IN THE SPOTLIGHT

Then there were my secondary school sex ed classes. At that time, they were no-nonsense sessions that dealt with the biological facts in a perfunctory and cautionary fashion; we were shown diagrams of how a sperm penetrates an egg and how a foetus develops, and photos of diseased sexual organs – oh, how my classmates and I had squirmed in our seats.

The rich complexities tied to our budding sexuality and changing bodies were omitted: There was zero mention of falling in love (or lust), no mention of the clitoris as a hot-button issue, and if the teacher had said anything about the G-spot, we’d have thought she was referring to the bottled orange soda. It was all quite wham-bam-thank-youma’am. I think the lesson of the day was don’t be naughty, or your nether regions will erupt in pus-lled boils or fall off. When I was in my 20s, I caught a local theatre production of award-winning American playwright Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, which was written in the ’90s.

Eve had been concerned about what women thought about vaginas, and worried that they didn’t think about them at all. So she interviewed 200 women, asking for their thoughts on the female genitals, which were then collated in The Vagina Monologues. “At rst... they were a little shy. But once they got going, you couldn’t stop them,” she was quoted as saying.

I remember feeling self-conscious initially, but as the play progressed, I, along with the rest of the audience, lapped up the salty language, the sharp insights and the raw, honest emotions behind the words of women who were angry, lonely, afraid, ashamed, triumphant, playful, curious and more.

More recently, I came across a 2014 Youtube video made by user Davey Wavey that had attracted four million views. Featuring ve women who see their vaginas for the rst time, it had me smiling, seething and even tearing at times.

I smiled when one of the women explained that her stomach was covering her vagina and she didn’t