I have no idea what the heck brought this on, but something I was working on yesterday made me think that it’d be pretty fun and empowering to think of my average vulva as my super, big, GIANT vulva. I suddenly found myself wanting to say, and quite loudly, to no one in particular, “Yeah, well check out my BIG VULVA!”

I came to the conclusion that “big vagina” somehow has a better ring to it, though, likely because however incorrectly it’s often used, it is a more commonly used term, and it’s that part of the vulva which women are so often told or think must never, never — oh, the horror! — be anything but as diminutive as possible. It’s still overall seen as much more okay to have a big labia than a big vagina, and big clits often seem to be seen as fine and dandy, mostly because they’re perceived as being like big penises.

You might wonder what on earth would compel someone to somehow get fixated — and in a way that makes her feel giddy and silly and very excited and more than a little powerful — on BIG VAGINA.

Often, activists who do serious and emotionally challenging work can, when pushed to the work-limit, become slap-happy and rather silly at times. It’s also been a big of a girl-bits-themed week for me, and I could possibly blame Christa in part. Plus, I work in sex, which while it is certainly important, and absolutely very serious in some ways, is in just as many ways, something ungodly silly which people do. My partner is used to these occasional bouts of sex-geek-goofy by now, so, while it certainly created a moments pause — and also a question as to if I had been drinking — my greeting him when he arrived home by jumping into the room and bellowing “BIG VAGINA!” was not the surprise it might be for someone else’s partner.

This does NOT mean, by any means, you should discount what I am about to say, or dismiss that ultimately, I’m quite serious about all of this. But you are allowed to laugh, and in fact, I strongly encourage you to do so, because way too many people take the size and appearance of their genitals way, way too seriously, and it is really messing y’all up for no good reason.

Women (though it’s important to put out that we’re pretty much always only talking about heterosexual women when it comes to this) have started to obsess on their vaginas or vulvas or labia just being way too big to a similar degree that many men have long fixated on their penises being way too small. People are tossing away ungodly piles of money daily to attempt to change the shape or size of their genitals, and some — a lot, really, vaginal “rejuvenation” surgies rose a whopping 30% from 2005 to 2006 — even risk going under the knife for surgeries which not only pose serious risks to their overall health, but also put their sexual function at risk, all for the sake of appearance or sexual performance concerns which are almost always completely unfounded and unrealistic, and which most often do NOT impair sexual function.

Genitals are small. ALL genitals are small, because in this big planet we live on, in the far bigger context of the whole cosmos, people are amazingly small, let alone a handful of inches of genital tissue. Even when we’re looking only at people, we’ve got parts of our bodies that make our genitals look microscopic: our small intestines go for 20 feet and our blood vessels quite literally are 100,000 miles long. My dog, a pug, is a small breed — so small as to be considered a “toy” breed — and she’s far bigger than anyone’s genitals could ever aspire to be. But my dog, even though she thinks quite otherwise, is but a very small dog. If I had a dresser drawer the size of any genitalia, that drawer would be really useless. Sure, compared to say, one of my freckles, my vagina or clitoris is big, and it’s all relative. But let’s face it: genitals aren’t big, even though they can sure feel big, and can even make us feel bigger or emotionally amplified.

Before I tell you more about my VERY big vagina, it’s probably a good idea to do some basic discussion and deconstruction of genital size. We’ll get to penises in a little bit: for a change, let’s first start by talking about female genital size. To keep this discussion from becoming War and Peace, we’re going to focus on average size ranges, so do understand that average means just that — the middle point of a group of values (in this case, sizes), obtained by taking the sum of a group of values and dividing by the number of values — not “normal.” The sizes of normal, functional genitalia are generally well beyond the averages in either direction, and genital size, even sizes pretty far from the averages, very rarely impacts sexual enjoyment or function unless the person with them gets so hung up on normalcy that their hangup becomes a buzzkill, or unless that person’s sexual partners aren’t making any adaptations that might be needed in some cases.

It’s not exactly an easy discussion to have about women’s bodies, for a few reasons: a) female sexual anatomy is seriously nonlinear, both internal and external, and thus very tough to measure or quantify, b) so few people have given a hoot about our genitals that they still haven’t been studied very much, and c) the parts of our genitals which have been studied have more often been the parts that men deem important to them than the parts we deem most important to us. Plus, the size of our genitals varies a lot based on age, sexual arousal, whether or not we’ve had children, the works. Men’s penises are given measurements for erect and flaccid, which is only so apt for men, but it’s even less so for women as we have more degrees in between in terms of changes with sexual arousal, and parts of us that change with arousal we can’t really measure (since they’re internal), as well as those additional factors.

That said, the things we can look at when it comes to female genitalia and size, which we have some numbers for, are the size of the clitoris, the inner labia, the length of the vaginal canal, and the width of the back of the vagina. We can’t really talk about differences in size when it comes to the vaginal opening once the hymen has worn away — and boy howdy, do you bet your rump I get tired of explaining this every day — because as we all know (and if we don’t we seriously should by now), the vaginal opening is closed unless we insert something it it, or something (read: baby) is coming out of it. It’d be sensible to talk about measurement of vaginal muscular strength, but since scientists don’t seem to find that worthy of study, we can’t speak to it just yet very quantifiably. And the size or measurement of all of these things is often relatively useless and very arbitrary, but for our purposes today, that’s okay.

