Come as You Are (5 page)

One example of a vulva.

So if you decide to have a look at other women’s vulvas—which I highly recommend, by the way, but only with their enthusiastic consent—you’ll notice how very, very different they all are from each
other. Only rarely do you find the tidily tucked-in vulvas you see in
Playboy
.

Unless you’re experiencing pain (and if you are, check with your medical provider!), your genitals are perfect exactly as they are.

hymen truths

You may or may not have a hymen—a thin membrane along the lower edge of your vaginal opening. Whether you have one or not, I guarantee that virtually everything you were taught about the hymen is wrong.
⁴

The closest thing to true is that during intercourse the hymen can be painful if it’s not used to being stretched—that’s one of a number of potential causes of pain with penetration, but it is by no means the most common. (The most common is lack of lubrication.)

But the hymen doesn’t break and stay broken forever, like some kind of freshness seal. If a hymen tears or bruises, it
heals
. And the size of a hymen doesn’t vary depending on whether the vagina has been penetrated.
⁵
Also, it usually doesn’t bleed. Any blood with first penetration is more likely due to general vaginal tearing from lack of lubrication than to damage to the hymen.

What does change when a woman begins having the hymen stretched regularly is that it grows more flexible. And as a woman’s hormones change as she approaches the end of adolescence (around twenty-five years old), the hymen is likely to atrophy and become much less noticeable—if it was noticeable at all.

The hymen is another example of the wide variability in female genitals. Some women are born without hymens. Others have imperforate hymens (a thin but solid membrane covering all of the vaginal opening) or microperforate hymens (many tiny holes in an otherwise solid membrane). Some women have septate hymens, which feel like a strand of skin stretching across the mouth of the vagina. Some women’s hymens are durable, others are fragile. Some disappear early in adolescence, and some are still in evidence past menopause.

Women’s hymens vary because, as far as science has been able to discover, the hymen was not selected for by evolution. It has no reproductive or any other function. It’s a byproduct, a little bonus left behind by the juggernaut of evolutionary selection pressure, like men’s nipples. It’s the homologue of the seminal colliculus, a crest in the wall of the urethra where it passes through the prostate and joins with the seminal ducts.

The hymen is a profound example of the way humans metaphorize anatomy. Here is an organ that has no biological function, and yet Western culture made up a powerful story about the hymen a long time ago. This story has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with controlling women. Culture saw a “barrier” at the mouth of the vagina and decided it was a marker of “virginity” (itself a biologically meaningless idea). Such a weird idea could have been invented only in a society
where women were literally property, their vaginas their most valuable real estate—a gated community.

Even though the hymen performs no physical or biological function, many cultures have created myths around the hymen so profound that there are actually surgeries available to “reconstruct” the hymen, as if it were a medical necessity. (Where is the surgery to perfect men’s nipples?)

In a sense, the hymen can be relevant to women’s health: Some women are beaten or even killed for not having a hymen. Some women are told they “couldn’t have been raped” because their hymen is intact. For them, the hymen has real impact on their physical wellbeing, not because of their anatomy but because of what their culture believes about that anatomy.

a word on words

One more thing about women’s external genitals: The name for the whole package of female external genitalia is “vulva.” “Vagina” refers to the internal reproductive canal that leads up to the uterus. People often use “vagina” to refer to the vulva, but now you know better. And if you are standing up naked in front of a mirror and you see the classic triangle? That’s your mons (“mound”), or mons pubis.

Got that?

Vagina = reproductive canal

Vulva = external genitalia

Mons = area over the pubic bone where hair grows

I’m not suggesting that you go around correcting people who use the wrong words, or picket
The Vagina Monologues
with signs saying, “Actually, they’re
The Vulva Monologues
,” but now you know what words
you
should use. You wouldn’t call your face or your forehead your throat, right? So let’s not call the vulva or mons the vagina. Let’s make the world a better place for women’s genitals.

the sticky bits

Woman have a set of glands at either side of the mouth of the vagina, called Bartholin’s glands, which release fluid during sexual arousal—maybe to reduce the friction of vaginal penetration, maybe to create a scent that communicates health and fertility status. When women “get wet,” this is what’s happening. And it turns out, both women and men “get wet.” The male homologue, the Cowper’s gland, just below the prostate, produces preejaculate.

Why do we talk about men “getting hard” and women “getting wet,” when from a biological perspective both male and female genitals get both hard and wet? It’s a cultural thing again. Male “hardness” (erection) is a necessary prerequisite for intercourse, and “wetness” is taken to be an indication that a woman is “ready” for intercourse (though in chapter 6, we’ll see how wrong this can be). Since intercourse is assumed to be the center of the sexual universe, we’ve metaphorized male hardness and female wetness as the Ultimate Indicators of Arousal. But like our anatomies, our physiologies are all made of the same components—changes in blood flow, production of genital secretions, etc.—organized in different ways. We put a spotlight on male hardness and a spotlight on female wetness, but male wetness is happening too, and so is female hardness.

Women also have a set of glands at the mouth of the urethra, the orifice we pee out of, called Skene’s glands. These are the homologue of the male prostate. The prostate has two jobs: It swells around the urethra so that it’s impossible for a man to urinate while he’s highly sexually aroused, and it produces about half of the seminal fluid in which sperm travels. In other words, it makes ejaculate. In women, the Skene’s glands also swell around the urethra, making it difficult to urinate when you’re very aroused. If you’ve ever tried to pee right after having an orgasm, you’ve confronted this directly—you have to take deep, cleansing breaths to give your genitals time to relax.

