This is an excellent point. Was it Fried Green Tomatoes that had elderly women using mirrors to see their bits for the first time?
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You wanna see a bunch of vulvas? Porn, and that’s not very realistic. Gaging what you should look like using porn as a reference is a terrible idea for both men and women.
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I think so? And yeah, first of all it’s not even something that occurs to us a lot of the time. And then you need some privacy and a hand mirror. And … I think we even feel a little weird about it sometimes. It’s hidden away, to me it seems almost an invasion of my own privacy to look at it. Weird and illogical, but there you go.
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Here, have a journal article.
Immodest Witnessing: The Epistemology of Vaginal Self-Examination in the U.S. Feminist Self -Help Movement
Author(s): Michelle Murphy
Source: Feminist Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 115-147
http://www.womenshealthinwomenshands.org/PDFs/Immodest%20Witnessing[1].pdf
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This is so on point. I was raised in a totally non-religious household and yet somehow I still got the messages that it was “not proper” to be curious about stuff like that. And my mother wonders why I didn’t tell her when I got my period for 6 months. 
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Sex Ed here in America is perfunctory and clinical at best; mine consisted of one lecture by our gym coach with a cross-section drawing of a vagina and a penis, which didn’t exactly give me a realistic idea of what stuff was supposed to look like. But as you say, for guys it’s ‘out there’. I guess I’d assumed that girls might be getting better info than me, but probably not. I certainly didn’t get any help from my parents in that area, either. “Those things are private, if you have questions, that’s what the library is for.”
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I remember getting a diagram in … I think, 8th grade, where we had to label all the parts of the vulva. We also got one for the male reproductive system, and the uterus. But of course, a line drawing with neat labia (for the purposes of labeling) doesn’t really convey the variety.
And, I also remember when my friend who had been out sick asked me about the homework, I got in trouble for showing her the vulva diagram. Because it “was not for joking around with!”
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Mine was pretty similar. Except they brought in “secular” abstinence-only educators. Basically they said everything Focus on the Family says about how, apparently premarital sex makes you worthless and disgusting. But they left out the part about “because god hates you and made your body shameful”.
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WOW. At least my school didn’t make any kind of judgements, they just didn’t give us any helpful information.
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The school didn’t make judgments. They just abdicated responsibility to shame us to a pseudo-accredited religious organization’s subterfuge.
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Overshare warning.
I have been asked by women, “what does it look like”, and, “is it normal”. I am not a doctor, so I’ve demurred on the ‘normal’ question. But I am quite comfortable with questions like What Does It Look Like. It took me decades to understand my own junk, so I don’t expect anyone else to be an expert on their own.
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Seriously? Huh. You must have the sport package, cuz my junk has always seemed to me to be about as complicated as a light switch.
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I’m more like an MG or Jag E type. Pretty on the outside, nightmarish in every other way.
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All I know is that my genetics say I’m a Delorean. Liable to fall apart after 30k miles.
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I do believe BB is the place I was introduced to this vid, oh so long ago before I was even a bbs lurker…
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You’re welcome! It is so lovely to meet a member of the Patriarchy who is so thoughtful and sensitive.
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Obligs:
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