The vaginal canal: Let’s start by talking about the length of the vaginal canal. To most folks concerned about penis sizes, that’s about the only thing they might consider relevant (even though it isn’t all that relevant, given that when we’re talking about women who like vaginal intercourse, length usually is a non-issue, save when someone is trying to insert something too deeply which is just too long: it’s width that’s an issue, as well as how the penis is stimulating the g-spot and internal clitoris). We already know we can’t talk about the width of most of the vaginal canal, since that depends on what is inside of it, and when nothing is inside of it, its walls are collapsed save at the very back, but I will talk about width in one respect in which we can in a minute. The vagina is often referred to as a “potential” space — a term I can never figure out whether I like or not: on the one hand, very literally, the world of potential really is all about vaginas, but on the other hand, I think that term is often used to suggest that the vagina isn’t “actual” in any way unless something is inside of it, which is absolute crap.

From the vaginal opening to the cervix, the average vaginal canal length is 3 to 7 inches, unaroused to aroused, with an average capacity to stretch — when something is inside of it — to around 8 or 9 inches deep (it can also stretch from side to side). It might be helpful when we’re trying to illustrate this range to consider the range of adult speculum sizes: they range from around 3 inches to long and one inch wide to just four and a half inches long and one and a half inch wide.

Vaginal anterior width: If you really want to talk about vaginal width we have a practical reason — that being to fit a diaphragm to use for birth control — to measure, then we’re talking about the back end of the vagina. In case it’s not clear, the vagina is smallest at the opening and widest at the back, whether we’re aroused or not. Diaphragms are held in place by the vaginal muscles in the back of the vagina — a place we don’t even have the sensory nerve endings to really feel, mind — and sits over the cervix. Diaphragm sizes range from 50 to 95 mm in diameter, with fit determined by the distance between the posterior fornix and the pubic bone. A 70 mm diaphragm size is generally considered average. If it helps to understand how minor a difference this all can be, and how adaptable the vaginal muscles are, most menstrual cups only come in two sizes, with only around an eighth of an inch between sizes, to fit all women, and these two sizes sure fit us all a lot better than the ten sizes of pants we’re all supposed to fit our behinds and thighs into.

Labia minora: Since so many women, especially younger women, are so crazed over it lately, the range of average sizes for the labia minora (bearing in mind that no one ever seems to account for the fact that the size of our labia changes a bit during sexual arousal) is apparently between just less than an inch to just over two inches in length to the longest point. Average inner labia are everything from barely visible to easily seen outside the labia majora.

But obviously, given how incredibly organic and nonlinear the shapes of the labia are — and how vastly they vary amoung women, to a degree that there’s no way you could try and make the kind of easy comparisons men make between penises — it’s not exactly easy to measure, or even to determine what the longest point of some labium is. It’s often said — and anyone who had had their face or hands around even a small sampling of vulvas knows this — that the largest range in size, shape, color and texture that we see from vulva to vulva is with the labia minora.

Clitoral glans: When we’re talking about the clitoris (which also changes in size with arousal: measurements done with averages have shown an average change of 1.5 cm with arousal in XX women: intersexed women are sometimes a different story), the developed clitoral glans when “resting” is about an inch long on average, but it’s not really something there has been a lot of focus on, probably because when it comes to clits (or ovaries, or vaginas, or…yeah, you get it), many researchers just aren’t that interested and you also don’t have to tell women that something does not have to be big to do Very Big Things, especially when you consider we’ve got more nerve endings in our clitorises than there are in any size of penis. Heck, if you want to pick something that includes everyone, let’s not forget that sperm and eggs are microscopically small, but look what they can do! Too, the clitoris as a whole, when we include the internal clitoris, is basically the same size as most penises, but again, so spread out and organic in form, we can’t really measure it well, and can’t really measure it at all in live subjects at this point.

(You’ll note, if you have to torture yourself by ever looking at FAQs for genital cosmetic surgeons that they are very reluctant to say or even ruminate what normal and average sizes are, and more often will say that “normal” is determined by if the owner of said labia likes them or not — in other words, if a woman, for whatever reason, by whatever standard, doesn’t like her genitals, then it’s apparently sage for her to then consider them abnormal. Oy. It should also be noted that in double-checking the things that already live in my head on all of this, I kept falling upon studies showing that for most men and women looking to surgically “correct” their genitals, most of them have perfectly normal, functional and average genitalia.)

Take a break from the words for a minute, and before we move on to penises, check out this handy visual reference I’ve made for you, especially since it was a total pain in the bottom to make and try and keep as right as I could get it. While in even the largest version, things are still not exactly actual size, they’re awfully close, and the relative differences are correct. The anterior width circles were the toughest, but I just happen to have a wide array of diaphragms sitting around here for a project. Just because I love you so much and want to be sure everything is on the up-and-up, I really did sit putting diaphragms against my computer screen to double-check the sizes.

You’ll note I went ahead and provided an extra, very practical item to give you an idea of scale. If you want to see that graph a bit larger, click here, and if you want to see it life-size, click here.

(If you can’t see the graphic on the page for some reason, click here.)

The idea of “large” and “small” vulvas or vaginas really is silly, but it’s not like ideas about large and small penises are any less silly.

We may as well go ahead and talk about penis size, since let’s be honest: male worries and fixation on penis and genital size seems to be what created and in large part enables any sort of female concern about genital size, especially since lesbians don’t give a damn. This would likely be of NO issue to women if a) men didn’t go on and on so much about genital size and put genitals under the perpetual microscope, and then become fixated on ours, then bring women into the whole mess by making them think they’ve cause for concern, and b) if vaginal intercourse was not both defined as THE sex — even though for most women, it’s not the most satisfying, and also isn’t for plenty of men, too — and if problems with intercourse weren’t very foolishly all thought to be due to someone’s genital size, rather than due to the fact that the activity defined as “the” sex was, overall, a poor contender for the title who only got it due to being an incredibly savvy politician.

