Labia liberation! The movement to end vulva anxiety for good
“If you start a conversation about labia with anyone whose labia protrude, “it is like fireworks go off in their brain … I’m not weird? I’m not ugly?”
—TikToker, Jennifer Prentice (@jenniferprentice)
‘Praise your petals’ is a floral vulva installation at the Vagina Museum in Camden, north London. Photograph: PinPep/Rex/Shutterstock
September 13, 2021
The gist: A new movement, mostly by digital native Gen Z women is rising to end the shaming of all things vuvla, the non-naming, which is predominant in our culture, i.e. referring to it as ‘down there;’ or worse, its reduction to degrading terms like “beef curtains” and fanny flaps“ have dominated the conversation for far too long.
“Quite a lot of people have never even seen their own, so it’s hard to have a concept of what’s normal.”
—Zoe Williams, the spokesperson for theVagina Museum
However, a new wave of Gen Z women are “reclaiming difference as part of being human,” and are creating new forms of women-centric representation that challenge the dominant spaces where it has been present, and presented: in porn and medical textbooks.
There are doctors: “sincere, social-savvy gynaecologists [sic] – such as Jennifer Lincoln (@drjenniferlincoln) and Jen Gunter (@drjengunter), the author of The Vagina Bible – explain the vast spectrum of what is normal
Artists: Lydia Reeves, is Brighton-based feminist body-casting artist + author of My Vulva and I, was young, she says, there was no such thing as a vulva-positive online community, so she is thrilled that, while such communities are not ubiquitous, She is keen to underline that pornography was not the problem, per se – it was that there was no visual or cultural representation other than the very particular aesthetic of pornography.
“There are definitely those spaces: so many Instagrams, so many people talking about it now. I’m hopeful that we’re turning a bit of a corner.”
—Lydia Reeves
And institutions, like the UK Vagina Museum, opened by Florence Schechter, in 2019, partially in response to the “genital perfection” movement, and the rise of labiaplasty surgery in the beginning of the 00’s. The surgery involves altering “the appearance of the vulva – generally by trying to reduce the size of the labia minora, the inner genital lips, so that they don’t hang below the labia majora, the outer ones.” The Museum went online in "a partnership with [the tampon brand] Callaly, commissioning some realistic drawings of vulvas in all their glorious diversity,” which was taken down, but later reinstated by Instagram.
The #faxx:
In a poll of more than 3,600 readers, the online women’s magazine Refinery29 found that almost half (48%) had concerns about the appearance of their vulva. Of those, 64% were worried about the size and 60% about the shape of their vulva, with almost one-third (30%) worried about the colour [sic]of their genitals.
Link to Zoe Williams’ Guardian article here.
Photograph: Lydia Reeves, Brighton-based feminist body-casting artist + author of My Vulva and I (Linda Nylind/The Guardian)