A twat by any other name

The World Needs a Vagina Museum

One woman in London is dedicated to starting the world’s first physical space wholly dedicated to vaginas.

BY SARAH LASKOW 

APRIL 28, 2017

Florence Schechter is the sort of person who gets a good idea, starts a project, and sees if it its sticks. “I like just going for things and seeing if they work,” she says. “I get upset if I’ve got a good idea and I can’t actually put it into action.” This outlook is what led her, after realizing that the world lacks a museum dedicated to vaginas, to start planning to rectify that omission.

There is a chain of events that led to this particular good idea. Schechter studied biochemistry but realized she likes talking about science more than doing science. After college, she started a YouTube channel so she could keep talking about science. (She also has started a science film company, Collab Lab, and does science-themed stand-up comedy.) One of her videos is about animal penises—she’s interested in mating behavior in the animal world—and as a follow-up she wanted to make one about vaginas.

BLOGGER'S COMMENTS. OK, OK - I get her idea. Too many penises; not enough vaginas. But this "museum" of hers displays all kinds of floral images, which are meant - I would guess - to give a sense of a woman's external genitalia.

In other words - her vulva.

Vulva, people!

I've written about this before: how the word vagina, once never uttered by anyone, is now proclaimed at every opportunity to refer to anything below a woman's waist.

The synonym for "vagina" is "birth canal". It's a tube. It's nothing that sticks out or is visible. At all. The vagina is invisible! No one can see it but your gynecologist (and only when the speculum is in there and cranked wide open). Why then is it being used to describe the most erotic part of a woman's anatomy?

For just that reason: it's too erotic. Vagina has a nice clean, clinical sound to it. (Ugly, if you ask me, reminding me of Regina and Spadina and Carolina). Vulva is just too - I don't know! It's sort of - ugh! It's - it's just too -

Too sexual.

It's a voluptuous sort of word (ewwwwww!) that folds into itself, actually a kind of visual onomatopoeia (and I can't believe I actually used that word). Say it over and over again.

Oh all right then, don't.

The point I'm trying to make is that society has become pretty casual about displaying a man's "junk" and making lots of jokes about it.  But when it comes to the humble vulva, we pretend it doesn't even exist.

We just don't display what's "down there". Who has a vulva, anyway? And for God's sake, let's not get into the clitoris, a word which is mispronounced 95% of the time. I once heard a university professor go on and on about the "cli-Taurus". Nobody corrected him because they all thought he was right.

As far as I am concerned, women's sexuality has been shoved back into the closet. I remember all sorts of stuff coming out in the '70s about consciousness-raising, women comparing genitals to learn the lesson that "everything is natural and normal and beautiful" in a woman's body.

Now none of it is, and everyone is abnormal.

Meantime, in 2017, a record number of women are undergoing a mutilating, utterly barbaric procedure called labiaplasty (labia being another word we never hear, because all that "stuff" down there is called vagina, folks. VAGINA!). This means the labia are cut off and sewn up so, basically, the woman ends up with a cute little pre-pubescent slit with nothing protruding at all. This sexless mound is usually kept neatly shaven because, well, it just looks better that way. Looks better for him, I would assume.

Why is this happening? Why is it acceptable, increasingly popular and even desirable, to undergo this modern-day version of female circumcision? I don't watch porn, but I have been informed that this is the way a lot of female porn stars look. God knows what they have done to themselves to achieve that look (probably labiaplasty!), but it is fast becoming the "norm", making sexually-intact women feel dirty, smelly and messy "down there" (the vagina, I mean).

I suppose boy friends, husbands and lovers will eventually come around to that standard naked slit, rejecting any woman who does not resemble an eight-year-old girl. Men watch a lot of porn now, and have come to assume those images reflect reality. If that's all a guy has ever seen, well - . Victorian men used to run to throw up on their wedding night, realizing to their horror that their wives had pubic hair.

What creeps me out - well, the whole thing does. I'd rather cut my ears off so my head will look neater. But the fact that it renders the vulva pre-pubescent in appearance is simply alarming. It's eroticizing childish-looking genitals. I don't know how else to see it.

But it gets worse.

I Couldn't Poop For 5 Days While On Vacation With My New Boyfriend

It seems when you’re in the midst of that “Everything is perfect, I’m perfect, you’re perfect” stage of a relationship, nobody poops.