Plus, sensible or not, lots of guys care about penis size, and so do some women, which makes it important enough to talk about, and if we’re going to talk about one set of genitals being big or small, then it doesn’t make much sense to leave out another.

The Penis: The average range with penis length is between 5 and 7 inches, and the average girth (the distance around) is around 4 inches. Studies often show that the deviation between sizes, on average, is just around one inch. We see far greater variation in the size of flaccid penises than we do in erect penises. Penis averages are always a bit suspect, mind, because the men who volunteer for them are usually aware of what the study is, so guys who feel like they don’t have anything to brag about are less inclined to show up to be measured than those who do. In checking my homework here, I also found references stating that at around nine inches of length is the point at which, for women who engage in heterosexual intercourse, most women will experience discomfort. So that guy with the seven-inch penis saying it’s nine with the idea it’ll impress a woman may find that with a savvy chick, that’s not always an enticement.

But since we’ve got to hear again and again from men (and even their female partners sometimes) overstating penis length, you’ll not that in the graphical comparison above, I went ahead and even included a “larger” penis size that really isn’t very common.

(And just for the record, most of the studies on penis size done these days are being done by condom companies, so their work is actually meaningful and important. This is the lone practical need to know anyone’s penis size. Of course, more study on women’s bodies is also important for any number of reasons, but it’s still mighty slow going.)

So, there you have it. Now look at that chart again. Seriously. And not just at the dog.

Things that all vary only THAT little? Calling one SO large and the other SO small? C’mon people, you’ve got to be able to see that it’s pretty loony to get hung up on size differentials when we’re talking about such minor differences, and when those minor differences do not have anything to do with sexual satisfaction or reproductive function. Again, when folks get all hung up on the size of their genitals, the problem that becomes or creates is rarely a problem because of the size: it’s usually a problem because of the hang-up. Lose the hang-up and fixation, lose the problem.

Really, all of this size stuff is pretty deranged from the get-go, about anything when it comes to our bodies (and a lot of other things, for that matters). No matter what we’re privliging based on size, our size — whether we’re talking about height, weight, breasts, genitals, noses, you name it — is almost always mostly or entirely genetic. We’ve got what we’ve got, for the most part, and going nuts over largely unchangeable parts of ourselves, or anyone else, is a waste of otherwise good energy at best and bigotry at worst. And when it comes to genitals, no matter what we’ve got, the size of anything very rarely impairs its function. Differences in size simply — if they even do that — may create differences in the way we do certain things. Since sex is supposed to be individual, not one-size-fits-all, should we ever meet a sexual partner who isn’t down with making sure the sex they’re having is as unique and catered to they and us as possible, the problem is that partner, not our genitals.

Now, all things given, if we go ahead and make the determination that with a variation as minor as a handful of millimeters or a handful of inches, we can really still say big and small and all that jazz, when it comes to myself, I’m pretty darn average in all respects when it comes to genitals. In other words, most of my genitalia is not at either end of the poles of the averages. I wear a smaller-average diaphragm size (I’m a 65 these days), and given the clitorises I have seen up close and personal and via photos, I’d say my clit is right in the middle. One of my labia is smaller than the other, and the longer is on the longer side of the average. To look at my bits, I’ve got what Betty Dodson calls a Baroque vulva. As someone who is all about the spirit of decadence in sensory things, I think that’s quite perfect for me, really.

But you know what? Being average has NEVER stopped an awful lot of guys from saying they have a big penis or thinking of their penises as big. And again, this whole big/small business with such a small range is just goofy.

I often avidly protest all this size stuff, and even get ungodly irritated by it daily, especially given how often I have to comfort the “smaller” guys and the “larger” girls in my daily work, who really should not have to worry about any of this at all.

But I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s time I tried rolling with it. So, if it’s up to me if I’m big or I’m small, I think it seems a whole lot more fun to have a VERY BIG vagina than an average one.

Which allows me to finally get back to my monumental, super-duper vagina. If what men consider a monumentally big penis is still as long or just a little bit longer than most vaginas can stretch, and the back end of some vaginas within average are still wider around than those penises, AND our clitorises, internal and external, are just as big as penises, then by gosh and by golly, we don’t have diminutive genitals, girls, we’ve got BIG GIANT VULVAS!

I want to give it supervillian names: Vaginormia or Vulvumba or Vagigante! (That one totally needs an exclamation point, because it sounds like a Lucha Libra name.) The Pink Colossus. Vulvuminousa. Monsmonstro. Vagzilla. The Big Vagowski — eh, that’s not going to work.

Now I’ve just got “Mike Wazowski” stuck in my head again (it’s a bit of a constant problem), and weird as I am, mixing vaginas and Monsters, Inc. is even too weird for me.

I am wholeheartedly enjoying this image of Vagzilla, like a very large sea creature of some kind, pulling its pink, fleshy feet (which totally make a noise, it’s like “schlop, schlop”) across the earth. It waves it’s VERY HUMONGOUS labia around like big, flappy, sea-anemone hands, and it makes a huge whooshing sound, like wind through trees in a storm, when it does. It’s absolutely moist, and seriously squishy. It also has a very, very large nose When it moves, it leaves a trail of shiny, clear ooze in its wake. It’s whipping aside commercial menstrual product manufacturers with those big labia-tentacles, and it’s yelling and blowing air from it’s GAPING vaginal opening, causing douches and speculums and the torture devices of cosmetic surgeons to blow across streets like tumbleweeds. Godzilla knows better than to even think about messing with it.

