Like any healthy relationship, the one I have with my vagina is built on a foundation of love, misunderstanding, and passive aggression.

One of my earliest memories is of urinating in our front garden; legs akimbo, hands proudly on hips, shouting “Call me Michael, for I am man!” Michael was an asthmatic four year old from my playgroup with scabby knees and a bright gold bowl cut. I didn’t just want to play marble run with Michael: I wanted to be Michael. As a three year old, it never occurred to me that there could be a point of difference between Michael and I insurmountable without medical intervention. But alas, there was.

Okay, so I’m a girl: I can’t pee standing up, what’s next for me to learn about myself? Well, my Mum’s a girl, and she does this thing after a bath sometimes where she unwraps the world’s least fun glow stick, and pops it up inside of her for safe keeping.

WHAT THE FUCK MUM?! WHAT IS THAT, AND WHERE THE FUCK HAS IT GONE?!

Around this time, my mother was perfecting her niche mix of early ninety’s hippy and horribly repressed catholic, exorcising irrational guilt with an arsenal of joss sticks and alfalfa seeds.

“It’s just what you do when you have a period, to soak up the blood”.

It’s totally groovy man; I’m not ashamed one bit. Oh, but disappear your used applicators with the stealth of a Russian spy – evidence of your menstrual cycle is a sight no man should have to endure.

I then went through a phase of padding out my knickers with balls of toilet roll, announcing to friends, family and teachers with the gravity of an obituary that I too, was on my period.

In a girl’s early experience of her identity, it doesn’t help that there is no one standardised term for her anatomy. Boys had a willy, everyone knew that. One of my friends had a fanny, another had a front bum (WTF), and I had a tuppence. Aside from adding an unwelcome prostitution subtext to the “Feed the birds” skit in Mary Poppins, this confused the bejesus out of me.

Well, if you thought that hitting puberty would give me the chance to finally understand what was going on down there, you’d be mistaken. The communist invasion was spreading through my peers’ Tammy Girl thongs at an alarming pace, and it was only a matter of time before I would finally understand the exquisite pain of becoming a woman.

Then I saw this:

I was mentally prepared for B-movie bloody gore, not blue shit in a shot glass being used to baptise a lady-nappy.

My thoughts ran thus:

–       This must be a product that you put into your sanitary towel to make it absorb all the evil badness as it flows from the vagina. You know. Like the things posh people clip under the rims of their toilets.

–      Where is it kept in the supermarket? (My best guess was with the car air-fresheners)

It did not occur to me that this holy water was meant to represent ordinary, run-of-the-mill red blood. So, much like I was still expecting my Hogwarts letter to appear halfway through year 7, I was two years into my monthlies before I gave up on the idea that someone was going to take my hand, and with the wry nod that comes of wisdom, tell me “It is time. You have proven yourself a master menstruator, and have moved with ease from the lilac to the primrose Tampax. You have even, on occasion, practiced the dark art of that most challenging of period paraphernalia: the non-applicator tampon. You are now ready for the truth my friend, behold! The blue liquid!”

And then there was fingering.

You’re a fourteen-year-old with a lush BF. You’ve been snogging for enough time for you to both appear as though you’re suffering a localised patch of eczema from chin to philtrum. He’s gotten skilled at squeezing your chest like a builder negotiating a particularly stubborn wedgee (although you don’t even know when it’s happening as you are purveying not one, but two padded bras from Miss Selfridge). And so his hand, sticky with Tangfastic residue, finds its way into your ‘cheeky’ g-string, and starts sawing away at your genitals, moving in and out with such speed and enthusiasm that you assume he must know what he’s doing.

Once enough of your peers have undergone the saw, the bat shit fucking insane rumours start. And you believe them. There was the girl who got called Kit-Kat, “coz she takes 4 fingers”. The girl who let her boyfriend put in both of his hands, “and then, she put in her two thumbs as well!”. And who could forget the girl who put a can of baked beans up there, in front of her paramour?

Unless each of these young women had a Tardis where their vagina should have been, we were spreading some pretty mental lies about each other. Why didn’t I question it? Because there’s so much cloak and dagger mystery around female genitalia and sexuality that there was simply no space to.

Over time, you grow up; you unpick the half-truths from the lies, and create a mythology of your own amongst your friends. And just when you think you’ve pieced together all there is to know about your body, how it functions, and what it can accommodate, you get called up for a cervical smear.

I went to mine, freshly showered and ready to take it all in my stride. My doctor was a Czech woman of about 55 with a facial tick and the kind of hairstyle you wouldn’t want to light a cigarette around. She told me off for turning up early, and then told me off for leaving it until 25 to have the test. Bamboozled by the paradox of being simultaneously too early and too late, she then asked those questions, which though framed in a clinical, non-judgmental way, end up sounding like “On a scale of one to ten, with one being Our Holy Virgin Mother, and ten being Russell Brand, how much of a total slut are you?”

It was then time to get strapped into the torture garden, lay back, and think of Michael…

“Oops” said the Czech between my legs, her be-latexed hands popping up to eye level like some nightmarish kids’ puppet show “I forgot the speculums!” And off she trotted, leaving the door open wider than my legs.

After what felt like 15 minutes, my carnal explorer was back, this time with a tray of plastic instruments.

“Which size?” She asks my vagina

“Erm… I don’t…”

“Which size? Big?! Maybe I’ll use small. You look small”

“Okay. Thanks”

And in it goes, followed by unpleasant creaking sounds as Dr begins to crank me open.

“Oh, drats!” I am treated to a repeat performance of “look mum, no hands” as she leaves the room once more, the door and my genitals hanging from their hinges, to retrieve some swabs.

“Here we are”. She came, she saw, she took samples. Speculum removed, I was instructed to get dressed. I watched as she happily typed into the computer, and noted with alarm that she’d chosen not to remove her now fanny-battered gloves.

Thankfully, I was given a full bill of vaginal health, but amongst my close acquaintance a high number have had complications ranging from false alarms through to multiple surgeries. And it made me angry. Angry that young girls don’t know what to call it. Angry that advertisers camouflage it with euphemism. And angry that discourse around it is still so mysterious.

If we allow people to think and talk about female sexuality in these coded terms, then we encourage them to disassociate from the very human reality of the subject. Furthermore, we remove a certain capacity for empathy, for ownership, and ultimately for equality.

So, it’s not a magical cave in which time moves in a different dimension; it’s a vagina, which is wonderful.