“But we talked about so many areas that aren’t ‘sexy’ – periods, menopause, infertility, miscarriage, abortion, pregnancy, birth, cancer.” In this sense, she saw herself as a “kind of midwife, helping women to birth their own stories”. “The vulva is often seen just as a site of sexual activity,” she says. The pages are filled with people of all ages and sexual orientations, speaking honestly about key life experiences. The stories told in Womanhood are vast (even if there are few people of colour included, which Dodsworth puts down, in part, to cultural taboos, as participants self-selected). In my head, when I touch it, it feels huge – because I was holding on to huge memories of a traumatic birth.” And I remember when I took my photograph and I put it up on my Mac screen, I just thought, ‘Wow, there is a lot going on there.’ I remember looking at my episiotomy scar and it looked tiny. “I couldn’t ask people to do anything I wouldn’t do myself,” she tells me. In fact, she found the experience liberating – posing for her own portrait, too. ![]() She writes that she needed to overcome her “‘good girl’ socialisation and internal self-censorship”. Photograph: Paula Beetlestone/Channel 4ĭodsworth had worried that it would be awkward to be in such an intimate situation with her subjects. Laura Dodsworth, whose own vulva appears among her portraits. Some women were shaking, asking me if they were normal.” ![]() “This time, women were revealing themselves to themselves. “I feel like men were revealing themselves to a woman, in a sympathetic space,” Dodsworth says. For many women, being photographed was the first time they had looked at this part of their body in close detail. This gap in knowledge may also be responsible for the growing numbers of people who undergo labiaplasty: according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, there was a 40% increase in procedures in the US between 20.ĭodsworth’s vulva shoots were a very different experience from Manhood. Meanwhile there is a pervasive squeamishness about vulvas, which may be one factor behind the fact that, in England, cervical smear test rates are at their lowest for two decades. It’s also a part of the body we know relatively little about – historically, there has been a lack of scientific understanding about the clitoris, about orgasms, sexual pleasure. If you’re a straight woman, you don’t see many.” And, as she writes in her book, they’re not easy to look at: “Let’s be honest, it’s tricky to witness our vulvas for ourselves, legs awkwardly astride pocket mirrors, bums shuffled up close to full-length mirrors, or taking a selfie with the unflattering lens of a smartphone.” Vulvas are rarely seen outside porn and childbirth, which Dodsworth puts down partly to their position on the body. But the more she thought about photographing women’s vulvas, the more necessary she felt it was. The photographer has described the series as an “unexpected triptych” she didn’t know the project would take this direction at the start (and, when it was first suggested to her, she didn’t want it to). It’s the third instalment in a series: in Bare Reality and Manhood, Dodsworth photographed and talked to people about their breasts and their penises, respectively (both stories featured in Weekend magazine). ![]() In a book and accompanying film for Channel 4, she tells the stories of 100 women and gender non-conforming people through portraits of their vulvas. It’s this shame that photographer Laura Dodsworth is aiming to overcome with her latest project, Womanhood. I felt a deep sense of shame about my body, which over time became crippling. At 25, I’d spent years considering labiaplasty and having sex with the lights off, because of things ignorant boys had said, as well as some of my friends. Towards the end of last year, I published an essay about my vulva – in a book, and then in the Guardian.
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