(My partner also had to watch me try and illustrate this image last night through the wonder of interpretive dance. Welcome to life at our house.)

I want to pen a theme song for La Vagina Grandiosa, but until I do, we can certainly already hear her when we listen to Aretha Franklin, Odetta, Paula Cole, The Staple Singers, Hedningarna, Saffire: the Uppity Blues Women, Phoebe Snow, P!nk, Janis Joplin, Mariachi Reyna de Los Angeles, Bonnie Tyler, Chaka Khan, Joan Jett, Diamanda Galas, Loretta Lynn, Bessie Smith, L7, The Heartless Bastards, Patti Smith, Stevie Nicks (I know, I had a moment of pause, but then I really thought about it: Edge of Seventeen is totally big vagina music), Michelle Malone, Kathleen Hanna, Pat Benatar or Nina Simone. Big vagina isn’t coy, subtle, delicate or soft-spoken: big vagina is raucous, gigantic, fleshy and eardrum-shattering loud.

I mean, there’s something awesome about it, isn’t there?

Not with me just yet? Okay, I’ll hang on while you get into it. I found it helped to yell one or two of those super-villain names very loudly in the living room (though in retrospect, it might be more fun to do in the bathtub, which I may just have to try later) while waving my arms around, punctuating it all by shaking my head back and forth with my mouth a little open so it made a very vaginal sort of “blubbalubbablubba” noise. The dog was certainly intimidated, I’ll tell you that much, and the pug ain’t intimidated by much. If that isn’t helping, revisit the imagery. If THAT isn’t helping, do remember that when we’re talking about vaginas, in particular, we’re talking about the place that quite literally has given birth to the world and everything in it. If even that isn’t helping…well, I tried.

For those of us who are with me on this, I really love the idea of even voicing this sort of sentiment or battle cry from time to time, just because, given that the very LAST thing any woman is apparently supposed to have, and certainly should be very, very ashamed of is a GIANT VAGINA. If women can succeed at, or even just try, to reclaim words like bitch, the very least women should be able to do, especially given the fact that if men have big penises, then we DO have big vaginas, is kick all this teeny-weeny-darling-cutiepie-vagina stuff to the curb and groove on feeling like our genitals are the stuff of epic proportions. I’m grooving on the Utopian idea that I’ll overhear some guy say to another in a bar, when describing a woman he’s awed by, who did something beyond daring he can’t imagine doing, “Man, it took some BIG-ass vagina to do that.”

In being completely obsessed with this idea over the last day or so, I’m also finding that I can kind of understand the dudes that go overboard with the “my big penis,” stuff to everyone within earshot. I so know that I’m really torturing the people listening to me talk about the vagina as giant in some way right now (but hey: I’m a sex educator, I gross people out all the time for my living), but I kind of dig it, because it’s making ME feel so big by extension that I just don’t care very much if y’all are all “YUCK!” especially since I very seriously feel we should should be awed and impressed with our bigness, that they should covet my bigness and wish it were theirs, rather than grossed out in any way.

It also seems like the more I go on about MY HUGE VAGINA, the bigger it feels. I know full well that everything genital is small in this great big world we live in, I know that the range with genitals when it comes to size is not at all vast, and I’m aware that personally, for the most part, even within that small range, I’m pretty darn average. But when I bellow BIG VAGINA, have images of Vagigante! in my head, and crank up the Joan Jett while giant, labial sugarplums dance in my head; when I envision my vulva and vagina not as small, but as vast and colossal, they really do start to feel that way, and it really makes me feel a bit bigger on the whole.

That feeling makes me a lot more sympathetic for the guys who are fixated on size, and who want their penises to feel big, and are bummed out when they don’t, or when someone else doesn’t see them that way. It also doubly illustrates part of why some women who are so fixated on their vaginas being so small often feel small themselves. While by no means do the size of your genitals — or the size you think they are — influence your size and scope as a whole person, if thinking of them as big makes you feel bigger, and makes them feel more special, I have to say that I think I’m all for it. And I’ve got to say, I really can’t help but wonder if women as a whole couldn’t really benefit from catching the size train in this regard: seems like it’s at least worth a try.

The only caveat is, though — and thus, the heart of my babblefest today — is that if we’re going to think of our genitals as big, any one of us, given the small range between them, we should think everyone’s genitals are big. We also need to accept that it’s ignorant or misinformed (and/or that we’ve clearly got some kind of agenda through which we benefit from our ignorance or misinformation) to think, presume or suggest that penises are big but vaginas are small, because we really are all about the same size. If thinking big is better for one sex, it’s also got to be better for the other. So, if you’re going to go on about your big penis, buddy, you’d best get just as excited about the idea of a big vagina, and make having a big ol’ vagowski just as cool. And if you’re a gal all hung up on the idea that your vagina must, must be as small as it can possibly be, or is such a small thing, then you’ve got to accept that penises are small, too.

But I suggest that you at least try on the “everybody is big” idea for a little while, and embrace the idea that a big vagina is at least as cool as a big penis is supposed to be. Next time you hear someone saying someone had a big vagina, and is meaning it to be an insult, try grinning and saying, with glee, “She sure did! Yeeha!” You certainly don’t have to make up super-villain names or do interpretive dances like me (though while according to some people, it’d probably be better if you didn’t, I personally feel that we just don’t see enough vaginal interpretive dance these days), but if you go through life without yelling

“BIG VAGINA!”

with great fervor at least once, I can confidently say you always feel at least a little bit smaller than you, and your vagina or vulva, actually are.

