When I was in high school, our biology book had this picture in it (or something similar). And for IB Biology we had to learn human anatomy. But for some reason, my biology teacher censored this diagram. I called him on it in class and he shut that shit down faster than Canchola (the McDonald’s franchisee in Nogales) shut down Rally’s (oh the curly fries).

Look, I get it. He was a dude and sex ed is always a precarious subject (see how I avoided the word touchy there?).

To this day it still bugs me. It bothers me that 100% of high school students don’t see this. By hiding it, there’s some implication that this…a very UNdetailed diagram of human plumbing is considered dirty, or suggestive, or disrespectful, or dangerous.

You know me, I don’t throw feminism around to incite reactions willy nilly. And I’m not here to shock for its own sake. If this offends you, I hate to point out that you and everyone else on the planet are only here in the first place because one of your biological parents had these parts.

But I only learned about the Bartholin’s and Skene’s glands TODAY and I’m about to turn 41. If these terms are unfamiliar to you, I suggest you google them. Because if you’re a cisgendered woman, you were born with them. And if you’re a cisgendered male, you came with analog parts.

When you make our bodies taboo, and keep us ignorant about them, you send us the message that there is something about us that is bad which we have absolutely no control over. And that we are somehow guilty for carrying these parts on our body to begin with. And that’s not a shame. It’s a crime. You’ve stolen something from us.

I’m taking it back. I’m done with pretending that there’s some mystery we all need to be protected from.