I don’t know whether it’s a case of my mildly conservative up-bringing, my very conservative schooling or my tendency to Google-diagnose, but I have no idea what goes on ‘down there’.
As a 20-year-old, educated student whose friends are finishing university and taking on the big scary world, I am noticing a trend of cluelessness when faced with a womanly medical problem.
(Warning, the rest of this post may cause men to feel awkward.)
Late cycles, itches, pains, pills – all issues many women face in their lives.
But when something untoward occurs in this area, a young woman’s first reaction is to panic, Google it, then call all of her friends to convince her she couldn’t possibly have what Google told her she has.
I can’t honestly say a month has passed in the last couple of years where a friend hasn’t joked about, but secretly lost sleep over, the possibility of being pregnant.
Of course, they never are, because we are just misreading signs our bodies are giving us.
This constant state of pregnancy paranoia can consume an entire day, or week, waiting for that bittersweet red flag to wave… and when it does, life continues as normal. Phew.
But what worries me is how little we understand our own bodies, and the quirks, changes and pains we are bound to get.
At the risk of sounding foolish, I only just a few weeks ago understood how the pill actually works.
It took an accidental stumble upon an episode of Dr Oz while I was at work at 5am to find out why women get urinary tract infections (UTIs) a lot.
And I still haven’t fully grasped the concept of what happens when, and why, in a menstrual cycle.
I never got a lesson. My primary school had sex education in year 5, but I left in year 3. My science teacher in year 9 had the thankless task of teaching a class of giggling girls the anatomy of the reproductive organs. And I vaguely remember a family planning van that visited in year 11, and there was a Styrofoam contraption and a condom… and then I draw a blank.