The Vagina Monologues for Preschoolers?

July 9, 2006 – 10:44 pm |

Recently my oldest boy was strutting around the house practicing his math by counting the genital make-up of our household…

“Now that we have the baby,” he announced confidently, “there are three people in the house who have penises and two who don’t.”
“Yep,” I said quickly, blushing at the picture of gender math recurring in line at the grocery store.
“And” he continued to his sister “you don’t have a penis.” Just to make sure she understood he said it again, louder, getting right in her face. “You know, You Don’t Have A Penis, [Sis].”

Before I even had a chance to contemplate how to handle this issue, my daughter retorted. “Hmph!” She said, stomping away, “I don’t know what’s so great about your penis, anyway.”

While I smiled and secretly cheered my daughter for her unusual insight and gusto, I also realized something that concerned me. From the beginning of toilet talk, we teach boys the names of their private parts while we teach girls what they don’t have. We teach girls the absence of the parts.Anyone who has a girl with older brothers has stumbled upon the potty training daughter trying to pee standing up at least once. The day it happened to me, I gently reminded her she has to sit down to pee. “Why?” she inquired, “[Brother] stands up.” The easiest explanation came out somewhere along the lines of boys and girls have different body parts. Boys have penises and girls, well girls… don’t.Of course, as parents we know we are supposed to teach girls about their anatomy, about what they do have. But even when we try labeling the vagina, I will make a bold guess that most parents don’t say the word ‘vagina’ with the frequency or confidence with which we teach the boys about their penises. Many of us resort to simple babyish terms like “pee-pee” or “buttsy” that the whole family can say without risk of embarrasment.And so I went searching for some resources that might help me teach my daughter the words. I didn’t find much. Potty training books avoid using any anatomical identification words, and they certainly don’t detail the parts of the vagina. While there are a handful of good books about puberty for older girls, I wasn’t able to find anything geared toward preschoolers.I can’t provide any insight about how we erase lifetimes of discriminatory cultural history that resulted in allowing us to shout about the ‘penis’ while we whisper ‘vagina’. But shouldn’t we start to try?