Sorrel grew up during the 1970s, in a big Caribbean household in the north of England. One of two girls in a family with four boys, she learned early that not only was her vulva not to be looked at – it wasn’t even something she could name. “It was called a ‘munchie’,” she says. “We weren’t allowed to touch the munchie, we weren’t allowed to see the munchie, and we definitely weren’t allowed to speak about the munchie.”
In this, Sorrel and her munchie still aren’t alone. No matter what we call it, many women grow up with the sense that there’s something unspeakable “down there” – and it shows. A 2019 poll of the British public found that 45% of women couldn’t label the vagina. Another, in 2021, found that, regardless of sex, more than a third of the people surveyed couldn’t locate the clitoris. It’s not something exclusively British, either; in 2010, an advert by the tampon company Kotex was banned by three US television networks just for saying the word “vagina”, and a 2020 poll found that roughly half of US women couldn’t identify the cervix or the uterus.