In some women, the Skene’s glands produce fluid, which is how some women ejaculate. Female ejaculation—“squirting”—has gotten some
attention lately, in part because more science has been done and in part because it’s been featured in porn. As a result, I get asked about it pretty regularly. In fact, one day a couple of years ago I was visiting a student residence hall to answer anonymous questions out of a box, only to find that one student had put in the question, “How do I learn to squirt?” while another student had put in, “How do I stop squirting?”
⁶

Needless to say, our culture sends mixed messages to women about their genital fluids . . . or their lack thereof. On the one hand, ejaculation is viewed as a quintessentially masculine event and women’s genitals are, ya know, shameful, so for a woman’s body to do something so emphatic and wet is unacceptable. On the other hand, it’s a comparatively rare event, and the perpetual pursuit of novelty, coupled with basic supply-and-demand dynamics, means that the rare commodity of a woman who ejaculates is prized and put on display. So if they’re paying attention to cultural messages about ejaculation, women are understandably confused.

The biological message is simple: Female ejaculation is a byproduct, like male nipples and the hymen. No matter how big a deal culture makes of it, women vary. One woman I know never ejaculated in her life until shortly after menopause, when she got a new partner. All of a sudden she was ejaculating a quarter of a cup of fluid with every orgasm. Was it the change in partner? Was it the hormonal shift of menopause? None of the above? I have no idea.

But this brings me to an important point about genitals: They get wet sometimes, and they have a fragrance. A scent. A rich and earthy bouquet, redolent of grass and amber, with a hint of woody musk. Genitals are aromatic, sometimes, and sticky sometimes, too. Your genital secretions are probably different at different phases in your menstrual cycle, and they change as you age, and they change with your diet—women vary.

If you don’t find the smell or sensation of genital wetness to be completely beautiful and entrancing, that’s unsurprising given how we teach people to feel about their genitals. But
how you feel
about your genitals and their secretions is learned, and loving your body just as it is will give
you more intense arousal and desire and bigger, better orgasms. More on that in chapter 5.

intersex parts

Intersex folks,
⁷
whose genitals are not obviously male or female at birth, also have all the same parts; theirs happen to be organized somewhere between the standard female and standard male configurations. The size of the phallus, the location of the urethral opening, or the split of the labioscrotal tissue may be anywhere in between.

Homology goes a long way in explaining how intersex genitals come to be. People whose genitals are “somewhere in between” experienced some slight variation in the hugely complex cascade of biochemical events involved in the growth of a fetus, from egg fertilization through embryonic development and gestation. This small change results in slightly different genitals. There’s nothing wrong with their genitals, any more than there’s anything wrong with a person whose labia are uniquely large or small.
⁸
It’s still all the same parts, just organized in a different way. For example, the male urethral opening may be anywhere on the head of the penis; rarely, it is somewhere along the shaft of the penis, but that too is just fine, as long as it doesn’t impede urination or cause chronic infection (which it usually does not). As long as the genitals don’t cause pain and aren’t prone to infection or other medical issues, they’re healthy and don’t require any kind of medical intervention. We’re all made of the same parts, just organized in different ways.

This is why I don’t need to see your genitals to tell you that they’re normal and healthy. You’ve got all the same parts, just organized in your own unique way.

Like many sex educators, I include photographs of a variety of vulvas in my anatomy lecture slides.

Where do I find these photographs? On the Internet, of course.

My only difficulty is getting a diverse range—mostly I find images of the vulvas of young, thin, white, completely shaved women. I have to search carefully to find great sex-positive images of the vulvas of older women, women of size, women of color, and women who’ve got all their pubic hair.

One day I was sitting around a busy comics convention talking about this challenge with Camilla, who, like me, is a nerd and a former college peer sex educator. Unlike me, she has a degree in gender studies and studio art, is African American, and makes her living as an illustrator—all of which gave her insight into my little challenge.

She said, “Seriously, Emily? You’re googling, what, like, ‘black vulva’? At work?”

I shrugged apologetically. “Sausages, laws, and sex education lectures. You don’t want to know how any of them are made.”

And Camilla said, “Let me guess: All you find is porny images, nothing artistic or empowered or body positive?”

“And graphic medical pictures,” I said. “I tried searching ‘feminist vulvas of color,’ but all I got was embroidery projects from Pinterest and Etsy.”

Camilla laughed at that, but said, “Now think if you were a young woman trying to see what a normal, healthy vulva looks like. If you’re white, you’re all set, Tumblr is full of those. But if you’re Black or Asian or Latina, what is there? Porn and medical pictures. What does that tell you?”

I said, “But I can’t say, ‘Hey, women of color, post more pictures of your vulvas on the web, so that other women will know they’re normal.’ ”

“No, but still,” Camilla said, “the images we see—or don’t see—matter. You know those Escher girls?”

“No, what’s an Escher girl?”

“They’re the female characters in comics with abdomens so flat there’s no room for their internal organs, and their spines are impossibly twisted so that you can see both boobs and both butt cheeks at the same time. Their poses are so anatomically absurd that they’re named after an artist famous for impossible illusions.”

“Sounds like some bad porn I’ve seen,” I said.

“Right,” said Camilla. “I saw those as a teenager and I felt like that said everything about what a ‘female’ was supposed to be, and because that wasn’t what being female felt like to me, I decided my first identity is ‘geek.’ Not woman, not Black: geek. Gamer. It took a long time to integrate the other parts of my identity, because I couldn’t see how they all fit together. Images matter. They tell us what’s possible, what things go together, what belongs and what doesn’t belong. And we’re all just trying to belong somewhere.”