just kind of talks about through history how they’ve been treated in artwork, how they’ve been treated in medical knowledge, do people believe in these body parts? It’s really such an interesting approach to the whole topic. In this interview, we’re going to go body part by body part. I do want to emphasize too that in this book, Helen King, she talks about gender, the gender binary a lot in this book because she’s bringing up so many examples of non-binary people throughout history and how they’re treated. So, like breasts, clitoris, hymen, and womb, and what makes somebody a woman and what makes somebody not a woman. And it’s in a really sort of open, I think, very trans-inclusive sort of way and I hope that comes across in our discussion as well. 

I do want to just let you know a bit about Helen and where she’s coming from and who she is. She’s a Professor Emerita of classical studies at the Open University. She’s an elected member of the General Synod of the Church of England, where she is vice chair of Together, which campaigns on a range of discrimination issues, including discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexuality. She’s published extensively on the history of women’s health. And just in talking to her too, you’ll hear this, but in doing the research, she learned so many things that she hadn’t known before just by going through these body parts. I think it’s so interesting. 

Actually, one other thing I just want to mention is I recently saw the new movie version of Nosferatu and there’s a part in that where Lily Rose-Depp’s character, she’s suffering from possession by a vampire, but the sort of dim-witted male doctors are just like, “Oh, I think there’s a problem with her womb. Tighten up her corset more, hold the womb in place and stuff.” So, I do want to say, we don’t talk about it in the podcast, but in the book, Helen absolutely gets into the whole concept of the wandering womb and things like that. 

So anyway, without further ado, I hope you enjoyed this conversation between myself and Helen King, author of Immaculate Forms: A History of the Female Body in Four Parts

—————

Ann: So, today we are joined by Helen King, author of Immaculate Forms: A History of the Female Body in Four Parts. Welcome, Helen. 

Helen: Thank you. Lovely to be here. 

Ann: I’m really delighted to have you here. I think that this book is going to be of great interest to my listeners. Can you explain, initially, just the premise of your book? 

Helen: Sure. So, I was trying to write a book which was a history of women’s bodies, mostly in Western Europe, but going beyond where necessary. And I was trying to think, how do you do that? Where do you start? What counts as a woman’s body? And of course, that’s the big question. What is actually a woman? How much is it our bodies? How much does that define us? And I thought the way to do this was to pick four body parts, the ones that sort of come up most in discussions of what a proper woman should look like and be like. So, breasts, clitoris, hymen, and womb. 

That also takes me from the outside of the body, from what is visible. I mean, even if you haven’t got your breasts on display, you can show them with clothing, you can sort of play them down, you can play them up, you can actually see some shape there. Whereas when you get to clitoris, hymen, and womb, you don’t know what’s going on there. So, from outside to inside, from visible to invisible. And that also means going from, sort of, what you can find out about through experience to what you really can only guess is going on inside the body. Like, what is happening deep inside the body and the womb? What does it look like? What does it do? What’s it all about? So, from outside to inside, and from visible to invisible, and from, sort of, factual-ish to imaginary. 

Alie: And can you explain… I mean, you’re talking about, just the book is described, it’s going from classical Greece to the modern age, but the historical time periods and things you’re talking about, it’s everything. Like, you’re just looking at all different history. 

Helen: Yeah, so my own background is in ancient Greek stuff, classics, so Hippocratic medicine, the medicine of ancient Greece. But I’ve been studying a lot more than that ever since I really started doing research academically. So, the point is that ancient Greek medicine is used up to pretty well the 19th century as a basis for what the body is about. Modernity is quite recent, [chuckles] if that makes sense. The same sorts of beliefs that, for example, a woman’s body only has a finite amount of blood in it and if you use up your blood by thinking, using your brain, you haven’t got enough left to make babies out of. That sort of belief goes back to the ancient Greeks, and it was still around in the 19th century. So, it was used as an argument against women having a higher education; if you used your brain too much, the race would die out. 

Ann: And what I was thinking of, just because there’s so many things I want to talk to you about your book, we can go body part by body part. So, starting with the breasts, which I was just explaining to you before we recorded on this podcast, we talk about being “tits out” as the ultimate compliment, and that’s for any gender. Being tits out is just, a person who is just being audacious and doing their own thing, so I was excited to have a whole chapter about tits. 

Helen: [laughs] It was the first one I wrote because I’d never really done anything on the history of breasts before and I thought, I’m going to start with something I don’t know too much about because that will be interesting for me to write, and I won’t get overwhelmed by knowing too much. And I was just in shock the whole way through the chapter actually, there was so much more historically than I had ever imagined.

