Women need to reclaim their bodies and …

it starts “down there” with the bare realities.

Laura Dodsworth photographed 100 vulvas and wrote a book about them, Womanhood: The Bare Reality. She has also created a documentary about them, and previously photographed and wrote a book about women’s breasts, Bare Reality: 100 women, their breast, their stories; and men’s penises, Manhood: The Bare Reality. 

“If I’d seen and read this when I was 18, I think my entire life would have been different. I’m not exaggerating, I think it would have changed everything for me.”

So many women turn away from pleasure and the wonders of sex because, as Dodsworth says, “Shame is a really big problem for humans.” And most of it is out of ignorance, insecurity and an unwillingness to accept, explore and discover.

This article from the BBC.com, this book and these photographs beautifully dispense with so many infantile hang ups.

Laura Dodsworth

Dodsworth’s work is a blessing for young girls and women of all ages because in today’s overburdened culture, driven by mindless, unmonitored, superfical social media, plasticity trumps reality through almost every media source. Finding reliable, credible, well-informed perspectives is like looking for a needle in a haystack – and instead too many women go looking for a plastic surgeon’s needle for their vulva or breasts or facial augmentation (see earlier article: Botox Brides: OMG! What are we injecting into a marriage?).

Dodsworth’s amazing photography and book is about women reclaiming their womanhood and purging their bodily anxieties and it – all books – can be the beginning of an exploration on the road to understanding and empowered self-worth. It’s a trip many, many more women, especially young girls (with adult companionship) should take. It’s well worth the investment of time.

“A revelation and a celebration of all that being female means.” – Sarah Ditum

“There’s no such thing as a normal vagina.”

Reading the Foreword to Womanhood, written by Sarah Ditum (journalist, columnists, critic), is worth the price of the book and she speaks to most women when she says, “… for so many women, the absence of speech and information about our anatomy has been filled up with shame and pain of various kinds. There is a vast communal reservoir of injustice which men will only fleetingly see, but in which all women swim, at least sometimes.”

Sexual ignorance is widespread, men’s insularity common place and women’s subjugation too common, but none of that should stop women from knowing – in every sense of the word, from carnal knowledge to psychological knowledge – every textured detail of every nook and cranny of their beautiful bodies.

Women break through the ceiling of sexual ignorance and injustice. It starts in their mind and can begin with this informative article, this celebratory book and the abundance of readings available to women everywhere.

From BBC.com. Read more >>

Read Love & Sexcess Book Review >>

Buy Womanhood: The Bare Reality at Love & Sexcess Bookstore (25% off) >>

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