Ellie has photographed 500+ vulvas & this is her advice…

Published Nov 19, 2024, 2:00 PM

Photographer Ellie Sedgwick is on a mission to relieve women of vulva anxiety. She shares about her own struggles, and her learnings and wisdom from photographing 500-odd vulvas for her Comfortable in my Skin project and book. 

 

WANT MORE FROM ELLIE?

For more on her book Flip Through my Flaps see here or for Ellie’s Comfortable in my Skin project, click on @comfortableinmyskin_ or here

 

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In print: Each Sunday, grab Body+Soul inside The Sunday Telegraph (NSW), the Sunday Herald Sun (Victoria), The Sunday Mail (Queensland), Sunday Mail (SA) and Sunday Tasmanian (Tasmania). 

Welcome to Extra Healthy Ish. Yes, we're living the extra on this episode today. You have d you into the Body and Soul podcast, And of course this is the big sister one, Too Healthy Ish, but you knew that right. I am your host, Felicity Haley, my guest today, is on a mission to relieve women of volver anxiety. And not just women, partners of women, all of us, everyone who well has Evolver or comes into contact with Evolver. Ellist said Youriick joins me and she has got an amazing project. It's called Comfortable in My Skin, and she has photographed well five hundred volvers for her new book which is out now called Flip Through My Flaps. She's going to talk all about volvers today, how well her own experiences with volver anxiety, and she's going to share her learnings and wisdom from photographing five hundred odd bits. Ellie, thanks for joining us on Extra Healthy Is today.

How are you? Yeah, really good? Thank you, very busy but very good. Yeah.

Well, it's an exciting time. You're about to well, you are launching this amazing book. But before we get to that, I do have to ask you a question I ask of everyone who comes on the podcast How do you stay extra healthy in your daily life?

Well, I live on a bus. It's been three years in February, and therefore I travel a lot. I've just gone all around Australia and I park up at the beach for most nights, so I'm just the second I wake up, I'm walking up and down. I think I live naturally an extremely healthy life because the ocean is my favorite place to be in the world. So I do like I've done a free diving course. I'm always swimming, Yeah, walking the beach. I'm just out and about all the time. Me and my have this joke we're like use it or lose it, and we try and just use our bodies because they're so amazing. So and then with food, my dad saying he's always brought me up, is saying, like, just eat food. So that sort of means like non not processed as much as possible, you know, just actual fruit and ven and just food.

Yeah, real food.

I never dive into all of those little fads or anything. I just eat.

Oh, but there's something magical about waking up on a beach every morning, So I would lose the extra You're probably just healthy and lose the ish.

Yeah, yeah, the issues big in my life. It's fun. I quit alcohol a year and a half ago, so that also helps a lot. And yeah, I think that was a very healthy ish choice of me.

Yeah, I like it. Now, before we talk about well you photographing five hundred plus volvers, tell us about your experiences growing up with volver shame.

So in about I must have been about fourteen, a boy in my math class passed me a little note and it said do you have an inny or an audi? And so he wasn't talking about belly buttons, but that was the first time I realized that your vulgar could be in or out. And that's when I started hearing all those school yard bully terms like badly wrapped, kebab, octopussy. I mean, there was definitely I think I grew up on the northern beaches of Sydney and I think, you know, we all served and we hung out with the guys a lot, and after they'd sleep with someone, because we were like their mates, they would start telling us all these horrible things about the person's body that they'd slept with the night before. And I would sit there and listen and freak out in my head thinking, oh my god, this is what someone who sleeps with me is probably saying about my vulva, which then created this huge insecurity in my head that I was, you know, different or wrong or not worthy of pleasure because of the way my vulver looked. So in about my early twenties, I had two consultations for lady aplasty in Sydney Double Bay, and neither of those ladies who I had my consultation with even looked at my bulber. They just said, yep, we can book you in Oh wow, Yeah, they were just I told them that I didn't have the money yet, so I needed to save. And they even went down that conversation of trying to say, you know, if you're if your ladies is so long, I think it was eight centimeters, you can get under many care and they were asking like, do you get recurrent Thrashually, they were sort of trying to ask me all these questions to help me get it cheaper. Whereas I and now that I'm thirty four, I can look back and think like, you were so young and you know you need mental help. You need to go and see a therapist. In try and dig deep into why or where these insur securities came from. And then, luckily the third cosmetic surgeon that I went to when I had the money, he was in India, and I think it was actually culturally, like the reason he talked to me out of it was more of a cultural thing rather than he was just being really nice. But he first of all, when I went in, I was really awkward, and I said I wanted lipos suction, but I just pointed down. So I got myself in this really awkward situation where he was like thinking that one of my legs liposuctions, so he was like drawing on my leg with a highlighter. And then I finally found the words and said to him, Hey, I mean like this part of my body, which at that age I called my vagina, but actually I was talking about like the external parts, so the volver which is the LaBier, and I pointed to that and he asked me to take my undies off, which was obviously very uncomfortable, and then I showed him and he said like, I don't think you need this, And he was saying, have you like told me to go and look at what others look like, So, it's so funny now because I photographed like five hundred people, so I really want to send him the coffee table book that I've just brought it. I went and saw others, which is quite funny. But in that moment, he went and got a mirror which is sort of like an oval shape, and he told me to put my teeth forward, and he said, for the same price as what Laby Plastic costs, I could get a chin extension and make my jawline look like it did when I was sticking my teeth out, but without actually doing that. So yeah, he I left with like a little post it for laber, passing what it cost, and a little post it for chin extension. So I always joke saying, like I walked in with one insecurity and left with you.

