Is My Vagina Normal? Undoing Vulva and Labia Shame
Vulva shame — feeling that your own genitals are dirty, gross, or unacceptable — is extremely common among women, and it usually originates in early bullying, patriarchal religious messaging, and a culture that teaches girls their bodies exist for other people's judgment rather than their own pleasure. It is not a fact you discovered about yourself. It is a belief you were handed. This episode covers where that shame comes from, why female genital shame tends to be more layered than penis shame, the myths worth dismantling, and a four-step process for repairing your relationship with your own body.
Why I Felt Disgust About My Own Genitals
I'm going to start with a little story about me. When I was in my very late 30s, early 40s, about 40, I ran smack dab into a reality that I had not realized or appreciated for very many years. What I realized was that I actually felt shame and disgust about my own genitals. When I tracked it back, I had been carrying these school bullies' words about my body and about female genitals in general around in my head for more than 30 years, and I'd internalized this idea that my own vulva was something gross or unacceptable or shameful.
Frankly, I just didn't even know that. I didn't acknowledge this to myself until I started really trying to discover and reclaim my own sexuality on my own terms. And this just smacked me in the face, because when I started to really be present with my own body, what I realized was that I felt shame, and it was a real struggle to stay present through that. Because of that, it was hard to feel pleasure and to receive pleasure and to feel good when I was playing with a part of my body that I felt bad about.
So today we're going to talk about undoing the shame around vulvas, labia, your vagina, whatever you like to call it, whatever parts it is that you have shame about. We're going to walk through exactly how I turned that around later in the episode.
What we're covering specifically: where this type of shame comes from, why female genital shame is often more layered than penis shame, the early bullying dynamics that plant it, and why it's really not personal. Why it's not about you and your vulva, even though it feels personal and feels like it's about you and your vulva. Why is this a collective experience? Because it is, and a lot of times we're not talking about it, so we really feel like it's ours and ours alone. That is absolutely not true. I can tell you from my professional experience that I work with tons of women who have this.
We're going to talk a little bit about the vulva-vagina distinction and terminology, and why getting it right matters for your pleasure. We're going to bust some myths — the dirty or gross myth, the I-need-to-have-a-vulva-that-looks-like-porn myth. And we are going to talk about your own repair process for your relationship with your vulva, and how to get started if this is a place where you particularly feel stuck.
Now, a quick side note on scope. This episode is specifically addressing the issues related to cis women — if you are cisgendered, you were assigned female at birth, you identify as a woman. I want to acknowledge that for trans people with vulvas, either born or created later in life, trans people have different, unique, and important challenges with genital shame that deserve their own special coverage and attention. I'm working with a trans colleague to bring a collaborative episode on that. It really deserves its own attention separately.
Where Does Vulva Shame Come From?
For people who were born and assigned female at birth and then socialized as girls, the core message that girls absorb very early in life is that our genitals exist for other people's pleasure — specifically male pleasure — and for other people's judgment. Not our own. We get this message very, very early and very subconsciously. It lodges in our subconscious.
And it's really wacky. It's a really wacky thing about modern patriarchy, because if we think about it for even a second, women are the only sex with an organ that exists entirely for our own pleasure. The clitoris doesn't have any other function than your pleasure, and it is a fairly large part of your genitals. Even though most of it is internal, that is an entire organ that is only recently being understood — only in the past year have we really understood the nerve system that innervates this organ. This is an organ that exists entirely just for your pleasure. So it's even more weird that we get the message that somehow our parts exist for somebody else's pleasure.
So where does that all come from? Well, if you've been around the block here with me at all, you'll know that I am a feminist. We are going to call out a patriarchal society that puts us in this place, and acknowledge that it's not good for anybody — male or female, or however you identify, or anywhere in between. Patriarchy is not helping us have better sex, or better connection, or feel more alive and connected to ourselves. But this is one of the big places where we get it. A lot of it's from patriarchal religions, and from a culture, at least in the U.S. and in many other places around the world, that teaches girls that their bodies are for the approval and judgment of boys and men, not for themselves. That's a really big problem.
The consequence is that as we grow up, girls and women skew very hard toward over-prioritizing other people's comfort and pleasure while ignoring their own. This can lead to almost exiling your own body parts — even the ones designed to give you pleasure — and feeling like they're not acceptable, they're not okay, and that you don't have a right to have a positive, loving relationship with them.
The Dirty Myth: Why Vulvas Aren't Gross
On top of that, we get this dirty myth, which is a total myth. The vagina is absolutely normal and clean. It's absurd. It's like looking at plants and calling flowers dirty. Flowers are the reproductive organs of flowering plants. That's very normal. Nobody calls a flower's reproductive part dirty. And a vulva is just a reproductive part of a mammal.
