The Women's Stories

Age: 28

It’s not every day you answer your phone to hear;

“Quick, come home! We’re having our vaginas cast at 6 o’clock and you’ll have to shave first”

“Shave everything?”

“Total eclipse baby!”

The day was rapidly charting unseen territory, not only would I be revisiting my prepubescent youth, but also being smeared in strange substances by a man I’d never seen before. I decided to wear a dress.

The showroom put me at ease with tasteful nudes of torsos, holding hands and pregnant bellies. It was certainly more a homage to the human form than anything crude or explicit. Having met Jamie, we stepped into the back room. The scent of solvent hung heavy in the air. A table of white casts lay to one side like an alien flowerbed while a gory decorporated head swung slowly above us, faintly in a breeze. I could almost hear the violin shrieking when Gemma spotted a phallic cast, so detailed you could almost see the veins pulsing with blood.

“Wow! It’s huge, how big is that?”

“10 inches.”

“Christ….how would you…..there’s no way you could sit on that.”

We looked around some more and chatted to Jamie about his work.

“How do you get them to stay up?”

“Normally they’d bring a partner”

“So you don’t have to…?”

“No.”

“Has anyone ever….you know…..on you?”

“Yeah, once. His girlfriend was with him though.”

“Dude!”

“Yeah gross. So, who’s first?”

Gemma hopped on the couch much like you would for a massage.

“Just put your feet together and drop your knees to the side….”

The process was remarkably simple, involving moisturiser followed by a thick coating of blue rubber gel which soon dried. It easily peeled off revealing an inverse landscape of your own hidden planet. While I was being cast Gemma busied herself gaining photographic evidence of my graphic pose, quizzing Jamie on the process and his motivation. It turned out to be a response to the increasing numbers of women having labiaplasty for purely aesthetic reasons – anathema to a true lover of the human form. And I think he is.

The whole experience took around an hour and reiterated the positive effects of good pure laughter.   Any self-conscious edge seemed wholly removed, in part due to Jamie’s professionalism and cheery nature but also because of the simple bizarreness of the situation and the surroundings. Manhoods of all shapes and sizes, a pair of salt and pepper balls, disembodied body parts, a taxidermy cat with things where they shouldn’t be….and a wall full of vaginas. Like zebra stripes, they are all truly different.

And so cast, we offed. For my part happy to have been part of such a delightful project but also safe in the knowledge that I am as normal as ‘normal’ is. For Gemma’s part, full of the glee of the Facebook mischief set to come. Yes, my vagina is on now on the internet, I like to think of it as art.