Why must shame be associated with my private parts?
A few days ago a friend sent me an article from The Guardian which talked about how pupils across France will now be able to use the first full-size anatomical model of a clitoris in their sex education classes.
The image of the 3D printed clitoris would debunk myths that have repressed female sexuality for centuries.
For one, it would negate the dictionary/textbook education that wrongly asserts that the clitoris is the size of “a fingertip”, a “pea” or that it is small.
Because we can now see that the clitoris includes two shafts (crura) about 10cm long. Not only can we visualise that the clitoris is more than what the eye perceives; with the visual model we can also get a mental image of how it encircles the vagina, making penetrative sex potentially orgasmic. That means a demystified discussion about the female orgasm is possible at long last.
The article went on to highlight how uninformed the representation of women’s bodies is usually; whether in sex education, pop culture or pornography.
Another popular notion that this will eventually prove false is that the vagina, rather than the clitoris, is the female equivalent of the penis. "Yuck, never thought my G-spot looks so gross, what do you think? Will any man be turned on seeing this?" read her next message.
As I stared at the graphic image transfixed for a while, I think of two recent conversations with my girlfriends, one of whom is a mother of two, the other, my age and still single. The former complaining about how her husband wants her to shave her sex, as opposed to her not wanting the same, since she feels naked minus her pubic hair.
"He doesn’t get turned on if I don’t, and keeps showing me porn and naked pictures of foreigners, to prove his point and even says he won’t have sex if I don’t listen to him. Once, I shaved in front of him while he shagged, it was like our own private kinky ritual. I faked my orgasm, just to be done with the damn thing!" she explained.
The latter, in answer to my question on self-pleasure, said: "Yikes, of course I don’t masturbate. It’s so dirty and boring and makes me feel either like a loser or a bloody, cheap whore. When the truth is that I am still a virgin at 39. In fact, I have started greying there... I am so over the hill. Which man will want to touch me...now!"
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| Was our sexual emancipation the start of a long winding and complex battle of the sexes? |
Will the female genitalia ever really be truly free - I am forced to ask myself? Must pleasure always rest with another and why is touching ourselves always thought of as something we choose to do out of sheer desperation or the lack of a lover?
Why isn’t masturbation in women ever seen as normative and healthy - a journey of self discovery that all of us have been on, at some point, those who shy away, either jaded by social conditioning or embarrassed by the sensation of their touch, who are scared of being discovered or branded as horny. Who chooses if I want to shave, get a bikini wax, get myself pierced, or plain, do nothing?
If I want, or don’t want, to have sex a certain way? Why is dirtiness, stink, shame always associated with my privates? The way sanitary napkins always highlight a woman being shunned and asked to sit out of a race or a fashion show - how we are made conscious of something natural - of how repressed is our own representation of female sexuality?
I mean how many Indian women can even pronounce the word clitoris without shuddering, once. Of how we all brag about and read so much on the G-spot, when the truth is most of us don’t know where really it’s located and what its function is.
Also, will seeing our clitoris as a clear 3D picture help men in treating us as more than stereotypical sexual props – will we be more than our womb – pleasure and procreation seen separately?
I ask my friend who sent me the piece why she was so turned off by the picture of a female clitoris - what had she expected to begin with? She didn’t answer and sent me a smiley instead. When I ask again, she texts: "I don’t know, just that it looked more like a penis, maybe. I hated the sight…"
Was our sexual emancipation the start of a long winding and complex battle of the sexes? Or maybe, we as women in India, reared in cloistered and sexually stifling environments, have never relished the sight and touch of our own bodies. Our validation - an external defence mechanism. A safe hiding place, maybe…