Apparently the word 'vagina' is incredibly offensive and should be kept off TV - even in an ad for sanitary towels...

[edam]

Ridiculous fuss but weirdly Facebook wouldn't let me link to the story - are they anti-vagina too?

I think there is a trend for vaginal 'freshness' products creeping in, particularly in younger women.

I see a fair few young women who admit to using them, and quite a few who request vaginal swabs for "discharge" when all they've got is normal healthy vaginal secretions.

I think we've lost sight of the fact that it's OK for a vagina to smell like a vagina and some discharge/secretions is NORMAL.

What you all seem to be forgetting is that if it wasn't for our foul, stinking la-la's , man would still be in the Garden of Eden.

The poor menz.

Forcing them to acknowlege that we actually have a VAGINA and it's perfectly acceptable to use the word VAGINA must be terrible for them.

OMG they are telling children what and where the clitoris is?

That's a bit unnecessary and newfangled isn't it?

We were also told where the clitoris was, 20 odd years ago.

Relatively normal isn't it?

You lucky devil!

We weren't told anything apart from the bare minimum of mechanics. Then shown a video of a woman giving birth. And that was that!

We were only taught in P6 though, so was about 10. I just didn't really "get" it, especially since my parents never mentioned sex (when I was about 16, my mum asked if there was anything I wanted to know about periods...I mean, a little late really!) so I had no other information.

We didn't get any sex ed in secondary school, so everything I know I picked up from Sugar and Just 17.

Thank God I know to swoosh out my fanny with coke after the deed, no babies here!

We had a video of a woman giving birth (maybe to shock us all into never having sex??) and a video of a naked family playing volleyball on the beach (again, maybe to shock us all into never having sex??).

I think it's really important that they teach about foreplay and secretions and sex is supposed to be fun and all the rest of it.

Rather than "male gets erection and sticks it up female and look there's a baby and you don't want that DO YOU".

i imagine things have moved on a bit, i hope so anyway!

I do know that female orgasm was never mentioned or even alluded to.

I remember an interview between a boy and a girl, maybe in their late teens, and the boy said "yeah for boys it is just physical" and the girl said "for me, it is about emotions".

That really sticks in my mind. Perhaps it was my early feminist thinking and it stuck in my craw.

Such a crock of shite.

I came across this earlier

The whole "being ridiculously coy about our vaginas" thing pisses me off.

I was babysitting over the weekend. At one point, my DS pointed out his cousin has a penis too. Then he asked what little girls have? "Girls have a vagina". Simple as.

Except it was greeted with 7 year old niece telling me "no, it's a mini. Vagina's a naughty word". I mean sure, use slang if you prefer. Just don't tell your kids that genitals' names are "dirty words".

Gosh, I was never taught about the clitoris or female orgasms at school. Our sex education was entirely reproduction-based. Pretty much everything I knew about recreational sex came from a 'women's health' book my mother owned, and her collection of literary novels (thank you, AS Byatt).

mildew
i'm with you here, for a good reason
telling a DD about her vagina may seem needlessly biological at such a tender age but if she said for example "uncle jack touched my primrose/fandango/flower " ETC there is some scope for dismissing the talk as childish mantras, especialy when the truth might be awkward.
" uncle jack touched my vagina"
leaves little room for misinterpretation.

also, children and not attall embarrased by any words.

I remember a fashion for vaginal sprays some years ago. The marketing people kept trying to convince us that we smelled bad and should use these horrible things. Luckily they didn't really catch on. Hope they don't return.

But when people teach their children to say vagina, do they mean vulva, or what?

No sex Ed at all for me.

At the moment vagina is the term I use for general area- as opposed to bum. She insists she has a willy though.

It's a shame there isn't a "friendly" word like willy, or a word that encompasses the whole genital area.

This topic comes up on MN all the time it's ridiculous that women don't even have a cheerful casual name to refer to their genitals.

It is ridiculous SQ. There's just no equivalent to "willy". The closest is "fanny" but it's a bit slangy and coarse

Maybe we need a MN campaign for a new, non-cutesy, non-medical word to describe our vulvas.

Are they too young to know it? I don't think that they are. They're old enough to know which parts they have - maybe not to be told the mechanics of sex, what it means, why we do it and stuff, but at 6 or 7, they are old enough to know the biology.

Why was the teacher dreading it? I think the kids might giggle a little and get on with it, but at the end of the day, a vulva's a vulva and as a teacher, part of your job is teaching that sort of stuff.

There's always a finite amount of time that you can have for asking questions in class though. I generally tell kids that I can answer 3 or whatever questions and then we have to move on.

The clitoris though, yeah, that's a tough one to explain. It's for sexual pleasure. Well, that is its only function, there's no way round it really. But you can't really explain that in a meaningful way at that age.

I don't see a need for 6 year olds to be quite so scientific - about any part of the body tbh.

Maybe there's not much of a need to explain the clitoris at that age.

Vulva, penis...not sure what the problem is with explaining that. They're learning about internal organs at that age, most of them will have started pondering and asking questions about sex, so not sure what the issue is.