Just the same way that a mouth or nose serves its own necessary function and has normal secretions, there is nothing wrong with a vulva, and there's nothing dirty about it. In fact, it's a self-cleaning organ. There's nothing more shameful about a vulva than there is about having a mouth or a nose.
There is nothing inherently dirty about genitals any more than a mouth or nose. If you never wash the outside, then you might have some dirt accumulate there. But the inside of your vagina and your vulva is not going to be dirty, because it is self-cleaning.
So this idea of clean versus dirty is a choice. It's a belief that you may have been handed somewhere along the way. If you hold that one, I want to encourage you to notice that it's not a fact that you discovered. It's a mistaken belief, and that means it's optional, and you can decide to change your mind.
But remember — you've thought that a million times. If that's something that's installed in your brain, you've run that program a lot. It's got a lot of practice, so you're going to have to counteract it a lot of times in order to install a new belief. A belief is just a thought that you have practiced many, many times. It just means you've thought it so many times that it feels true. So you're going to have to practice actually believing that your vulva is perfectly clean.
How Middle School Installs Genital Shame
What happens early on in our lives, a lot of times right around middle school but sometimes even earlier, is that simply being a girl in the world means you will be body shamed. A lot of times, somewhere around middle school, the genitals come in for the body shame.
There is documented evidence that girls as young as three already have weight shame — three to five year olds can already have internalized fat phobia. Most of the time the genital shame doesn't come in until a little bit later, but we can see that we're already in a system that's primed for us to feel like we're being judged, like our worth is being evaluated based on our appearance and our body parts.
Now add to this, around middle school, the sort of rediscovery of genitalia. We discover it very early in life — most little toddlers are already playing with themselves. Sexuality is interesting in humans. It comes out really early in childhood and toddlerhood, then goes dormant a little bit for a few years, and then tends to come back right around early middle school. A lot of kids who are three to seven years old are masturbating, and that's totally normal. I like to say there's a reason that your hands reach your genitals — it's for good times. So we know kids can be sexually active with themselves earlier on, sometimes with each other, exploration.
But a lot of times the public shaming starts really hard in middle school. Around middle school we get this dynamic where boys learn that they can get social credit by targeting girls' bodies for ridicule. When they feel insecure themselves — and they always feel insecure — a way to make other boys laugh is to put girls down and have this other be a target.
It's a really early case of what we call othering people. Making somebody who's different into a target so you can feel included in a group. By shaming girls, it makes the boy doing it feel included with other boys. So it's a tool for insecure little boys. And adults tend to tolerate it a lot more than we should. We often don't even hear it or see it. Boys aren't taught better or held to account most of the time.
So what happens is you've got grown women like me, like I used to be, walking around with a middle school boy's voice in their head that has been so internalized that it now sounds like our own. Whatever they said to you, whatever they called you, whatever they said about your genitals — and gosh, there are so many things. I'd be really curious to hear what you heard. I heard all kinds of things, like that girls were smelly, that girls' genitals were smelly. There was just a lot of negative talk and put-downs around that.
What I want to know is: do you really want to let a kid who knew nothing about female genitals — a clueless, insecure little boy who'd never seen one, never knew what they were for, didn't understand anything about them — decide how you feel about your body?
So if you are one of the many, many millions of women who've had this experience where you internalized genital shame from an early age — and maybe it didn't happen to you early on. Maybe it happened later. For some women it happens when they first become sexually active. They may have new ignorant partners who don't know what to do with these new parts and who put them down for that reason. Or maybe those partners have had only exposure to porn and not to real women, so they're comparing something they have no idea about. Wherever you got it: do you want to let those people decide how you feel about your body?
Generally, for most of us, the answer is hell no.
The same kind of thing happened to me in high school with my face, actually. There was this boy who was a senior, and I had a crush on him, and it was this whole thing. The short version is that he told everybody he would fuck me if I had a bag over my head. I decided in that moment that my face was ugly, and I carried around that internalized judgment of myself for the next several decades, until I finally realized — you know what, maybe I shouldn't let a high school douchebag decide how I actually feel about my face.
I just want to illustrate that these moments — little tiny moments, one comment somewhere, where you felt othered, where you felt shamed — they can run unquestioned behind the scenes and really impact the way we feel about ourselves. It's really worth taking a moment and taking an inventory of what happened to you and who said it, and thinking about whether you want to let that person decide how you feel about the parts that are designed to give you pleasure.