(The Scarleteen version I just got up of this lives here.)

posted in Heather Corinna, Happy!, feminism, women, sexuality, body image, gender | permalink | comments (7) »

Oh, UGH.

Honestly, you know (as if you didn’t already) that gender binaries have gone too freaking far when we have a discussion at the Scarleteen boards where a young female user is informed by another young lesbian user — the former having suggested as much herself — that she couldn’t be straight, but instead must be queer, because she likes pretty, skinny, longhaired emo boys.

When I have to sit and explain that if a man identifies as a man — no matter how he chooses to present — and doesn’t feel HE is cross-dressing himself nor ID’s as a cross-dresser or as trans, he’s not a transvestite (which, FYI, is often defined by youth these days as simply a “feminine,” cisgendered man), and figuring you must be queer or gay because you’re attracted to him, rather than the Brawny man, is pretty messed up…well, bleh.

I mean, sure, I know I was a teen when cisgendered guys — who, stright, gay or otherwise, were all identifying very expressly as male, nor could figure why the way they liked to present even made that a question — wearing eyeliner was all the rage, but from all I can gather, it’s no more or less so, now. Their pop icons are wearing it just like ours were (though they often appear to be usuing much more powder to set their liner, and are awfully handy with the concealer): their emo boys aren’t that different from our punk and new wave guys. The majority? Not hardly, but most of those male-identified pretty dandies then and these boys now tended to argue pretty hard — especially with freaked-out parents — that they were not trying to be women or trying to dress like women: they were expressing themselves, as men. When even with our queer-minded, identifying-as-so-different youth are still coming to gender thinking it’s anyone’s place to decide someone else’s gender identity, things clearly aren’t as improved as we seem to want to think they are.

I do my homework: I’ve seen plenty of sound data that’s made clear that this youth generation overall has some pretty traditional ideas about gender — which often make very lousy bedfellows with a lot of queer theory — but this is just plain SILLY. If our queer youth community starts doing exactly what the status quo and traditionalists do (and I’ve seen this sort of thing more than this once) in terms of second-party gender assignment — he wore a skirt, therefore, he’s not really a guy, nor am I really attracted to men; she wears her hair short, therefore she’s not really a girl, so it’s not like I’m really attracted to women — we are in some SERIOUS trouble, people. And it’s not like it’s the fault of the thirteen-year-old in question for being so confused and so garbled in this: it’s the systems we have set up that are so freaking flawed, as well as the flaws in the systems — based on the existing flawed systems — we have set up to try and make life less uncomfortable for those stuck in them to blame here. Nothing like a barely-teen from Florida to illustrate all of this mess so concretely.

This disgruntled yawp was broadcast to you from the intersection of Queer Theory and Straight Culture, where there’s a 20-car pileup. And apparently some sort of time warp: this conversation feels like one already had in every fifth living room of a Stones or Bowie fan circe 1970.

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, body image, gender, the binary blues | permalink | comments (2) »

I am at the point where I am accepting that it is time to start saying goodbye to my red hair.

The fact that there are moments in which this is earnestly sniffle-worthy — hell, the fact that this is something I even feel a need to publicly mention and invest any emotional energy in whatsoever — is freaking ridiculous.

Ah, vanity: you heartless bastard, you maker of small minds and distractor from far greater things.

I can justify this preoccupation ever-so-slightly by saying that those of us with any brand of red hair are often defined by it, even if we don’t self-define by it. I was born, oddly enough, with nearly gray hair, to the point that my mother had a moment of fear thinking I wasn’t actually alive. In early childhood, I was one of those very light blondes, which soon turned to a dark strawberry. In juniour high, I tried to be blonder, but that soon made way for being pink, burgundy, black (alas, I didn’t look like Siouxsie Sioux as I’d hoped, but rather like Snow White gone terribly wrong), until we came back to just making the red brighter and brighter. So, sparing summers when I was just out in the sun so much, the stuff went almost white, I’ve claimed and amplified my copper for a good twenty years now, and if my appearance is mentioned by anyone, even in press pieces, it’s usually been mentioned that I’m a redhead above all else.

When you’re red, you can do nothing else to yourself, and people seem to think that you invested as much effort as they did in sprucing yourself up: it’s a great cheat for the lazy primper. When you’re brave and your red, it often feels as if your hair advertises that bravery; if you’re bold and you’re red, it seems to prepare people in advance for your assertiveness, which can be a real blessing.

But it’s going away. My father’s side of the family has a history of going grey incredibly early: his mother was nearly full-on white by her mid-twenties, as I understand it, and my father’s went that way by the time I was in high school. Who knows whather it’s the premature grey that’s hereditary or simply the legacy of trauma and stress. My mother had that hair everyone wants, that gorgeous deep russet stuff, but she’s bleached it for so long that even she doesn’t know when hers went grey. I started seeing white hairs in my twenties as well, but it’s been a slower process for me than I anticipated, which perhaps gave me some false hope.

I say that, but really, I’ve always looked forward to going grey, but in part I realize that’s because I had the silly idea that I’d go to sleep looking like me one night, and wake up the next looking like Emmylou Harris. Hope springs eternal, eh? When it became clear that wasn’t exactly the most realistic expectation, I just figured that the streak of white that had started growing on my crown would get bigger and bigger, until you’d have a hard time distinguishing me from Bonnie Raitt: in fact, when I’ve had my hair highlighted over the last handful of years, I’ve always had Sy just throw more bleach there to make it bigger artifically.

