“vagina bones”


vaginabones

Some gamer/anime fan complained about prudish censors painting out the vagina bones in his Japanese TV shows. I’ve dissected cadavers, I’ve gone through bone collections, I’ve even seen the genitalia of a real, live woman (I know! It was awesome!), but sad to say, while knowing about the pelvic bones in the general neighborhood, I’ve never seen bones in the vagina. I was about to laugh at this ignorant guy, but then…

I thought about it. It suddenly makes perfect sense.

What else would the teeth be attached to?

Clearly, the women of the world have been keeping a deep secret from not just your ordinary run-of-the-mill man-on-the-street, but also from all of the scientists. This conspiracy has to run terrifyingly deep. It has been incredibly thorough in hiding this basic fact from everyone. It was perhaps a little too thorough, making its one mistake in a little zealous editing of anime sexy babes, and the whole story has begun to unravel.

Thanks, gamers and guys obsessed with the authenticity of soft-core porn. You have opened my eyes to the Gynocracy.

Comments

  1. johnson catman says

    What else would the teeth be attached to?

    I am glad I did not have anything in my mouth when I read this! I literally laughed out loud. My coworkers now know that I was reading non-work-related material.

  2. Siobhan says

    You have opened my eyes to the Gynocracy.

    Fucking finally.

    Also, I’ve worn some pretty tiny booty shorts, but nothing so low that the upper portion of my pelvis could be seen. Maybe I just don’t have enough butt, but I suspect such a garment would just fall off of me at that point. I suppose that’s why the character is wearing a belt, but still.

  3. birgerjohansson says

    Maybe the anime women are like sharks, their skeletons are purely cartilegeous and thus are not well preserved, postmortem.
    — — —

    Also, in regard to medicine…
    Another Myers: “Hundreds of antibiotics built from scratch” http://www.nature.com/news/hundreds-of-antibiotics-built-from-scratch-1.19946

    Goddammit PZ! I was just about to unleash a plague of MRSA bacteria, and then your relative at Harvard turns up with a brand new batch of antibiotics.
    Next time, I will use some virus as a pathogen.

  4. robro says

    Perhaps he had been reading the Wikipedia article on Sada Abe, featured in the “On This Day” section a few days ago.

    That’s some close attention to artistic details. Does make you wonder what prompted and who made the decision to make such subtle changes. Silly prudery is everlasting I suppose. In the film Comic Book Confidential, Bill Gaines tells how the Comics Code reviewers insisted he remove beads of sweat from the brow of a black fighter pilot.

  5. laurentweppe says

    Thanks, gamers and guys obsessed with the authenticity of soft-core porn. You have opened my eyes to the Gynocracy.

    And not only that, but in the latest episode of their pork-your-siblings matchmaking simulator, they removed the possibility for your princely protagonist to molest her retainers’ faces. (says the guy who put 350 hours in Awakening)

  6. HappyHead says

    I have to wonder if the person who is tasked with actually doing these edits is able to tell people what they do for a living without breaking out into uncontrollable fits of giggling.

    I would not be.

  7. cmutter says

    Great. My 7-year-old reads “paleo detective” stories, now I have to wonder how detailed they are in describing the fossil smuggling.

  8. crocswsocks says

    That game is called Tokyo Mirage Sessions, and I’m looking forward to it. The censoring is silly, but not as silly as the people who get super upset about it

  9. flange says

    There is a commenter, I think on the Salon website, that goes by the pseudonym “Virginia Dentata.”

  10. Carl Muckenhoupt says

    Speaking as someone who works in game development, I can assert that “bone” is actually a term of art in computer animation, referring to a node that drags a bunch of the model with it when you change its position. This mostly corresponds to things that would contain bones in the usual sense, like arms and legs and spines, and a diagram of the nodes and how they’re attached to each other usually looks a bit like a skeleton. But every once in a while you have, say, a character with long hair that you want to animate blowing in the wind, and you wind up talking about the “hair bones” without thinking about what an absurd notion that is.

    That said, it’s unlikely that the “bones” this person was referring to were even bones in this sense. This is surface detail, not control structures.

  11. William Clark says

    @13
    No, going by the image PZ embedded in the post, the “vagina bones” in this instance is the outline of the mons pubis that pokes up out of the character’s shorts. The article he linked to at the end suggests the phrase itself was a reference to a blind idiot translation from a few years back, and “vagina bones” does have an entry in the urban dictionary as a synonym for the pubic bone. Let the merry-making resume.

  12. says

    No. The mons pubis would be below the character’s belt buckle. The pubic bone forms a kind of horizontal bar low on the abdomen, so that can’t be it either. To call the pubic bone a “vagina bone” is about as stupid as this guy’s original comment.

    What’s different is two lines drawn on the abdomen in one, but not the other. Those are the inguinal creases, they aren’t bony at all, and both men and women have them.

    We also both have pubic bones.

  13. William Clark says

    I half suspected I was using a too-specific term so thank you for the correction.

