‘Realising that every vulva is unique helped me celebrate my individuality’
Thoughts used to spiral around in my head whenever I was with a sexual partner. Why weren’t they going down on me for long enough? Did I smell funny? Was there too much hair? I could never enjoy myself properly because I was never in the moment. At the heart of my anxiety around sex was a conviction that my vulva wasn’t ‘acceptable’. I felt it should include neat outer labia, with no pubic hair, that it should smell ‘good’, and then, on top of that, as a Black woman, that my vulva shouldn’t be ‘too dark’. They were conclusions inflicted on me by society; cemented by the people I dated.
My insecurities about my vulva began when I started performing oral sex on men – as when it was my turn to receive, it would often last less than a minute. I was the common denominator, so I assumed I was the problem. Once, at a casual partner’s house, we stumbled into our regular routine: half-naked kissing, him on top, my legs wrapped around him. We stopped kissing and he then knelt above me, ready to penetrate, but I needed more foreplay, so I asked for oral sex. He paused and stared at my vulva for what felt like forever. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘Nothing,’ he responded – before going down on me for precisely one minute. I couldn’t enjoy it at all; his hesitancy seemed to confirm my worries. But instead of changing the men I dated, I stopped men from going down on me. The confidence was knocked out of my sex life – and out of me.
Without oral sex, foreplay was heavily centred on my partner, and penetration was painful. After one such incident, I thought to myself: what’s the point in having sex if I’m not enjoying myself? It was like a self-respect switch was flicked. I stopped seeing men who told me they didn’t do oral sex at all, or if I didn’t experience enthusiasm, passion or initiation from them while they were performing it. My partners’ positive attitudes began to improve my own, and I started to allow myself to feel good about my body more generally – in a sexual context, yes, but also when I was out with friends on a Friday or in the office on a Monday. Realising that every vulva is unique, and there definitely isn’t a ‘right’ way for one to look, helped me celebrate my own individuality as a woman, and a human.