Knowing thyself: Constructing women's sexual identity theory to include sexual anatomy knowledge, vulva genital awareness, and sociopolitical ideations

Abstract

A Women's Sexual Health Model suggests women's sexual identity centers on four interrelated concepts of the self. The four interrelated concepts center on the self-concept, followed by the sexual self, the social self, and the sociopolitical self. The current research study examined and validated a three-factor structure of a newly designed measure of women's genital perceptions, titled, vulva genital awareness (VGA). The VGA measure contains two hierarchic factors that capture women's genital perceptions in terms of the sexual self (VGA-Self) and the sexual self with a partner (VGA-Partner). The study also investigated the role of sexual anatomy knowledge in young women's lives. The women in this sample completed a sexual anatomy assessment. The women with high sexual anatomy knowledge were also more likely to report higher VGA and sexual satisfaction, when compared to women with low sexual anatomy knowledge. Furthermore, the women who reported masturbation to orgasm were more likely to know more about their sexual anatomy and more likely to report sexual satisfaction than women who reported no masturbation activity in the past 30 days or ever. The findings from this study suggest the importance of sexual anatomy education and masturbation in the development of women's sexual self-concept, thus the inclusion of these aspects could improve comprehensive sexual education programming in the U.S. Future research and clinical implications are discussed.