vol. 3 issue 41
Greetings,
I have one. Your mother definitely has one. Yup, Granny, too. Your sister, your daughter, your favorite auntie. Your wife, as you are, I hope, keenly aware, also has one. Your boss – if she’s a she, she’s got one. You might have one, too.
What do we have? We have a vagina. Vagina. Altogether now. Vagina.
Does this vagina blitz make you squirm?
We also have a head, a back, a stomach, a neck, and a face. No one has any trouble naming these parts of our bodies. Not a half a nanosecond pause drops before we will name these parts of ourselves, or each other.
So, what’s the big deal about claiming by name the place where life and pleasure are generated?
A recent New York Times article offers a keen insight.
Then one day [University of Miami medical student, Allison Draper] looked up the pudendal nerve, which provides sensation to the vagina and vulva, or outer female genitalia. The term derived from the Latin verb pudere: to be ashamed. The shame nerve, Ms. Draper noted: “I was like, What? Excuse me?”It grew worse. When her teacher handed her a copy of the “Terminologia Anatomica,” the international dictionary of anatomical terms, she learned that the Latin term for the vulva — including the inner and outer labia, the clitoris and the pubic mound — was pudendum. Translation: the part to be ashamed of. There was no equivalent word for male genitals.
So, hidden in our Latin, but practiced everywhere in the light of day, is a medicine that is rooted in the view that bodies with vaginas are shameful.
Bodies with penises? Whip that sucker out and sidle on over to a Texas county courthouse to collect your cash, you hero!
Maybe the cowboys are just jealous. Or maybe they’re angry. Either way, they don’t have the keys to get in where they want to be, next to all that pleasure.
So, they steal the keys.
The keys are the words. The penis-bodied ones steal the words from the vagina-bodied ones. They say “You can’t use these words anymore! These are our words, our secret words! We are going to codify and make laws around the words we’ve stolen from you!”
Do you think that a language which characterizes and codifies women’s bodies as shameful has any bearing on how they are treated?
Or, perhaps serves as a signal as to how they will be treated?
Incest. Rape. Molestation. They don’t just have vaginas in common. They also share secrecy. Silence. Darkness. Shame. A man dumps his shame into a woman. She holds it in silence. He expects that she will keep silent, because vagina shame is just that powerful a lock, and it is what our language demands, just ask any anatomist. Just ask any member of the US Women’s Olympic Gymnastics Team.
Hmm. You know, to successfully heal sexual trauma, the victim has to be able to name what has been done to her until she can do so without feeling ashamed. It’s so often that the body itself will heal, but the shame lingers, even kills.
And shame thrives in silence. In secrecy.
Today, women are marching here in Washington and all across the country to protest the recent Taliban, I mean Texan ban, on pretty much the last scrap of control over a woman’s body that state legally recognizes.
So, in their honor, let’s say it: Vagina. Once more. Say it with meaning. Say it often.
The more often we vagina-bodied ones say the words that have been stolen from us in order to imprison us, the less power the penises who want to shame and disempower us, have to do so.
Say it. Say vagina, as often as possible, in polite company. Don’t see it as an act of pudere, being ashamed. See it as your civic duty, reclaiming your keys to freedom.
Peace,
Whitney
Vagina. Say it with me: Vagina.
So glad I’m Sorry is getting its due! ❤️
Preach! (and thx for teaching me something I did not know)