Agreat deal has changed in the conversations and information we have about sex, thanks to technological advancement, the Internet and social media. But ten years ago, when I was in high school, knowledge was handed down, especially to girls, from one of the following channels: a reproduction chapter in the biology textbook that was taught with the threat of being ousted from the classroom should a giggle be heard, one sex-ed lecture facilitated by guests in which students were too shy to ask questions should they be picked on later, and ‘wisdom’ from pornography passed on by boyfriends to girlfriends who then loyally handed it over to their friends.
Rampant heteronormative culture meant we discussed love, romance and sex in male-female binary, and questions of gender, sex and sexuality were never touched upon. We were taught to think about sex as condoms, sexually transmitted diseases or abstinence, and we learned to see sex with shame, disgust or rarely, with wonder. By the time we got to college where men and women could be separated with ropes, we had accepted the severance between the anatomy and the act of sex, and firmly replaced pleasure with pregnancy, taking out all the fun from it.
This segregation resulted in the creation of myths in the corridors, secrets passed on without revealing sources over snack breaks, and the full erasure of the anatomy we might have retained. In being told to never scratch, never ever to show and continuously silenced if ever spoken of, we carried around the fairies and the peepees of childhood as adults.
Vagina was rarely used as a word, if used as a part we never heard of it. The labia was all but forgotten, and the clitoris had never been discovered. We were made to forget parts of us, and then left to grope in the dark for answers to questions we were told we cannot have. We never asked, never learned, never visited the gynaecologist, and picked up in whispers what we should have never caught: discharge, discolouring and other normal bodily functions were the devils work, pineapple ‘cures’ for pregnancy, (wrong) ways of getting pregnant including from swimming pool, the stand-up, wash-up, pull-out and church, count ways to avoid pregnancy, and rumours of size.
All of this and more came rushing back to me when I was in the world’s first Vagina Museum, set up to literally set the scores right, and full of potential for change in how we understand our bodies, bodily functions, and sex if we start again now in the right ways. The museum seeks to have conversations, insist of the diversity of bodies, account for many experiences and break myths. The dialogue we stayed away from so far has made us dismiss our own bodies.
I wonder if we start now, with a Vagina Museum here and many honest conversations around health and ourselves, how we far we will go. Is it not fair to say that when the ear is an ear, and the nose a nose, the vulva should not be called anything but? What we could do is break the silence and begin with the basics: name first, use next, and allow abundant exploration and discovery from thereon.