Is My Vagina Bigger Than Yours?

I’m curious about vaginas. Not in a sexual way. In an anatomical way.

My brothers are both much younger than me, and I remember when they were toddlers, they’d sit naked on the floor with our male cousin, also a kid, and pull their tiny penises out as far as they could and scream “my willy’s bigger than yours!” at each other, and then almost die laughing. From their earliest cognitive age, boys are part of a culture of dick sharing and a bizarre weiner pride that I, as a female, cannot understand because I have never partaken in any analogous comparative activity with my vagina.

By the time a boy becomes a man–even if he is a straight man–it’s likely that he’s seen a lot of non-sexualized peen in person. I’ve been naked around my girlfriends and had them naked around me, but never have we shown such fascination with each other’s anatomy as men do. Much of it has to do with the fact that all our stuff is inside our bodies, all neatly tucked and not dangling about like an extra limb, so taking a good look requires a lot of bending and spreading. It’s an ostensibly uncomfortable thing to do, asking your friend for a gander at her genitals.

But I want to see some more vaginas in the flesh. Sure I can look at medical images or porn but it’s not the same–I want to know what my vagina looks like compared to those of my peers. I want to know if my labia is larger or longer, if all my bits fold into each other in a similar pattern. I want to see how everything is arranged on other women I know and see if the color matches. I want to see how my pink bits fit into the scheme of vaginal aesthetics.

It’s not that I feel like I don’t understand the vagina or it’s machinations–it’s that as a heterosexual woman, I have never been exposed to anyone’s but my own, and I’m interested in the comparison and contrast between them. We have a frigid state of mind about women’s downstairs business, and it prevents us from exploring each other’s bodies the way men do. Our society deems it innocuous for men to stand next to one another while urinating, and yet women are separated from each other, even though a man is fully exposed in the act and a woman is not.

Penises are normalized in our culture. Even the in the most heteronormative quarters, the penis is shamelessly displayed between men, whether they’re peeing, changing in locker rooms, getting naked at parties (as the boys at my high school so often did, but the girls–never), or checking out each other’s junk in an inquisitive, jockular setting. I’d like to live in a world where girls and women can learn about their special parts in a communal way, the same way boys and men so often do.

I find it so strange a thing–to share this organ with 50% of humanity and yet to not share it at all. And for all the cock-sharing men do, they’re the ones (at least the straight ones) that also get to peer down the barrel of the vaginal gun. It’s an unnecessary stigma that we still attach to female nudity, and I feel like it might be time that we let curiosity get the better of us, because in this particular case, I don’t see that curiosity killing the pussy.