Ann: What I appreciate about your book—I appreciate a lot about your book—is with all the body parts, you’re talking about… In one context there’s maternal thing, like, a procreative content, but then there’s also sort of philosophical… But breasts especially, you talk about the breastfeeding versus just breasts as objects, breasts as sexuality. And so, you’re talking about both sides. Yeah. 

Helen: Yeah, that whole sexual versus maternal thing, I think what really brought that out for me when I was researching the chapter was the very recent discussions of human breast milk ice cream and the sort of, shock horror, “How could you possibly? [gags]” Versus well, we’ve all either used breast milk as children or we’ve used substitutes for it. What’s the big deal about breast milk? And yet, it really freaks people out to think of breast milk ice cream. So, that was a modern example, which I found quite illuminating. 

Ann: Well, in this chapter, as well as in other chapters, but you, I appreciated in your book, you also, you’re talking about like a trans person’s experience so talking about top surgery, the removal of the breast and how that can help. But also, even people who aren’t trans, like a cis man who might have excessive breast tissue. So, just talking about the breast is not just as a… It’s a very expansive discussion. I thought that was also interesting as well. 

Helen: Well, thank you for saying that because it was something, again, which I found surprising. I hadn’t realized quite how much breast tissue is something found in people of any sex. So yeah, you’ve got the situation where somebody who is identified as male from birth could end up with breast cancer and men don’t take that seriously, they don’t think about breast cancer. They think it’s a woman’s disease. Well, actually breast tissue exists in anybody. 

And then the thing about accessory breasts, which to me always sounds a lot like a handbag or something, [both chuckle] taking your purse out, you know, accessory. Accessory breasts where you can have breast tissue that grows even on your leg! That can happen in people, whatever sex they identify as, and it can even produce milk. Finding examples of that from the past but also examples in modern medical literature, was one of those, sort of, shock-horror moments in my breast chapter. I had no idea that breasts are actually not that much of a girly thing. In terms of getting your tits out, I was really in a state of over-excitement when I found people literally doing that, including a man. There was a guy in the early-modern period, 1665, who we’re told, in medical texts, had so much milk in his breasts—and this is someone assigned male at birth as far as we can see, but who had maybe some sort of condition where breast milk develops even in the breasts of someone who’s supposedly male—and he would actually get drunk at parties and squirt milk at people as a sort of party trick. Now, again, what does that do to our ideas of breasts as the thing that’s really, really female? Clearly, it’s not as simple as that. 

Ann: I’m hoping to be able to control myself and go body part by body part. But every single chapter has examples like that where it’s just, like, this book really illustrates how… What is a man? What is a woman? Like there’s so much… It’s not like bodies are born, people are born with a combination of parts or whatever. It’s not straightforward at all. I left this book being like, “I don’t even know what a woman is anymore.” I don’t know. 

Helen: [laughs] I have to say, I get to a similar stage myself. Exactly that. So, things like, how do you name parts? We’ll come to that later on. But how do you name them? What is a female organ? What is a male organ? Do you have different words if it’s in a man or in a woman? So, the breasts thing even, do you talk about, in English slang, you know, tits and boobs, are those words which suggest one more than the other? You talk about men who have a lot of breast tissue, obvious breast tissue now, sometimes described as having man boobs. So, man boobs, even there, is that actually saying that it’s the same thing? Which it is, tissue-wise. Or is it something different? 

Again, when you try to define what makes someone a man or a woman, we often go now to hormones as something which people think is significant. You think of the Olympic sports debates about what a man is, what a woman is. Is it hormones? But people can have conditions which send their hormones in a different direction. So, if a man has a tumour which is producing hormones, particular hormones, he can then produce milk. But then if a trans person wants to breastfeed, they can induce breastfeeding if they take the right hormones. So, does it actually make you a man or a woman? I don’t know about in the US, but in the UK, the National Health Service has got into lots of trouble with some people for talking about chestfeeding rather than breastfeeding because ‘breast’ is seen as too female a word. But somebody who is not female can feed an infant if they take the hormones. So, that’s chestfeeding, and that really gets people in a nervous state in the UK in terms of upsetting all the categories. 

Ann: Well, and that’s the thing too. I think this book could be required reading to anyone who panics about stuff like that because you have so many examples where it’s not binary, where you can’t actually define anyone as a man or woman, really. 

I wanted to bring up, just for my listeners, I was reading your book in an eBook form, and I took pictures of the pages when I thought, “Oh, I have to bring this up.” So, in your chapter about breasts, you have this story about a woman, a ballad singer, Mary White in 1745, who during an attempt to arrest her, she used her breasts, squirting milk as a form of self-defence to try and get away. 

