fbpx What Your Sex Ed Class Got Wrong About the Vulva and Vagina
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What Your Sex Ed Class Got Wrong About the Vulva and Vagina

The intricacies of your anatomy should be cause for celebration, not confusion.
Britany Robinson
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Britany Robinson

The vulva is a stunningly complex organ that about half of the population owns. It is the outer portion of the female genitals and includes the opening to the vagina (a term often misused when someone is referring to the vulva), clitoris, urethral opening, labia majora (outer lips) and labia minora (inner lips).

The vagina is an internal tube connecting the vulva to the cervix and the uterus. While sex education classes traditionally focus on the vagina as a reproductive organ, it is surrounded by so much more—namely, the vulva—including the potential for pleasure both with and without penetration.

The majority of U.S. schools focus narrowly on risk prevention in sex, so it isn't surprising that many students aren't taught about the other parts of the vulva, such as the clitoris, whose function is one of pleasure, not reproduction.

But today's comprehensive sex educators—those who cover pleasure and consent when teaching people about sex—see the lack of proper education around our anatomy as a source of much shame, embarrassment and pain for people with a vulva. And they're trying to change that.

"We hear from 80-year-olds who might have a medical concern and they don't know how to talk about it," said Andrea Barrica, the San Francisco-based founder and CEO of O.school, a science-based and shame-free sex education platform. "They don't have the words."

Barrica said the first step in sex education should be simply identifying our body parts, and this should happen as early as possible. She explained that while people hear sex ed and often immediately think of intercourse, sex education must start with simply owning and understanding our body parts.

"Two- and 3- and 4-year-olds should be taught that they are the boss of their own body," Barrica said.

Schools might assume kids are receiving basic sex education at home, but Barrica said it's important to remember that sex abuse can happen at home. Teaching young kids about their body should be a fundamental aspect of education in schools, helping those who are experiencing abuse learn how to identify and name it—for starters.

Middle schoolers and high schoolers can continue to benefit from increasingly thorough conversations about sex and anatomy to better understand their changing bodies. Education about body parts can also help prevent the stigma and shame often attached to genitalia, especially for females.

Let's explore the vulva and vagina with the complexity and precision they deserve.

The term 'vagina' is commonly used incorrectly

"The vagina is what we learned about in sex ed, because of its role in reproduction," said Kate Sloan, a sex educator in Toronto and author of "200 Words to Help You Talk About Sexuality & Gender."

But that focus on the vagina has largely simplified female reproductive anatomy. The use of "vagina" when someone means "vulva" is pervasive. This is nothing new.

Consider the fact that the pinnacle reference book for parts of the human, Gray's Anatomy, removed "clitoris" from the 1948 edition.

"And the clitoris is a part of the human body with thousands of important nerve endings," Barrica noted.

Going back much further, there wasn't even an English word for "vagina" until around the 1680s. The Latin word "vagina" originally meant "sheath" or "covering."

Mystery continues to shroud female anatomy. The regular misuse of the word vagina as vulva is a big part of that mystery.

"That's like someone referring to the penis but only mentioning the balls," Sloan said.

When we properly identify the vulva—and not just the vagina—we're including the clitoris and labia, without minimizing women's genitalia to the part that can be penetrated by a penis.

Today, most anatomical illustrations of the female body label the vulva and vagina correctly and include the clitoris. But they're still persistently incomplete, including only the smallest part of the clitoris, protruding in the corner of the labia, and leaving out the hood and the legs that extend inside the vagina.

Jimanekia Eborn, a comprehensive sex expert and trauma survivor in Los Angeles, said this misuse of vagina and vulva is one of the most common misunderstandings or gaps in knowledge she encounters in her practice. The way we use, or misuse, language can have an impact on our experience with sex.

"Most of us were never taught about our own genitals, which starts us off not being able to even address our body parts or ask for certain things," Eborn said. "We don't even know what we're asking for!"

Everyone's vagina and vulva are different

In the popular Netflix show "Sex Education," Aimee (played by Lou Woods) inspects a model of the female reproductive organs and confesses shyly to her therapist, Jean (played by Gillian Anderson): "My vagina doesn't look like this. One of my lip bits is longer than the other."

Jean assures her that all vulvas are different and all vulvas are beautiful. They come in "all different shapes, sizes and colors." Aimee embraces this newfound awareness and appreciation for her uniquely beautiful vulva by making cupcakes iced with the lips and folds of all different vulvas, demonstrating a sweet range of attributes.

"There's a lot of shaming discourse around both vulvas and vaginas in general—that they're smelly, they're gross, they're ugly," Sloan said.

Think about how many slang terms we use in place of vulva or vagina. Is it discomfort? Is it a lack of education? Shame? Probably a mix.

"It's especially common for girls to feel self-conscious about inner labias that are more visible," Sloan said.

This pervasive shame and discomfort is evidenced in the rate of labiaplasty surgery: In 2016, the medical procedure to minimize the inner lips of the vulva was the fastest-growing cosmetic procedure in the world.

Sloan explained that because so few girls are taught about the complexity and variety of vulvas, they might compare their own anatomy to what they see in television or in porn, which offers a limited portrayal of realistic female bodies.

Not all women have a vagina or vulva

As of 2020, only six states, plus the District of Columbia, required LGBTQ-inclusive sex education. It's a gaping hole in sex ed that leaves out many students who don't identify with the gender-specific or heterosexual curriculum.

When it comes to the vulva, it's important for sex educators to acknowledge that not all students who identify as girls have the anatomy associated with females, and not all people with a vulva identify as girls.

That's why comprehensive sex educators are working toward more inclusive sex education that covers all gender identities, anatomy and sexuality for all students, and why Barrica is making this type of sex education available online.

Other forms of education are filling in the gaps where they might continue to widen in public schools, with curricula that embrace all identities and sexualities.

Reva McPollom, the Mount Vernon, New York-based founder and CEO of Lessonbee, which provides adaptive, online health education, said health educators should ask, "How do students feel in respect to their confidence to manage and nurture their health on their own?"

Acknowledging the unique experiences and identities of individuals is critical to the self-efficacy her platforms aim to promote.

"We're talking about all the dimensions of their health. So not just their sexuality or their identity, but you know, their nutrition, their mental health and all those things that are connected to it," McPollom said.

Not all sex involves the vagina

"We're taught to think of penetrative intercourse as the centerpiece of sex when we're talking about sex in a cisgender, heterosexual context," Sloan said. "But for most women, that's not where they get the majority of their pleasure."

Sex education still has an overwhelmingly (if not exclusively) heterosexual focus, so in many people's minds, sex is what happens when a penis enters a vagina.

But for many women, a focus on penetrative sex leaves out the most pleasurable types of sex and parts of the body that experience pleasure. This reproduction, risk-prevention, heterosexual focus does a serious disservice to young people, not just in terms of how they learn to enjoy and experience sex, but for their health, too.

In focusing on penetrative sex, the risk of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and pregnancy is a major topic—but STIs don't just happen when a penis enters a vagina.

"Even if you use condoms, there are things like HPV and herpes, which can happen through just skin-to-skin contact," Barrica said.

The ways in which the vagina and vulva are discussed in sex education can have a lasting impact on how women experience sex, from pleasure to reproduction to consent. There are so many topics that stem from a proper understanding of our bodies. Understanding and appreciating the parts of the body is an important first step that can lead to increasingly important conversations.

"We spend time memorizing terms like the vas deferens and the fallopian tubes," Sloan said. "But we don't learn about the things that we're actually going to be dealing with on a regular basis in our sex lives."