I love the citizen science motivation behind this doula/student midwife's project to photograph her cervix every day through one entire month: "to better understand my cycle and the changes in my cervix throughout the month."

Beautiful Cervix Project (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

  • Unanimous Cowherd

    People, people, we are all animals. Just animals. We’re just ground-dwelling monkeys living on a warm rock.

    I like this. Don’t know why, just do. We need reminders of what we are. Thanks Cory.

  • Anonymous

    May I get an unicorn with this?

  • Anonymous

    this is a good idea , atleast we can know what inside of us should look like

  • Anonymous

    The pic of the cervix and the rocket shaped air blower below it is enough to fuel a good years worth of Freudian discussion about the blog team

  • misterjuju

    OMG That’s what I look like on the inside!?
    Fkkin cool, sorta HURK, beautiful if I think of it as my own cervix and not some other chick’s…
    reminds me of those silicone eggs you can have sex with

  • Spikeles

    Now when my kids ask me where babies come from, i can point them to this site.

  • Anonymous

    damn, 503

    The cervix is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

  • mikesum32

    and I thought Xeni was the NSFW poster.

  • mollymolly

    Annie Sprinkle, Ph.D., started this in the seventies: During one of her shows, she would insert a speculum in her vagina and lean back and invite audience members to come look at her cervix IN REAL TIME! The name of this act: Public Cervix announcement. She’s got a picture of hers bleeding on her site. Try to handle that one, Squeamish Sallies. http://www.anniesprinkle.org/html/writings/pca.html

  • NJ

    Puh-leeez..unicorn chaser…

  • wolfiesma

    Cervical changes are the tip of the iceberg. Imagine what happens inside the uterus every single month. Think about it, the uterine lining tearing away from its moorings… cell by cell, rip, rip, rip! Oy! If the walls of my uterus could talk! They would say, OW! That hurts!! Crazy what women go through! At least I can look forward to menopause! Right?

  • VICTOR JIMENEZ

    Great! My libido just reached an historical low.
    Unicorn chaser plez!

  • stevew

    Nice os.

  • StRevAlex

    Note to most of you: grow up.

  • mastercontroller

    EVERYONE loves Jello…

    but no one wants to see pictures from the rendering plant as they boil down hooves and hides.

  • Anonymous

    Fascinating!
    </Spock>

    Seriously, this is a great science post…answers questions like “What goes on?” and “Gee, I wonder what it looks like?”.
    The human body is an amazing thing. :)

  • Boomer

    Does this make her “very talented boyfriend with a headlamp” the Wizard of Os?

  • Anonymous

    Huh. Can’t imagine why net-nanny software keeps picking on BoingBoing. This is totally safe for work, right?

  • efergus3

    Cory, Cory, Cory. Tsk, tsk, tsk. We worry about you.

  • chenry

    Wow. That is a level of detail that I don’t think I ever wanted to know about anyone.

  • Anonymous

    Cory -

    thank you for posting this! I am kinda in love with the site now. I’ve always wondered what the doctor sees and now i know!

  • skramble

    a true test of boingers tolerance of biological imagery..

    as for me I say its somewhat fascinating… and a little gross. but this sort of stuff needs to be out there. bring it on!

  • 13tales

    Well that’s 100% more cervix than I usually see in my RSS feeds. Hooray?

  • Shannon

    Far more disturbing than it should be, but I having looked at the blog it’s actually pretty informative. I don’t know if I should be ashamed of being disturbed or not. But I sure am.

  • Anonymous

    Is this getting to be some sort of trend now? I mean, xkcd did it recently and raised a huge ruckus, now this…

  • TheBlessedBlogger

    I saw these pics a couple months ago and found them very helpful. We practice the Fertility Awareness Method (FAM) to get pregnant/not get pregnant and keep track of my gynecological health. I have endometrial cancer as well as PCOS and can’t use any form of protection accept condoms which I’m usually allergic to so this method is great for me, but honestly it’s great for a lot of women. Keeping track of your cervical position, firmness, type of cervical fluids etc may seem gross to men, but for women it can literally be a life saver. If young women were taught about their bodies in a realistic way they’d be much healthier.

  • Anonymous

    Unicorn chaser please (teehee)

  • bellamama

    For heaven’s sake, stop being such osholes about it.

  • Nick Danger

    Do I see Rocky Rococo?

  • dr.hypercube

    Nick, you beat me to it! You win the bottle of Pyramid Patchouli.

    Awesomely science-y – no mixed emotions here.

  • daen

    We’ve all seen one at least once (from the other side on the way out, at least). And very interesting it is too. I suspect this is going to be a useful resource for a lot of worried women.

  • Anonymous

    BTW, I love the juxtaposition of this post and the one immediately below Kudos!

  • Anonymous

    When I want cervixes I’ll go to steaminghotcervix.com, thank you very much.

  • Nelson.C

    Well, that’s not something I expected to see today.

    Objectively, though, I have to say that it is a healthy looking specimen. Only one question I have: what’s the orientation of the picture? Is the top of the picture ‘north’, in a manner of speaking?

  • Anonymous

    How is this even remotely disgusting to people? It’s healthy. It’s not injured. And lots of people try very hard to get very close to these every day.

    OK, my captcha says longwood. Hmm.

  • Anonymous

    WHERE ARE THE ERROR BARS? DAMMIT!

  • Mark Crummett

    This is WAY more information about this woman than I need.

  • Brainspore

    Just please, please don’t follow this up with “daily photos of an unhealthy cervix.”

  • Anonymous

    Is it wrong that I’m turned on?

