up is a matter of personal preference, if women feel pressurised to do so the big question is: who are they doing this for? Do females really turn themselves on when trying to squeeze into their old school gymslip?
Now I’m nearly six foot tall and have the characteristic spread of middle-age; so it’s just ludicrous to imagine what this would look like in a cute little French Maid’s outfit. I also know that if my man wore his underpants on the outside of his tracksuit and flew at me from the top of the wardrobe, I would fall about laughing and, at our age, he may risk losing more than his erection.
One of the things the Vagina Monologues set out to achieve was to bring the diversity of female sexuality into normal conversation. But for starters even using the word ‘vagina’ was problematic. Some female callers to radio stations had the typical shock-and-horror reaction to this word being touted in public. Perhaps they would be more comfortable with any of the hundreds of vulgar euphemisms used to demean the only part that makes us definitively female.
This inability to utter the word points to the baggage attached to female sexuality and it is this that leads many women to feel shy about bonking. Parents seldom deal with sex as if it were an everyday topic to be discussed openly with children and their self-consciousness is interpreted as shame.
My first sex-education was a rather awkward clinical tour of vaginal tracts, Fallopian tubes and sperm sacs delivered by a nun at the convent I attended. Even at age 11 the credibility problem was patently obvious; what could a celibate nun possibly know about sex?
This clinical version certainly didn’t include ideas about