What Do I Know About Your Genitals?

Writing about sexual anatomy is one of my least favorite parts of writing about sex. Each time I sit down, as I did a few days ago, and begin to write something about the way the foreskin works or what the urethra looks like I get a shiver down my spine. It’s not that I don’t love human genitalia. I mean it might be more accurate to say I have love for genitals than to say I love genitals directly. Either way, I’m not squeamish or conflicted about these body parts. My point is not that I don’t like my own, my loved ones, or complete stranger genitals. The point is that I don’t like writing about them.

After all, what do I really know about your genitals? Aside from the most mundane large scale generalizations, what can I really say about your genitals that won’t clash with your own experience of them? This is a problem for anyone writing about the body (above or below the waist) but its one we don’t talk about much.

Consider our bodies. It’s true that most of us have two eyes, two ears, a nose, etc… But some of us don’t. And some of us have two eyes, but only see out of one of them. Some of us have big noses, and some have little noses. Some of us have taken the body we were born with and changed it, either intentionally or unintentionally. While the parts may look and feel vaguely the same for many people, our experience of our bodies, and our personal history with our bodies is entirely unique. Forget what you see on TV, read in magazines, and even a lot of what you’ve been taught in school. Those other bodies don’t matter (also, they usually aren’t real). Ultimately your body is the only one that matters when what you want is to learn more about your body.

Back to your genitals. What happens when I sit down to tell you something about your genitals? My intentions are good. I want you to get to know your body, I want you to be able to identify potential signs of illness or disease, and I want to encourage you to look at your body in new ways. But as soon as I start to describe the way your genitals look or feel, and they don’tlook or feel that way to you, it’s easy for you to think there’s something wrong. Something wrong with your genitals and something wrong with you. And then I become part of your genital problem, not part of the genital solution (which is not to be confused with “a solution you put on your genitals,” for that, see our STD Guide).

And this is why I don’t like writing about genitals. I don’t want to be part of the problem, and I don’t want to feel like I’m trying to tell you something about your genitals. Because if I haven’t seen them (and I probably haven’t) what can I really say about them?

After much hand wringing (genital anatomy tip: when learning about your own body a "hand wringing" motion is not the most productive) I’ve come up with a two-step plan. First I can offer a general genital tour. These are some overall things that people with male genitals and people with female genitals might expect to find on and in their bodies. As I do this I can remind you that you might not have all of these things and they might not look, feel or work the same way I describe them. But it’s more of a lay of the land than a guided tour. Secondly, I can offer you a way to take your own guided tour of your sexual anatomy, one where you’re the guide, the crowd and the amusement park all rolled into one. Doing it this way is more work for you, but I think it puts the onus and the expertise in the right place.

Read more:

• About Sexual Anatomy and Response
• Mapping Out Your Sexual Body
• Write Your Own Sexual History