The Great Wall Of Vagina – it’s in London, it’s amazing and y’all might enjoy checking it out
Three years ago, I had my cunt cast. It was only last week that I really understood why.
The Great Wall Of Vagina is an art project, showing the cast cunts of four hundred women and a few trans men, and it has come to London for a month as part of an exhibition, “Skin Deep”, at the Hay Hill Gallery. It’s free, and I’d very much recommend a visit.
The idea behind the Great Wall is to show natural variation - it’s another part of the battle against a homogenised, Photoshopped view of cunts. There are cunts from cis women, from trans women, from trans men, from old people, younger people, at least one virgin, there are cunts full of piercings, ones without, and the variety in shape, in texture, in size, is absolutely staggering.
I knew intellectually that cunts varied enormously, that variation was normal, but there’s absolutely nothing like standing in front of a panel, resting eyes on one cunt after another after another. The photographs do not do the sculpture justice. In person, you can see just how far some of those labia extend, how puffy or long or pendulous they might be. I had thought it would be difficult to locate my own cunt in a group of 400 - it was a piece of cake.
I understood why this was so important. I’ve seen a few cunts in my time, and I’ve managed to dodge having many body issues of my own, but even so I had no idea how wide the bell curve went, and I left with even more appreciation for the ability of cunts to be enormous, flappy and magnificent just as much as they might be small and neat. I loved seeing the bigger, messier cunts with huge labia, and understanding them to be beautiful.
(icky stuff ahead - ) Look, did you know that in Australia they’re getting the makers of soft porn to Photoshop out visible labia minora? That these Photoshopped cunts are all that thousands of people ever see of what others’ cunts look like? That hundreds of women, there and in the UK and all over the place, are asking surgeons to *literally cut off their labia with knives*, for no medical reason than that their society has instilled this false idea of what’s beautiful in their minds? Can you imagine how pissed off that makes me?
I’m not going to do a huge amount of consciousness-raising on this, ‘cause that’s not much fun to read - just, here’s a video if you’d like to know more about this godawful stuff, and look, folks, negative body image is a big deal, yeah? So, I’m really glad to see stuff like the Great Wall in the world.
There is also a book about the project! And I’m in it, writing about myself and body image from two years ago! I hope that it’s been edited beyond all belief, and I wasn’t actually that bad a writer back then.. I’ll post some of what I wrote later this week, so you don’t need to squint.) And this book - it’s just full of other people writing about their cunts, their body image and the experience of being cast. It’s brilliant. As the Monologues have said, ‘once they got going, you couldn’t stop them. Women love to talk about their vaginas, they do.’
Showing more of what un-Photoshopped cunts actually look like feels like a really important endeavour. I’m proud to be part of this project - it’s been really fun to see it get bigger and bigger (I’ve had email updates for the last three years), and to see friends talking about it online (to which I bounce and say ‘I’m in that!’) I really, really recommend seeing the exhibition - it’ll run in London til June 2nd, at the Hay Hill Gallery near to Oxford Circus.
As for more pictures of non-Photoshopped cunts - here are some galleries, here is a tumblr, and of course here are lots of photos of the Wall. You can also chat about cunts and much more with the enormous and wonderfully queer- and trans-friendly Vagina Pagina community on LJ - enjoy!










