on in public health or medicine, but it’s entirely up to each person
whether or not they want to look.”
Merritt didn’t do it.
Instead, she had her partner, Carol, look—which in some ways is braver than looking herself—and she looked at her partner’s. And they talked about what they saw and about how they had never before taken the time to deliberately look at and talk about their sexual bodies. And Merritt learned something remarkable, which she told me about the following week: “Carol told me she’d looked at her vulva! She was part of a feminist consciousness-raising group in the ’80s, and they all got together in a circle with their hand mirrors.”
“Wow!” I said, and meant it.
She held her hands out, palms up, weighing her feelings. “I don’t know why this kind of thing is so much harder for me than it is for her.
When it comes to sex, I always feel like I’m teetering at the edge of a cliff with my arms windmilling around me.”
The ambivalence Merritt experienced is absolutely normal for anyone whose family of origin taught them that sex should fit into a certain prescribed place in life and nowhere else. But it made sense for Merritt for other reasons, too, having to do with the way her brain is wired. I’ll talk about that in chapter 2. lips, both great and small Female inner labia (labia minora or small lips) may not be very “inner” at all, but extend out beyond the big lips—or they may tuck themselves away, hidden inside the vulva until you go looking for them. And the inner labia may be all one homogeneous color, or they may show a gradient of color, darkening toward the tips. All of that is normal and healthy and beautiful. Long, short, pink, beige, brown—all normal.
The male homologue of the inner labia is the inner foreskin. If a penis has been circumcised—that is, had its foreskin surgically removed—there is very often a color change midway down the shaft. That’s because the skin at the top of the shaft is actually the inner foreskin. (Because the color change is sometimes evident only after puberty, guys have asked me if something they did made the color change, but nope, that’s just how some penises look, bless them.)
The outer labia, too, vary from person to person. Some are densely hairy, with the hair extending out onto the thigh and around the anus, while others have very little hair. Some lips are quite puffy while others are relatively flush with the body. Some are the same color as the surrounding skin, and some are darker or lighter than the surrounding skin. All normal, all beautiful.
As with the clitoris, the cultural view of labia doesn’t match the biological reality. Vulvas in soft-core porn are digitally edited to conform to a specific standard of “tucked-in” labia and homogeneous coloring, to be 2 “less detailed.”This means that cultural representations of vulvas are limited to a pretty narrow range. In reality, there is a great deal of variety among genitals—and there is no medical condition associated with almost any of the variability. But such limited representations of women’s bodies may actually be changing women’s perceptions of what a “normal” vulva 3looks like.
One example of a vulva.