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“Um, my vagina doesn’t look like this — one of my lip bits is longer than the other.” That blunt observation was made by 17-year-old Aimee Gibbs on the Netflix show Sex Education, and it made a lot of people with vulva shame feel less weird and alone.
In the scene, which aired during Season 3 earlier this fall, Aimee (Aimee Lou Wood) is poking around a giant plastic replica of a vulva in the office of sex therapist Jean Milburn (Gillian Anderson). “Well, it’s just an educational model,” Jean replies. “The external part is called the vulva, and the lip bits you’re talking about are called the labia, and they come in all different shapes, sizes and colors.”
Aimee isn’t the only person who can benefit from Jean’s lesson. Vulvas have been a source of confusion, fascination, and shame for centuries. There was a time when the reigning scientific belief was that the anatomy of half the population was simply an inversion of a penis and scrotum. To this day, most people can’t correctly identify parts of the vulva. And many are unaware that no two vulvas are alike — though shows like Sex Education, along with in-your-face art and conversations in the mainstream media — are changing that.
After setting Aimee straight, Jean directs her to the illuminating website, All Vulvas Are Beautiful, which shows just how varied vulvas really are. (Hint: they go well beyond the tiny, tucked-in, Barbie-smooth vulvas most commonly shown in popular porn.) The site is a collaboration between Netflix and Dutch illustrator Hilde Atalanta, the artist behind The Vulva Gallery and the sex education book A Celebration of Vulva Diversity. “Seeing oneself represented in popular media can give you the reassurance that you are in fact normal, that you belong,” said Atalanta. “[It’s what] many of us are looking for.”
That kind of positive representation is long overdue, as vulva shame has also been linked to subjugation for centuries. In the 19th century, an enslaved Black South African woman named Saartje (Sarah) Baartman — better known as the Hottentot Venus — was exhibited around Europe and made famous in popular culture for her large buttocks, but in the scientific world, she was known “as a freak of nature based on the size and shape of her labia,” said Sabrina Strings, PhD, a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine and the author of Fearing the Black Body. After Baartman’s death in 1815, her body was dissected and her brain and genitals were pickled, placed in jars and displayed in a Paris museum until 1974.
Like other indigenous Khoikhoi women, Baartman had an elongated labia, according to Strings. Doctors took that as "evidence of inferiority," said Strings. In their view, her large anatomy made her a "perfect specimen of African identity” — hypersexual, more sexually active, and diseased. These white, male European doctors were looking for any excuse to justify slavery and claim racial superiority, said Strings.
While vulva appearance is no longer used for racial eugenics, shame can still affect those who view their vulva as abnormal. That’s something Atalanta has been focused on since 2017, asking people around the world to share photos of their vulvas as reference for the tender and intimate paintings. Accompanying the paintings are personal stories examining the journey toward self-acceptance that each of the people have taken. Atalanta, who identifies as queer and non-binary, made a point to include portraits and voices of not only cisgender women, but a spectrum of gender identities (such as agender, bigender and gender-fluid to name a few) as well as diversity in biological sex, such as people with vulvas who are intersex.
Atalanta started the Vulva Gallery in 2016, after attending a clinical psychology lecture on the global rise of labiaplasty (surgery to reduce the size of the inner lips). “We’ve somehow gotten the idea that there’s something wrong with us,” Atalanta said. “But there isn’t.”
That anxiety over labia length and shape — including “visibility in yoga pants” as a 2017 study put it — is causing girls as young as nine to go under the knife.
The reality is, more than half of vulvas have visible labia minora, meaning those “lip bits” are protruding in some way, and yes, can even be asymmetrical (like Aimee’s in Sex Education). Still, many continue to hold shame over their anatomy.
