Vagina Diary 5

'I am thirty-two years old and all my life I have been told what to do, what to like and who to be. From an early age, I have been taught that if my knees were scarred, I wouldn't find a husband, so I shouldn't run so much. As a teenager, I learnt from girly magazines what to do to please men and later, I discovered that I needed to follow 'the rules' to get a man to marry me. Every day I have been told that I am imperfect and that I should change certain things about myself; how I look, how I dress and who I am. I'm not supposed to fart, shit or even bleed. I'm not allowed to be human.'