Helen: Yes! Yes, it’s a shock-horror moment. So, women pulling out their breasts and demonstrating them goes back to the ancient Greeks, of course, to Helen of Troy, who’s supposed to get her breasts out in order to get the sympathy of her husband when she’s run away from him. So, breasts out for sympathy is a big thing. But actually, breasts out and spurting milk all over somebody is a completely different message. 

Ann: I was just like, “I have to say this on the podcast. People need to know,” because we talk about tits out. But yeah, so the breasts at first, it’s like, okay, well, there’s a maternal thing, but then there’s also this sexual thing. But then there’s also this shock-horror other thing. 

Helen: [laughs] Yes, there is. 

Ann: Sure. Why not? 

Helen: Whoa! Breasts out of place, right? Breasts where you’re not really expecting them to do something like that. 

Ann: Weaponized breasts. 

Helen: I love that. 

Ann: Like you said, the man at the dinner party who would just, kind of, have this party trick, you know? Exactly, all different things. 

Helen: Yeah, yeah, very different message. 

Ann: So, the next body part is the clitoris, which I’ve never read anything historically about that, ever. It’s not something that I’ve come across. Can you describe that chapter? 

Helen: Sure. So, I suppose one of the things I’m trying to say throughout the book is that history is never linear. It’s not just a steady process of discovery where we find out more and more and more, and we are really up to date, we know everything about bodies now. It’s never that simple. 

So, with the clitoris, it’s been discovered and rediscovered and lost again rather rapidly. So, there’s a sort of key moment in that chapter where I talk about 1559, the big watershed moment for the clitoris where an anatomist called Colombo announces he’s discovered this part of the body, which if you touch it, “Even with your little finger,” I love that specific detail, [Ann chuckles] even with your little tiny, tiny pinky, women go wild and send seed in all directions and just, you know, they’re putty in your hands. He presents this as a really amazing discovery. 1559, now come on! They did know about the clitoris before 1559. Ancient Greek literature talks about it in terms of the imagery of a little red apple left at the top of the tree, which no one can quite reach, which is fascinating. There are lots of terms for the clitoris as, sort of, pearl, or rosebud, or some sort of small, always small, precious thing. But 1559 is supposed to be the big moment. 

And then it sort of goes quiet again. And then somewhere in the 19th century, you get a much bigger discussion of the clitoris in anatomical texts saying it’s not tiny at all, it’s actually quite extensive and the little, tiny rosebud-y thing is not the whole of it. And then that gets forgotten again and medical textbooks in the early 20th century just leave it out; it’s not labelled, it’s not mentioned, it’s just not there. And then it comes back again big time in the 1990s when it was rediscovered, you know, it keeps being rediscovered, but this time by a female anatomist. At that point, it starts to go into the sort of consciousness of what we have now of what the clitoris looks like, the sort of wishbone shape extending below the surface, not just a small dot on the body. So, it sort of comes and goes in a way that shows that, again, medical history is not linear. Discovery just doesn’t go in one direction. 

Ann: Well, and you mentioned, I think I just have this picture I took of the page, but you were talking about Cleopatra, I think it’s from this chapter. And just talking about how she was… We’ve talked about this, I’ve done a whole Cleopatra episode about how people think, “Oh, she was this wildly sexual woman,” where it’s like, I mean, she had these two monogamous relationships. 

Helen: Quite. 

Ann: Anyway, but just sort of talking about… You wrote here: 

Ancient Greek and Roman writers contrasted her behaviour with that of a proper wife, holding her up as a warning to women of how not to behave. The sexualization of Cleopatra continues even today with the marketing of clitoral jewelry, including the Cleopatra clip.

Helen: It’s absolutely extraordinary, isn’t it? So yeah, there’s all sorts of use of that, the name of Cleopatra, to sell sex products, basically, because she’s still seen as this sex-crazed woman. I mean, if you actually read her in the ancient texts, they talk more about her ability to learn different foreign languages as one of her main characteristics. It’s not about her sexuality, it’s about her brain. But that’s the sort of typical problem that women have always had, isn’t it, really, being defined like that? 

But the story is that she was just completely overwhelmed by her clitoris, that she had to sleep with vast numbers of men in a brothel in order to try and get any satisfaction at all. That’s actually a modern-ish story, 17th-century story, that has then been used to argue that the historic, real queen Cleopatra was somehow the discoverer of the vibrator and that she had this vibrator filled with bees. The more you think about that, the more disturbing it is. Right. And also, apart from the fact, would you want to use a sex toy full of bees? You know, what if the lid came off or something? But actually, vibration-wise, that seems quite subtle to me. 

