Ten Years in the Making! vagina vérité Now Available

Alexandra Jacoby's book of vulva portraits is FINALLY available for purchase! And now, till 2/27, you can get $10 off. How sweet is that? Use code SAVE10 at checkout. I'm very excited that this book is making its long-awaited and much-anticipated debut. This is an artist's print of the book; self-published. Positive buzz will help land a traditional (well not so traditional) publisher. We need more books like this! We need more conversations like this!

If you can't afford the book, or just want to share the text with someone, you can read it here. (Clicking the link will open a text file - no pics. Trust me, it's safe. Unless you don't like stimulating, heartfelt writing about stuff that normally doesn't get written about.)

Viva la vulva! And congratulations to Alexandra.

Oh, and Happy V-Day everyone.

Two Good New Books About Your Down There

You've heard this before: there are so few realistic images of women's bodies, and so many images of airbrushed, surgically-altered women, that most women have no idea what normal is, and often think that they are abnormal, unattractive, etc. Although the problem is pervasive when it comes to women's overall appearance, it's even more acute when we consider women's vulvas. Aside from images in pornography, many women have never seen another woman's external genitalia. And just as our breasts don't look like porn star breasts, our genitals don't look like porn star genitals.

A few women (and men) have taken matters into their own hands. I've written many times about Alexandra Jacoby's vulva portraitraiture project. Now there is a new book, out of Canada, which essentially tackles the same idea. By showing each other what we look like, we can come to understand that variety is normal, and beautiful. I'll Show You Mine consists of 120 portraits of 60 women, all in exactly the same 2 poses (frontal and with legs spread), along with text written by the women about their relationships with their vulvas. The women are fairly diverse, ranging in age from 19 to 60, with varied backgrounds and lifestyles. They comprise a range of ethnicities and sizes; there is even a trans woman. The book is beautifully produced, in an environmentally sound manner, and 10% of proceeds go to women's charities. And as with so many media products these days, there is a highly interactive website to accompany it. The book is mainly available in Canada. If you're in the US or elsewhere, you'll probably need to order it by mail from their website. 


I've also been very impressed by a new book that deals in a straightforward, cogent way with a problem that many women have, but few women talk about. The book is called When Sex Hurts: A Woman's Guide to Banishing Sexual Pain. Although there are many causes of genital pain in women, we generally divide them into two broad categories. Vulvodynia means "pain in the vulva" and is considered a chronic pain condition, though the pain may be constant, intermittent, or primarily provoked by touch. Dyspareunia ("dis-pah-roo-nee-ah") refers to painful intercourse. Just as women tend not to discuss their feelings of shame or inadequacy around the appearance of their genitals, they rarely talk about their vulvar pain, even with their doctors, who can be dismissive and/or ignorant. The authors estimate that up to 40% of women with these pain conditions don't seek medical care, and those that do will often end up seeing many different practitioners before obtaining a diagnosis, if they receive one at all. The book is written by 2 doctors and a psychologist, and I found their approach to be smart, frank, understanding, and hopeful. Women with these pain conditions can become very depressed and disempowered. While this book will never hit the best-seller list, I hope that many women who need it will find it.  

The Happenings, the Non-Happenings, and the Future of Fertility Awareness

This post is late! Here's what's been happening, with backstory:

I am currently working with some wonderful, talented women who are on the path to becoming teachers of Fertility Awareness. I think an important part of the teacher-training process is being connected to, and learning from, other Fertility Awareness educators. So when my Israeli colleague Michal Schonbrun told me that she would be coming to NY for a couple of days in May, I asked her if she'd be willing to spend a few hours working with my students. She readily agreed, and somehow that idea grew into a two day event. One day was for teacher training, just for my students: Michal in the morning, and me in the afternoon. We also decided to create a public event. That event was to have centered around an introduction to Fertility Awareness (my presentation), and also was to have included presentations by two artists who do incredible work related to fertility and sexuality. The artists are Alexandra Jacoby, whose work I've mentioned & written about before, and Rebecca Morton (whose website is nearly complete, I'm happy to say).

