Today my 9 year old has been taught that as she grows older, hair will grow on her vagina!

[Ziggyzoom]

I raised this in year 1 when they sent a work sheet home. I can't decide whether to keep ploughing on or satisfy myself with the knowledge that at least my daughters know the correct names for their anatomy.

[SinclairSpectrum]

The judicial system is a minefield for victims of crime, none more so than survivors of rape. The defence vampires barristers will use any means possible to create credible doubt.
When women are so badly educated about their own bodies that they are unsure of how many openings there are, let alone what to call them, their evidence can sound uncertain.
Women should be given the tools so they can stand tall in the evidence box and state clearly what assault was perpetrated on them.

[PuffinsAreFictitious]

Well said Sinclair.

We need to have really good quality sex and relationships education in schools, with anatomical parts being given proper names right from very early on. Luckily, for most children, the information gained will just be of interest, but for enough it will be extremely important.

The same goes for adults. If there is this much confusion over what the vagina and vulva are then....

[Yops]

I meant epithelium, Puffins. It is referenced here - beware, there's a picture of a co...., sorry, human penis as soon as you open this link, and more within;

Wiki link - here be willies!

It makes up the shaft and foreskin, apparently, so is touchable.

The frenulum, aka the banjo- or budgie-string, is the spot underneath the glans with the concentration of nerves is highest. It's the equivalent of the clitoris in terms of sensitivity. And it really doesn't attract half the attention it deserves in the popular press.

Wow, this is a conversation I never expected to have on FwR.

[Madamecastafiore]

Fuck me I always thought it grew on your Noonie.

Learn something on here everyday!

[TeiTetua]

I wonder how many terms there are for parts of the genitals, of female and male varieties, which are not Latin words.

Incidentally, I recall reading a while ago that "vagina" in Latin as it would be understood in ancient Rome, meant "sheath", and it only became an anatomical term in the 18th century. To a Roman, a vagina was "cunnus" (root of certain obvious words in English). I don't know how specific that word was in Latin, though.

[scallopsrgreat]

Frenulum can also refer to the piece of skin that restricts your tongue movement (or any other piece of skin that restricts another organ's movement e.g. your lower and upper lips have frenulum). Just putting it out there.

And epithelium has a much more general use as one of the four basic types of tissue in the body.

There we go.

What this all has to do with teaching girls and women the correct terminology for their body parts I don't know. But Yops got to show us a picture of a penis.

If you want to argue that frenulum and epithelium should be in common use for boys and men then feel free. If not, then that still doesn't mean we shouldn't be teaching women and girls the correct terminology for their genitals.

[WhirlpoolGalaxyM51]

Did I really just read a post from a bloke telling us that vagina and clitoris are fairly arcane, unusual and barely used words that girls and women don't need to know?

[Heckler]

Telling a doctor you have a problem with your epithelium would not narrow down where the problem was see here

Saying you have a boil on your vulva would be pretty specific though.

[Yops]

My initial post at 12:46 was that frenulum and epithelium were specialised terms. That was it. Then it got picked on because....well, whatever. Then someone had a go at me because I did't think vulva was a commonly-used term. Funnily enough, right after that post, Beryl Streep made the same point about vulva, but that wasn't picked up on because...well, whatever.

And then, because Puffins asked at 14:49 if I meant a different word, I published the source with not one but two warnings that pictures were present, but still someone has to make a snarky comment - because, well.....whatever.

So if you were referring to me with the 'arcane' comment, Whirlpool - no, you didn't read that.

[TheoriginalLEM]

and this is a feminist issue ?

pedants corner is over there >>>

[scallopsrgreat]

It got picked up on because I couldn't see what point you were trying to make other than we shouldn't be teaching women and girls vulva and vagina because frenulum and epithelium weren't in common use.

Not the same point that Beryl made.

[Yops]

Okay. My point was that a lack of education on the finer detail of both male and female genitalia was apparent. If the education system is lacking, it seems to fail both equally. And so I did not think that this was because women were being treated as less important - this comment is from the first page;

Without wanting to be accused of over-thinking it, I do think it is the legacy of a patriarchal society where women were not expected to feel in control of their own bodies.

And to me, that is bollocks, if both genders are teated equally. And, of course by bollocks I mean testes.

[WhirlpoolGalaxyM51]

Well, boys have words, willy and balls, and I imagine most know penis and testicles as well, and everyone knows what all those words mean. Willy especially is a "friendly" word that people aren't going to get upset about a child using. Boys never use the word willy to mean any bit of them that isn't a willy, same with balls.

Girls don't have this. They have flowers, and noonoos, and front bottoms, and vaginas (to mean the whole thing) and fairies, and all sorts of things. Many of these words would not be understood by someone not from that family / area of the country if the context was not very clear. Many of these words have other meanings too. To most people (around here) a vagina is a vagina and isn't used to mean "the whole thing" and so a situation like the OPs would be eyebrow raising as to all those people what that teacher said is nonsensical.

