What do you find frustrating about mainstream conversations about women’s health and bodies?
My least favourite thing is hygienic euphemisms for vaginas. Isn’t ‘intimate’ the worst word? ‘Intimate area’? Delicate feminine wash? Ugh. Femininity is presented so cleanly. Oh how I would love to see some hairy-legged women on the telly, and for that not to even be the focus.
How do we combat this ‘clean’ notion of femininity?
The more versions of femininity we have available from a young age, the more accepting we will be of ourselves. I’m inspired by Arundhati Roy, because she broke taboos with her writing, but she didn’t carry on writing just because it did well. She fights for what she believes in and is a political activist and lots of other things. She only wrote another book twenty years later. She’s single and says she likes it that way. I think she’s so cool.
In your ‘Foreword’, you talk about ‘discharge’ as a kind of forbidden word in common conversation – which other words should we be using more often?
‘Fanny lips’, ‘gooch’, ‘chocolate starfish’.
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