By Yashna Arora
I grew up calling my vagina a 'chhee-chhee'
'Chee' being a Hindi interjection for 'disgust'.
Truly, my vagina wasn't that bad a stuff,
But,my mum taught me that,
So,it got to be correct
And I like a good girl,followed that.
Years rolled by,
And my vague thoughts;I just held them tight
I grew up a bit,
Influenced by the west,
I learned another pickup-
My vagina was now a pussy.
Now,this got me a bit gritty.
For I was resolute on what a pussy was-
A small circle for the face,a big circle for the waist,
Two dots for the eyes,a nose in the centre,
adorned with some moustache and a tail -
That was what a pussycat looked like
Apparently,my vagina was nothing like it
Then why call it this?
Muddled and
Dazed and
Confused and
Mad,I grew up a bit more,
Somewhere to be my present form,
When I came across this movie-'Finding Fanny'
More than the movie,the name intrigued me.
And I took to the Internet
To check what 'that' meant
And Bingo! It was my vagina again.
You know,I fail to understand
I have eyes and ears and legs and hands
But I don't go about calling them names
I don't call my eyes 'ping pong balls'
Or my hands 'Octopus tentacles with nails'.Do you?
Talking about hands or eyes does not make people howl
Then why is it so
That when I get upto a stage, stand before the mic and say,"Hey,I am here to talk about vaginas",people raise eyebrows?
Talking about hands is not profane
But talking about vagina is.
Call a chair a chair and
People won't stare
But,call a vagina a vagina,
Everyone in the room will give you that scornful glare.
An apple is not 'A'
A girl is not 'G'
Then why does my vagina have to be a timid 'V'?
I fail to understand why my vagina has to be a metaphor, a synecdoche, a noun, an adjective, a euphemism, an interjection or a pronoun,
And not just a body part, my body part?
A body part that belongs to me
And is no public property
To be
a laughing stock.
We rant about rapists being bad
And girls not reporting cases,
Well, we taught them that.
We taught our little boys and girls that
Their genitals-they are bad bad words.
You can call a vagina the 'V-word' or a 'chhee-chhee' or a 'pussy'
But not what it is meant to be .
We constantly ask girls to open up about themselves
but are we ready for that ourselves?
Maybe we need to open up a bit ourselves.