When I returned home from a two-week European vacation with my (fairly) new beau, after the tales of our journey from London to Paris, the revelation that pigeon tastes actually not that bad, and the admittance that, oui, Paris women really are the most stylish femmes on the planet, my girlfriend, Lauren, asked me:

“OK, but you have to tell me: How did you… poo?”

Just so you know Lauren’s not into poo, or anything. I mean, I think she composts, but she’s not into scatology or those DIY fecal transplants. The reason for her inquiry into my bowel movements was in regard to a common problem that plagues many women in new relationships.

“A lot of women actually get sick during the first six weeks of the relationship because they don’t poo around their partner,” Lauren told me matter-of-factly, as if she had actually researched that sh**.

Now, for the life of Google, I could not verify her claim for the sake of this article, but I did find various blog posts and forums where various women commented that pooping is forbidden when it comes to dating. It seems when you’re in the midst of that “Everything is perfect, I’m perfect, you’re perfect” stage of a relationship, nobody poops. Or, at least, you don’t want to imagine that the area you want to do dirty things to is, well, dirrrrtttty.

OK, here it is again, the imperative to NOT be a normal, natural, functioning human being. I had never heard of this pressure on females (no one ever mentions this problem in connection with males) to suppress their bowel movements when they're in a new relationship.

But now I have become enlightened. Girls don't poop, they just don't, and if they DO they are dirrrrrttttty and animalistic, if not a downright freak.
Or, at least, unattractive. Or, at very least, downright inconsiderate to their normally-pooping boyfriends. How can they even think of doing such a disgusting thing in the same hotel room?

I groaned when I came across this piece, but was flabbergasted to see dozens and dozens of articles and message boards and social media posts about "whether we should poop when we're with our boy friends". This is an actual question that you see. A lot. Incredibly, an example was cited of a seven-year marriage where the wife had always found a way to poop outside the home, in a public bathroom somewhere, or at least in a bathroom in a remote, faraway part of the house (with the fan on, and the water running). Or maybe she had a port-a-potty out in the back yard. Thus, her husband had actually come to believe that she never pooped.

It's hard enough not to have genitals, or to have genitals that can only be called by one (inaccurate) name, or genitals that can only be portrayed by pictures of flowers and fruit (or sliced off and sewn up into a neat little slit). It's much worse to be forbidden a bodily function which is about as crucial to health as eating (and by the way, women face pretty tough strictures on that too). The story I quoted above concludes with the woman's shame-faced admission that she had become hellishly constipated after two weeks of not pooping. But isn't dealing with rock-hard shit a lot better than having him leave you because you. . . poop?

This is what I worry about. These things become standardized, after a while. Holding it in will become a requirement, something all decent women are expected to do so their boyfriends won't be totally disgusted and grossed out.

I remember reading someone's query to a sort of internet Dear Abby dating expert, and it was on this question: when my boyfriend of three years sleeps over at my apartment for the weekend, should I - you know? Can I - I mean, is it OK if I - sort of - I mean, uh - can I use my bathroom? The Dear Abby person was sort of taken aback. This woman was asking a dating expert if she could use HER OWN BATHROOM for a universal bodily function. The underlying feeling is that if he finds out she actually shits, he'll just (pardon the expression) dump her.

Who knows how true this is? Maybe a lot of guys DO insist a woman never poop when they're in the same building (if ever). Maybe a lot of guys DO want a neat little slit in which to deposit their goopy, disgusting, fish-smelling slime.

And women always fall into lockstep. If they don't, they might not get ANYBODY. The fact that this may even be true makes my head truly spin, if not fall right off.

You say vagina, and I say va-WHAT?

I didn't write the intriguing article below - it was written by Martha Kempner for an interesting site called RH Reality Check (RH standing for reproductive health). No discussion of reproductive health would be complete without a mention of education. This  makes the article's revelation even more shocking: Anne Frank's immortal diary is being criticized and considered "inappropriate" for adolescents, not for its stark description of life under Nazi oppression but because Frank includes an accurate description of her developing adolescent genitals. This kind of insane prudery is both headspinningly ignorant and groaningly typical in a culture that really hates women's pussies. 

