Men have been left horrified after discovering what the “stitch” on the bottom of the scrotum actually is.
If you’ve ever glanced down and spotted a suspicious-looking line running along the middle of your scrotum, you’re not alone, and no, it’s not a surgical scar or leftover stitches from some forgotten procedure.
Turns out, plenty of men are just now noticing what many are calling the “crotch seam,” and the internet has been flooded with questions, and plenty of jokes, about what it actually is.
One social media user sparked a viral thread after bluntly asking: “Why do balls have that stitch line in the middle?”
Cue a wave of risqué humor and wild theories. “It’s actually a zipper pocket and that’s where we hide all our feelings,” one person quipped. Another chimed in: “I thought you were talking about football or baseball for a second.”
But behind the gags lies a perfectly normal, totally scientific answer, and it all dates back to your time in the womb.
A lot of men were left baffled by the strange line on their scrotum. Credit: Cultura Creative / Getty
That "stitch" is called the scrotal raphe
The medical term for that mysterious line is the scrotal raphe, and according to the Intersex Society of North America, it’s actually a developmental marker from your early formation in the womb.
Here’s how it works: Every fetus starts out with the same basic genital structures. Male and female embryos look nearly identical up until around seven to nine weeks of pregnancy.
That’s when testosterone kicks in for male fetuses, triggering a dramatic transformation in the genital area.
As IFLScience explains: “Before seven weeks of the mother’s pregnancy, male and female foetuses look fairly similar in the genital area, each with a urogenital tubercle, urogenital swellings, and urogenital folds.”
After testosterone enters the picture, those urogenital swellings swell and fuse at the midline. This fusion creates the scrotum and the underside of the penis in typical male development.
“The line down the middle, called a ‘raphe’, is just a reminder of how all humans start out with a common female genital anatomy,” according to the Intersex Society of North America.
So what you’re seeing down there isn’t a surgical remnant or a sign of some hidden medical history, it’s simply a natural part of how your body formed.
The scrotal raphe forms several weeks after conception. Credit: Tetra Images / Getty
Everyone starts out the same
The scrotal raphe isn’t exclusive to men either. Women have a version too, extending from the anus to the labia majora, formed from the same developmental tissue, just shaped differently based on chromosome and hormone influence.
In males, that same tissue, called the labioscrotal swellings, fuses together instead of separating, which is why men are left with the visual marker known as the raphe.
To put it plainly, your genitals were just figuring themselves out in the womb. That line is the result of that journey, a literal seam from the moment your body started deciding which way it was going to go.