Pussy Portraits

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His reasoning was that he wanted me to realise that I had a beautiful body and that sex was a wonderful thing. You wouldn’t ask the same if I’d said breast, bowel, or brain – but when it’s something in between your legs, there’s an assumption that you’ve done something wrong; that you’ve slept with a lot of people. I had my cervix removed, the surrounding kind of tissue area and the top third of my vagina and, thank God, didn’t need further treatment, like chemotherapy.

I also know when a chap is in the bedroom and he’s about to get his end away, he’s not going to be thinking, ‘Oh, it could have done with a bit of work’. In reality, my labia were probably quite small pieces of skin, but to me they felt like big elephant ears. In the last couple of years, I have discovered that there are so many more labels and identities and the world is really opening up. It turned out I have endometriosis, uterine polyps and fibroids, which was a blow on top of a missing ovary. Consultant gynecologist Dr Pandelis Athanasias says “there’s no such thing as a normal vagina – they naturally vary in size, shape or colour.

I thought perhaps the rise in labiaplasty wouldn’t be happening if people understood more about what other women looked like,” she says. Because if you find yourself feeling admiration, pride and inspiration for another person, it becomes easier to apply that to yourself, too. I loved that, because interviewing women who have been through the menopause and still have incredible sex lives sends out a beautiful message about womanhood.

Some of the women I met had looked at themselves lots, some women had never looked and didn’t want to see it, and some women saw it for the first time on the back of my camera, which was a big deal. The idea that women are turning away from pleasure because they’re worried about what they look, smell and taste like has unearthed a fundamental message for Laura.Where I’ve found that, generally, men are under pressure to be ‘enough’ – big enough, getting laid enough, rich enough, man enough – women feel like they’re ‘too much’ – too fat, too hairy, too saggy, too female.

if I think back to some of the women I've been involved with sexually, this holds true as well, because I sat there thinking yesterday, their faces definitely didn't give me a clear picture of what their labia might look like. From there, it was a familiar format with Laura taking the pictures of each vulva and interviewing each person about what it means to them. I have opened up that conversation about being a man and a woman by taking these uniquely male and female body parts. One woman had an orgasm when she gave birth, another talked about the different types of orgasms she can have, which inspired me to think about sensuality differently.Lots of women were looking at themselves for the first time or they hadn’t looked at themselves much.