And all of this is because actually, most of the time, women's genitals and reproductive functions are (because history) rather unmentionable, because of associations with being unclean, unladylike, and so on.

I think it's a reasonable conversation to have.

And incidentally it was this post of yours I was writing about "As much as the terms I used. What differentiates vagina or clitoris from frenulum or epithelium?". And as I said, I don't think those terms are on a par at all, and females (and males for that matter!) damn well should know what a vagina and a clitoris are. Same as they should know what a penis and testicles are.

[SirChenjin]

That's because we have more bits...we're generally more complex If you were to google names for penises then you'll see there are a fair few to choose from. My sons have enjoyed using many of them over the years!

[MrsTittleMouse]

But the picture that Yops linked to had words like "shaft" and "foreskin". Perhaps I'm very well educated in these matters but I would have thought that those were very well known terms to describe the different parts of male genitalia. So men do have words to describe themselves, and don't have to use epithelium. I bet all men know scrotum too.

I was just thinking it would be interesting to do a study on this, but of course someone has already had the idea here:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23518361

[Yops]

I never told anyone that it should not be discussed, or it wasn't important that people have knowledge. Let's get that clear. I really only wanted to say that hiding knowledge from girls in school as part of a patriarchal plot was a little...melodramatic!

Rodger, nob, cock, dobber, winkie, blue-veined flute, pink oboe....there really are more names than just a willy. And balls are used to refer to the scrotum, which is wrong, and another common misnomer. When I was a kid there was hilarity in the north-west of the UK because some sweet manufacturer brought out a 'nudger' chocolate bar , and a nudger round here is a willy. And 'Wee Willie Winkie' used to bring the house down in pre-school....My point being that these things are usually regional. Willy in Scotland is a common boy's name.

There were lots of equivalent names for a girl's genitals too, and still are. It still seems to me like some people think there is a nefarious reason why girls are kept in the dark educationally, because a teacher has got something wrong. Someone made a reference right at the beginning to the vulva police. I thought they were joking.

[Hovis2001]

The reason doesn't have to be nefarious - it can just be a case of people quite well-meaningly think it doesn't matter, but that attitude comes out of, as Whirlpool mentions, a sense that women's sexual anatomy is unmentionable and shameful. It's that underlying issue that matters, and teaching correct (basic!) terminology is be way, however small, of changing that.

[Hovis2001]

*thinking that it (the correct naming of the vulva vs vagina) doesn't matter

[SirChenjin]

Where is that 'sense' that it's shameful? Where - in practical everyday, rather than in academic (and perhaps religious) terms - is that sense, to the extent that the words for female genitalia, as opposed to those for male genitalia, are used to such a way as to infer shame? 'Cos I just don't see it - apart from on these types of threads.

[WhirlpoolGalaxyM51]

In the everyday sense that boys have words that are commonly known and used and everyone understands them, and girls don't.

The fact that little girls are taught to say "fairy" or "flower" is a bit weird isn't it? Why would anyone do that? I mean, I know they do it because they think it's the right thing to do, and as a parent everyone does their best and so forth so I'm not having a go at people who do that at all. But more, in society, why do we teach girls names for their parts which are so euphamistic that there is a good chance that without hefty context many other people would literally not know what they were talking about.

I mean if people think it's fine then that's OK. But let's not pretend that there is an equivalent of willy (universally used and known, "friendly") for girls because there isn't and why that might be, well, clearly different people have different ideas. You never get a thread on MN with an OP saying "what should I call my son's penis" and all the responses being completely different and with arguments breaking out about which of the man many suggestions are OK and which are not.

[WhirlpoolGalaxyM51]

So, I mean, if people think it's OK that girls get foof and twinkle and nonny and all the rest of it which will not be understood by some/many people if they need to talk about something (unless there is obvious context) then that's fine.

And if people think that it's OK for little girls to be taught that the part of the body that hair grows on at puberty is their vagina, then that's fine too.

But I don't understand why anyone would seek to say that people who think it's not fine, shouldn't talk about it, and are being silly and over-reacting or whatever the gist here is.

[YonicScrewdriver]

Yops, what word do you think is the female equivalent to willy that is (a) unambiguous and (b) could be used by a 6 year old girl about herself without anyone raising an eyebrow?

[AskBasil]

Oh Whirlpool, you seem to think women can just be allowed to have conversations without testicles of objectivity-owners monitoring and advising them of the validity - or otherwise - of those conversations.

Silly!

[TeiTetua]

People are out there doing lots of stuff that harms or insults women, and feminists are the the ones who say it's anything but a fine situation! Having non-traumatic comprehensible words to describe women's genitals seems like a worthy feminist goal. It would be normalizing the female body, in a way that we accept the existence of the male body (the way some men use it might be something else again).

[Branleuse]

if a child has been abused and talked to me, and used the word twinkle, or mimsy or fanny or foofoo, im pretty sure I could work out what they were going on about, even if they didnt know the exact anatomical term, and that would be the least of their bloody troubles.


Seriously, it isnt hard to work out colloquial terms really