Ann: Yeah. 

Helen: Let’s not go into detail, your listeners can work that one out. But yeah, so Cleopatra is used to sell things now, and she’s always been seen as this paragon of over-sexuality yet, originally, in the earliest sources, that’s really not what it’s about. As you say, two monogamous relationships, big deal. 

Ann: Yeah, exactly. And then also in the clitoris chapter too, again, you talk about trans surgeries and how the clitoris can be… I don’t know. Can you describe that? [laughs] I don’t know how to describe it. 

Helen: Well, partly, it’s that very interesting question about, what do you think about the clitoris and the penis? Is the clitoris a small penis? And some of the language used for it historically has suggested that it’s the lady penis. What if you reverse that and say the penis is the large clitoris? Whoa! The whole thing has just shifted, hasn’t it? And because, yes, there are clearly analogies between the two, as organs that are capable of erection and so on, and organs associated, obviously, with pleasure, then you can also say that some of the research that’s been done on surgery on trans people has actually helped us to understand how the clitoris works. So, if you think about the sorts of surgery you can do to make the clitoris bigger, if you cut to release it from the hood slightly, it looks more like a penis. But in the process of that, people have also discovered a lot more nerve endings that they didn’t know existed. So, it’s quite an interesting thing that surgery for trans people, if that’s what they choose to have, has actually affected the way we understand the tissue down there. 

Ann: And you also talk in that chapter about, I mean, in the tits chapter, there’s lots of shock-horror, but this is just kind of like, “Oh god,” the genital mutilation that happens in some cultures. 

Helen: Yeah. So, that was something I knew a bit about before I started writing the book, but you find out so much more when you start researching it. I was really surprised at how much of this is being carried out now, particularly things like labiaplasty, as opposed to clitoridectomy, that these things are available in private medicine. People choose to have it. But then you start to get very interesting questions about how we judge other people, historically or now. 

So, if someone is from a culture where you need to look like this in order to be accepted as a proper woman, and they don’t look like this, is it okay to say, “Well, yeah. Have the surgery”? Once you start looking at that, as well as thinking about the dangers of playing with different bits of your body and what could possibly go wrong, you also start to ask questions about how we judge people from other cultures, in the past or in the present, who choose to do things to their body, because in a sense, we all modify our bodies anyway, whether that’s in clothing or hairstyles or plastic surgery, obviously. How far do you go and how far is it legitimate to go? How far do you say, “Well, actually, no. That person shouldn’t be doing that. They’ve been brainwashed into it by their culture.” 

That’s really complicated because the female genital mutilation range includes full clitoridectomy. If you’re removing the clitoris, but we now know it goes on further in the body than just the bit that’s visible, pleasure can still be possible after clitoridectomy. But there are so many things that can go wrong in clitoridectomy, risks of infection and bleeding and so on, it still seems to me to be something we should be saying, “No, don’t do that.” But then that brings in all those cultural differences. I know in my own part of the world, I’m in Oxford, there is an anti-clitoridectomy movement, which is basically trying to say to communities where it’s normal, “Don’t do it because these are the risks to health on the women who have it done.” So, rather than saying, “We’re not in your culture, we don’t think your culture is right,” to say, “Think about the implications of this thing you do and fight it within your culture,” rather than because we say you should. Very interesting ethical issues which these body modifications can bring up. 

Ann: Well, that just makes me think too, I guess it’s more of an external thing, but in terms of the way that I read your book, and I was just like, “I don’t even know what gender is anymore.” I’ve seen people who are explaining, you know, men getting a hair transplant, that’s gender confirmation. Or a woman getting larger breast implants, that’s gender confirmation. The broad spectrum of somebody who is a non-binary person, or a trans person getting gender confirmation surgery, versus a cis person who just wants to look more feminine, who wants to look more masculine. Why is one frowned upon by some people and one is applauded? It’s odd. 

Helen: Yes, it is odd. It’s something which we really don’t seem to have worked out in terms of the ethics of this. The sorts of choices people have or don’t have about their own bodies and how they present their bodies. 

Ann: And just, what is a woman? Anyway… Listeners, this book will blow your minds. [Helen chuckles

Your next chapter is about the hymen, and that was very interesting. 

Helen: So, do we believe in the hymen? Big question. One of the reviews of my book has said, “It’s still not really clear if Helen King believes in the hymen or not.” That’s because Helen King doesn’t know if she believes in the hymen or not. I mean, I really don’t know. I don’t think I have one, but who knows? If it’s a stretchy sort of membrane, and if some people’s stretch more easily than others, then you might not necessarily know you have it. There is something where the hymen is called an imperforate hymen, where the hymen has no gaps in it, and you can’t have a period because the blood just builds up behind it. So, in some cases, there clearly is some sort of membrane that’s really powerful and actually blocks the exit. But does that mean every woman has some sort of membrane? It’s really not clear to me. 