So how did you become okay with what your laber looked like?

Look, I'm going to be very honest with you. Even after shooting bolvers for six years and photographing five hundred people, I would still self conscious even to the very very last minute. So I ended up stepping out in front of the camera. And yeah, so I actually went to New York to try and find more cultural diversity for the book. So two weeks before flipped through my flaps went to print, I realized there was not I mean, I've known this the whole time, but there's not enough black people in the book. I really struggled. So I ducked over to New York in hope to get more black women for diversity. I wanted like that representation. It was very important to me. And when I was over there, I had someone photograph me, and I must say it, up until that shuit happened to me, I was still self conscious. But it was pretty cool because I used the book in real time on myself. Yeah, it was so crazy. So after my photoshoot, I had the book next to me and I had my Volver up on the screen and I was flipping through the book, looking at five hundred volvers and looking at mine and being like, wow, it actually is similar to so many and there's actually nothing wrong with me. And I've hung on to these comments for so many years that people said about my Boxley in high school and it's their problem, it's not mine, and there's nothing wrong with me.

I actually want to ask let's talk about that in a minute, because I think there needs to be education of particularly boys and men as well about what labers look like. But tell us about actually photographing five hundred volvers. How did you find people and were people comfortable? I mean, if you know, some of us do worry about what we looked at look like down there, So how did you go at perhaps calming your subjects down.

So what people don't realize is that it's actually a big workshop before you get to that stage taking their pats off. So we do anatomy, we do sister circles, so we share stories and people are often a lot of the time people will sort of say disclose that they carry the herpes virus or that they've got vaginismus or bacteria vaginosis, and then I shoot six people at once. So usually one person in the group will start and then someone else will say, hey, me too, or I can because of my memory of all the people I photographed, I can say, hey, I can connect you with other people that are going through something similar to what you're going through. So I think they start to feel seen and heard and they realize that they're not the only one going through this. And then we go on to study like the anatomy of the vulvar. What we weren't taught in high school. We talk about pleasure. We talk about all the different pleasure plots inside, like the g spot, the casepot as what There's so many different ones that's missed. We talk about cervical orgasms and how the cervic moves up and down during your menstrual cycle. We talk about tracking cycles. There's like so many things that we cover before we actually get to the photo shoot, and people just by the time the camera comes out, they're honestly walking around naked, like they walk in hunched over, a little bit nervous, and they leave just like a completely different person. I'm often told that the one photoshoot changed someone's life or helped them or heal them more than five years in therapy. Yeah, so I have very good feedback. And yeah, it's easy to find people. I actually just went on a national tour around Australia and I have a weight list in every city and as soon as I got there, I just emailed them and there would be like one hundred people trying to book in for a photoshoot.

We'll be back after this short break with more from Eli and it's not just folvers. I mean you have taken pictures of penises and discharge and all sorts of things, and I think that is so refreshing because it just normalizes all these things that many of us go through.

