Vagina dispatchesLife and styleThe Vagina Dispatches asked you for your drawings, and we got plenty – ranging from the requested vulvas to penises to cars. Here’s what we learned
- Add your own drawing here: draw a vulva
Submissions for the Great Wall of Vulvas will close down on 31 December. Add your vulva drawing before the year comes to a close.
We were prepared for the penises. We were ready for the onslaught of offensive, hand-drawn internet memes. The Volvos came as a surprise.
We created the Great Wall of Vulvas to accompany the Vagina Dispatches, the Guardian video series on women’s health. The first episode focused on the question: “What does the vagina vulva even look like?” According to one survey, only half of women aged 26-35 were able to label the vagina accurately. As one person featured in the video said: “How can [women] be in charge of their bodies if they don’t even know what they’re called?”
If they’ve seen them at all, some people have only seen vaginas and vulvas depicted clinically as pink medical diagrams in health textbooks, while penises are frequently found carved into the very desk the textbook sits on (not to mention scrawled on bathroom stalls, tagged on lockers, drawn in snow …).
As Dr Hilda Hutcherson said in episode one, no two vulvas look exactly the same. So we set out to prove it, by creating the world’s largest collection of vulva drawings. We wanted vulvas to be seen, and to be seen en masse. Inspiration came from a few sources:
- Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, an art piece depicting the vulvas of 39 important women in history.
- Weegee’s photographs from Coney Island, which so effectively showcased the massive crowds who, despite their differences, were united in a desire to stay cool.
- Aaron Koblin’s The Sheep Market, a collection of 10,000 pixelated sheep drawn by Amazon’s Mechanical Turk workers.
From artist to wall
The vulvas did not go straight from the digital pen to the wall. After the wall went live, the Guardian US interactive team spent the entire weekend swiping through vulva after vulva after penis after vulva, and making sure only the vulvas came through. And we’ve been examining the incoming vulvas daily since then.
We were impressed that the great majority of submissions were correctly drawn vulvas, rather than the health-textbook diagram of the vagina, which also resembles the logo for the Dodge Ram. But another car found its way into the project.
One hundred and three people felt pretty darn clever. They thought: “You know what vulva sounds like? I bet nobody thought of that …” So, in honor of the 103 people who used to sit in the back of their classrooms and crack jokes, The Small Wall of Volvos. Good joke.
The vulvas
With boxy vehicles out of the way, we could return to our initial investigation: what does a normal vulva look like? Some 21,000 vulva drawings later, we were pleased to confirm that there isn’t one. Submitted drawings varied in size, shape and color. There were tiny labia and long ones. Expansive and shorn pubic hair.
Drawings did tend to break down into two points of view. More frequently, it was the view of concentric ovals one can only see on oneself with a hand mirror. But there were also many W-shaped front views, like the cup, which has often been a symbol for the vagina.
After looking at 21,000 of them, these were some of our favorites
They captured the undulating natural curves of vulvas, and some used negative space masterfully, or as masterfully as pixel art can be. Importantly, they weren’t cars.
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