    No, seriously it was a cool project. I like how systematic she was about it and the helpful asides were amusing.

    Bonus comment: my captcha is “1968 foreplay”. What does that trying to tell me?

  • Anonymous

    Is this porn? This is porn.

  • Anonymous

    I sense a new Flickr group in the making

  • Anonymous

    And there goes the pizza I was eating.

    The cervix is on the inside for a reason, man.

  • Anonymous

    well having seen that webpage, you definitely gain a better appreciation as a woman

  • InsertFingerHere

    Day Twelve

    Cervical fluid white and wet, milky

    Feeling particularly sexual

    —

    Look hard enough, and you’ll see the Millennium Falcon in there.

  • Clemoh

    This cannot have been more poorly placed above the Rocket Shaped Air Blower.

    I just had a psychological embolism.

  • Ian_McLoud

    What a range of emotions this provokes:

    Ew.

    Cool!

    Science-y!

    Sexy!

    Ew.

    Naughty.

    Naughty Ew?

  • ROSSINDETROIT

    Some times I wonder what motivates Cory. Other times I just don’t want to know.

  • Anonymous

    Snore, knew about that a year + ago. I applaud her for bringing self awareness up a notch, but it’s along the same line as do it yourself pelvic exams from the 70s.

    Of course, if we were more aware of our cervix there would be a lot less $ spent on ovulation predictor kits and pregnancy tests.

    - Ethel

  • Ian_McLoud

    Comment from the audience who walked in on me scrolling through:

    “…ugly as cock. Makes sense we keep it on the inside, otherwise we’d be expected to put makeup on it as well…”

  • Anonymous

    This has been a public cervix announcement.

  • Anonymous

    I’m so not looking forward to the healthy anus blog.

  • treq

    @ #42 – optuser:

    Your dad was a genius, what better way to deter adolescent sex than by that?

  • Susan Oliver

    Fee, Betty Dodson is well known for her excellent illustrations of a wide variety of vulvas – it’s amazing how many different shapes and sizes there are.

  • Anonymous

    Thanks Cory!

    This is an excellent project! Mainstream gynecology is surprisingly silent on health — as an infertile endometriosis patient, I’ve noticed a bizarre (male?) focus on genital aesthetics. Fertility is a distant second, and gynecologic pain, internal deformity, and function is off the radar.

    Just as people like Buckminster Fuller have documented their feelings on a daily basis, we need more daily medical documentation, normal and otherwise.

    Blood pressure is the key example here. Varies widely based on circumstance, overdiagnosed in those nervous at the doctor’s, and underdiagnosed in those that relax in the professional’s presense. As a cruel trick, a broken machine once made my doctor think I was pregnant and in danger!

    We need more understanding of human function if we are ever going to help the sick or understand our own biology.

  • optuser

    I’m going to do “Daily photos of a just-used Fleshlight.” Who wants to help?

    I have to remind myself the main reason most orifice imagery doesn’t bother me is that my dad was an OBGYN who left his medical journals (med porn) laying around the house. I knew what external female symptoms of VD looked like by age 10.

    This was a contributing factor to staying a virgin until age 21.

  • Cowicide

    @#10

    Goatse Blog?

  • wgmleslie

    DAEN

    Don’t know about you, but I had my eyes closed the whole way out! Bungee jumping has nothing on being born.

  • apoxia

    What about healthy ear canal?

  • Cunning

    Anti-Cthulhu PSA for young netizens indeed! Wait, that’s a cervix?

  • Anonymous

    I tried to go through this for science. I’m usually relatively unaffected by anatomy.

    Sadly, after 20 days, I felt like I was doing the BBC disgust test again. Penises are ugly, but, damn. Luckily it’s healthy to wash penises of their crusty white discharge. I’m glad I’m not a gyno.

    I’m going to go have nightmares now.

  • Fee

    I moved through all reactions from “yuck! to “fascinating!” in the course of scrolling through the month on the linked website. The comments here had me in stitches. I think #29 may have solved the teenage pregnancy problem in the UK with one idea. Issue all teenager with OBGYN manuals!

    However, I think there is a very serious point in the project: it is true that most of the photographs and cases which doctors see and get reported in medical journeys, are abnormal….

    I think the same is true of childbirth… in the UK a mother having a normal birth may not see a doctor at all. It’s the breech births and failure-to-progress cases which the doctors get to see.

    Also, a recent programme on UK tv showed that what most teenagers thought of as normal bodies were the images they saw in porn. The ordinary natural breast which obeys the laws of gravity, and non-operated labia are not what they see in those images, and therefore what they may expect from a real live girlfriend is an impossibly perfect body which of course they do not have.

    They may also be shocked or horrified by untrimmed or shaven pubic hair in the manner of Ruskin….

    I’d like to see a sister project, real vulvas, certainly, and maybe real penises too, to reassure those teenagers just getting used to their adult bodies that everything is normal and that bodies vary as much as people do. I think it could be a real and necessary service.

  • Pixel23

    Yay! What a wonderful project. The beauty and complexity of the human body never fails to amaze me.

  • squalor

    I love the internet!

  • twobeeshawn

    unicorn chaser, plez, just not right there

  • HeartlessMachine

    I would have appreciated a warning of some kind, or putting the image after the jump.

    I know it’s just human anatomy, and I should just accept it. But a little warning would have been nice.

    I don’t really want to be blindsided with ANY images of the insides of people or animals. I would have the same reaction to a large photo of a dissected fetal pig, an armadillo as road pizza, or open heart surgery.

    Put it AFTER the jump!

  • Chocolatey Shatner