Ode to Dr. Ruth
It has been a little over two months since Dr. Ruth Westheimer passed away and I have been thinking a lot about how her life impacted mine as a teen, through my twenties and in shaping my career and my vernacular as an obstetrician/gynecologist. Karola Ruth Westheimer opened a door into a world where sex was an easy conversational topic. I grew up in a home where my sex talk was a book that was handed to me when I was six years old and my mother was pregnant with my brother. It was about how babies were made. The bulk of my education came from whispered conversations with friends and looking at my father’s stash of Playboy and Penthouse magazines. As a flat chested 13-year-old that was something that I could never imagine my body turning into. Dr Ruth was the butt of many a joke in the 80s. She was a Saturday Night Live staple. Yet she became part of mainstream media and she took the shame away from conversations around sex, sexuality and orgasms.
Forty years later I am a practicing obstetrician gynecologist in a small town. I cannot only talk about sex, I feel like I have spent my 20 year career as the “Dr. Ruth of Northeast Connecticut”. I became a monthly guest on a local radio show where part of my gig was using the word “vagina” in each interview and trying to get the radio host to say it. We joked that you could see him blush through the radio. I was trying to normalize conversations around sex and sexuality, making words like vagina, labia and clitoris a little less taboo.
I also made it my mission to try and help teach elementary and middle school students age appropriate sex education. We need to normalize conversations about sex as adults, physicians, and people. I once had a 10-year-old girl ask me in a sex education class if we could call the vagina a Va Jay Jay because the word vagina made her feel uncomfortable. I told her “we can call it Gladys, but what it is a vagina and you have one so own it!”. I ask all the girls (or students that are assigned female at birth) “why, in an area the size of the palm of my hand where we need to control our urinary system, our gastrointestinal system, and our reproductive system are we taught that it's stinky, bad, we shouldn't look at it, and we shouldn't touch it? Why is it OK to pick our noses in private, pick wax out of our ears in the morning, but not touch our vagina and explore it? Other holes are considered fair games, just not this one.”
I strive to be the next Dr. Ruth. My goal is to help the next generation have less shame around their bodies and body parts. I want to empower children to know their bodies. This can make puberty less frightening and more exciting. It can give them the opportunity as they enter adulthood to be the “tour guides” of their bodies; to instruct and inform their partners about what feels good. The porn industry has hijacked sex education because many of us caregivers are too embarrassed to have the conversations. We need to teach our children about their whole body, all of their parts and what all of their parts are doing. If we start this when children are learning what they call their nose, eyes and ears then sexual organs never become forbidden and shameful. When did they become “wrong” and why has sex become taboo? This is the root of reproduction, a center of power and a beautiful part of the human body. As adults we need to consider it is not the children who have the problem speaking about their bodies, it is us. Do we really want our legacy to be generational trauma, shame and embarrassment around genitalia? I challenge anyone who is reading this to use the word vagina once in a sentence today. The more you use the words the easier they are to say. Stay tuned. Next week we can talk about the penis, scrotum, labia or maybe even the clitoris!