It’s Only a Vulva—Except It’s Everything

We all remember our sex education.

A teacher you’d never quite be able to look in the eye again, a box of polystyrene cocks on the front table, and the overriding message: if you look a sperm in the eye, you will likely get pregnant, so don’t have sex.

That was it. That was the foundation. That or some crude video. 

No one told you what a vulva actually was. No one drew you a diagram of your own anatomy and said, this is yours, and it matters, and you deserve to know it intimately. Instead, 44 percent of parents use words like “fairy”, “flower”, or “tuppence” and only one percent, one, use the word vulva at all. Not because they’re bad parents. Because nobody taught them either.

So here we all are: a generation of women sitting on a root we were never properly introduced to, wondering why nothing quite feels like enough.

Our Fanny (Funny) Education

The sex education most of us received was fear-based and body-blind. We were taught about contraception. We were taught that periods were something to manage quietly. We were not taught about discharge, or the fertility awareness method, or the fact that we are only actually fertile during a small window each month. We were certainly not taught how to feel safe in our own pelvis.

Those with a uterus believe they are fertile all the time, and sex is something you definitely don’t want to dabble with. We instil fear and further disconnect from what it means to be sensual, sexual beings.

Some of us went on to binge drink at a sixth-form party and forget whether we actually did use a condom with sexy James from upper sixth. Panic-buy the morning-after pill. Go on the pill for fifteen years. And then wonder why we can’t even answer the question: When is day one of your period?

The education we deserved would have started with a mirror, a diagram, and the correct language. Because here’s something most people don’t know: using the anatomically correct word vulva with children isn’t just educational. It’s a child protection issue. A four-year-old telling her teacher that her uncle was “playing with her fairy” might go unheard in a busy classroom. A four-year-old who says “vulva” cannot be misunderstood.

Language is power. Silence is not neutral.

Spreading Your Legs for Those in the Medical Profession

Now let’s talk about what happens when we do eventually seek help.

I spoke to a doctor, Sam, second foundation year in the UK, who told me something that should make every woman’s blood run cold. In five to six years of medical training, the entire focus on gynaecology amounted to roughly one afternoon or morning. Not compulsory. No specific exams. Conditions like vaginismus and vulvodynia—glossed over. Conditions like endometriosis are detected only after years of dismissal and we wonder why.

In Sam’s words: “I feel that most of the time, everything is dealt with so insensitively. I find it frustrating that we generally lack the ability to treat patients like they are human beings.”

He told me about sitting in a gynaecological appointment where a twenty-six-year-old woman with endometriosis was told she would likely never conceive before she’d even sat down. No warning. No extra time. No “I’m so sorry.” Just the news. This is the system.

“If my email newsletters land in your junk folder because I use the word vulva, then I am overthinking nothing.”

Gaslit

There’s a particular kind of loneliness in being told that what you feel isn’t real.

I know it personally. I ended up in hospital post-trauma, in extraordinary gut pain, only for the medical team to perform explorative keyhole surgery and find “nothing.” The next morning, a male doctor swung open my curtain surrounded by junior doctors with clipboards and eager looks in their eyes. He went through my admission symptoms and then proclaimed to his students that there was fuck-all wrong with me. I asked where the pain was coming from because it was very real to me. “It just stems from the head,” he said, tapping the side of his head, in case I needed more clarity on his diagnosis.

He closed the curtains.

Years later, during womb massage training, when my teacher began explaining the ileocecal valve—a small valve between the small and large intestines that often holds onto tension, my whole body began to shake uncontrollably. Because the pain had always been real. It had just been living in a body that had been taught not to speak up. This is what gaslit looks like in the body. The pain doesn’t disappear when someone dismisses it. 

The Foundation We Were Never Given.

I am not here to teach you. I’m here to help you return to what was always yours.

Gwyneth Paltrow has her “It’s Only a Vulva” tees. And yes good for Gwyneth, and her $200 million net worth, and her absolute refusal to pretend the pelvis doesn’t exist. But really deep (very deep) down, she knows it’s more than a vulva. And so do you. Otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this.

The pelvis is where safety lives in the body. Where your creativity is housed. Where trauma settles when the mind won’t hold it. Where your voice is rooted, your boundaries are stored, your pleasure begins. When I had a doctor suggest a hysterectomy as the solution to my period pain from behind his desk, his hairy toes resting on it, I felt the overwhelmingly physical sensation of needing something more rounded. Something that saw all of me. That feeling is where this work begins.

One Thing to Notice Right Now

I’m not going to give you a ten-step plan. But I will give you this.

Place one hand on your lower belly below the navel. Don’t analyse. Just arrive.

Notice what happens. Does your breath change? Do you want to move the hand away? Does something in you go very still, or soften, or brace? There’s no wrong answer. Whatever is there is information. Your pelvis has been waiting for your attention, maybe for years. You are allowed to begin here. Gently. Without agenda.

Ready to Go Deeper?

If you want to move through this foundational work exploring the pelvis’ relationship with the nervous system, the language you were never given, the reconnection—I have The Gold Standard in Pelvic Floor Healing journey. This is where we land together. The journey includes you: your story, your body, your nervous system, your whole self.

And if you’re in the postpartum period navigating a body that feels unfamiliar after birth, wondering why no one prepared you for this recovery and doesn’t just tell you how to exercise then I have the Postpartum Pelvic Floor Journey. 

Coming Home to Your

Ground Floor.

The education we deserved would have started here, with our own language, and a system that believed us when something hurt. It didn’t. And that’s not a small thing. It’s the crack in the foundation so many of us have been building our lives on top of.

But the foundation can be rebuilt. Not by learning more information or working harder or fixing something broken but by returning to what was always yours. Your body. Your pelvis. Your ground floor.

You’ve spent your whole life sitting on your root. It’s time to come home to it.