Come as You Are Read Online Free PDF Page A

midway down the shaft. That’s because the skin at the top of the shaft is actually the inner foreskin. (Because the color change is sometimes evident only after puberty, guys have asked me if something they did made the color change, but nope, that’s just how some penises look, bless them.)
    The outer labia, too, vary from person to person. Some are densely hairy, with the hair extending out onto the thigh and around the anus, while others have very little hair. Some lips are quite puffy while others are relatively flush with the body. Some are the same color as the surrounding skin, and some are darker or lighter than the surrounding skin. All normal, all beautiful.
    As with the clitoris, the cultural view of labia doesn’t match the biological reality. Vulvas in soft-core porn are digitally edited to conform to a specific standard of “tucked-in” labia and homogeneous coloring, to be “less detailed.” 2 This means that cultural representations of vulvas are limited to a pretty narrow range. In reality, there is a great deal of variety among genitals—and there is no medical condition associated with almost any of the variability. But such limited representations of women’s bodies may actually be changing women’s perceptions of what a “normal” vulva looks like. 3

One example of a vulva.

So if you decide to have a look at other women’s vulvas—which I highly recommend, by the way, but only with their enthusiastic consent—you’ll notice how very, very different they all are from eachother. Only rarely do you find the tidily tucked-in vulvas you see in Playboy .
    Unless you’re experiencing pain (and if you are, check with your medical provider!), your genitals are perfect exactly as they are.
    hymen truths
    You may or may not have a hymen—a thin membrane along the lower edge of your vaginal opening. Whether you have one or not, I guarantee that virtually everything you were taught about the hymen is wrong. 4
    The closest thing to true is that during intercourse the hymen can be painful if it’s not used to being stretched—that’s one of a number of potential causes of pain with penetration, but it is by no means the most common. (The most common is lack of lubrication.)
    But the hymen doesn’t break and stay broken forever, like some kind of freshness seal. If a hymen tears or bruises, it heals . And the size of a hymen doesn’t vary depending on whether the vagina has been penetrated. 5 Also, it usually doesn’t bleed. Any blood with first penetration is more likely due to general vaginal tearing from lack of lubrication than to damage to the hymen.
    What does change when a woman begins having the hymen stretched regularly is that it grows more flexible. And as a woman’s hormones change as she approaches the end of adolescence (around twenty-five years old), the hymen is likely to atrophy and become much less noticeable—if it was noticeable at all.
    The hymen is another example of the wide variability in female genitals. Some women are born without hymens. Others have imperforate hymens (a thin but solid membrane covering all of the vaginal opening) or microperforate hymens (many tiny holes in an otherwise solid membrane). Some women have septate hymens, which feel like a strand of skin stretching across the mouth of the vagina. Some women’s hymens are durable, others are fragile. Some disappear early in adolescence, and some are still in evidence past menopause.
    Women’s hymens vary because, as far as science has been able to discover, the hymen was not selected for by evolution. It has no reproductive or any other function. It’s a byproduct, a little bonus left behind by the juggernaut of evolutionary selection pressure, like men’s nipples. It’s the homologue of the seminal colliculus, a crest in the wall of the urethra where it passes through the prostate and joins with the seminal ducts.
    The hymen is a profound example of the way humans metaphorize anatomy. Here is an