A couple years back, I stopped having any sort of allover color done, primarily because a) I got tired of it ruining my hair, b) red has always been easy for my hair to hold since there’s so much red already in it, but as the red has started to go and the greys began to take over, it would fade out very fast, and thus be a total waste of cash and c) I began to get visible roots (yuck!) because what was growing back in was so ashy. So, I’d only gotten some foils put in twice a year or so, and mixed some henna into my conditioner every now and then: I’m generally thrifty both of out habit and necessity, as well as the fact that I’ve appreciated my decreasing care in what I look like over the years. But even then, the foils with the red have started to look more and more odd to me, sitting next to a weird mix of fading copper that’s now looking more and more gold and the encroaching silvers. In some ways, it looks more like I’m going blonde than grey, which is a strange disappointment.

Yesterday, I came in from gardening and passed a mirror where the light was just hitting that certain way, and my hair was up just-so, in which I was able to see that not only are my temples now filled with white and ashy hairs — which I hadn’t noticed, having been distracted by the greys in my crown — but that it’s clearly all growing in…well, not red, and not even all that reddish. I’ve heard runours before that red-types don’t often go grey so nicely, that we do get this weird ashy stuff, and the color just starts to look more and more muted and strange, but now the proof has begun to find itself in the proverbial pudding. I remember this older woman I taught with who was a red going grey, clearly desperately clinging to her old hair, with her rinses whose color always seemed off and the whole works looking a bit like the red version of those clothes we all tried to dye black with Rit dye in high school, all spotty and mushy and nothing close to black.

I’ve had folks tell me that no, absolutely, it’s not going as much as I think it is, but I think that’s what you’re supposed to say (and I confess that I also bring to this the eagle-eyes of a photographer: we’re obsessed with tonal values). And that’s not what my hairdresser says. When leafing through my hair, and mention is made of the color and the grey, she — and I expect they teach you this etiquette in beauty school — lets out a small sigh and a simple “Hmm, well, okay.” (And as Becca could back me up with, that near-silence is quite the statement: Sy talks more than I do, which is really saying something — I write like this because I talk like this, but if my mouth is usually doing 80 in a 50MPH zone, Sy’s is careening off the highway with screeching tires and a bloody mess in her wake.)

Ladies and germs, this copper-top is going down, and I intend to go down gracefully.

I’ll be in Minneapolis very briefly next week to photograph a friend’s wedding, and because I gave up on trying to find someone here who could cut my crazy hair decently, I’ll be engaging in what has become a very silly habit (that feels very bougie, even though it’s not like I only go there to get my haircut, and it also costs me less to get a good cut there than it does to get a crap one here) of still getting my hair cut by my hairdresser who is now over 1600 miles away. She, too, has loved my hair over the years; I know that she’ll want to toss some red foils into it, but I feel it’s time to decline, and say farewell fuschia, sayonara scarlet, and cheerio copper.

(And heck, I won’t be the first person in this house to lose their red hair: Mark was even more red — by a serious longshot, he had that brillo-pad copper — than me before he lost his.)

I can’t promise, mind, that I won’t backpedal at some point (nor that I’ll win this battle this time with Madame Sy). While it’s silly as fuck to invest identity in one’s hair, or any aspect of one’s appearance or body, given how much flux we’re always in, really, my unruly red mane has been part of me for a long, long time. I’ll likely keep my red ends around for as long as they’ll have me, and if Sy argues that she wants to do something so it’s a more gradual transition, I probably won’t put up that much of a fight. Honestly, I might tell her to hack the whole works off at this point, save that for the first time since maybe the seventh grade, I have a partner who is so in love with my hair — even though he’s usually been a short-hair fan with other partners of his — that his little face crumples at the mere mention of hacking it off. Since I figure I’d react similarly if, say, he wanted to change the canvas of his perfect bottom with a giant tattoo, I get it. I’m not ready to cut it all off again anyway, if for no other reason than the fact that the upkeep sucks with short hair.

Anyway, I’m going to start adjusting my brain, and looking for some good symbolism in silver and gold to get attached to.

…and keep hoping that I’ll wake up one day looking like Emmylou Harris. A girl can dream, after all.

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing, body image, vanity | permalink | comments (5) »

How is it that that scads of people who salivate daily at pieces of gnarled, bloody-but-bleached cow cadaver and think “Mmmm-mmm, tasty!” can look at living, breathing and very-much-alive bodies and genitals and think “Ewwww, gross?”

Just curious. And procrastinating.

posted in Heather Corinna, sexuality, apropos of nothing, body image | permalink | comments (1) »

And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations (Revelation 17:4)

Maybe it’s just me, but filth and abonimations, being drunk on the blood of saints and martyrs and riding around on seven-headed beasts has always sounded like a damn good time.

My maternal grandmother was a big fan of religious shaming and of scaring her children, grandchildren, and anyone else within the sphere of her influence with Biblical nightmare tales. Having no reverence for the dead when they were awful alive, I’ll share that she was one of those people who was at mass three times a day primarily because she enabled her household to be so abusive that not only did she have lots of guilt to work out, my impression always was that mass provided a perfect excuse for her not to be there and to leave her children to take the worst of it. So, she got less of the nightmare AND approval at exempting herself from it. Bonus.

In any event, while there were plenty of familial scare tactics and terror that did work on me as a child, the morality tales about fallen women never had any effect on me. Quite the opposite: it always struck me that those terrible, sinful, rebellious women of the Bible we were supposed to avoid becoming were the ones to aspire to be.

