Vagina.
Vagina vagina vagina.
Uncomfortable yet?
Dr. Lissa Rankin, OB/GYN and author of her new book What’s Up Down There? Questions You’d Only Ask Your Gynecologist If She Was Your Best Friend, insists that you shouldn’t feel uncomfortable at all. Rankin is here to talk, and she wants to talk vagina.
“The focus of my talk is on bringing the vagina out of the closet, not just so we can laugh and bond, but so we can heal the traumas many of us have experienced there,” Rankin writes in an email.
She begins her book tour at Northwestern, where she served her residency in obstetrics and gynecology at the Northwestern Memorial Hospital. She’ll lay out her lecture in three parts: an interactive chat, a reading from her book and an open question-and-answer session with the audience. Rankin calls the event “more a conversation than a lecture.”
But anyone who wants to go will have to get used to words like “vagina,” “va-jay-jay” and “coochie” — plus other topics that may make people uncomfortable, as Rankin feels no shame in speaking about them at length.
“It’s honestly more about our communal experience as women, and how we can — and must! — talk about all of the stuff that we’ve been told not to talk about: vaginas, sex, self-pleasure, periods,” Rankin writes.
Although Northwestern students may have seen their fair share of sex lectures during Wildcat Welcome Week, Rankin says she hopes for a much-different “empowering, girlfriendy, funny, BFF” atmosphere.
But she says that fun attitude comes from a life fighting negative images of the female body. When she was five, she climbed a tree with a group of boys. She was wearing a dress. She says a mother yelled, “Lissa Rankin, get out of that tree. You should be ashamed of yourself. The boys are going to see your panties.”
“Before that moment,” she says, “it had never occurred to me that my body was different, let alone something I needed to shamefully hide.”
Correction: Rankin will be in the McCormick Auditorium in Norris University Center on Monday, Sept. 27, at 7 p.m. Thank you to commenter Lisa Currie for pointing out the error.