I Am So Over Vagina Shame
Overcoming a deeply ingrained mistrust of my lady bits
Nowadays, my vagina and I have a good relationship. She and my uterus have seen me through two pregnancies resulting in three children. I know what she likes and she has always been responsive when it’s time to get down and dirty. I take good care of her and she cooperates by keeping the yeast infections to a minimum.
But this healthy relationship with my vagina is a nominally new development. Not so long ago, we weren’t on as great of terms. I’ll be fair and say this was definitely me, not her. She didn’t misbehave or function poorly. No, the blame for our dysfunction lay with me. I was ashamed of her.
This isn’t to say I was ashamed of or unsure of my identity, sex, or gender. I’ve always been clear on these fronts. No, my shame came not because I had her but because I’d grown up thinking she was dirty and her natural responses made me slutty. My vagina getting moist when aroused, her insistence on bleeding every month, her gross flaps of skin, and easily stimulated nerve endings was supposed to be a source of shame.
No one ever actually told me in so many words to be ashamed of her. But I was nonetheless. I grew up in conservative Okahoma. Our sex ed was written by Southern Baptists. It wasn’t just abstinence-only education. It…