So we poured a lot of time and energy into creating both these events, and my last blog post was to have been in late April, promoting the public one. But about a week beforehand, we decided to cancel the public event, due to poor ticket sales. We were all very disappointed, of course, but there came a point where we had to make a tough decision, and that's the one we made. I see again and again how people who know about Fertility Awareness tend to be quite passionate about it, but people who don't know about it tend to be indifferent. FA is a hard concept to get your mind around, since we're not used to thinking about fertility management, or body literacy. We think about birth control, until and unless we're ready to get pregnant. Then we think about pregnancy achievement. And we hardly ever think about empowerment around our sexuality or reproductive health care, unless something goes wrong. In short,  we don't have a holistic approach to our bodies in general, and much less so when it comes to our fertility and sexuality. So, Fertility Awareness, which offers a comprehensive approach to fertility, sexuality, and reproductive health care, is off the radar for most of us. It just doesn't fit neatly into the boxes we're used to ticking off.

So we cancelled the public program, but proceeded with the teacher training day. And that was a big success! I look forward to introducing you to each of these women as they get closer to actually teaching. There are so few qualified, secular teachers of Fertility Awareness in the US. My colleagues and I are actively working to make sure that there are new, younger teachers to carry on this work in the future. It may never be "popular," but it's life-changing stuff, and we want to ensure that personalized, non-religious instruction will always be available to those who need it. Charting on your iPhone is convenient, of course, and I think keeping track of your data electronically is a great idea, especially as our devices become more entwined with our lives. But electronic charting will never eliminate the need for personal instruction. When your smartphone can discuss with you the relative benefits of progesterone supplementation vs. Traditional Chinese Medicine for luteal phase defect, or how to assess if you can have unprotected intercourse up to day 3, day 5, or using the formula S-21, or helps you negotiate when to start trying for pregnancy when your partner is on the fence, or does any of the myriad other things that only a human teacher can do for you, you let me know, and I will take a nice long holiday.

By the way, in anticipation of the public event, I finally got the Facebook page for the Fertility Awareness Center up and running. It's been pretty active thus far. In fact, I think eventually it might supercede this blog. So if you're on Facebook, please "like" us. You'll be rewarded with more frequent postings, news of events, links to like-minded orgs, and photos. And of course you'll be part of a community of other FA devotees.

New Year's Resolution: Have Good Conversations

I recently told a friend about a salon I'd attended, and he said, "Salon? Like a hair salon?" No, my dear young readers. A salon, in the centuries old sense of the word, meaning a gathering, an event, a place to be entertained and to learn (to quote Wikipedia) "under the roof of an inspiring host." My friend Alexandra is the very definition of an inspiring host, and she has recently revived her Sunday afternoon salon series, which is part of her larger "vagina verité" project. (She does not like to use capital letters in that phrase, but I forgive her.) If you are in the New York area, I highly recommend that you treat yourself in the coming year to some great conversation, and some provocative art, and go. Here are the details, from Alexandra's content-rich website.

The topic of the December salon will also be the topic of the January salon, "v-anatomy 101." It wasn't a lecture on anatomy & physiology, however. Yes, we looked at some videos and books about the anatomy & physiology of the vulvovaginal area, but mostly we talked about stuff:  sex (of course), vulvovaginal health, first experience with tampons, where we go for information, how much information we want, and at what age - that sort of thing. We also looked at the "v-portraits," which are now one step closer to being in book format, and one happy participant colored in Tee Corinne's famous coloring book. 


If you're not in NY, well, you can still sign up for Alexandra's mailing list, and why don't you think about starting up your own salon series? I co-facilitated one for nearly two years and it was a blast. Be the antidote to Facebook in your community. Stop communicating in 140 characters or fewer.

I want to wish everyone a very happy and healthy new year. Take care of yourselves, and make the world a better place.

The Vagina Festival

In addition to the aforementioned benefit, Ilene also participated in the Vagina Festival. The Vagina Festival was a performance and art event that took place February 16-18, 2007, at the Agni Gallery, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Organized by Alexandra Jacoby, the Vagina Festival was held in conjunction with V-Day, an enormous project born out of Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues which focuses on ending violence against women. Two performances of the Vagina Monologues took place at the Vagina Festival. I was one of several presenters who did informational, as opposed to arts, presentations. I gave a short introduction to Fertility Awareness, entitled “Do You Know What’s In Your Underwear?” It was a unique and fun experience to give my talk in the presence of 60 or so V-Portraits, photos of vulvas, taken by Alexandra. She is working on a book of these portraits. For more info about her work, and to learn about upcoming exhibitions, see her extensive website:
http://www.vaginaverite.com/

For info on Vag Fest 2008, visit the website and sign up for the mailing list:
http://www.vaginafestival.com/index.html

(Astute readers of the vaginaverite website will notice that Alexandra often uses the word “vagina” instead of the anatomically correct term “vulva.” We have had extensive & interesting conversations about this and she discusses this on the anatomy page of her website.)