I remember quite distinctly — which is likely part of why I still fixate on it in my collective imagination often enough, and lord knows I’m in good company in my fixation with this one: Durer, Swedenborg, Blake, Monty Python — having parts of Revelation read to me, and my grandmother doing her level best (to my ears anyway, but then much of my mother’s family was seriously creepy) to make the Scared Whore of Babylon sound as horrific and terrible as possible (no irony lost there, either, since she’s supposed to be Rome, and my half-Dego heritage disgusted my grandmother to no end). I came away from that with nothing more than the idea that this colorful Babylon chick clearly scared the hell out of whatever idiot guys wrote this stuff and people like my grandmother — go, her — and she sounded pretty fucking badass to me.

(And yes, these are my self-assigned Sacred Whore of Babylon tulips, which I care for by lovingly fertilizing them with the blood of saints and martyrs, and the ash of empires crushed cruelly underfoot. I got the bulbs a couple of months ago, thrilled to bits about the crazy mix of colors in there, and how dangerous they looked, so I was elated when they finally started opening this week. There’s some black columbine starting to come in behind them, next to the bleeding hearts also just budding, and the stinky voodoo lilies behind those, so my garden is becoming a wonderful den of unabashed floral terror and mayhem right now.)

I was reminded of this last night when Mark and I were cooking while listening to Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. I still have a handful of vinyl of some value (the original Sargeant Pepper with the moustache inserts, for instance, and an early copy of Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills), and the tri-fold Yellow Brick Road remains in my collection.

I loved the whole album growing up: all the young vocalists and pianists love Elton, after all, and it’s a helluva piece of work. But the inside of that album was so awesomely illustrated, so it was great to pour your eyes over while you sang along. In all of these illustrations are many, many pretty women: a gorgeous illustration of Marilyn, a rendering of the stylish Bennie, the vargas-style pinup of the Sweet Painted Lady and he sister who can’t twist with her shiny stockings, the delicate blond Alice (later on in my adolescence, I’d grow to hate “All the Young Girls Love Alice,” though — just hit too close to home, and it wasn’t at all cute to me at that point).

But I wasn’t drawn to those painted ladies: instead, the woman in the illustration for “Dirty Little Girl” (which ultimately is a serious piece of misogyny set to music, but I didn’t get that then) was the one that got my attention. The song was critical as shit of her (”you have to clean the oyster to find the pearl,” is one of few nasty gems in there), and I think the illustration was supposed to make the viewer disgusted. But to my girlhood eyes, she was the only woman in the bunch who looked relaxed and fun, who looked like she could have given a shit what Elton John or anyone else had to say about her. Her rollers were falling out, her hair was all over the place, she wasn’t wearing a bra; she clearly was dirty and had a big ol’ loud mouth, and she topped it off with a smoke dripping ashes all over the album cover.

And so, of course, I adored her.

Whether it’s about my own self-image or about how I look at others, I love a woman undone who looks like she hasn’t taken a shower in a week and just got back from camping. I love people-stink (I confess to even being an enthusiastic armpit-sniffer, and I’d totally pick off gnits from someone’s back and eat them if we hadn’t since evolved past that and gnits were available), I love the mud and ash, I love a big, giant, uncaring mess of a person. In terms of myself, the more “done” I am, the less human, the less sexy, the less female, the less grounded and real I feel. I never feel as much myself as I do when I’m coated in sweat and dirt, when the most I’ve done in a day is scrape the grime off my teeth and maybe have a nice, hot facewash before I shove something in my hair to get it outta my face, or better still, when it’s gotten so ratty from days of being ignored that I can just knot it up with itself and it stays in a messy, stupid-looking bunch. My queendom to have a head full of Medusa-snakes instead of hair.

What’s supposed to be or look gross, too overt, too overwhelming or just plain out there has always had the opposite effect on me. I was one of those kids every adult had a “Don’t TOUCH that! Don’t PUT that in your mouth! Get your finger OUT of your nose! Keep that icky thing OUT of the house! Oh GAWD, throw that AWAY!” on an endless loop about. What’s supposed to be filthy, abominable or nasty has always struck me as the good stuff: bring on the muck and the mire, literal and symbolic. It’s always seemed to me that if you’ve got to go seriously nuts trying to clean every inch of yourself up, all the filth underneath you’re clearly convinced is there and needs be complusively washed away is clearly wearing you anyway, so you may as well just put it the hell out there and wear it. Go dirty girls, go.

(You know, until just this minute, I was convinced this mini-ode came from a pretty elevated place, until I remembered that I really need to tidy the house today before Becca comes to visit, and now find myself wondering if some of this isn’t just about procrastination per housekeeping, which would be really pathetic.)


P.S. I solidified the first of my travel for the summer for book promotion and other nits, and will be in Minneapolis from Thursday morning (red-eye flights, barf) May 17th through Saturday afternoon, May 26th. As book promo dates come in, I’ll announce them here and on the Amazon page for the book, but I also will have some time for a couple of photo clients while I’m there for those interested.

posted in Heather Corinna, body image, nature | permalink | comments (6) »

I’m hoping to be able to make time tomorrow morning to be able to do some self-portrait work, so long as the old camera will be a dear and cooperate. (Can’t use the new camera for that, and besides, we seem really to not care for one another — it’s hopefully going back soon.) If I don’t get to it tomorrow, it won’t happen until after my Dad is gone.

I know it’s been a while. Primarily, that has to do with time and how much I’ve had to cram into a day, but it also has to do with interest. As longtime readers know, I tend to cycle between my arts, with one often crying out for attention over another: I have seasons of creativity that demand different media at different times.

Too, though, subjects here are few and far between, and I haven’t been all that interested in myself as subject lately, and without the real interest, there’s no real work.