Yeah, So on my website, we've got all different galleries. We've got some herpes, outbreaks, hemorrhoids, stretch marks, boobs from that angle. I love that album. It's you know, when you're laying on top of someone and your boobs are hanging down. So we've got everyone to send them photos from that angle. And these, again are all topics and body issues that we often struggle with that actually are really normal and should be normalized and should be celebrated because you know, if you have stretch marks, it can often be like it can often be post birth, so it's something that you've brought a whole new human into the world and yes, your body stretched, and how beautiful is that? So I like to call them tiger stripes. It's just kind of reframing the narrative and using more positive language to talk about your body. When you're talking about yourself like you would to a friend, treat yourself that way. And I feel people often make friends through my community and through these galleries, like we've got an inverted nipple gallery, and I have support Yeah, I have support groups for all of these topics. And there's like thirty people in each group with the herpes ones those up to fifty, and people have made their best friends in those groups.

Yeah.

So sometimes you could take the pain and use it as your power and create really beautiful, strong connections with people that you never would have met if you didn't reach out for the support.

What do you wish women knew, well, perhaps more of about their evolvers.

Well, I mean, I just wish that they could find my gallery and see how they are all. Yes, they're unique, but they're also quite similar. And you know, it's just like the rest of your body. It can be asymmetrical. Your eyes aren't always the same, your fingers aren't always the same, your eyebrows are always the same. It can be darker the skin on your labia to the rest of your body. I always find that really interesting. You can have skin tags, you can have moles, you can have little you know, little spots and all of these things. I mean, so I wish that people would get a mirror and look inside and learn what yours looks like. And yeah, reach out to me if you think there's something different going on, and I bet you I can show you a hundred others like yours.

Yeah, I like that. What about? What do you wish men knew about women's volvers?

So from hearing hundreds of thousands of horror stories of things that people's partners have said to them in the bedroom or school yard bully terms, or especially from people's partners, I wish that they could stop and think and realize that, hey, this is actually going to make my partner with the vole but very self conscious. How can you get out of your head and into your body If the person you're sleeping with have said, oh, you're not as tired as you used to be, or I've slept with people who whose labya is along like yours, that comment is going to stick in that person's head forever and they're going to have to do so much therapy to release it. And you can't orgasm or feel pleasure on the level that is accessible if you're stuck in your head worried about mean things. So you're actually like screwing with your own sex life, with your partner by saying these horrible things.

I mean, I almost feel like these are the messages are great to get out there to you know, people born female at birth and women people who identify as women. But really we need to get your project in the hands of teenage boys and men and grown men.

It's never too early to get this message into the hands of anybody. I just went to Seven Sisters Fessival, which was teenagers up from twelve were allowed to come, and mums brought their teenagers up to me and we had discussions of like, do you understand the difference of a volver and a vagina? And what they learn in sex Ed is just not enough at the moment. And I think a lot of people have been asking me what age people can have my book, and the short answer is like, yes, a child can have this book, but it's up to you as a parent to sit with them and find out what's or know what's age appropriate. And you could go to a sex therapist and say, hey, I want to show my child this book, and then they could tell you how to have that conversation with your child. But I just think even using the correct terminology, so just saying like this is avolver, this is the vagina, so that your child can then know, yeah, the correct terminology for their body, and they can always have that language.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really important point. I still see it all through media, the volver being referred to as the vagina, and I'm like, come on, people, let's speak to twenty twenty well twenty twenty five. Let's get with the lingo.

I know. And also the language is so important because when children are better educated, they're better protected. So I literally just did a post about this. Same ignorance is not innocent. So the sad reality is that child abuse is more common than we think, and a child who understands the anatomy and their body automody, they're a lot harder to groom. So yes, my book includes sensitive topics, but it's really important that the parents have this conversation with their child because it literally keeps them safe.

Yeah. Well, Ellie, I think you're doing a fabulous thing. I like the Comfortable in my Skin projects, so yeah, well done. Keep on taking those photos and thanks for joining us on Extra Healthy Ish.

Thanks Felicity.

Ellie's coffee table book. It's really more than a book it's an extraordinary project. It's called Flip Through My Flaps and it is out now. And I also encourage you to go on her website and take a look at all the things she has photographed. Would I found it really empowering actually just sitting there and staring at all those evolvers. Anyway, I hope you did enjoy this chat. Jump online if you would like anything else, bodyansoul dot com that you is a place to go. Follow us on socials, grab our print edition which is out in your local Sunday paper. You can DM me at Felicity Harley with any feedback and until tomorrow it's extra healthy ish