I know. It’s a dirty word. Vagina. Ew, right?
Wrong!
For all of my life, I’ve had to refer to my genital area as my “privates” or my “lady area” and, quite frankly, I’m sick of it! I’m tired of hearing people refer to periods as “that time of the month” and breasts as “chests.” Meanwhile, the cisgender men are unashamed of saying whatever word they want to refer to their genitals as – dick, balls, penis, and even more raunchy and vulgar things. Cis men also feel no shame in referring to AFAB (assigned female at birth) body parts how they like – pussy, tits – and go even further by referring to women wholly as “females.”
For all of our lives, those of us with vaginas are made to feel ashamed of even talking about our genitals, even when we have something wrong with us. I remember feeling too embarrassed to tell my mother I thought I had a yeast infection at the age of sixteen, and there’s no reason I should have felt that way. There is nothing wrong with our bodies, and there is nothing wrong with talking about them.
Because talking about our bodies so openly and technically is considered dirty and forbidden, I think it’s time to make people uncomfortable. By using the language of our bodies, we are starting to take back some of the control over our bodies that has always been stolen from us. In a society where being in the minority (non-white, non-cis male, non-straight, etc.) means your body is no longer yours, it’s time to fight back with what little we can.
If even the language used to describe our bodies is forbidden, it’s time to change that. One “vagina” at a time.