Why This Week’s Channel 4 Documentary ‘100 Vaginas’ Is Essential Viewing For All Women

I’ve just come from seeing a screening of a new documentary, 100 Vaginas, which is due to air on Tomorrow night on Channel 4, and how I wish I could have watched a film like this as a young woman.How many years of confusion and embarrassment, it might have spared me; all those furtive hours scouring the pages of Cosmo for some sign that I was, in fact, normal. Beautiful, funny, powerful, shocking, it is the best documentary I’ve seen in a long time.

And it’s also very necessary - because we’re still not talking about the female sexual anatomy, or female pleasure anywhere near enough, and it shows.

We know that smear testing attendance at a record low. According to a recent survey by cervical cancer charity Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust, as low as one in two in some areas of the UK amongst young women, with 8 in 10 young women (81%), saying they feel too embarrassed, or vulnerable (75%) to have the test.

This is in the context of so much misinformation about female bodies and pleasure, not just from porn, but also mainstream movies and television, which presents penetrative sex as the only ‘real’ sex when, in fact, only 20% of women can orgasm through penetrative sex alone. That it was only in 1998 that the full extent of the clitoris was discovered speaks volumes. (It’s a 10cm long octopus-like creature that grips around the outside of the vagina, not just the small button, as described by the Oxford English dictionary).

As we learn from the film, over half of 11-14 year olds have watched porn online. It’s no wonder so many young men think a good, hard seeing to will guarantee ecstasy and are horrified when they encounter a real hairy vulva. Or that girls harbour so much embarrassment around this most brilliant body part. If only kids could be shown this film as part of sex education - how much confusion they might be spared. There is a need for real, open and honest information and not just for young women.

‘It’s a long overdue conversation,’ says Director Jenny Ash, who says making the film bought her own unacknowledged insecurities into sharp focus. ‘There’s a lot of shame around women’s bodies and the vulva especially. It’s really crucial that we start talking about it. It’s only by talking that the shame will dissipate.’

The film follows a cast of women as they are photographed, legs akimbo, up close and personal, by photographer Laura Dodsworth for her book, Womanhood: The Bare Reality, Pinter& Martin, £20. This is the third book of intimate body parts that Dodsworth has undertaken. First it was breasts, then penises. ‘Now I’m ready for the last taboo,’ she says. ‘It’s part of ourselves we don’t look at or talk about.’ She hopes her work will go some way to normalising the vulva in all its glorious variety.

Dodsworth’s photographs are almost forensic in their detail and we quickly learn that no two vulvas look alike. They are certainly not all the neat, pink, smooth Barbie versions popularised by porn.

Check out the women featured in the documentary:

It’s interesting to observe the women’s reactions to seeing their most intimate body part. ‘It’s not as bad as I thought it would be.’, ‘It’s mine, it does what I need it to do.’, ‘She’s pretty, I like it.’, ‘She reminds me of a pink cupcake.’

The shoot provides a conduit for the women’s stories as they unfold in a series of candid interviews about key life experiences and this the most powerful aspect of the film. Their stories are compelling.

Hats off to the women aged 19-77, for talking so openly. It helps that they are such a likeable bunch, I wanted each every one of them to be my friend. Ash has filmed people of all ages and sexual orientations and says she was determined to find a woman in her 70s who still loved sex, but persuading anyone to come forward was no easy task. In desperation she found herself asking a relative, whose reaction predictably was: ‘Are you really asking what I think you’re asking.’ In the end a neighbourhood website yielded a sparkling 77-year-old feminist who still enjoys her orgasms.

The interviews are woven through with footage of life models offering us powerfully intimate portraits. A girl on the loo removing a bloody tampon, a close-up of a clitoris, masturbation. Shocking stuff for mainstream TV and yet it isn’t, there is nothing salacious or pornographic here, the effect is more like a beautiful painting. I felt I was viewing a Rembrandt or an Old Dutch Master. Full marks for the cinematography.

In the film we hear women describing their orgasms and first sexual experiences as a river of voices, the effect is hypnotically beautiful and the brilliant score brings an added explosion of joyous fireworks.

There’s plenty of humour too with one woman calling for a ‘sexual Brexit’, where women take back control.

It’s this lightness of touch that makes the film so easy to watch, but there’s no shying away from difficult subjects: sexual abuse, rape, sexual dysfunction. I was moved to tears as one woman, now a vibrant sexual health nurse, described how she was robbed of her childhood and fertility throughFGMto remove her clitoris and labia, as young girl age 7. You want to punch the sky as you learn that the people who did this to her have not robbed her of her ability to enjoy sexual pleasure – or orgasm.

Dodsworth began the project by photographing herself and says she was so keen to make sure that pubic hair featured that she grew a full Seventies bush to ensure that an unwaxed vulva made appearance. Though, as we see in the film, most of the women do have pubic hair although many asked if they should change their ‘hair style’ for their close-up, as if natural is no longer good enough, thanks to the proliferation of porn.

And as groundbreaking as 100 Vaginas is, it’s by no means the only sign that the vulva is having - for wont of a better word - a moment. Late last year I attended an event by Intimina, the menstrual cup makers, where a panel of women from Meg Matthews to radio presenter Gemma Cairney openly discussed periods, menopause and masturbation. Meanwhile novelist Stephanie Theobald’s incredible memoir Sex Drive is making solo-sex sexy, while the US website OMGYes!, which focuses on the science of women’s pleasure, shows real women explaining exactly how they have orgasms.

As Dodsworth notes, we are working towards a new acceptance and appreciation of our vulvas for everything they can do and feel – rather than how they look - and not before time. ‘This intimate part of ourselves, that we’re so conditioned to conceal, actually defines so much of our lives as women, and our most intimate experiences: pleasurable and painful, shouldn’t be treated as taboo, but as a testament to our strength,’ she says in the film