Buffalo Is a Hard Word To Be Handed

Suppose you have spent a decade quietly worried that yours are too big. Somebody now hands you a naming system in which your shape is called Buffalo.

That is not, on the face of it, an improvement.

It is worth staying with the discomfort for a moment, because the word is doing something specific, and because the anatomy sitting underneath it is one of the most ordinary arrangements a human vulva comes in.

The shape

Full, thick outer labia that protrude, curl and hang downward in soft layers rather than sitting flat and closed. Inner labia that are also thick, often ridged or wrinkled along the edge, and often clearly visible past the outer pair. A hood with many folds gathered around it rather than one smooth sleeve. A vaginal opening the framework describes as comparatively wide, with a canal that is comparatively short.

The distance between the clitoris and the vaginal opening is given as two to three fingers, measured by laying your fingers together horizontally underneath the clitoris and counting how many fit before the entrance.

The book puts numbers in inches on the depth and width of the vagina. Those are its figures, not this site's, and they should be read as part of the system rather than as anything that has been measured and checked.

Everything in that first paragraph is real, common variation. Inner labia visible past the outer pair is one of the most frequent ways a vulva is built, not a sign of wear, not caused by sex or cycling or anything else, and the full range is set out in Are My Labia Normal? The Honest Answer. If you have arrived here from a run of search results written by cosmetic surgery clinics, read that one first.

The West, and what the name is for

The framework is a system of nine types set out by Amara Charles in the book credited below, taught in her workshops since the 1990s. Nine vulva shapes, each with an animal name instead of a clinical one, arranged on a wheel of eight compass directions plus a centre. Four directions are cardinal points, described in full with measurements. This shape sits at the West, which the book calls the place of the body and the Earth.

Charles explains the animal by way of the buffalo's standing in Plains Native storytelling as a sacred creature of abundance, an animal from which nothing was wasted and which sustained whole communities. The name, in her usage, is meant to carry generosity and physical power rather than bulk.

Whether that survives contact with a modern English ear is a fair question, and you are allowed to find the word unhelpful while finding the rest of it useful. But it is at least worth knowing that "buffalo" was chosen to mean abundance, which is the opposite of what a surgical consultation means by "excess tissue".

What Charles claims about the women

Attribution matters more here than anywhere, because this is where a description of a body turns into a description of a person, and the two are not the same kind of claim.

Charles describes Buffalo Women as easygoing and physically confident, direct and forthright about what they want, unhurried in the way they approach pleasure, and strongly grounded in the body rather than in the head. In her account the weakness of the type is that the same directness can land too heavily, and needs tempering with attention to what other people have not said out loud. Her summary line for the West's sexual temperament reads: lusty, playful, direct, passionate and powerfully sexual. She also gives preferences, including a slow build, a great deal of unhurried attention, and an average time to orgasm of fifteen to twenty minutes, and she frames these as temperament rather than as anything the anatomy causes.

As with every type on the wheel, the animal carries the argument. The buffalo is generous and grounded, therefore so is the woman named for it. Charles asserts this plainly and without hedging, and her method on these pages is anecdotal: she is writing from years of conversation in her own workshops, not from research. The book is also explicit that a woman can have a direction's anatomy without the described qualities, so even inside the framework the character material is a tendency and not a consequence.

The passage worth having

The book says something in this section that is worth repeating, and one thing about it is worth pushing back on.

It says some women feel embarrassed by large lips, and that once they learn how many partners enjoy them, they come to take real pride in them. That is the book arguing against genital shame, in a chapter that does a fair amount of that, and it is the best thing in it.

The reservation is this. Being told that other people like it is still an external permission slip. It is better than being told to have it cut off, and it is worse than the flat anatomical fact, which is that this shape is common, healthy, and nothing whatsoever went wrong. You do not need anybody's enthusiasm to be entitled to the body you have.

One framework among many

None of this is medicine. There is no research behind the nine types, no clinician sorts patients into them, and no textbook mentions them. It is one author's system, published in one book.

Its use, if you want one, is that it gives a common shape a name that is not a diagnosis. That is genuinely something, in a search landscape where the alternative vocabulary is hypertrophy, protrusion and correction.

And the book's own method is self-identification. It says to read the descriptions and see which you think you are, and it says plainly that a type cannot simply be looked at and named. If you would rather work from the measurement than the description, the framework's own identifying measurement is that clitoris-to-opening distance in finger widths, and the members' quiz at /tools/labia-quiz walks through it without asking for a photograph of anything.

Framework: Amara Charles, "The Sexual Practices of Quodoushka: Teachings from the Nagual Tradition" (Destiny Books), chapter 8, "Female Genital Anatomy Types".