One of the bad things about moving is having to find a new doctor. I liked our doctor, she was female, she was relatively young, she was warm, she was left of centre, she was relaxed, she was up to date, she liked and understood my daughter, and she had been seeing her since she was born. Everything I wanted. But a sudden persistent case of nappy rash accelerated the inevitable and I took my daughter to a nearby doctor who my mother recommended. The new doctor is very gentle with children and enthusiastic about another generation of my mother’s family joining his patient list but our consultation soon turned into a scene reminiscent of The Vagina Monologues.
I explained to my two-year daughter what was going to happen –
You know how the outside of your vagina feels sore, well the doctor is going to take a look and see what we can do to make you feel better, ok?
To which he said something like –
I’ll have a look down there.
More discussion around the specifics of the rash led to more specialised medical terms like “that area”, “it” and “this region”, but no matter how many times I said vagina (see it’s OK, you’re a doctor and you can especially say ‘vagina’ and see, I’m a mother and I’m OK with my daughter hearing ‘vagina’, which is after all a part of her body) he wouldn’t utter the word himself. I’m quite sure that if I’d presented my child with a sore ear he would have comfortably discussed her ‘ear’ using the anatomically correct term.
This type of thing really boggles my mind. I’m trying to teach my daughter to be confident and knowledgeable about herself and her own body and the last people I expect to undermine this is doctors. Imagine a generation of girls that aren’t ashamed of their bodies. For crissakes its time, let’s de-shame the vagina.
This experience reminds me of the time I saw a doctor in my university days who while giving me a talk about sexually transmitted diseases warned me that you can contract oral herpes on your genitals.. by maybe a boy with cold sores kissing you.. and then you touch your lips with your fingers and get a bit of his saliva on them… and then maybe you happen to wipe yourself (you know, ‘down there’, ‘that area’, ‘it’) presumably during some innocuous activity like going to the toilet.. and your fingers accidentally touch yourself and you thereby contract oral herpes ‘down there’ …. I think the term you’re looking for dear doctor for all this is oral sex.
I don’t know how many times I said vagina in this post but you know it didn’t hurt a bit. I expect my google search stats to go through the roof.
Oh goodness… the big bad vagina… how terrifying!
I didn’t get a lot of hits on my site for using the word ‘vagina’ because of course everyone is searching for ‘pussy’ and ‘cunt’ etc. So vagina, vagina, vagina.
[…] for female genitals. The more I read about it the less I can justify ‘vagina’. That family doctor is going to seriously die. Vulva, here we […]