When we are children or teenagers we are taught that boys have a penis. But what are we taught that girls have? The answer is usually a vagina. We are not taught that she has a vulva. We are not taught about the clitoris or the inner or outer lips or the mons, we are taught that we have a hole or two. And that's it.
Our old buddy Sigmund Freud is at least partly responsible for this. The whole Oedipal thing relies on the fear of castration: The idea that men have a penis and women do not. They have nothing. Men are defined as a presence and women as an absence.
How many times have we heard a child say that they had seen a woman's vagina in a locker room? Unless the kid had X-ray specs, she did not a vagina see. Even if the woman was spread eagle with her fingers separating everything, she might have seen the vaginal opening, but that probably did not happen.
Defining women as an absence is a huge problem for women and body image. Anything that is not a hole is considered somehow masculine. So women who have large inner lips for example are considered masculine and imperfect. If we are just supposed to have a hole down there, how do we explain everything else? And if we don't have a name for it, how can we enjoy it?
Education does not help this matter at all. Most people are taught in Sex Education the same thing, that women have vaginas. Many teachers are not allowed to use the word clitoris at all, lest it should encourage exploration. (Or any kind of pleasurable female sexuality, we wouldn't want that now would we?) Diagrams are usually thin, white women with everything "neat" and tucked in. There is no variety, no black vulvas, no fat ones, etc.
So between being yelled at and told we were dirty for touching ourselves when we were children and then being "linguistically castrated" by our teachers, most women start in a very bad place when it comes to vulva body image, heaped on top of the body image problems we suffer in general. However, no fad diets will help with this problem. We must immediately turn to surgery to "correct" this problem.
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I think it has a lot to do also with why a lot of women don't know how to make themselves achieve orgasm. I know when I was first "exploring" I just assumed that women got off from penetration, surely this must be, since I'd seen it in a dirty magazine once! Ha-ha! Oh how wrong I was. I think girls should be encouraged to explore without it seeming like a dirty/selfish/devious/etc thing. Sure would have saved me a lot of time and later boyfriends! Ha-ha!
ReplyDeleteAmong the lack of things on the sex ed diagram: hair (the male charts lack this too). This goes back centuries... supposedly in the 1800's art critic John Ruskin didn't know women had pubic hair until his wedding night because he'd only seen the hairless freaks in paintings, and he was so grossed out he annulled the marriage!
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