What’s in a name?

I named the project vagina vérité because back then that’s what my friend called it when she asked me if I liked the way my vagina looked and started all of this. However, the anatomical name for female external genitalia (what you see in the image above) is vulva. You can see just about half way down the list of names of its part, where the vestibule of the vagina shows up and the vaginal orifice. The vagina is the canal, leading inside.

I don’t know if anyone among my friends and family had even heard the word vulva back then. I don’t know where I learned it, but I was aware of it when the project title came to me as vagina vérité.

Early on, once I started the website, a few people here and there would ask me about it, complain about it too, but vulva just wasn’t a word I was using, and it was for my friend that I started the whole thing: and she said vagina. I wanted to start there where she was. It’s not like we’d ever talked about it before and I didn’t know much more than vagina and vulva. I hadn’t been taught much of anything when it came to sexuality, anatomy or bodylife experiences I could expect throughout my life at school or home. That’s part of how we got here where it’s common for women not to know how to talk about their anatomy: an absence of education around our bodies. While education was at the core of the project, I wasn’t the one to be doing any teaching. My job was to provide reference, so we could have the conversations we needed and wanted to have, on our own terms. In my mind the vulva is the face of the vagina.

To finish explaining on the project name, vérité is truth in French and cinéma vérité means documentary [film], so: vagina vérité.

We haven’t even begun to talk about the clitoris. It’s not just a button.