Michelle Wolf is angry about an overlooked part of female anatomy, and honestly? This is a reasonable thing to be mad about.
In her video about the rete ovarii, the comedian calls out how a structure connected to the ovary could be treated as so unimportant that it disappeared from anatomy textbooks.
That part has support in the research itself. And “we haven’t figured out what this does” seems like a pretty good reason to keep looking.
Yes, the researchers say it disappeared from textbooks
The authors of a study published in eLife on March 19, 2025 describe the rete ovarii as an overlooked ovarian appendage. They say it appeared in early Gray’s Anatomy drawings, disappeared from recent textbooks, and was often dismissed as a “functionless vestige.”
You can understand why that would make a woman pause halfway through her coffee.
Wolf puts the frustration into a comparison that is painfully easy to picture:
“We research women’s health just about as thoroughly as a man looks for ketchup in the fridge.”
Somewhere, a woman who has personally located that ketchup is nodding.
The science gives us a reason to pay attention
Working in mice, researchers mapped three connected regions of the rete ovarii. They observed fluid moving toward the ovary and identified secreted proteins that could be important for ovarian function.
The journal’s published assessment called the study important and its evidence convincing. What this structure does for human fertility and hormone health remains an open research question.
That is a good reason to keep investigating. Women should not have to wait for a finished treatment before they are allowed to care about the questions.
There is a little more history here
The structure did receive some attention before this study. A 1999 paper examined hormone receptors in the human rete ovarii, for example. So it was never completely erased from scientific research.
That detail matters. It also leaves plenty of room to agree with Michelle about the dismissiveness. The newer researchers themselves describe a structure that received little attention and was routinely treated as having no function.
We can give credit to the scientists who kept asking questions while also asking why something connected to the ovary was so readily written off.
She is allowed to be angry about that
The demand here is pretty reasonable: take female anatomy seriously enough to stay curious.
We do not need to claim this one structure explains every hormone problem. We can be interested in what researchers have found, honest about what they still need to learn, and frustrated that there is so much catching up to do.
And Michelle does not have to deliver that frustration in a soothing voice. She is a comedian talking about a part of the female body that researchers say was dismissed and left out of textbooks. Of course there are jokes. Of course there is some anger.
Women should not have to make that concern more polite before it gets taken seriously.