My hope is that your answer is no. So if our answer collectively is no — like, fuck no, fuck them all, that's kind of how I feel about it — then what next?
Porn Vulvas Are Not Real-World Vulvas
Another myth we want to start busting: porn vulvas do not represent the diversity of real-world vulvas. What people see in porn is a very narrow, curated look that is not representative of real anatomy, real arousal, or the real diversity of women.
Imagine if all you saw on TV were people with those turned-up little noses, and eventually you start to think that's the way all noses should look, because those are the people doing stuff in the world. Those are the people you see represented. They must somehow be more worthy. Therefore we should all have these turned-up little noses. Personally it's not my favorite nose style, but hey — maybe it would be my favorite nose style if that's all I saw for my whole life.
Porn is a lot like that when it comes to vulvas. There's a very specific type of vulva that gets shown over and over again. Unless you're watching specific types of porn that have more inclusive female anatomy, you're only going to see this really narrow curated look.
Real vulvas vary enormously, just like people's facial features. There are all kinds of beautiful shapes of noses out there. Different types of eyes can be beautiful. Different types of mouth shapes can be beautiful. Different types of vulvas can also be beautiful.
There is a lot of variation in the length and shape of both inner and outer labia, in symmetry and asymmetry. I personally have an asymmetrical haircut. I love it. I have asymmetrical labia. Love them too. Skin tone varies — not everybody has a baby pink, super-white-girl-looking pussy. There's brown, red-brown, mauve, much darker, very deep browns. There are all kinds of different colors of skin tone in your vulva, just like nipple variation. Lots of different colors of nipples out there in the world. And there are lots of different textures and types of pubic hair. It is only really prepubescent people who have no pubic hair naturally, so keep that in mind when you're comparing yourself against whatever stereotypical vulva you think it should be. It is pretty normal for any adult woman to have pubic hair. That is part of being an adult woman.
Every version of vulva is normal. There is no wrong shape. There is just lots and lots of variation.
If this is something that's hard for you — if you have a hard time normalizing the look of your vulva — then I really want to suggest that you get familiar with lots of different types of vulvas. And I'm going to tell you how to do that, because that was one of the things that never happened to me.
I think this is one of the things that's hard for people who grow up as girls: we don't see each other's vulvas. They're tucked away. For boys, they see penises all over the place in every locker room. But for girls they're really tucked away. You're not seeing a lot of the variation, so you don't know. You're just left to wonder: am I normal?
You are normal. Please let that sink in. Your vulva, whatever she looks like, she is normal. Just like your face is normal. It's going to be slightly different from somebody else's face. That doesn't make it abnormal. It's just yours. And there's no downside to loving the way your vulva looks. None. You are not going to harm anybody else by loving on your vulva.
Vulva vs. Vagina: Why the Right Word Matters for Your Pleasure
Here's another myth to bust. The word vagina does not actually describe all of the bits. The vagina is just the internal canal, and it's the part that men tend to focus on. Because of that — because of misogyny and the orientation toward the way men think about women's parts — we have lost the focus on all the parts that actually give us pleasure, and on all the beautiful complexity of our female genitalia.
The vulva is the entire structure. It includes your clitoris, whereas the term vagina does not include your clitoris, which is the most important part to you. So I want to invite you to reorient your language and attention toward the vulva, not just the vagina.
If you don't love that terminology because it feels kind of medical — I get that. Come up with your own. You can use whatever you like, but do have something. Have some way to talk about this body part, because if you refuse to have a term for it, then it's really hard to build a relationship with it. If you refuse to have a term for your nose, it would be really hard to acknowledge, hey, this is my nose. So we want to help you claim it and claim yours. You need to have some terminology.
You can use pussy. If you want to borrow from Sanskrit, it's your choice and your moral compass about whether you want to borrow terminology from another language and use yoni. I personally don't do that because I have no cultural relationship with Sanskrit. Pick whatever you like. Honeypot, the JJ, whatever it is that you want. You could name her. You could name it Thelma. Whatever you like. Choose words that feel good to you. The specific word matters less than approaching your own genitalia with curiosity instead of judgment.
But I do encourage you to use the term vulva, because it is more encompassing, more correct, and includes all the bits that feel really nice to you.
The Four-Step Process to Repair Your Relationship With Your Vulva
So what is the repair process to repair your relationship with your genitals when it has been damaged?
First, acknowledge the hurt and the harm and the impact. Just like in any relationship repair. Where you started may have been where I started, which was taunts from bullies at school internalized as facts, and then treating my own vulva as something gross. Did you do that too? Acknowledge whatever the hurts were.
