Renowned Hoo-Ha Doctor Wins Nobel Prize For Medical Advancements Down There March 30, 2009 Jill So good. Related: Now that boys may be getting vaccinated for HPV, we’re suddenly worried about the vaccine’s safety and efficacy — and not a peep about how vaccination may turn boys all slutty.
My spouse and I were just laughing with some friends about parents who get all shy about what to call female genitals. Telling little boys that they have a penis seems easy for everyone we know, but even some folks that we expected to have more sense refuse to use proper terminology with their girls. My daughten knows she has a vulva, though. That’s where it starts. We start communicating the shame right them. Boy parts are ordinary body parts with names. Ear, elbow, penis. Girl parts are unmentionable, and have cute names, and occasion giggles and blushing. That’s how it starts. We teach girls they cannot deal openly and forthrightly with the bodies the way boys can, and then later we teach them they can’t deal openly and forthrightly with their sexuality, even if boys can. Boys have penises, boys have desire, boys have sex. Girls … the adults would rather not talk about.
I never really understood this until it came about a few years ago that I have a double system: my vagina divides and leads to either two uteri and corresponding tubes and ovaries for each or to a bisected uterus. (They don’t know for sure). Freaking out, I told my mother, whose response was: “No you don’t, I would have seen it when I changed your diapers!” Me: “Um, Mom, I think that’s called a vulva. The vagina is inside.” The joke now among my friends is that she’s so Catholic and repressed that I had to give her The Talk.
I never really understood this until it came about a few years ago that I have a double system: my vagina divides and leads to either two uteri and corresponding tubes and ovaries for each or to a bisected uterus. (They don’t know for sure). Are you a Time Lord?
OK, so the “down there” discussion aside, in reading the HPV article it seems that, since the vaccine is not required for school age girls it won’t be covered by insurance. $500 is a significant amount of money to pay for the “privilege” of potentially warding off HPV and cancer. Am I missing something here or is this just one more example of how we continue to punish those without?? Back to the “down there” discussion. We call my 4 yo daughter’s collective parts her “punta.” And I have explained that the punta is comprised of a vagina and a urethra as the parts that go inside of her (or deliver things to the outside). I haven’t really gotten int describing her vulva or clit (not sure when that is appropriate) but I did not want her confusing her vagina and her urethra as I did for so long. And some of this comes from a guy that I dated who did indeed refer to my punta as “down there.” It was disturbing and I wish that I had had the confidence to correct him, train him and give him the eye opening experience he really needed. He has a daughter now and I’m really sorry that I didn’t.
What a Very Amusing, Good, Interesting, Noteworthy Article! I went to a GYN while in college who pulled out a diagram and he was all like, “These are your ovaries…” And I was all like, “Dude, tell me something I HAVEN’T known since reading Our Bodies, Our Selves when I was nine. Sheesh.” (Yes I know many women are sadly uneducated about their bodies but I found it offensive that this guy automatically assumed I was.)
There’s a great healthy sexuality promotion / sexual violence prevention initiative called Care For Kids that stresses the ideas you’re talking about. http://www.healthunit.org/carekids/carekidppt/carekids.htm
This reminded me of the time when my husband and I had to explain to our seven-year-old son that it was pronounced ‘penis’ and not ‘peanuts’ – apparently, some adult in daycare (running, not attending) thought that was an appropriate euphemism for his ‘gentleman bits’. It helped him a lot, especially since he knew his older brother was allergic to peanuts. For a seven year old, that’s high comedy. I’m not looking forward to explaining the mechanisms of keeping an intact prepuce clean, but compared to what parents of daughters apparently sometimes have to face, I can’t help but feel we’re getting off lightly.
Just flabbergasted at the whole double standard in the gardisil debate, it’s mindboggling to think that for half of the children, it’s about controlling behavior, and not about the potiental risks and necessity of the actual vaccine* . I know, it’s called living in a patriarchy, but nonetheless still horrifying. On to the whole “down there” issue for girls. I just returned from a two week stint of taking care of two mildly autistic boys while their parents went off to S. America. During the two weeks, one of the boys got hit in the penis with a tennis ball during a tennis lesson. He very matter of factly informed the instructor he got hit in the penis. The instructor came up and told me that S. had said a very bad word, the “P” word. I am sitting there, thinking, what P word is so bad that a teacher can’t even say it for christ’s sake? It took me a while to figure it out. I told the teacher I would address it, knowing full well that with this boy and his challenges, it could very be very innocent, and I needed not to react, and instead listen to S. tell his side of the story. Well, it was the dreaded penis word. Cripes, how do I handle this? I mean, penis is not a bad word, I know the boys’ parents don’t want them to think that, so, I handled it like this. I told both boys that penis is just another word for a body part, like arm, or leg, or ear, and the body part and the word are not bad, or good, but because some people freak out about that word, we really don’t use it in public. I mean S.(the older boy) has no impulse control, so he very well could just sit and shout it out, or use penis just to make other people mad, but still, I am so irked I had to have this conversation with these two boys because some grown probably in his late thirties tennis teacher freaks out over a body part. Of course the younger brother then had to ask if a girl talked about her penis, would people freak out. Same story as above, girls have vaginas and vulvas, those aren’t bad words either, we just as general rule don’t say them in public because other people are weird about those words and freak out. Then of course, the younger one had all sorts of other questions about girls and boys, and I just said, “what great questions, let’s write them down in your travel journal, and you can ask mom when she gets home!” Yeah, I chickened out. *I am on the weigh the risks and the benefits and if the benefits outweigh the risks, get the damn vaccine all ready.
I don’t remember what my folks told me, though given that my mom is a doctor and I got a book about “where babies come from” when I was old enough to read, I’m pretty sure I knew the correct words for my anatomy. I was lucky enough to go to a private school that had a really excellent sex education program. We all made models of male and female sex organs out of things from the local scrap exchange, along with the more formal labeling of parts on a diagram for a quiz. I remember being disappointed with the sex ed I received when I transfered to public school.