We’re entering the age of the vulva*. If you happen to are sceptical, take stock of the present popular culture landscape for a moment. Consider Cara Delevingne gleefully crawling through her vagina tunnel, of Janelle Monae’s vagina trousers in her “Pynk” music video. Consider Goop’s “This Smells Like My Vagina” candle and Erykah Badu’s “Badussy” incense crafted from burning her own underwear; of celebrities left, right, and centre shilling sex toys. 

Slowly but surely, vulvas are making their way into the cultural conversation, a suitable – fun, even – topic to reference and openly discuss. It’s a protracted overdue shift for the once taboo body part and one which is way needed in a time when so many individuals with vulvas still experience such deep shame and anxiety around their anatomy.

Shame has been baked into vulvas from the start. The original Latin term for the vulva was pudendum which directly translates as the part to be ashamed of. And lots of individuals are – research has found that one-third of young women avoid going to the doctor for gynecological health issues, while 65 per cent struggle to even say the words vagina or vulva. Last 12 months, a study conducted by period product brand Callaly discovered that one in 4 people have negative feelings, including hatred and disgust, towards their vulvas and that one in five people aged 16-24 have considered cutting their labia or bleaching their vulvas.

This anxiety over the looks of their vulvas is leading people, sometimes as young as nine years old, to increasingly go under the knife. In 2013, labiaplasty, cosmetic surgery that reduces the scale of the labia minora, was the fourth hottest type of cosmetic surgery within the US and the third hottest within the UK, and the figures have only continued to rise. In 2019, the variety of labiaplasties performed worldwide increased by 24 per cent from the 12 months before. 

“I feel quite loads of it’s that almost all people don’t see many vulvas of their life, and after they do it’s often in either art or porn,” says Zoe Williams, spokesperson for the (world’s first) Vagina Museum, on where this shame is coming from. “Throughout the history of art there’s been very specific ways of depicting vulvas that are at all times hairless and without labia protruding. Sometimes not even the pudendal cleft is visible. That becomes the usual and anything deviating from that becomes incorrect.” 

Major sites like Pornhub are crammed with videos tagged ‘innie pussy’, ‘perfect innie pussy’ and ‘innie vagina’. Meanwhile, educational and artistic depictions of vulvas face censorship and regulation. “There’s a rule in Australia that magazines cannot show the true likeness of a vulva in a drawing, it may possibly only show two lines and all the things all ‘tucked in,’” explains Ellie Sedgwick, the photographer behind the Flip Through My Flaps blog. “This will not be the fact! My labia have been called a kebab because they were ‘messy’ and never neat and tidy. People could be really cruel.”

“For lots of these people, the negative feelings [about their vulvas] have made them insecure and embarrassed in intimate situations, and have often affected their ability to be freely intimate with their partners or lovers” – Hilde Atalanta

If we aren’t seeing many vulvas outside of the worlds of porn and art, lots of us also often aren’t even seeing our own – one-third of people surveyed by Callaly said they’d never checked out their very own vulva. (Nearly half of the 16-24 12 months olds didn’t even know what a vulva was.) It was exactly due to this type of ignorance and misinformation that second-wave feminism within the Seventies encouraged people to look properly at their vulvas and demystify their very own anatomy. “Take a mirror and examine yourself. Touch yourself, smell yourself, even taste your individual secretions. You might be your body and also you usually are not obscene,” foundational text Our Bodies, Our Selves stated. Within the face of shame and chronic lack of education, these consciousness-raising sessions were radical. Informing yourself about your individual reproductive health became a political motion.

While the activity has largely fallen out of favour within the intervening years, it was brought back to attention in an episode of Sex Education released last autumn. The storyline began with 17-year-old Aimee (Aimée Lou Wood) examining a plastic replica of a vulva in sex therapist Jean’s (Gillian Anderson) office. “Um, my vagina doesn’t seem like this, one among my lip bits is longer than the opposite,” she says. 

