It’s Time For A Re-Education
In conversation with Lynn Enright, author of Vagina: A Re-Education
This interview was published a year ago for paid-for subscribers; as women’s health has been in the news a lot lately, especially with the US election, I wanted to make this freely available. Maybe you’ll consider a discounted subscription meanwhile?
I need to get something off my chest: I am sick to death of the ‘v word chat’*. In other words, the so-called ‘trans debate’ - often platformed by patriarchal men who hijack discourse to fit their own agenda (read: a roll back of women’s rights), based on scaremongering and no scientific basis. Why is it that this privileged group who are symptomatic of patriarchy given any kind of credence in ostensibly speaking for women? Feminism settled that a long time ago, surely. It’s oppressive otherwise. Piers Morgan surely shouldn’t have a say in any of this.
And this is infectious seemingly everywhere we go. Be it the junk science of ultrasounds uncovered by Sophia Smith Gahler, or the release of the brilliant book on abortion rights, Bodies Under Seige by
of , this is everywhere.So I talked to Lynn Enright. Because who else would be better in this scenario?
*Used in jest of course. Because of course this group dare not use the correct terminology..
A writer and editor, Lynn Enright has worked as a journalist for a number of years. She is also the author of Vagina: A Re-Education, a book that aims to correct some of the mythology in the gynaecological space.
As an opening question, can you tell me a little about the impetus and the idea behind Vagina: A Re-Education?
While working at The Pool, which sadly doesn't exist anymore, my colleagues and I noticed that articles and pieces about – I suppose you could say gynaecological – issues seem to resonate with our readers. I think they've always been a mainstay of women's journalism. You know, when you think of Cosmopolitan magazine or teen magazines, they've always had these sections that talk about women's bodies in quite a frank way. And I think that's because it's been a topic that's overlooked by a lot of the mainstream media, so women's magazines provided advice and guidance and insight on that. It wasn't always perfect. Some of the information contained in women's magazines was harmful, but it was there in a way that it might not have been in other publications and in the media more generally.
So at The Pool, we noticed that that content was particularly popular. And I mean stuff that covered the reality of genitals and cervical smear tests, but also more emotive subjects like miscarriage, because there are very strong taboos around all of this.
And then simultaneously while working as a journalist in that space, I noticed – well, everybody noticed – the rise of Me Too, and the rise of the Repeal the Eighth movement. So I connected those movements to these strong taboos around the actual body. I wanted to investigate what happens when we don't tell people the full story about their bodies, and how that impacts more complicated notions like consent or reproductive rights and reproductive justice. So that was where the idea came from.
It's also striking that there is a real need to educate currently - and there have been a plethora of books that support this idea, such as with Honest by Milly Evans and Losing It by Sophia Smith Galer. I was wondering, what do you think about this - and what is the one thing you would maybe change about sex education to empower and re-educate women?
I mean there have been a lot of people banging this drum for a long time. I think every feminist, certainly every Gen Z or millennial feminist, will realise at some point that the work they're doing has probably been done already. But I don't think that there's a problem. We need to keep working and chipping away until this is so mainstream. I think that we can build on the work of each other. I was very much building on the work of second wave feminists. Educating women about their bodies was a key part of that movement – and there were huge gains made, but there are always new challenges.
But to come back to your question about sex education, I think that we need to address how we set girls up as the ones with the responsibility, you know we teach them about the pill, pregnancy and periods. We don't really talk about pleasure. And I think that it's understandable that pleasure is maybe a taboo in a classroom situation, I totally understand that. But I think we task girls with guarding their bodies against boys and I think we need to change that. There is still this idea that boys’ sexuality is more powerful or dominant.
Also what was really interesting when I did the research for the book was speaking to men or coming across men, who seemed quite upset by their lack of knowledge around women's bodies. They hadn't realised how painful a period could be until they saw their girlfriends or wives or sisters in extreme pain. So I think we need to teach boys about periods, and about girls’ bodies, too.