I'm sorry, but it does. Hates them. Women (myself included) have been boondoggled into thinking they're abnormal, weird, bad-smelling, and shouldn't have anything "down there" but a neat slit or, like a Barbie doll, nothing. We should not swell or protrude or bush out in any way. If anything does, shave it, trim it, even cut it off (and labioplasty, incorrectly referred to by plastic surgeons as "vaginal surgery", is now becoming frighteningly common as young women seek the "perfect slit", free of mess, fuss or feeling).

---

Barbie - You Bitch!
Conforming to Sociocultural Ideals of the Perfect Vagina
A Public Health Issue

If this reminds you queasily of a slightly less-drastic form of female circumcision, then - you'd be right. That is exactly what it is. Cutting off parts of ourselves because they're seen as ugly, abnormal and (worse than that) sexually taboo is nothing more than socially-sanctioned mutilation. 

What else? Though we've supposedly outgrown the Freudian dinosaur belief in the "vaginal orgasm", "vagina" has taken over as the descriptive term for everything below the belt, obscuring and even denying the locus of sexual response and enjoyment for almost all women. The vulva. The pussy. The (if you don't mind the term) cunt.

If you don't like cunt, and some don't because it's also used as a nasty name for someone we don't like, then just come up with some other term such as muff (female masturbation is sometimes called "buffin' the muffin") or jellyroll, which was blues singer Bessie Smith's favorite euphemism. As with Mae West and her infamous "is that a gun in your pocket" line, the censors didn't even know what it meant.

Not so incidentally, vulva has a very different sound and feel to it, a different texture than the clinical-sounding vagina. It's voluptuous, is what it is. It sounds like Volvo, a luxury car. It has curves and folds. Vagina always reminds me of Regina, and I sure don't want to go there.

I think people are uncomfortable with the word vulva because it sounds dusky and erotic.  I think people are uncomfortable with the IDEA of vulva because it's so much simpler for women just to have a neat little hole.

The vulva is external, and yet at the same time fairly well-hidden, like a rabbit in the bush.
Female masturbation can also be called "petting the bunny", and we know what bunnies are like: not the Playboy type, but the sort that spring around in the lush woods, coupling joyously whenever the urge strikes. Once they get started, there's just no stopping them.

Take that, you Michigan mother!

Half the People in the World Have a Vulva—Can We Please Get Over Our Fear of the Word?

by Martha Kempner, RH Reality Check

A Michigan mother has become the latest person to complain that a blunt, accurate account of female genitalia—one that uses descriptive words and proper names—is too explicit for school. It’s an argument that we’ve heard many times recently about textbooks, sex education lectures, and even political speeches, but this one is a little surprising. This time the source of the “pornographic” material is the classic book about the Holocaust, The Diary of Anne Frank. Are we really so obsessed with women’s body parts that one paragraph about them is enough to cause a panic even when it’s in a book about far more serious issues?

The book, as most people know, features the first-hand account of a young Jewish woman who was forced to hide in an attic with her family and others during World War II. A new, less edited version of the book has been released. It includes passages in which Anne explores her own body. In the passage in question, Frank writes:

Until I was eleven or twelve, I didn’t realize there was a second set of labia on the inside, since you couldn’t see them. What’s even funnier is that I thought urine came out of the clitoris…When you’re standing up, all you see from the front is hair. Between your legs there are two soft, cushiony things, also covered with hair, which press together when you’re standing, so you can’t see what’s inside. They separate when you sit down and they’re very red and quite fleshy on the inside. In the upper part, between the outer labia, there’s a fold of skin that, on second thought, looks like a kind of blister. That’s the clitoris.

The Michigan mother complained that this was far too graphic—in fact pornographic—and completely inappropriate for school. In an interview with the local Fox affiliate, she explained that her daughter brought this too her attention: “I thought it was because she was concerned about the depressing aspects surrounding Anne Frank and all that, and she said no it was because they were talking graphically about Anne Frank’s genitalia.”

Although it is 2013, and about half of the world’s population is female, our body parts seem to cause constant kerfuffles. Recently I wrote about a biology teacher in Idaho who is under investigation in part for using the word vagina during his lecture on human reproduction. (As I said at the time, I’m really not sure how one could give a lecture on human reproduction without using the word vagina, given how many roles it plays.) Last year, I wrote about a report on sex education in New York state and was particularly horrified to learn that one textbook used in New York and other states defines the vagina as the “organ that receives sperm during reproduction.” 


