Yesterday, my younger sister gave birth to a totally cute little boy named Braidan. Fittingly, as we sat around in her hospital room, we watched bits and pieces of a marathon of I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant. This show is pretty interesting, if dramatic, especially considering the responses you see from people who hear just the title alone: “How can a woman not know she is pregnant?! How stupid can you be??” Even the people present yesterday asked those questions, including a nurse who came into the room.

The show, I think, does a pretty good job of explaining why the woman did not know she was pregnant. She never had regular periods anyway; she lost weight rather than gained it; she didn’t have any cravings; she was told she could not have children. I’m sure that if these people watched the show, they’d be surprised and yet interested that yes, truly, a woman can not know that she is pregnant.

In any case, I think that people’s common “WTF!” reactions to this show are rather unsurprising. Our culture is pretty out of touch with women’s bodies and biological functions. There are misconceptions everywhere about periods, pregnancy, vaginal fluids, the vagina itself, the vulva and labia, breasts, and so on. A lot of people are sadly unaware of the vast diversity and variations present across all women. It seems that we are programmed to believe that all women’s bodies are the same, that they all operate in the precise same way, each part doing a precise job exactly the same way, every single time, like an assembly line.

Maybe life would be a lot easier for some women if our bodies did work that way, but I think the diversity is pretty cool. I think it’s interesting that some women have labia minora that stick way out, and some have labia minora that hide inside. Some women have pretty evenly sized breasts; others have breasts that are different cup sizes from each other. Some women have a clockwork period, while other women haven’t had a period in months. Every woman is unique. Our society needs to be more in touch with that fact–and more in touch with the realities of women’s bodies: that they are not all the same, that the diversity between them is not a sign of error or illness, but it in fact unique and beautiful.