“I hear women who are devastated because they have an “outie” vagina...it’s awful,” said Jen Gunter, MD, an OB/GYN and author of The Vagina Bible. Gunter, who famously calls out harmful vaginal trends on the internet, said parents have asked her to perform labiaplasty on their girls, because the girls’ labia minora are noticeable and that makes the parents uncomfortable. “A lot of times it's the mom who’s worked up about it, and I'm like, ‘Stop looking at your daughter's labia. That's the answer to the problem.” In another case, Gunter said, a mother complained that her teenage daughter was uncomfortable riding a bike. “I'm like, men have scrotum with balls. They can fit on a bike saddle.”
Gunter said she’s been seeing fewer of these patients in recent years. (Although she does still perform these surgeries for people who have had birth trauma and damage to their labia or people who’ve had dramatic weight loss and have extremely stretched out labia as a result.)
“Those young girls did have symptoms but they weren't from their labia,” said Gunter. “They might have [problems from] chronic hair removal and overuse of products, or they had irritation, but they mistakenly believed that their irritation was from their labia when really it was from irritant dermatitis.”
Another type of cosmetic surgery gaining popularity is monsplasty, to tighten the mons pubis, the part of the vulva directly above your outer labia where most of your pubic hair grows. Gunter said she’s heard about plastic surgeons referring to that as a “pussy lift.”
“It’s normal to have a fat pad in your mons, that's part of how you’re built.”
For some, recasting how we think of vulvas and what’s normal is quite literal.
Lydia Reeves is a body casting artist in Brighton, UK, and the author of My Vulva and I, which came out in September. She started her vulva diversity project in 2019 though she first dabbled in it 10 years ago while at university studying fine art. “We learned the basics of how to cast our hands. I went home from this session and tried to cast my vulva straight away, obviously,” said Reeves. “I feel like we’ve grown up in a society which has drowned us in shame and embarrassment and never feeling good enough. I never felt there was the space for me to celebrate my body, which had lasting, damaging effects for me growing up. And so, I wanted to create this space for others.”
When Reeves put a callout on Instagram for vulva models, she had plenty of volunteers to start and her project took off from there. Throughout the sessions, people told her how much the casts, which are set in plaster or shiny metallic and colorful resin, have helped them reconnect to their vulva, or helped them look at it in a different, non-judgmental way. “It’s quite difficult to properly look at our own vulvas!” she wrote in an email. “So having the cast on display, as a piece of artwork, for people to look at every day in their homes, gives people an opportunity to really get to know what they look like, and accept it for what it is.”
That feeling of connection to your own vulva is also crucial to maintaining healthy sexual relationships, said Rhiannon Webb, a therapist and educator who specializes in sexuality and relationships in Vancouver, Canada.
“When a person is worrying about how they look, feel, or smell, they’re not likely focusing on whether they enjoy what’s happening in the moment. When we feel shame, our bodies react as if we’re in danger on a nervous system level,” said Webb. “Not only do our minds struggle to be in the moment if we’re dealing with shame, but our actual nervous system is going to have a hard time experiencing sexual pleasure.”
As a first step toward reclaiming confidence in their bodies, some are taking a mirror and looking at their own vulvas, Strings says. People who have penises don’t need to do that. “For the most part, [cis men] understand how to get themselves off. We don't necessarily have the same understanding of our genitalia ... because of shame, fear and not wanting to be different.” For people with vulvas, Strings says this is changing. “I think that we are entering a moment in which more cis women are starting to say, ‘My body, my pleasure. I don't care what you think. I'm going to embrace it.’”
In Sex Education, Aimee’s path to acceptance and empowerment come to a healthy conclusion, too. She inspects her own vulva with a handheld mirror and has an epiphany that hers looks like a “geranium.” Later in the season, her confidence fully blooms by baking “vulva cupcakes” and spreading the message of vulva diversity and self-love. Describing her newfound piping skills, she shows them off, one by one: “This one has a longer labia, which is really common. This one’s all tucked in. With pubes, without pubes. This one’s more frilly,” she says. “This one’s crooked, like mine.”
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