Teachers and school leaders are falling into sexist tropes when delivering sex education, with some shying away from explicitly naming female anatomy to pupils, a consultant has warned.

Dr Jessica Eaton, founder of VictimFocus consultancy, said that when she was delivering teacher training on how to teach sex education in schools, a headteacher said her staff were comfortable using the word “penis” but not “vagina.”

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Writing on Twitter, Dr Eaton said she asked the headteacher how they planned to teach sex education “if you won’t even say vagina”.

The headteacher reportedly said: “I know it’s bad, but we just don’t want to say it - we don’t feel comfortable talking about it and everyone feels the same way.”

Dr Eaton said that out of 35 teachers, none felt comfortable using the correct anatomical terms for female genitalia, which, she said, reflected “how misogynistic and harmful bad sex ed can be”.

Sex education fears

She said the school told her that staff “felt that talking about ‘vagina’ and ‘vulva’ was embarrassing and vulgar but felt that talking about ‘penis’ was fairly uncomfortable but OK.”

She said teachers leading on sex education often neglected to teach girls about their own sexual pleasure or masturbation.

Another Twitter user shared an image of vocabulary for boys and girls from a Year 5 sex education class, where boys’ vocabulary included terms such as “wet dream” and “orgasm”, while the vocabulary for girls focused on “menstruation” and “odours.”

And another commented that the fact boys and girls are separated when learning about menstruation - with boys learning less about the topic - contributed to ignorance in later life.

In the thread, Dr Eaton said squeamishness about using the word “vagina” reflected sexism in society. The school in question wanted to use the word “privates” as a euphemism.

Dr Eaton wrote: “Just more and more evidence that, as a society, we can objectify, sexualise, rape and exploit girls and their bodies - but God forbid we teach them about their own bodies, their own pleasure, their own genitalia because that would be terrible.”