“Please get out of my room,” I said in a strangled voice as I threw a blanket over my naked vagina and slammed down my laptop screen. “Please.”
My mum’s face was frozen in shock. “Are you sending pictures of yourself to men, Elena? That is disgusting.”
“Oh my God, no! Mum, how can you even ask that? It’s for a uni project . . . about . . . umm, genitalia in literature.”
She crinkled her brow but looked calmer. “It’s . . . homework?”
“Yes.” I nodded enthusiastically. “It’s homework.”
The magic word soothed her and she walked out of my room shaking her head and muttering about schools being too modern for their own good. I collapsed onto my pillow and vowed to buy a lock for my bedroom door.
The Vagina Monologue
Dear Reader,
We have a confession for you: Both of us have had moments of not accepting our nether sisters because, quite frankly, vaginas are fucking weird. However, after years of struggling on the road to vaginal acceptance, we have finally managed to embrace our own smelly and lopsided vaginas.
Here are the vaginal hurdles we have jumped over:
1. The smell. Vaginas do not smell like roses and lavender—even when we used to spritz them with perfume before a night out. They may look like flowers but they do not smell like flowers. They smell like the unique combination of sex, sweat and salmon. And that’s when we don’t have our periods.
2. Discharge. The first time we found this in our underpants we freaked out. EM thought she had wet herself. It is not the most attractive part of female biology, but hey, at least if it gets really smelly or yellow you know you have an infection. Thanks, nature.
3. Wetness. Not to be confused with discharge, lady juice is the body’s natural lubricant. EM used to be embarrassed that her vagina would get too wet the second a boy looked into her eyes. Until she realized no boy is going to complain about your vag being too moist, even if it is dripping onto the carpet.
The same goes for dryness. Every vagina is different. And, hello, what do you think lube was invented for?
4. Shapes. Each inner lotus is a unique composition waiting to be explored. EM used to be self-conscious about her uneven and large flaps—until she realized it was the way Mother Nature intended them to be. And who ever said “neat” was more attractive than lopsided anyway? Much like EK’s acceptance of her oversized nose, EM realized large can be attractive. Small is not perfect. We just need to look at the vagina’s male counterpart to prove that point.
I had started touching myself at the age of seven. Obviously, I didn’t know what masturbation was and had no idea about the end goal of orgasm, but I knew that rubbing my vagina through my pajamas felt nice. It stopped feeling nice the second my mum caught me with my hands down my pants and called me “dirty.”
The word had stayed with me for the next seven years and every time I started to reach down at night, her look of disgust came back to haunt me and I stopped—until I was fourteen and had to build a model volcano with Leah in a geography lesson.
No one really liked Leah because she was loud and pushy and didn’t roll up her skirt or shave her legs. But I was secretly in awe of her for not caring that her skirt reached her knees and her legs looked like furry sticks. When she casually asked me, during that geography lesson, if I’d ever masturbated, I dropped the clay and stared at her mutely. She carried on, unperturbed, and starting telling me all about her first experience and what she had learned from an old book in the library.
I absorbed Leah’s advice as though it was old news. I pretended I already knew that women could have orgasms, and when she asked if I was going to try it for myself, I looked at her as though she was disgusting for even suggesting it. I never spoke to Leah or anyone else about masturbation ever again, but I did run straight home to try it out. It ended up being the best geography homework I’d ever had.
That night I went home, prepared for a little experimentation of my own. I was freshly bathed and I had pink candles lit in my room. I was ready. This was something I had to do privately, just for me. I couldn’t even talk to Lara about this because then she’d know I had first touched myself at seven. She’d think I was a sexual deviant or a freak like that kid from The Exorcist. No, this was my private journey of self-discovery.
I put on my Now 67 CD so that any sounds I might or might not make would be muffled. I took all my clothes off and slid my moisturized body under the covers. I lay on my back and put my fingers on my clitoris just like Leah had advised. I rubbed it gently. It felt nice and I closed my eyes. I started by following Leah’s advice, but after a while it felt so good that I stopped concentrating and just let it happen.