Yes, I said it. I said the V word.
Red Canna by Georgia O'Keefe
I am working on a section of my NaturalBirthBabyandBeyond.com Childbirth Empowerment site about Understanding Your Female Body and I have to say I am disappointed in our society.
Maybe it’s just because I have a health care education or maybe it’s just me. I think the human body is NORMAL. Why do we hide it and pretend it doesn’t exist?
What am I talking about? VULVAS!
Do you even know what your vulva is? Don’t be embarrassed if you don’t; most women don’t know either.
We grow up being told that boys have penises and girls have vaginas, so that’s what we know. Even then we aren’t to utter the “V” word; we have slang for it instead. It is now commonly being called your “vaj” because saying vagina in public is just inappropriate. Chances are that when you are talking about your “vagina” you are not referring to your vagina at all.
Has anyone actually told you what your vagina is or what it looks like? Frankly they can’t show you because without a speculum you can only see the vagina’s opening.
Also, vaginas have nothing to do with making pee pee. But that is what we tell little girls. Yes, it’s true that boys pee from their penises, but girls do NOT pee from their vaginas!
Confused? Not surprising.
Yes, girls have vaginas but vaginas are not part of the female external genitalia. Your external genitalia are called a vulva, not a vagina.
So as I am putting together the section of the NaturalBirthBabyandBeyond.com on Understanding Your Female Body, I am thoroughly disappointed in my search for pictures of vulvas. Since most women have never seen a vulva, including their own, I feel it is important for us to see all the variations of normal anatomy. All I can find are medical pictures of diseased vulvas, sexually transmitted infections, and sites that refer to our bodies as being embarrassing.
The female body seems to have been given up to the domains of medicine, shame, and porn. Seriously, who is holding the power and control of what we know about our bodies?
Our bodies belong to us and we need to reclaim them. This is the first step to reclaiming birth. Get to know your own body. It is yours, no one else’s. Don’t give it up to the man in the white coat.
To learn more about your female body, join the http://NaturalBirthBabyandBeyond.com community.
Thank you! This is great. I just wish she used proper terminology. She is talking about vulvas and not vaginas.
This documentary touches on some similar ideas and they have an artist in there who did moulds of all different looking vulvas. That might be something to look up as most women had not, in fact, seen the variety of different vulvas. http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/perfect-vagina/
Look up Judy Chicago and The Birth Project
Don’t forget about the clitoris! Another very important, never discussed, hidden & unjustly shamed part of female anatomy. Let’s talk about it all.
Dear Dr.Nancy, I agree so much about vulvas. Here is one that I would choose as an illustration – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Origine_du_monde. Not medical, not porn and surely not about shame!
I have yet to figure out what vagina’s are such an embarrassing topic… sometimes i ask people if they know where their uvula is…and just the letter v seems to turn them pink! Until i inform them that it is, in fact, the hangy thing in their throat
I think women need to know more about their bodies too… i was misinformed as to where i could rip during childbirth and was so shocked and surprised after being “stitched up” with my first child. Because the small tears were not in the spot i thought they would be! The second time around, i didn’t allow any stitching and recovered just fine on my own
Good Luck finding photos! I really enjoyed that website that shows photos of cervix’s because it was the only way I was able to discover where mine was, and made me able to check myself during labor so I’d know when to leave for the birth center 