For the last week, I've had a posse of post-it notes in my car, with drawings of vulvas/vaginas on them.
Here's why: not that long ago my friends were boozing on and got onto the topic of vaginas - as you do - and soon realised they all had different perceptions on the general look of their vagina and surrounds. They each grabbed a post-it note and drew what they believed their vagina to look like and it was only at the point of comparison, did they realise how different each of their vulvas were.
They are all amazing women of age 28 and up until then, they’d all assumed they either were, or weren’t part of ‘the norm’.
Now back to me.
Several years ago, at a time in my life when I hadn’t quite got a grip on my sexuality - let's call it my sexual awakening - I found myself obsessed with Eve Ensler’s book,
The Vagina Monologues. (I was also taking recreational drama classes!)
As things personally started to fall nicely into place, so did a need to 'spread the legs' on the lack of vaginas/vulvas in the media, the mainstream and the minds of many women.
Currently, as a society it’s as if we’re veiling the vulva,
By hiding it away in the shadows, we're not getting to know it and the further we become from understanding/owning it ourselves. Often, when we don’t understand something, we fear it, which is only further perpetuating the cycle.
I think it’s important for women to understand the deliberate censorship
that exists around female genitalia, so that we can take steps towards celebrating it.
The more we hide the real examples of sexuality the more insecurity, particularly within young women, we create. We need to be able to embrace what it means to be different and the only way to do this is to see, and hopefully appreciate, these differences.
Unless you're a lesbian for a day, a week or forever, you’re generally not seeing that much of other females’ genitals. So from where are we getting an accurate portrayal?
Well, it wasn’t that long ago that
Clem Bastow contributed a piece to TheVine cheering an episode of SBS’
The Hungry Beast which featured, a look into vagina censorship and labiaplasty.
This episode went into fine detail regarding the classification board and the censorship laws regarding soft porn, suggesting that only “neat and tidy” vaginas are appropriate for these magazines.
A former editor of
Picture magazine is even quoted as saying, “the labia minora is too offensive for soft porn”. Also interviewed is a graphic designer whose job it is to cut and paste the image of the woman’s vulva so it is ‘healed to a single crease’.
What is happening here?
Essentially, we’ve got a classification board restricting all types of
female genitalia that don't resemble Barbie’s, as anything
'normal' - which there isn’t when it comes to your coochie - is considered to be too OFFENSIVE!
Not surprisingly, in Australia the number of women getting labiaplasty - defined as the ‘reduction of excess tissue of the inner (labia minora) or outer (labia majora) vaginal lips’ - is increasing every year by 100%.
Remember when we all thought Lady Gaga might have been hiding a small
penis? We couldn’t get our judgmental eyes on the video quick enough,
but when Gaga wanted to show us in full view what she was actually made
of, we couldn’t pixilate her puss fast enough.
Whoa hey, Board Of All Things Vagina, you sound like
China
and their Internet restrictions.
But back to those post-its.
Imagine how excited I was when my friends showed me these drawings of their ‘vaginas’, and explained their reasons for the drawings.
It’s moments like these that I realise why
I do what I do. There’s way too much censorship when it comes to female sexuality, diversity and freedom, censorship that creates a distance between women and their bodies and men and their expectations.
It’s important that this changes.
Vagina/vulva/female genitals, we definitely want and need more of it
on our quest to claiming the power in our female sexuality.
So don’t save the life drawing for a hen’s day. Go ahead and get doodling your pussy post-its. It’s quite the leg-spreader, or should I say eye-opener?