I actually felt like it was really important for me to apologize. I went through a process where I really apologized and owned that I had been shaming this part of me, that I had been distancing myself from her, that I had not appreciated her fully and all that she could do for me, and that I really didn't want to do that moving forward. I really wanted to own the impact I'd had on this body part, and I feel like that helped me. I know it sounds a little woo, but I'd throw it out there as a good idea to try and see how it feels to you.
Second, normalize. What I did was normalize my vulva by exposing myself to a lot of different varieties of vulvas. I sought out a wide range. I went to photo galleries. I'm going to link some of these resources in the show notes, because there are some really great people doing some great projects out there — because this is so pervasive for women — who are doing a fantastic job both with portraits of real vulvas and with drawings and watercolors. Coffee table books. It's pretty awesome.
Please share them with your friends. Please look at them a lot. Please start normalizing using some of these wonderful resources. Just like you look at variety in people's faces, eyes, and noses — you see that stuff on a day-to-day basis, but you don't see vulva variety. So this is a way to expose yourself to the actual variety of real human vulvas.
Third, mirror work. This is looking at your own and really trying to look with curiosity and not judgment. Notice color, shape. Notice the different parts. Treat those details the way you'd treat eye shape or nose shape — as just variation. Get curious and see, hey, this is my human flower. Can I be down with it? Can we have a relationship where I approve of you?
Fourth, a daily gratitude practice. For me this was about two minutes, just really brief, each morning, just thanking my body for what she does. I did this with all the different parts that I had shame around, but I did it for a while in particular with my vulva. I really thanked her for the sensitivity, the pleasure, the orgasms, generally functioning — building the relationship on appreciation instead of constant judgment or shame.
For me, the payoff of all these steps was that I can now take in and really fully believe that my body, exactly as it is, including my pussy, is lovely. I can take it in from a partner. I can even ask for it from a partner, because I do like to receive that. But now I have a place for that to land. That validation is landing on a foundation I built myself.
Because you can't really get from the outside — and we talk about this a lot on this podcast — you can't receive from the outside what you won't give yourself first. You just won't have a landing place for it. It'll feel like a black hole. It doesn't register, it doesn't make any difference. But once you actually believe it, there will be a place for that to land, and you can actually take in appreciation.
You can allow yourself to be looked at. You can allow yourself to be touched. You can allow more pleasure. You can allow more attention, more time, praise, whatever it is that you want there. And that is wonderful and pleasurable. You can allow more pleasure into your life from this body part that has so many nerve endings. It's made for your pleasure. The clitoris has more than double the nerve endings in an entire penis. This is also why the floor can feel like lava sometimes — she's very, very sensitive, and can be really, really wonderful. And the whole structure, your labia, can be played with in a way that's really lovely.
I couldn't even access allowing any of those things to happen when I was stuck in shame and worrying about whether I was gross or acceptable. So there's so much more freedom and pleasure available to you. And just the freedom of not having to carry that around and worry about it anymore is awesome. I really want that for you.
The Eviction Exercise: Whose Voice Is Actually in Your Head?
The core step here, if this is something you struggle with, is really going through that four-step process, starting with understanding where it started for you and evicting that. I want to call that the eviction exercise.
Who was the old voice? Identify it. An ex, a bully, a middle school kid. If it's a current partner, heaven help you — then really think about that, tell them to stop, and consider how you feel about that. But evict anybody else's voice from your mind. You do not need to live your life and feel about yourself the same way a bully treated you. That's no good. No bueno. Consciously decide that those people don't get a vote. They never get a vote going forward.
And go check out these resources I'm going to link for you.
There is no downside to loving your genitals. None whatsoever. You are not in danger of becoming some sort of genitally arrogant person — and I don't think that would even be a problem if you were. If you just ran around thinking I have the most gorgeous vulva in the world, it's literally not going to hurt anybody else. But you know what? It's probably going to feel amazing to you. You're not in danger of becoming a flasher, do not worry. If you want to make art from your vulva, more power to you. Awesome.
But there is zero downside, and you get to carry a positive feeling around all day if you feel good about your genitals. And then you get more access to pleasure. So that's my hope for you, my wish for you.
If you know anybody in your life who may have the same kind of challenge — and you might want to ask some of your friends, it can be very vulnerable and sensitive, but very close friends — you might say, hey, have you ever experienced any pussy shame? Please consider sharing this, because so many people are suffering in silence. You could have a whole deshaming party and look through the coffee table book together over dinner, or chocolate mousse. I really want to invite you to share it with a person who you think might benefit, because there are a lot of people suffering in shame for no reason. No reason at all.
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