DOUBLE STANDARDS

“have eyes on the bottom of my stomach”. I was furious when one shared that the rst guy who went down on her told her that her vagina was “hideous and disgusting, and he never wanted to see it ever again”. I felt the sting of tears when another said, ever so softly, that she had been raped, so she “just pushed it out of my mind”.

And when these women, standing in an open-top tent that shielded the lower body, inspected their undercarriage for the rst time via a handheld mirror, I was touched by their reactions – “Awww (giggle)”; “I just saw [a] normal vagina ... I don’t know what I was freaking out about!”; “She looks really happy, I’m pleased.”.

It was all very heart-warming and drove home the point that the vagina is part of the body and it’s part of our identity as a female. We don’t have to be afraid or ashamed of it. Feminist author Naomi Wolf noted in her 2012 book Vagina: A New Biography that “... the way in which any given culture treats the vagina – whether with respect or disrespect, caringly or disparagingly – is a metaphor for how women in general in that time and place are treated.”

The vagina – as are women – in this day and age is still subject to strange double standards. Sociologist Zuleyka Zevallos, author of website The Other Sociologist (http:// othersociologist.com), couldn’t have put it better when she wrote that the vagina is both a source of titillation and derision: “[It’s] sexy when [it’s] portrayed in pornos; [it’s] positioned as ugly when [we] menstruate; and [it’s] either scary or awe-inspiring during childbirth.”

To illustrate, Zuleyka brought up a scene in the comedy Superbad, where “Seth (played by Jonah Hill) notes that vaginas are ugly when they’re