I was also wondering, could I maybe ask about the impact of your background when writing the book?
When I began to write the book, I felt I had a unique perspective because Ireland is notoriously Catholic. The Catholic church was very involved in Irish life: in the schools, in the hospitals, in the institutions. Ireland has had a reckoning with that over the past 10 or 20 years, acknowledging and realising the abuses that were carried out while the Church and State were intertwined. I would say that my sex education wasn't particularly good because sex was a taboo in society. Throughout my teens, the church's grip on people began to loosen. So it was an interesting time: people slightly older than me have had a very different experience and people slightly younger than me have had a very different experience. I'm an old millennial so Sex in the City was on TV, and everyone watched that, but abortion was still illegal, and still totally taboo, in Ireland. And so it was quite a strange tension, I think.
But I suppose the thing that I noticed though, when I wrote the book, is that almost every culture has an issue with educating girls and women about their bodies. Like in British culture, I think there's this idea of, ‘Oh, we're British, and we don't really talk about that kind of thing’. There's a huge Puritan culture in America. A lot of cultures are bad at this. So that was quite a surprise for me because I had thought that it was a particularly Irish thing to be bad at sex education – but actually it's a really rare thing, globally, to have a good comprehensive, empathetic sex education.
You write so eloquently of the influence of growing up in Ireland - and recent campaigns have included Repeal The 8th, too. How did that influence the writing of the book?
It was just really momentous to witness. It was just so brilliant to see how societies can change, and to witness up close the power of breaking taboos. It was a country coming together to tell stories, to listen to stories, to try and solve a problem together. And it was quite a beautiful, hopeful thing to witness. Since then reproductive rights have been rolled back, for example, in America and Poland, so, you know, it's not something that you can take for granted. And I think that that was another thing I realised while writing the book: progress isn't just straightforward. We take a step forwards and then we take a step back. You have to really keep alert, keep aware. Keep fighting, you know.
But the brilliant, important thing about Repeal the Eighth was to witness how frank discussion can lead to change. Ireland was, or is, a place where frank discussion isn't really part of our culture. Sometimes that's in an interesting way and impacts the ways that we describe things and the sort of language we use – but in terms of sex and reproductive rights, it wasn’t a good thing.
By having a referendum it forced this very painful discussion to come to the fore. And it really did dominate society for the months leading up to the referendum. It was on the radio, on every TV show, it was in communities. In Ireland, people were campaigning and canvassing and having these discussions in a new way. And to see the change that can happen when these discussions are had was incredibly inspirational. It was very, very hopeful – people can change their minds, can listen and reflect.
I feel actually in the six years since it occurred, there haven't been that many news stories or movements that have been clearly successful. So I'm really, really grateful that it happened and I witnessed it.
What was the biggest surprise you learned when writing the book?
I learnt lots of practical things while writing the book. I guess the biggest surprise was how little I knew before I started. I was in my 30s when this book was published, but I learned new stuff about my body while writing it. I learned about the extent of the clitoris: it's so much more than the visible tip of the glans.
I already knew the hymen wasn’t a clingfilm-like covering of the vagina but it was still very enlightening to learn about it as a membrane that might disappear or might not be there for some women or girls or people.
It was just very interesting to learn these facts about the body so late in the day. I suppose that's why I think this book, and this conversation, is important – because these facts about our bodies are not necessarily readily available. And that lets people down when they seek medical care and treatment. It has an impact on how people experience pleasure on how they can express consent and give consent. It’s so important to educate people about their bodies: the ramifications of not doing so are huge.
And for people who are aspiring journalists wishing to follow in your footsteps, what would be your advice?
Follow your nose and follow your passion. Writing about topics that you're passionate about is probably the quickest way, most surefire way for your writing to be strong.
Surround yourself with people you admire. Working alongside some brilliant colleagues was life-changing for me in terms of the things that I began to find interesting and inspirational. A real privilege of being a journalist is that you get to meet really, really interesting people, both in the office and when you go and interview people. Keep interested in people and keep interested in learning.