  14. moarscienceplz says

    I had to compare both images about a dozen times before I could even make out what was being complained about. I will agree with the original complainant that the censorship in this case is absurd, especially since covering up the breast cleavage resulted in even larger breasts, but gosh, does this person have so much free time that microscopically comparing cartoon images is a worthwhile use of it?
    I am reminded of a particular issue of the Sears catalog many years ago. There was indeed a picture of a man wearing only underwear that showed the tip of his ‘penis bone’ sticking out from the leg of the underwear. BUT, it was only one of about a dozen pics of men modeling underwear, and you practically had to use a magnifying glass to see it even when you were looking for it. So this situation said a lot more about the person who discovered it than it did about Sears.

  15. Akira MacKenzie says

    I think by “bones” they are referring to a “boner,” i.e. large, swollen, labia some Anime fans think women acquire when aroused that are visible through panties and swimsuits.

  16. azpaul3 says

    So, it’s all a bunch of miss-definition. It doesn’t matter.

    I will now be able to tell my Lady that in PZ’s blog there was all this talk about pussy bones and boobie bones and I feel compelled, for science, of course, to examine these hitherto unknown structures more thoroughly and completely as I lead her toward the couch.

    Thank you, Professor.

  17. Athywren - not the moon you're looking for says

    Man, it’s kind of amazing how long it took me to realise what was different in the two pictures. It took half as long again to realise that there were two things!
    At first I assumed the commenter had some degree of competence in the topic being discussed, and was thinking they meant bones in the 3d modelling sense (which gives you both breast bones and breast bone bones, although actually probably not breast bone bones so often) so I was staring hard at her crotchal region in a way that was starting to make me feel a little pervy, looking for any difference at all. It was only when I gave up on the assumption of knowledge and started looking elsewhere that I noticed the creases. (I have to say, I’ve seen a few people in various states of dress and undress, and I can’t say I’ve ever seen the leg-torso border line be so strongly defined. Frankly, I’m a little worried that her leg might be about to fall off.) The crotchal region itself is quite apparent in both images. Some time later, I also noticed that the terribly censored and definitely ruined version is also wearing a more supportive bra, and apparently a tube top underneath.
    Honestly, I’m a little worried that they even noticed this. I was actually playing spot the difference with the two images right next to one another and took ages to notice anything. I mean, are they actively looking for these things so they can find outrages over which to be outraged, or… well… I can barely conceive of a person so obsessive about the hip crease thing that it would pop out at them and cause them to check the original footage based on actually noticing it.

  18. Gregory Greenwood says

    What else would the teeth be attached to?

    OK Gregory, remain calm. Vagina Dentata are just a faintly misogynistic urban legend and nothing more.

    Unquestionably.

    There really is no doubt in the matter.

    Well, teeth can form in almost any part of the human body under some circumstances, but that really isn’t the same thing at all. I mean, there could in theory be women out there with teeth in their vaginas, but not an actual set of Xenomorph-like secondary jaws hidden in there. It is just impossible. An almost comedically ridiculous notion, or would be if horrifying pee-pee mutilation were any laughing matter.

    So, I will be rational about this, and I won’t be having nightmares about teeth where there really, really should never under any circumstances be teeth.

    Not again at any rate.

    Besides, the movie makes it clear that only arseholes who frankly deserve to be relieved of their penises get them bitten off, so a respectful, feminist bloke has nothing to fear. I mean, would the universe be so cruel as to arm a woman with teeth down there and then deny her any control of them, resulting in the mutilation of guys who hadn’t done anything to deserve it against her will?

    *Looks at things like cancer, AIDS, ebola, heritable conditions and strokes*

    OK, the universe is a callous arsehat, so all bets are off on that front. Still, it is all just a myth anyway, so there is nothing to worry about. No sir, everything is just fine…

    *Looks suspiciously at teh wimmins*

  19. says

    Between that and “David Beckham pubic hint“, I think I’ve forgotten the name someone in my university classes used. Apparently she found them really attractive.

    I remembered it yesterday when I read that Film Crit Hulk article, I think, but not today. Was it “sex lines”? Maybe that was it…

  20. logicalcat says

    What censorship? None. What they really mean is “editing”. But you know replace one word with another that vaguely resembles it, but carries all this negative baggage so you can convince gullible idiots that there’s a problem when there really isn’t. That old trick.

  21. Athywren - not the moon you're looking for says

    Any discussion of bacula always makes me think of Quantum Leap… this is probably a bad thing, but it does always make the discussion more pleasant from within my headplace – draws my thoughts away from the horror of the possibility of a break there. Eeesch.

  22. says

    I can assert that “bone” is actually a term of art in computer animation, referring to a node that drags a bunch of the model with it when you change its position. This mostly corresponds to things that would contain bones in the usual sense, like arms and legs and spines, and a diagram of the nodes and how they’re attached to each other usually looks a bit like a skeleton. But every once in a while you have, say, a character with long hair that you want to animate blowing in the wind, and you wind up talking about the “hair bones” without thinking about what an absurd notion that is.

    In that case, “vagina bones ” would still only confirm the total lack of understanding of cis female anatomy.
    The hair example is pretty clear. OK, not the most sensible name but yeah. Yet, unless your video game actually depicts the inside of a vagina there is no way any visible body part is affected by movement of the vagina the way hair moves. Hell, not even “labia bones” would do.