body image

Back in September I wrote a post called When Did Being Called a Feminist Become an Insult? I didn’t really have an answer at the time, I mostly wrote about my personal musings on the questions, but after reading the first Chapter of Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth I have or rather she has an answer to the question. It might be pretty obvious to some, but she wrote about it so well, that I’m here to share it with you all:

The caricature of the Ugly Feminist was resurrected to dog the steps of the women’s movement. The caricature is unoriginal; it was coined to ridicule the feminists of the nineteenth century. Lucy Stone herself, who supporters saw as “a prototype of womanly grace… fresh and fair as the morning,” was derided by detractors with “the usual report” about Victorian feminists: “a big masculine woman, wearing boots, smoking a cigar, swearing like a trooper.” As Betty Friedan put it presciently in 1960, even before the savage revamping of that old caricature: “The unpleasant image of feminists today resembles less the feminists themselves than the image fostered by the interests who so bitterly opposed the vote for women in state after state.” Thirty years on, her conclusion is more true than ever: That resurrected caricature, which sought to punish women for their public acts by going after their private sense of self, became a paradigm for new limits placed on aspiring women everywhere. After the women’s movement’s second wave, the beauty myth was perfected to checkmate power at every level in individual women’s lives.

This book is AWESOME. I’ve only read chapter one and it has pretty much blown me away. You should all get your hands on a copy from somewhere. I borrowed mine from my neighbor. Seek it out! Spread the word!

Crossposted from Cuntlove.

Frank Cordelle had an idea. He took nude photographs of women whose ages spanned over a century. The first picture is of the head of a baby girl crowning through her mother’s vagina. Not quite making it to a hundred, the last picture is of a 94-year-old woman whose photograph is accompanied by the following message:

I posed so some old lady will not fear age, and some old men would know old women are not so strange. I loved the challenge of posing nude, such excitement! My husband would have said, “Some picture, kid!”

Most of the pictures are in fact accompanied by a message written by the women themselves and although I did not read the entire book, I did take a look at the excerpts on Frank’s website and let me tell you they are heartbreaking, but in a good way. My eyes literally welled up with tears. As did my neighbors eyes when I told her about the project and the stories these brave women have shared.

I recently read in Sex for One that Betty Dodson was convinced that she had abnormal labia since one of them was longer than the other. As she tells it, when she was a kid she thought that she had deformed them by masturbating too much. She even made a deal with God that she would immediately stop masturbating if the situation was rectified, only to eventually make a compromise with herself, which consisted of only masturbating on the shorter side in an attempt to even them out.

It wasn’t only Betty was in her thirties that she came to realize that her labia were perfectly normal and in fact desirable. Her lover at the time asked if he could look at her cunt and ashamed she told him what was “wrong” with her lips. Fortunately he assured her that they were perfectly normal and in fact beautiful. In an attempt to reassure her and show her that labia came in all shapes and sizes, he took out some porno magazines and showed her photographic evidence.

This was the first time that Betty was exposed to that kind of material and the experience blew her mind. She came to accept her own body by simply seeing that other women had similarly shaped labia and that our bodies didn’t all fit into one image of how things ought to look. 

I‘ve had so many conversations with women who have felt that their genitals where deformed in some way or another, or at the very least not a representation of the status-quo. One person I know, had been told by an ex-sexual partner that her clit was quite predominant, which led her to question her genitals in a way that she had never considered before. When another friend was telling us how her inner labia hung lower than her outer labia, I started to question why mine didn’t do that. I wondered if my inner labia were too small. 

I’ve had many similar questions about my vulva: Was it too hairy? Where my lips too big? Was my clit too small? Was my pubic bone too prominent? How did it smell? How did it taste? From looking at my brother’s porn magazines, I determined that the entrance to my vagina had too many folds or that it looked wrinkly, or too stretchy, something I thought I was worsening by masturbating. Yup, I was concerned that my selflovin’ habits were going to make my pussy look prematurely old or used in some way. 

I’m not the only one, I know I’m not. This is a problem.