As a person with a vulva, I’ve been tasked with the constant grueling homework of seeing my body as the glorious sack of meat that it is instead of a failure, a shame pit, or a hell hole of political debate.

As a dancer, I’ve made my career around retraining myself to see my body as a personal tool, as a playground, as an ultimate toy that I have total agency over. It’s mine to fully customize and mine to make mistakes with. A DIY hunk of flesh, stuck in with lovely fat and bone, accessorized by a sausage casing of skin, and draped in knowledge and knowing.

I am actively trying to see my body as the playhouse it is, full of wondrous bacterial delight and flashing electric fat blobs (hi brain, what’s good). It’s not the heteronormative sex bag I’ve been led to believe. Though, we’re all sex bags at one point in our lives, but we’re also bags of other stuff, like fascia or a fun time.

The body is just a bunch of meat, goop, bone, and fat and I am determined to see it as such. I’ve long given up on the binary of my body being hot or not, it just is.

When met with the task of body positivity, I prefer body expansiveness. Falling in love with the unseen systems that allow me to turn cake into a good time (and then a wondrous nap) or coffee into a fast time (no nap, only go). This perspective can be as potent as holding my fat in my hands and saying ‘thank you, you hold me so well’ instead of ‘why are you here, everybody says I should hate you’.

Ever feel like you can’t get out of the perspective that your body is ugly and stupid and so are you? Try this:

Step One: Put on your favorite piece of music (Rosalia, Rachel Portman, SOPHIE) Step Two: Pretend the air is made of molasses
Step Three: Try to thrash your meat sack around in the imagined goop. It will limit and enrage you.

I call this the slow temper tantrum and it feels as good as screaming into a pillow.


Now you are not just “hot or not”, you’re as angry as you should be and maybe a little tired.

Through this life-long class project of retraining my eyes to see anatomy instead of travesty, I’ve become well acquainted with certain parts of my body. I see the crevices where I have sunk shame and the places that have slowly melted into autonomous parts of my playground. I see the essays I have written in the folds of myself and the work still yet to be done.

But what about the bits of me I can’t easily access in a standing mirror? The bits I can’t hold in front of my face. My bits.

I’m talking about my vulva.

Here’s a confession. I’ve had this life-long fear that my vulva was grossly mis-designed. I had vaginismus for 6 years. A painful, stupid, literal cock block. At the time I was very focused on the penis as my preferred form of penetration, I also thought penetration was the only form of sex.

These two things are lies.

I am also a person who is well endowed with labia. They are plump, They are girthy, and they give fabulous camel toe. They are also apparently shameful. Who knew?

Vaginismus plus a heavy-duty-down-there was a double whammy of shame and dissociation.
Add in genderqueerness and what do you get? A bad time.

The more I tried to have sex, the more I shut off my relationship to my vulva. Not only was I not fulfilling what I assumed was a basic human right (although sex isn’t for everyone, shoutout to my aces), I didn’t even know what pleasure felt like down there.

Without a working, orgasming, viable vagina, I was an NPC in a sea of main characters. I wasn't fully formed and no one would ever love me.

This is what I had decided, and so this is how I defined myself. Whoops, big mistake.

I hadn’t orgasmed until I was 21. I finally came omegeling with a hairless, white, un-faced penis.

That began my journey into mending my relationship with my vulva. But nothing could prepare me for the closure I would feel after making my own Clone a Pussy.

It’s been 8 years of learning and unlearning. I was surprised to find out that I still have a ways to go. Apparently, I still thought my cunt was a twat.


As I squatted in my bathtub, pressing some pleasantly messy molding paste against my vulva I thought, “This isn't going to work.” As if I didn’t trust that I had anything to be molded. I was almost convinced my clit was in the wrong place or my urethra wouldn’t show up. I was doubtful of my own anatomy.

This is what raced through my mind:

Are my labia too big for this? What will I be faced with?
Could I handle seeing the topography of a part of me that has been so hard to reconcile with?

To the dismay of my feminist and the delight of my poet, after pouring the silicone into the negative of my vulva, my Clone a Pussy resembled a flower.

My labia minora, which I had convinced myself had been absorbed by my immense labia majora sat there innocuous, just simply existing. My urethra, the head of my clitoris (often too sensitive to stimulate directly), even the ridges I’d learned through trial and pleasure were all there, gleaming in hot pink gelatin.

It was stunning. It looked like all the pictures of others that I had basked in, but not quite because it was mine.

I ran my fingers along the familiar pathways. Those I walk on my way to orgasm, and those I idle by while watching TV. All there, all tangible, all mine to see.

Now immortalized in soft body-safe silicone there to remind me that I myself, even in my worst storms, can also just simply exist.