This description is inaccurate (it’s not an organ) and offensive (a part of the female body should not be defined exclusively in terms of what it does for men). And who can forget last summer when state Rep. Lisa Brown (D-West Bloomfield) was banned from speaking on the Michigan house floor because she used the word vagina in a speech against an anti-abortion bill.

Things get worse the more specific you get. The word vagina is often used to describe everything between a woman’s legs, because, despite the controversies surrounding the word, it’s considered more socially appropriate than accurate terms like vulva, labia, or clitoris. (Emphasis mine. This whole issue exposes the hypocrisy of supposed "openness" when referring to women's genitals: now it's almost OK to say "vagina", but the word is constantly being misused to stand in for all the sexually-responsive parts of a woman's body. The culture seems to prefer the less-threatening concept of an uncomplicated, functional tunnel.)

What struck me most about Frank’s description is just how accurate it is. Though she starts by laughing at her past ignorance, the passage provides a spot-on description of where everything is and what it looks like. She also knows all of the correct terminology (though obviously the book has been translated from the original Dutch). Frank was clearly a great writer, and her parents seem to have educated her well about her own body.

Unfortunately, many women growing up some 70 years later do not have this kind of education, at that, in my opinion, is what’s behind our obsession with female genitals. As Frank said, these parts are hidden between a woman’s legs. This makes them very different than penises and testicles, which are more visible and recognizable to most. If we don’t look at these parts and we don’t talk about them in any detail—or worse, if we insist on using nondescript or cutesy terms like “down there” and “vajayjay”—two things happen: ears perk up when you say vagina, and panic ensues if you even whisper the word clitoris.


My first reaction upon hearing this mother’s complaint was about perspective and priorities. The book starts conversations about a disgraceful chapter in human history. Kids ask questions about anti-Semitism, concentration camps, gas chambers, and the complete and utter disregard for humanity. On a personal level, they likely think about how they would react if their freedom was taken away and they had to live in hiding. How shallow do you have to be to be more worried about how they’ll react not to this horror and misery but to a description of some body parts?

In one way, the Michigan mother is right: Kids do not need to know about Anne Frank’s genitals to learn about the Holocaust, and they will likely focus disproportionately on this passage because they are in seventh grade and because they’re not hearing about this anywhere else. That said, had the passage been in any other book, be it a novel or a biology textbook, it likely never would have made it into a school in the first place.


The solution is not to ban this new version of Anne Frank’s diary. The solution is to make vulvas about as mysterious as elbows. No, I’m not suggesting that we walk around pantsless with legs splayed. I’m simply proposing that we do what we do with all other body parts: Call it by its proper name, define it clearly and accurately in school, and stop freaking out.


Half the people in the world have a vulva. Can we please get over the word already?

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What rhymes with vulva?

Measures: 5" L x 3-1/4" W x 1" D

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Well, OK, and I'm sorry about that title. Sorry to use such a "dirty" word, but the original was worse, a word that nowadays is only heard when someone wants to talk about "tweet" and has a slip of the tongue.

Not that tongue has anything to do with it.

OK, I have a beef (I can't seem to use neutral terms here!). Sometimes at night, I have a habit. It's a very bad habit and I am deeply ashamed of it.

I watch old reruns of Sex and the City.

This is when I'm really desperate and my PVR recordings of  those wonderful History Channel and National Geographic shows have run out. When I can no longer stand to watch, for the 17th time, Adolf and Eva: A Love Story or When Aliens Attacked the Pharaohs.

I just want something to help me make it through the night, or make it from 9:30 to 10:15 (for the unedited version runs something like 29 minutes sans ads, a very awkward length).

It's like an archaelogical dig, in a way, seeing people with cell phones the size of a loaf of bread, talking about Y2K (and by the way, what was that anyway?) and pondering whether to start using some strange new invention called email.

The sexual stuff now seems rather silly, though I guess it did break some ground and shatter some taboos. But seeing Samantha endlessly groaning and shouting as a series of nearly-identical men pound on her in the missionary position gets old in a hurry.