But it’s clearly something that’s been fetishized over history that you’ve somehow got to have it, and you’ve got to be able to prove you have it. Well, how do you prove you have it? So, one of the moments for me in that chapter was finding out that as far back as Augustine, so late Roman Empire, we had people saying, “Well, the trouble is if you inspect to try and find the hymen in the process of inspecting for it, you’ll probably destroy it.” So, that’s crazy, isn’t it? You destroy the thing while you’re looking for it. 

Ann: Well, I’ve come across just in my research for various podcast episodes, these sort of appalling situations to imagine people who have to prove their virginity in a court of law or something, where it’s just like, “Oh my god.” But then even back then, you hear about people who would switch places with a servant girl, or they would try and fake it, shove something up inside of you to make it look like… And people still do that now. You were talking in your book— Can you talk about people who have…? 

Helen: Sure, yeah. I find it quite extraordinary that this is still going on. So again, if you go online, you can find all sorts of websites that claim to restore your virginity. This could be sort of jokey, like they’ll give you a certificate that says, “I’m a virgin,” right? That’s really going to help, isn’t it? But also, there’s a long history of people doing things to create the effect of bleeding, so inserting something red—berries, juice—into the vagina before sex, so something will come out. Or rather more dramatic things, like inserting something that will actually make you bleed so that you produce the effect at first intercourse. That’s very scary, too. This is important stuff. But then you’ve got cultures where they could insert a small piece of raw meat up there so that someone inspecting you will think, “Oh yeah, there’s some sort of barrier,” when there isn’t. 

But this whole sort of inspecting, why can’t you just believe a woman when she tells you about her sexual history? What sort of relationship is it if you don’t believe her? I find that quite amazing. But the sorts of tests people have done historically for virginity… All sorts of things. So, even things like thinking about whether a particular strange musical sound comes out of a cave when a virgin enters it, really quite freaky things. How do you prove it, particularly when there’s this awareness that by trying to prove it, you may well destroy it? What is it anyway? If it’s not a hymen, then what is virginity? Why do you need a physical marker of it? Why can’t a woman just say, “I’ve never done this before,” or “I did do this before”? 

Now, again, we get onto judging other cultures. So, if you are from a culture where virginity is critical and where you will be disgraced and your family disgraced if you’re not a virgin at marriage, then you can see why people have a strong motivation to do something, even something so extreme as having some sort of surgery that will then be broken at the point where the man enters the woman. You can see why people would do that in order to preserve their reputation and it’s disturbing that that is still a cultural thing. 

Ann: I have a friend who is an obstetrician, and she treats a lot of newcomers, like, people not from North America in her practice. She has been asked more than once to write a certificate of virginity for one of her patients. 

Helen: Wow. 

Afa: And she said, “That is not a thing I can do.” 

Helen: No, absolutely not. That’s amazing. Some of the historical things are far less dramatic. So, there’s all sorts of remedies for astringence, things that will tighten you in some way. But then the problem with that is they’re also associated with sex workers. So, sex workers trying to simulate it’s the first time by using some sort of constrictive medicine on those parts of the body. So, that gets tricky too, because it sort of equates virginity with sex work and that’s rather odd. And just putting a small amount of blood into you, animal blood, a small pouch of animal blood, which will then break. It’s very bizarre that we were so obsessed with that historically. And yes, the fact we’re still worrying about it is even more bizarre. 

Ann: Yeah, of all the chapters in your book, this is a thing that we don’t even know if it exists. 

Helen: Correct.

Ann: Breast exists, clitoris exists, womb exists, but this whole chapter is just kind of, it’s all cultural. It’s all cultural, really. 

Helen: Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, don’t forget that sometimes people said the clitoris didn’t exist. 

Ann: Fair.

Helen: There was a 16th-century line that said, “It’s not real. It’s just a freak of nature if you have one. Don’t worry about it. It’s just weird, but most women don’t.” So, to say it’s not even a normal part of the body, but then with the clitoris, it’s not. But with the hymen, supposedly it is, but actually, it clearly isn’t. So yeah, there’s an interesting link there between the two parts. 

Ann: And then the final part that you look at in your book is the womb. 

Helen: Yeah. So, wombs is what I knew most about before I started writing the book, but I still found out things I didn’t know when I was reading about this. There’s a theme throughout the book on religion and how religion works with medicine. By religion, I’m mostly meaning Christianity here, though not exclusively. Medicine and religion have worked together through Western culture to argue for what a woman’s body should and shouldn’t be like. 

