Why Love Your Vagina?

Loving your vagina is a fundamental part of being a woman. If you don't love such a central, important part of your body you are bound to lack confidence and be insecure.

Eve Ensler explained that one of the main reasons why women don't appreciate their vagina, and therefore themselves is because of what they have been taught by society. From a very early age girls are gradually being told that they are subordinate to men. One of the first steps to make someone comply is by making them feel insufficient or uncomfortable about their own body by making the  'vagina' taboo. Ensler aptly explores this in her chapter titled "I was twelve. My mother slapped me" (35, TVM).

This chapter is full of examples of mothers refusing to properly educate or explain the fantastic importance of vaginas and periods to their daughters. It's as though the female gender self impose this censorship and suffrage upon themselves. One such example of mother censorship in this chapter is when a young girl asked her mother what a period was and her mother replied by saying "It's punctuation.. You put it at the end of a sentence" (35, TVM).

Such censorship is shocking. For mothers not to educate their daughters about periods, instead letting them learn the hard way, just because vaginas are taboo is wrong.

But of even greater concern is genital mutilation, or female circumcision which still occurs in several countries and affects over 80 to 100 million women. This is several steps above making vaginas taboo, this is actively trying to destroy them. "About 2 million youngsters a year can expect the knife-or the razor or glass shard - to cut their clitoris or remove it all together, (and) to have part or all of the labia... sewn together with catgut or thorns"(67, TVM). This is clearly a female rights issue since this simply doesn't happen to men. It's disgusting, it's vile and it's illogical. After all it would stop women from having sex and having male offspring.