After explaining that labia come “in all different shapes, sizes and colors,” Jean directs Aimee to an internet site showcasing a wide range of vulvas – a real site created in collaboration with Dutch illustrator Hilde Atalanta, the artist behind The Vulva Gallery and the sex education book A Celebration of Vulva Diversity. Afterward we see Aimee taking a have a look at her vulva in a mirror, deciding it looks like a “geranium”. Scenes like this show there is no such thing as a such thing as a standard vulva (it’s scientific fact) and more than half – 56 per cent – of vulvas have visible labia minora AKA outie labia. 

“Sexual health education is poor in lots of countries and representation of genital variations isn’t a part of the teachings taught in schools. Young individuals aren’t taught that their genitals can look very diverse, and that that is OK and normal,” says Atalanta, who founded The Vulva Gallery in 2016 after attending a lecture on the University of Amsterdam where they were studying clinical psychology and learning in regards to the huge global rise in labiaplasty. They decided to do something about this lack of diverse representation with the hope of teaching the following generations and helping them feel more comfortable and assured of their bodies.

Over time Atalanta has painted the vulvas of tons of of individuals – the Vulva Gallery is gender inclusive and welcomes all – and though they are saying experiences have varied, the subject of vulva shame has arisen steadily within the stories they’ve heard. “For lots of these people, the negative feelings have made them insecure and embarrassed in intimate situations, and have often affected their ability to be freely intimate with their partners or lovers,” they are saying. Thankfully Atalanta’s work is offering relief and luxury to many: “The messages I receive on a day by day basis are very positive. Several people have even told me that, due to the Vulva Gallery, they’ve cancelled the labiaplasty surgery they’d scheduled.”    

It seems the tide is changing, nevertheless – a minimum of should you’re on TikTok. There, users try to normalise and have fun “outie labia” using humour and memes. Ying Lee AKA @sativaplath69 makes videos joking about gatekeeping phat coochie culture, “plateau pussy privilege”, and the comments and bullying they’ve received due to their “mountain mound”. While former Playboy Bunny Gaby Scaringe (@gabygabss) has racked up thousands and thousands of views on her videos making light of her “outie labia” (“Normal girl, 5’4”, blue eyes, brown hair, a meaty outie”) and educating people on the variety of vulvas, and has even created  an underwear line that accommodates large labia, called Cherri. 

@sativaplath69 it is a joke but in addition serious stop appropriating phat coochie culture #fyp #comedy ♬ original sound – Ying

TikTok doesn’t at all times make it easy for users to debate vulvas openly, though because it often censors even educational content across the anatomy (the Vagina Museum stopped using the platform because their videos were being taken down for speaking directly about vulvas, they usually face continual threat from other social media). And last summer, Instagram banned a post they shared of an academic illustration of a vulva, a part of a campaign by Callaly.

“We Need To Talk About Vulvas” aimed to debunk the parable of the “perfect vulva” by amplifying diverse, real experiences and posting realistic, informative imagery. By banning the photographs and taking down the post, Instagram paradoxically proved the purpose of the campaign and the importance of education and de-stigmatisation around vulvas. The brand also struggled with getting its campaign covered by mainstream publications, who didn’t want to indicate pictures of even the plaster casts that had been fabricated from the vulvas of ten Callaly spokespeople. “We needed to persuade them to make use of the photographs. It just goes to indicate how taboo vulvas still are,” says Jody Elphick, Callaly’s former head of name who led the campaign. 

Social media and mainstream representation is usually a vital tool in facilitating these discussions, but while they’re still censoring and regulating bodies and vulvas, the conversation might want to move beyond the digital realm. Clearly there remains to be a protracted technique to go to reassure women and other people all over the place that their vulvas are perfectly high quality just as they’re. “Instagram is nice for spreading awareness, but I feel the guts of the conversation must be real people getting honest with one another, ideally in the identical room,” says Elphick.

*For those unsure on the difference between vulvas and vaginas: “vulva” is the name for the collective external parts of the feminine genitalia including the clitoris and labia. “Vagina” refers solely to the interior tube connecting the vulva with the cervix i.e. where babies come out, tampons etc. go in.