None of this is about eroticism. It's about screwing. But never mind, that's not what I'm here to tell you.

I'm here to tell you that I'm a little tired of hearing women refer to their genitalia in the WRONG WAY.

There's just one word for everything below the belt: vagina.

Maybe it started with The Vagina Monologues, some sort of bizarre harpy-fest in which a whole lot of fading celebrity women, eager to prove themselves hip like actors making guest appearances on Batman, sat around and dished and jived about their VAGINAS.

Yes, women have them. But in a funny sort of way, a vagina "isn't". It's a hole, a tunnel, a non-thing. What women do have, the part of them that most often responds sexually, is a vulva.

Vulva.

You heard me.

Vulva!

A lot of women do not even know what a vulva IS, because no one ever tells them, but what it IS, is (are?) the external genitalia that includes the labia majora, labia minora, and that pearl beyond price, the clitoris.

But we don't talk about any of those things because, let's face it, they're "dirty", and besides they don't exist anyway. We have vaginas, and that's it.

The one word does for everything, doesn't it?

But does it?

If men talked about their prostates, and only their prostates, as describing their entire sexual paraphernalia, would it be accurate? Uh.

My feeling is that all this external stuff, which for many women is the locus for most of their sexual pleasure and release, is still considered dirty, smelly and secret.

It's "down there", the same "down there" we learned as children and later deodorized and shaved and ignored.

But hey! We've come a long way, baby, because now we have VAGINAS. Which are tunnels. Yes, it goes in, but it also comes out (though we won't go there). 

I have never once, in my life, even on Sex and the City, heard a woman refer to her vulva, her labia or her clitoris, either on TV or in a movie. Not even in a book (except for my novel Mallory - buy a copy now on Amazon! - in which a girl struggles with the social implications of her "abnormal" genitalia).

These words, the names of perfectly respectable body parts, body parts that are known to have given limitless pleasure to countless women, are considered so deeply taboo that most people don't even acknowledge their existence.

You may have heard of female circumcision, a barbaric rite practiced in parts of the Muslim world (and it really is, so please don't call me anti-Muslim, though I am definitely anti-female-circumcision). In its most extreme form, a young girl, a prepubescent girl, is attacked with a dull instrument which removes every trace of external female genitalia: vulva, labia, clitoris. All those things. They don't remove her vagina because they can't, though they do sew the ravaged opening shut so tightly that only a tiny hole remains.

On her wedding night, the girl (probably only a teenager) is cut open so that her husband may be admitted to the bridal chamber. One can only imagine what childbirth must be like.

So her "?" is mutilated, even removed. Her "?", which she doesn't need anyway, because she still has a vagina, right?

Heard on a news story when a woman was humilated during an airport pat-down: "He touched my vagina." OK. He must have done more than touch to penetrate a physiological tunnel. "My vagina is depressed" (Charlotte on Sex and the City, having been diagnosed with a condition called vulvodynia, an unexplained pain in the VULVA NOT VAGINA).

There was a time, and maybe that time isn't over yet, when you could say "penis" on TV, but you could not say "vagina". Why not? It made people squirm to say "vagina". It reminded them of gynecological exams and speculae and tampons and feminine deodorant spray and all that swampy stuff. 

Then suddenly, after the taboo-shattering celebrity girl friend sit-around called The Vagina Monologues, you suddenly could say vagina, it was suddenly cool and hip and funny-in-a-good-way to say vagina,  and in fact you were expected to say vagina any time you referred to anything that lived between a woman's legs.

Vagina, vagina, vagina! Say it loud, say it proud.

But what about that other language, which is far more accurate? Let's try it on. "He touched my vulva." (Excuse me while I run for the bathroom!) "My vulva is depressed." (Excuse me while I run for the police!)

I'm not saying anything unseemly here. At all. Can't I name body parts? Can't I say "liver", "colon", "upper respiratory system" or anything else?

"He touched my body." "My body is depressed." Oh, but "body" may be just too squirmy and uncomfortable and taboo. It's got all that mushy wet stuff inside it, you know. So let's just say my "you know". My "mm-mm".

"My whoozis hurts." "He touched my snickerdoodle." "My jimjam is depressed."

THAT is how we empower ourselves, girls. By telling it like it is.

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