Vaginal literacy: why every woman needs to reclaim autonomy over her own body

Hands up if you have an oral health routine. Brushing, flossing, tongue scraping, oil pulling. We all know we should do it every day to stay out of the dentist’s chair, and even the most disciplined of us still go for check-ups, or end up there in an emergency now and then. Picture the waiting lists if nobody bothered at all.

Now, ladies, hands up if you have a pelvic health routine.

Most of you just shrank a little, or admitted you wouldn’t know what one looks like. I ask this at networking events and the reaction is always the same. And we don’t have to picture those waiting lists, because they exist. In the UK, over 743,000 women are on an NHS gynaecology waiting list.¹ One in six experience pelvic pain and one in two experience some form of pelvic floor dysfunction. In Australia, almost half of women (47%) have had pelvic pain in the last five years. For 28% it gets in the way of daily life, and about one in three say it has affected their mental wellbeing or their relationships.²³

If more of us understood our bodies and looked after them early, I believe we could ease that burden. I was one of those women.

How I got here

Never in a million years did I think I’d be teaching women about vaginal health. For most of my adult life I was completely dissociated from my own pelvic space. I spent 30 years in education and helped revolutionise the forest school movement, so when I moved into women’s health, plenty of people thought I’d lost my mind. But I’d remind them that every child who has ever been born arrived through a vagina or by caesarean, and how we’re born can shape development in more ways than we tend to talk about. My background in education fits this work better than it might seem. It gives me a deeper understanding of it, especially when I’m supporting pregnant and postpartum mothers.

Trauma brought me here, mine and my daughter’s. We were caught up in a terrorist attack, and that was when I started to see how emotional trauma shows up as physical dis-ease, and how true it is that the body keeps the score. For years, medication and talk therapy were the only things offered to us, and nobody really listened. So I took matters into my own hands and studied. I trained in a range of therapeutic practices to help us both back to wellbeing, and I found a purpose I hadn’t known I was looking for.

When my daughter developed dysmenorrhoea, I watched her suffer month after month, year after year. As a mother you will try anything to ease that. Her pain started a relentless search for answers in me, and somewhere along the way, I healed myself too.

I feel I lost 30 years to not knowing my own body. Society still treats this subject as taboo, our culture runs on shame, and women’s health is still not at the forefront of medical research. That shame travels. I raised my daughter with my own shame about all of this and without the words to give her anything different, so the cycle simply carried on.

So what is vaginal literacy?

Vaginal literacy is the ability to know, sense and understand your vaginal health and the pelvic space around it. Think of it as becoming fluent in your own body.

It starts with the words. Lots of women use “vagina” to mean everything between the pubic bone and the anus. The vulva is the outside: the outer and inner labia, the clitoris and its hood, and the openings of the urethra and vagina. The vagina is the canal inside. Between the vaginal opening and the anus sits the perineum, an important part of the pelvic floor. When you can name what is where, you can describe it, and talking about it gets a lot less awkward.

Then comes knowing your normal. Discharge changes through your cycle, and so do lubrication, sensitivity and comfort. What’s usual for one woman isn’t for another, and there’s no chart to check yourself against. You find out by paying attention to how things look, how much moisture there is, how your pelvic floor feels when you squeeze it, and whether you notice pressure, tension, warmth or nothing at all.

Your normal also moves. It shifts through puberty, across your cycle, in pregnancy and after birth, and again in perimenopause and menopause, when dryness and changes to the labia catch a lot of women off guard because nobody warned them.

Mapping your own body

In my sessions I teach women to map their own vaginas, noticing where there’s numbness, congestion or tenderness. We split the vagina into four quadrants, so it feels less overwhelming and more like getting to know a new place. No one else examines you, and you go at your own pace.

Those three sensations mean different things. In my experience numbness is often protective, and for many women feeling only comes back once they feel safe. Congestion, a dense or heavy feeling, tends to be something that has been held for a long time. Pain is usually the most recent signal, and it can sit hidden underneath the other two until you start paying attention.

Once you know your normal, you can say something like: “I’ve noticed this, in this spot, since about this time, and it’s different from how I usually feel.” That is a very different appointment from “something’s not right down there.” You walk in with language, and you’re far more likely to be heard.

Why I took it online

I decided not to offer in-person sessions. I could see that was still a huge barrier for a lot of women, and it’s one more way of handing your pelvic health over to somebody else. So I adapted what I’d learnt and took it online. I’d completed a master’s in curriculum development in 2018, and I put it to use building my Vaginal Literacy 30 Day Programme.

What the old traditions say

In Chinese medicine and Taoist traditions, a lot of pelvic symptoms are traced back to the level of qi flowing through a woman’s pelvic bowl. Cut off that life force at the root and congestion sets in, blood flow to the tissues is restricted and the whole system starts to shut down.

Vaginal reflexology comes out of the same thinking. In the Taoist tradition, the vaginal canal is seen as a map of the body’s organ systems, much like the reflex points in the feet or hands. The entrance links to the kidneys, the lower vagina to the liver, the upper vagina to the spleen and pancreas, the outer cervix to the lungs, and the tip of the cervix to the heart centre. This is a traditional map, not a medical one, and it hasn’t been scientifically established. I use it as a framework for curiosity, a way of noticing what’s present in each area and asking what it might be pointing to.

I also see that women hold stress, trauma and unprocessed emotion in the pelvic space, and that can show up as fascial restriction. Period pain has many causes, but one that rarely gets talked about is restricted fascia inside the vagina. When a woman bleeds and the uterus contracts, that tissue can pull, and that can hurt.

Some simple things help. Gentle vaginal massage can ease restriction in the tissue, and breathwork and visualisation can help with congestion.

From silence to sovereignty

Vaginal literacy sits alongside medical care, never in place of it. You can’t care for what you don’t know. For me there is nothing more rewarding than helping a woman reconnect with a part of herself that has been ignored, and giving her some say over her own body again. Learn to listen to your body before it has to shout.