So, some of the Virgin Mary stuff in the womb chapter I found very surprising. So, is Mary just a container? Is her womb just a, sort of, bag into which Jesus is placed? Because she doesn’t have sex, there are representations of her conceiving through the ear. So, literally through the ear? Or is that just a metaphor for hearing the word of God and obeying it? Very unclear. There are even things where she looks, she sees, and she somehow conceives through the eyes. Completely weird to us. But then when she’s got Jesus in her womb, does he then, somehow, transmit his holy qualities to her body? Or is she chosen because she’s specially holy? And then somehow, even though her body isn’t contributing because he’s been put in her womb, she’s somehow contributing morally? But then… [laughs softly] It gets worse and worse. 

So, the big thing here for me is, because Mary’s blood makes milk, that’s sort of basic ancient Greek, how bodies work that went on for many, many centuries; your menstrual blood becomes your breast milk. It gets diverted and it’s the same fluid, it just moves to a different place. So, Mary’s body, her menstrual blood, somehow is becoming milk. Lots of representations historically of Jesus being fed with her milk. So, the milk jutting out at him, it’s back to the breast chapter, milk actually coming out of her breasts into his mouth. And then Jesus’s death, Jesus’s shedding of blood is what is supposed to put us right with God and we take that blood in the Eucharist, in the Holy Communion, the bread and the wine, the wine somehow becomes his blood. So, that’s Mary’s blood, isn’t it? It’s Mary’s blood that became milk, that went into Jesus, that came out of Jesus’s blood, that the believer then takes. 

Now that, to me, was a mind-blowing moment and I’m still having my mind blown by it. It’s saying something very different about Mary and making her very, very important, not just a container. But it’s the typical problem with looking at female bodies, isn’t it? At what point do you value them and say, “This is really important. This fluid, this body part is critical?” At what point do you say, “Well, actually, it doesn’t really matter. It’s all about men. Women’s bodies are just weird, very weird.” 

Ann: Just a container, yeah. 

Helen: And wombs in particular, are they like a sewer that’s just getting rid of extra waste material? Or are they, as Galen said, the most special organ of all? The organ that has powers to retain and transform and expel in a way no other body part can. So, they’re really special in that way. 

Ann: Well, and in your womb chapter as well, just to tie it back to the, what is gender? What is a woman? You talk about a woman who had a health condition where she didn’t have a womb and then one was transplanted into her and then she was able to carry a child. 

Helen: Yes. I mean, now, we are doing alternatives to wombs in a way that we haven’t really been able to do before. But in the past, having a womb has been one of those things that proves you really, really are a woman or indeed that you aren’t. Because there are people, again, this is back to what you were saying about the binary and how the binary just doesn’t work. In the binary, you argue that women have wombs, men don’t. But if you find real bodies, and this was something that became apparent really in the 19th century when post-mortems were carried out more, you will sometimes find someone who appears to be female on the outside, breasts, female bone structure and so on, when you go inside, there is no womb. Now, what do you do about that? Do you say, “Well, that wasn’t a woman at all”? Or do you say, “Well, actually, it’s how you present. That’s how she lived, so she’s a woman.” What do you do? The womb used to be the big thing that made it absolutely definitive that you were a woman. 

Now, not only are alternatives to wombs happening, so the idea of actually having a system whereby women can produce a baby and then it’s brought up outside the body even when they’re really, really tiny. That is another possibility. But also, if you don’t have a womb and you have everything else that we think of as female, you can still be a woman. And if that’s the case with people in terms of how they’re born, they’re just born without a womb, why can’t we say you can be defined as female if you were assigned male at birth? Why not? 

Ann: Well, I think that’s why I finished reading your book and I was just like, “Well, I don’t know what anything means anymore.” [both laugh] What is fact? What is truth? It’s such an eye-opening book. And I think just the number of examples you have, exactly like that, of just, does anatomy equate to sex or to gender? It can’t because there’s so much differentiation and often you don’t know until someone dies and you do a post-mortem and you’re like, “Oh! That’s what was inside them? Okay.” 

I think it’s such an important book, especially with all these conversations going on right now in the UK and in the US about gender and the binary. You bring countless examples of why it can’t be a binary. It’s not, it never has been. 

