It’s not coming out in time for Christmas, but that’s no reason not to pre-order Body Drama for your younger sister/cousin/daughter.

As reported on Broadsheet, the book by Nancy Redd is a handbook about “boobs, vaginas, and everything in between”.

Redd, who’s a 26-year-old Harvard graduate and former Miss Virginia, wanted to write a book that would help teenage girls find answers to the questions they had about their own bodies (e.g., Why do I sweat so much? Why is one breast bigger than the other? My vagina smells — what’s going on?) — not to mention provide photographs of real (as opposed to airbrushed) photographs of female bodies — and provide some solid health advice. Because, as Redd herself puts it in the book’s introduction, “our educational system spends millions of dollars creating detailed health programs, but those programs skip over the basic ABCs of basic body smarts. We’ve been so focused (and understandably so) on sexual education that we’ve completey ignored body education … How can we respect and protect our bodies if we don’t know what real bodies look like? If we can hardly utter the word vagina, much less peek at it without feeling dirty, how can we own and love it and ourselves?”

Good point! Sounds like the perfect antidote to the Vagina Institute.

Posted by Jess McCabe on 27 November 2007, at 11:10 PM