Not long after I started making v-portraits for vagina vérité®, it was pointed out to me that it is not the vagina I am photographing: it’s the vulva. It’s true. The vagina is the canal. The vulva is what’s on the outside. Our vulvas are the faces of our vaginas. I think of them as the threshold into the vagina conversation I want to have. The v-portrait project began when a friend of mine asked me if I liked the way my vagina looked – I knew she meant vulva; it didn’t dawn on me to correct her. Partly because, though I knew of it, I didn’t use the word vulva back then either, and partly because it was – at that moment – beside the point. She wanted to ask me something and to tell me something. Something that we had never discussed before; something that she probably had not discussed with anyone previously. Correcting her usage wasn’t going to make that easier or clearer. I knew exactly what we were talking about.
What I’m interested in is conversation. If that means that sometimes you – or I – will use the incorrect word that is widely used incorrectly and so, commonly understood to mean that incorrect thing that we’re talking about, so it goes. At least we’re getting started.
So, mine is a vagina conversation, that begins with me photographing vulvas because my friend and I weren’t the only ones who had not seen what other women’s vaginas looked like, and that brings us to the vulva, and to anatomy [much of which we know little about], the names of our parts – to our bodies. Our stories, our experiences of our bodies. I don’t mind taking a few steps to get here.
She could just as easily called it her bits, coochie, pussy, cunt, privates, panocha, hoo ha, fannie, woman parts, down there, choot, plumpy, Gee Gee – you get the idea.
a rose is a rose is a rose… right?
What do you call it?
Tell us in the comments here, or fill out the vagina-names questionnaire at vaginaverite.com
related page: about the v-book
C...
June 19, 2010
I love this post. I was smiling thinking … this reminds me of the movie Fried Green Tomatoes when the woman is horrified that they’d been given mirrors to self-inspect their down there! If I am being “naughty” I call it a pussy but among mixed company I say my privates. Some people can’t handle if you are too blunt about that part of the body.