Helen: Exactly. And it’s that point: it never has been. This is not new. We tend to think the discussions we have at the moment about gender and sex are somehow a dreadful new thing that’s just come and before, everything was really simple, people knew what they were. They didn’t! Not only do we know that people lived as the sex they weren’t born as, so they chose to dress and to live in a sex other than the one they were assigned at birth, but also, we know that bodies didn’t match, and they didn’t match the outside to the inside. So, for my book, which is going from the outside to the inside, it’s kind of relevant to say, “Well, actually outsides and insides can simply not match.” Fact. This is fact. This is not some gender critical weird thing that’s happening now, this is actually how bodies are. They don’t fit. 

These things like when I talk about the size that a penis has to be at birth in order to be defined as a penis and to make you into a boy, I find that quite extraordinary that 1.7 centimeters is the current number that makes you one side or the other of the binary. That’s so arbitrary. The same thing with hormone levels, which can vary through the day and through the year. At one point, this is definitely, your hormones make you a man, or actually, maybe they don’t. It’s not simple and there is no way that we can do it. Historically, we’ve done it mostly by doing, “Oh, looks like a man to me,” and we still do that now. 

You still get that discussion, you know, with the Olympics, with Khelif, you still have that discussion of, “Well, it looks like a man, so it must be a man”. So, it didn’t actually matter how she identifies what she was assigned at birth, what her legal sex is, how she presents herself. It was just, “Oh no, doesn’t look like one to me.” And again, what does that say if you, a woman who was assigned female at birth, you live as a woman, you consider yourself a woman, and someone says, “No, actually, you look too butch. You can’t possibly be a woman. You can’t come into these ladies’ restrooms because you’re obviously a man.” Come on! There are plenty of examples of that, where we don’t have to all look the same within our gender. 

Ann: Well, thank you so much for joining me, Helen. Again, this book, I think it could not be more timely. I don’t know if you knew it would be when you were writing it. 

Helen: I didn’t. It was something which developed as I wrote it because it took me… I started writing in 2017 and then I kind of stopped during the pandemic. I was one of these people who couldn’t write during the pandemic. Some people wrote nonstop, I just couldn’t cope. It became obvious to me that this was really important, that the history needed to be told. 

Ann: Well, thank you so much for writing this book, and thank you so much for joining me today. 

Helen: Well, thank you, Ann. It’s been a real pleasure. 

—————

So again, Helen’s book, Immaculate Forms: A History of the Female Body in Four Parts. It is available everywhere. Sometimes we have books on this podcast that aren’t available in North America, but this one is, UK, North America, all over the place. Like I said in the podcast, it could not be more timely or interesting. Basically, this book just proves, beyond a shred of a doubt, that gender is not binary. There’s not only male and female, there’s so many other things. And how do you, like I kept saying in the interview, what even is a woman? It’s such an interesting book. I think that a lot of you are going to enjoy reading this very much. 

And actually, something else I was thinking about just in talking to her now was, I did the episode a few years ago about the Chevalière d’Éon, the trans woman spy, fencing person in the French Revolution era, and how the Chevalière d’Éon lived as a man for time, as a woman for time. And then people weren’t really sure, is this a man, is this a woman? Listen to that episode to get into, kind of, how and why those discussions are happening around them. But sort of disappointingly, at the end of their life, the Chevalière d’Éon, they did uncover the nude body to see like, “Is this a man or woman?” But as Helen was saying, it’s like just based on what you see on a nude body, or even that could not match what’s on the inside. Like, you don’t know looking at a body, whether it’s in an autopsy, or whether it’s a person wearing clothes, like, what is the gender of a person? It’s just, it’s all so interesting. 

I do want to mention also in her chapter about the womb, she does talk about another Vulgar History character, real-life person, Mary Toft. The people who’ve listened to that episode might still have emotional scars from the whole thing about how she claimed that she was giving birth to rabbits. And she was not, anyway, it’s such an interesting book. I think you’ll all enjoy it. And next week, we’re actually going to be talking some more about medical history with another special guest. So, I’m looking forward to sharing that episode with you as well. 

So, how can you keep up with me and with this podcast and what we’re all doing? The number one thing I want to mention/advise/recommend is that you sign up to get my monthly mailing list newsletter. So, that’s every month I’m going to send out just a nice non-spam-like newsletter to anybody who signs up for it where I’ll just kind of delve a bit deeper into some of the podcast episodes we did, share some news about me and my book and live events I’m going to be doing, I’m going to recommend books to read and stuff. So, it’s just a way that if you’re not perpetually on social media and you’re afraid or you’re worried that you’re going to miss one of my announcements or something, this is a way that you can just get it, read it at your leisure. If you want to get that newsletter, what you do is you go to VulgarHistory.com/News and let me know your email address and I could put you on that list. That’s the one-stop shop, that’s the one way to keep up with this podcast and me and everything that’s happening. Because honestly, 2025 is going to be quite a year for me and this podcast and everything. 