But as winter is at its end, I want to capture my body in the state it’s in right now, because I know it is soon to pass. Due to both the winter months and to less activity during the winter than I’m used to, I put on a bit more winter weight than usual, to the degree that I even managed a teeny belly, which delights me. I can grow a lot of lush things on my body, but my midsection has always been the one area where weight just doesn’t tend to go: maybe I’m changing with age, who knows. But through my life, I have coveted other people’s bellies. Much to the chagrin of lovers of mine who don’t like bellies — or bellies on them — my hands always want to wander up and down a convex curve of someone who has a belly of substance. If allowed, I’d just run it back and forth like that for hours. Not sure what that’s all about, but there you go: I’m a belly admirer.

I’m also as pale as I get, which is to say pretty darn pale. While the Mediterranean genes keep me slightly olive beneath it all, during the winter months, my freckles become less and less distinguishable. So, between the paleness and the extra-cushy stuff, there’s something about my body during the season of dark and cold that I cherish in its difference. It reminds me of the passage in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek where Annie Dillard talks about the vulnerability of vertabrates: there is something both more transparaent and injurable and yet more insulated about bodies during the winter.

This is sensible, of course. We stay indoors far more often, and when we go out, we drape ourselves in layers that our own skin doesn’t provide. We are inwardly quieted and more slow. We are more sedentary, more solitary, we need to create more warmth in our own skin, and so, like any other mammal during cold times, we pad ourselves. When we’re not smart enough to do it ourselves, our own biology and the patterns of nature do some of the job for us.

It’s vexing to me how much to-do is made of winter weight and color and what is apparently a very dire need to change it as soon as is humanly possible. Of course, as the days lengthen, as light increases, as we become more active again — effectively, as we come out of hibernation — and we feel better, more energized, more vital. Again, even when we don’t pursue it intentionally, it’s the rhythm of nature and its effect on us: how intense the differences are between the seasons of the earth and our bodies and minds are clearly effected by our behaviours, but the changes would exist no matter what.

* * *

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately on some ideas I first started exploring in college, and which were going to be my primary focus of study until that crafty William Blake seduced me into a slightly different direction. Essentially, I’m coming to some conclusions regarding sexuality and body image in that the more divorced people become from nature and the most simple aspects of daily life — and I’m thinking this is particularly true for women — the more divorced we become from truly being in our bodies, and being in harmony with our bodies and our sexuality.

Working with teen and young adults, especially a generation in the western world who is the most divorced from nature in our history, these ideas have been coming to the forefront for me again. Trying to explain that a winter body exists because winter exists, and that it is only sensible and sound to honor and appreciate it for what it is, just as we do any season itself is likely to fall on deaf ears, even among many members of my own generation.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to talk about the body as something which — bearing in mind of the greatest influence of our genetics — takes the form and shape of what it is used for. If we engage in sports, what sports we choose to engage in will determine where our muscle most develops. The simplest explanation would be to talk about how easy it can be to recognize one kind of manual laborer from another just by the shape of their bodies, but to middle-class kids where many of them have never even walked to school one, where a majority of them don’t even know a single manual laborer, and may never do any themselves, this is obviously a lost cause, too.

Same goes for trying to work with some of them having real disconnects with their body and their sexuality in terms of exploring what is sensual, as in, of the senses. They rarely cook, and when they do, it’s rarely with fresh foods (much less food they’ve grown) or fire; even then it’s more about product than process — rushed, rather than savored. Many of them don’t even know what the whole of their bodies smell or look like without every product on them known to man, what it feels like to wind up totally covered in mud and dry in the sun, or to bathe in river or lake water for a week. The bleached-out world so much of middle America is woefully lacks a lot of opportunities for exploring the senses and what is natural. I can tell a teenager that the scents of their bodies are normal and just as they’re meant to be, but when the whole of their world is deoderized, sanitized, homogenized, and the only natural scent they might ever smell is their genitals, it’s going to stand out and seem foreign, rather than naturally blend in and feel natural. More than once the suggestion to some having a particularly tough time connecting with their own bodies to look into massage, dance or other bodywork, even to just start taking walks out of doors more often pretty clearly gets me dismissed as a crunchy old hippie. (Go figure: with the ones that DO get out and hike, like to camp or dance, cook because they’re vegetarian and family food won’t work, the body image and sexuality problems don’t seem so pervasive or intense.) There’s a section of the book where I work to get them to redfine “sexy” more holistically, with more emphasis on all their senses, and who knows if it’ll catch.

So much of this shift away from nature is thought to be a luxury; a privilege, and one given as a gift by the generation before to them. So many of them are expressly reared to drive, not walk; to nuke something frozen rather than cook; to take a pill rather than try and heal other ways; to spend lesuire time seated rather than in motion (and to HAVE so much leisure time in the first place); to hide or remove what is natural rather than to cultivate harmony with their nature and nature-at-large. The more time that passes, the more I observe things through this lens, I’m seeing less of a gift and more of a curse, especially the more and more extended childhood — or rather, dependency — is in our culture, and it is a curse not just upon people, but obviously, one on the planet itself.

And with that, I’ve got to tear myself away. There are so many branching-off points from here, but I’m about to miss my own evening walk I had set aside time for and very much need today. Mark and I are meeting for dinner in an hourish, but I’d hoped to be able to catch a solitary, moist, dusk-time stroll through the neighborhood before then.

How cool is it when you must force yourself away from work to something far more pleasant in order to practice what you preach?

posted in Heather Corinna, body/mind, photography & art, sexuality, body image, nature | permalink | comments (14) »