Over the week of Valentine’s Day, as part of the University of California, Riverside Women’s Resource Center, I put on a week of programming dedicated to vaginas. The first event was a screening of “Stonewall Uprising,” a film that was a littlewhitewashedd, as most things about gay rights are, but we meant to highlight the contributions that trans women of color have made towards the gay civil rights movement. Then we brought in an artist and UCR alumni, @ambarpanda, to put on “The Vulva Workshop” where we talked about vulva care and maintenance and then got into an arts and crafts session making some felt vulvas. The next day, the UCR LGBT Center, the HerCampus UCR chapter, and I had a conversation about oral sex called “How to Eat a Taco.” The room was packed, and we had a very candid conversation about cunilingus, while eating tacos. On the following day, Valentine’s Day, there was a period party! A celebration and commiseration of periods, which consisted of a nurse from the Student Health Center coming in to talk about periods and birth control, eating cupcakes, and HerCampus leading a period storytelling session. That same evening, the Planned Parenthood Generation Action Club hosted speakers from a local sex shop, A Touch of Romance, to talk about sex toys. To wrap up vagina week, we had a local physical therapist, Dr. Rachel Wong, come talk about the pelvic floor.
(image via @sexedsteph)
I have a vagina and many people I know also have vaginas. Some people don’t but many of them know people that have vaginas. As far as I know, everyone was developed in a uterus, and therefore they too know people with vaginas. Notice that I haven’t used the term woman. I identify as a woman, but that’s how I identify. Some people that have vaginas identify as women while others don’t. Therefore, vagina =/= woman. It was important to me to include trans women, specifically trans women of color in Vagina Week.
I have organized a lot of sex ed programming, because sex ed is my jam and I love it. Usually, I conceptualize it, run it by my bosses who help me book rooms and order food, and then I make the flyer. This is the flyer that I made:
(image via @sexedsteph)
I also made individual flyerettes for the instagram, and the UCR central calendar. It was important to me not to be super cutesy with it. No pretty flowers, no pink, no blue liquid on clean, pristine pads. Not in my house! I went bloody with it. Vaginas do that sometimes.
(images via @sexedsteph)
Some people had a problem with the imagery. They didn’t like the blood. Honestly, when I first heard that there were people that had issues with the flyer, I thought that it was because the flyer said pussy: “A Week Long Pussy Party!” We were ready with speaking points defending the use of the word, like the fact that pussy has been reclaimed in feminist spaces specifically in the Women’s March i.e. pussy hats. I don’t know what the goal was when people complained about my flyers, but they were unable to block the flyers from being sent out to be put up in various departments. Yay! But no one really put them up. We had to rely on social media to get the flyer out.
So much time is spent on shaming, fetishizing, and disregarding vaginas. In the Vagina Monologues, there’s a monologue about childbirth called “I was there in the room” that always makes me cry. It is introduced by a host that says that the piece was performed for a while without actually mentioning childbirth: “This was a bizarre omission. But, then again, a male journalist recently asked, “What’s the connection?”
(image via pinterest)
Remember the morbid fascination when Paris and Britney got upskirted and they weren’t wearing underwear? There’s so much miseducation too. For example, when these ladies got upskirted, it’s not their vaginas we saw, it was their vulvas. The vulva is the part of the vagina that encompasses the clitoral head, ciltoral hood, labia majora, labia minora, pubic hair, and the vaginal opening. The whole system is called the vagina, but the outside part that is visible to the naked eye is called the vulva. You can’t shave your vagina, but you can shave your vulva.
Ultimately, I deem the week a success because everyday people came to learn and have fun.