You can also keep up with me, I’m on Patreon. If you go to Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter, you can sign up as a free member or you can also become a paid member there. But basically, for the free people, what you get there is more frequent updates from me about what I’m doing, writing my book, sharing interesting articles and links and stuff. And that’s a way that I just feel like people who want my updates can get them from there without having to be beholden to any sort of rotted billionaire’s gross social media website, that’s where you can just like get the stuff right from me when you want to see it. So, to join the Patreon, you can do that for free, Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter, just sign up for free membership. 

Or you could become a paid member. So, that’s where for $1 a month, you get early, ad-free access to all episodes of the podcast. Sometimes I think, like, $1, inflation, should that maybe that price could go up? And I’m always like, no, no, because I want to make this attainable to as many people as possible. So, it’s always going to be $1 to get the early, ad-free access to all episodes. And then if people want, you can pledge $5 or more a month to get bonus episodes on there as well. So, that’s, like, Vulgarpiece Theatre, where we talk about different historical costume dramas, and by we, I mean myself, Allison Epstein, Lana Wood Johnson. There’s also other bonus episodes on there you get at the $5 a month level, So This Asshole, where we talk about gross men from history, The Aftershow, where I just, like, kiki with some guests where we have stuff to talk about. And also, if you join the Patreon at that $5 a month level, you get to join our Discord, which is just a big group chat for the Tits Out Brigade, where we recommend books to each other, we talk about The Traitors TV show, Survivor, but we also share pictures of our cats, offer emotional support to each other during these ongoing unprecedented times, and also just talk about the podcast. Some people in the group are taking university classes and they’re like, “This professor I think would be a good guest,” and I love that. I love hearing these connections, suggestions of topics, things like that. 

We also work with our wonderful brand partner, Common Era Jewelry, which is a small business. It’s a women-owned business run by my friend Torie. She makes beautiful jewelry that is inspired by women and also the classical history. So, some of the jewelry designs Torie has made, she is an artist, showing women from history. So, you know what? I’m going to say women and other people, because Hatshepsut is there and, like, what was Hatshepsut’s gender? Unclear, frankly. But we’ve also got Cleopatra, like we talked about, is featured on the jewelry, Agrippina is there, Anne Boleyn. And then also people from mythology, like Aphrodite and Medusa. And yeah, and then also some other jewelry just looks like recreations of jewelry that was worn by the ancient Greek and Roman people, including she has sort of like a talisman that’s inspired by her own, Torie, the owner of Common Era, her own fertility journey. And it’s like a fertility talisman, which I think sort of ties in with what we’re talking about with Helen today. Anyway, these pieces are available in solid gold, as well as a more affordable gold vermeil. Vulgar History listeners can always get 15% off your order from Common Era by going to CommonEra.com/Vulgar or using code ‘VULGAR’ at checkout. 

If you want to get Vulgar History merchandise, Americans can go to VulgarHistory.com/Store, or if you’re outside the US, go to VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com because the shipping is a lot better there for non-American people. 

I am on social media. You can find me on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky @VulgarHistoryPod. I think I might be @VulgarHistory on Bluesky, but like just look up “Vulgar History” and you’ll find me. Wherever I also have a Substack where I post essays about women from history and they also have like a social media thing, it’s called Notes. Anyway, just look at VulgarHistory.Substack.com and I’m there as well. Finally, if you want to get in touch with me, you can just go to VulgarHistory.com, there’s a little form, a little button that says, “Contact me” and then it sends me a message and let me know what you want me to know, I guess, basically. 

Yeah, we’ll be back next week with another new episode. And until then, I mean, tits out, squirt your milk at people, whatever you want to do. Pants on, tits out, and I’ll talk to you all next time. 

Vulgar History is hosted, written, and researched by Ann Foster, that’s me! The editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. The Vulgar History show image is by Deborah Wong. Transcripts are written by Aveline Malek. Find transcripts of recent episodes at VulgarHistory.com.

References:

Buy a copy of Immaculate Forms by Helen King.

Sign up for the Vulgar History mailing list!

Get 15% off all the gorgeous jewellery and accessories at common.era.com/vulgar or go to commonera.com and use code VULGAR at checkout

Get Vulgar History merch at vulgarhistory.com/store (best for US shipping) and vulgarhistory.redbubble.com (better for international shipping)

Support Vulgar History on Patreon

 

Vulgar History is an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which means that a small percentage of any books you click through and purchase will come back to Vulgar History as a commission. Use this link to shop there and support Vulgar History.