We need the patriarchy out of the bedroom as much as we need it out of the boardroom.

Many years ago I decided to take back my body and claim my confidence. This was about both owning my years of education and accepting only a worthy male partner. A man truly interested in learning what I like.

I learned that a healthy conversation starts early on in the sexual encounter and may include “Tell me what’s working for you.” Or even better: “Show me what you like.”

If those conversations were unnerving to my partner or not accepted, well, thank you, next.

As I began to think about how women often prioritize their sexual responses to please men, I looked at other aspects of gynecology with that in mind. And once you start viewing every discussion we have about the female body from the perspective of how it advances the patriarchy or how it pleases men you can’t un-see it.

It is a red pill.

Consider vaginal discharge. Even though urinary incontinence is far more common a problem, it’s discharge that brings women to the office in tears. It’s discharge that is referred to, and something else I can only describe as vaginal mayhem, in absurd articles about “winter” or “summer” vagina. Articles designed to prey on intimate fears about intimate places — as if the vagina, an internal structure that is capable of handling menstrual blood and stretching and even tearing to deliver a baby, is constantly one drop of water or wrong pair of underwear away from total meltdown.

One or two milliliters of normal discharge — a sign of a healthy vagina, and production during intercourse is unquestionably a good thing — is somehow taboo, while men’s ejaculate, which comes out of the very tube from which they also urinate is often glorified, especially in pornography.

Then there is the anatomy itself. More and more patients are asking if they are “normal”; women are wondering if their vaginas are “too loose” and their labia minora (inner lips) are too large for a man to find attractive.