Remember those awkward five days in middle school when your 60-year-old science teacher started class by saying, “If anyone laughs at the word ‘vagina,’ you will be getting a detention.”? If you’re anything like me, you remember the threatening detention scorns, but little to nothing aside from that. We’re taught that unsafe sex and STDs are bad, and that’s it.
A few weeks ago, my friends and I were talking about how much we don’t know about the female body. In fact, the only thing we seemed fully knowledgeable of is that once a month, we are immobile from cramps and fatigue, wishing desperately to wake up from a Midol PM-induced sleep as a man. Everything else about our bodies, though, remains a mystery for us college-educated women.
When I started thinking about it, I remembered the first time I got a UTI (urinary tract infection). It was right before my senior prom. I didn’t know what a UTI was, and I made my mom promise not to tell anyone because I thought it meant that I was dirty. I then lied to my high school boyfriend and told him that the reason I was on antibiotics was because I had an ear infection; I was genuinely embarrassed of a simple UTI.
Why is it that the female body (which quite literally creates and gives life, might I add) is taboo to talk about in our society? If we really think about it, even in the smallest of scales, boys grow up thinking girls’ bodies have cooties and that we never go to the bathroom or (god forbid) pass gas, or have any bodily function at all. We now see that reflected in the negativity and stigma surrounding public breastfeeding—yes, women are scrutinized for doing the only thing for which boobs were intended.
Society controls the information we receive, and us women are left to fend for ourselves in order to discover that our bras will fit differently when we’re on our periods, and that consuming a lot of sugar could lead us to getting yeast infections (or that 75 percent of women will get a yeast infection at least once in their life, and that it is 100 percent normal).
This all makes us turn to WebMD when we think something is wrong with our lady parts, and then self-diagnosing ourselves with the worst possible disease known to humankind, instead of being able to know our bodies and recognize a simple UTI or other infection.
Those of us who suffered through public-school education know that our lack of information isn’t because we were grossed out on the topic and didn’t want to pay attention; we weren’t given significant information at all. In our late teens or early twenties, we remain as uninformed as we were back then. This has to change. We have to grow to know our bodies, seek education about our bodies, and be open and unembarrassed of our bodies.
Image from: pinterest.com