SYDNEY, Australia — I defy you to find any female leader in politics or in business whose vagina is currently discussed over dinner tables. Not the idea of her vagina, but her actual vagina; its folds, curves, colors and depths. I’ll wait.

In my view, the professional world is much better when genitalia are kept tucked out of sight, for the sake of efficiency, decency and those of us who simply want to get some work done. It’s extremely unfortunate that we live in a world where you can be lingering over tea with a friend on a rainy day when — boom! — a famous man’s penis pops up, so to speak, in conversation, and you realize that millions of people know something about what it looks like.

The descriptions never leave you. They fester in the mind like mold in typhoon season — especially if the mentions come from women who never wanted to see them in the first place. And especially when you live in a state, like New South Wales, Australia or a country, like the United States, where a recurrent theme in public debate is the control of female bodies, but not men’s.

Sadly for me, this week I discovered, through no inquiry of my own, that the accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was asked during a deposition in 2009 if he had an egg-shaped penis. A friend casually brought it up while devouring a scone, squinting with the horror.