Viva La Vulva

It’s time to change the conversation around our most misunderstood body part, says author Lynn Enright, whose book on female genitalia is part of a new wave of art and literature on the subject

Crinkly, asymmetrical, hairy, pierced, plucked, bleeding, tattooed. The vulvas featured on The Vulva Gallery website and its phenomenally popular Instagram account (303,000 followers at the time of going to press), each lovingly drawn by Dutch artist Hilde Atalanta, are gloriously detailed and diverse. Tucked away and taboo, the vulva has been overlooked for millennia – but this spring it’s coming into focus and Atalanta’s illustrations are just the beginning.

My own book, Vagina: A Re-Education (Allen & Unwin, out on 7 March) is a memoir and guide about female health and sexuality that touches on abortion, infertility, periods and orgasms. Plans are afoot for a Vulva Gallery book and titles are also forthcoming from the anti-FGM campaigner Nimko Ali (Rude, published by Viking on 27 June) and Dr Jennifer Gunter (The Vagina Bible, published by Piatkus on 27 August), a Canadian gynaecologist and author of the viral New York Times piece ‘My Vagina Is Terrific. Your Opinion About It Is Not’. Meanwhile, photographer Laura Dodsworth has shot the vulvas of 100 women for her new book, Womanhood: The Bare Reality (Pinter & Martin, out now), presenting the pictures alongside candid testimony. She says many of her subjects were terrified about the mystery of their own genitalia.