Emma Buggy is an artist based in London, United Kingdom, with a specific passion for sculpting the female genitalia, or, in layman terms, Cunt, Pussy, Beaver, Snatch, Vag, Poontang, or a hairy, bloody, axe wound. However you want to call it, Emma has been sculpting it for the past 7 years, both individually and as part of a vagina-sculpting collective, The ClitorArty. Her love-affair with the lady-gash took her from deep embarrassment to the heights of adoration, and she is here to let us know: Every vagina is a special cunt.
I am an artist who makes Vaginas. Yes, Vaginas with a capital V for Vulva. Voluptuous, fluid, curvy, sexy, sensual, supple, sweet, Cunts! The core of womanhood, the penultimate receiver (and giver) of endless pleasure, the place that girls pee from, the hole everyone emerges from, the bowl that we bleed from, my luscious little entertainment section between my legs. I do make other things of course, like breasts and bottoms and other womanly curvaceous bits that are equally admired and degraded by the insecurities of men and women. Sometimes I might even venture out into the world of non-sensual art and make pieces of sculpture for festivals or community projects out of bits of old cardboard and plastic bags, but mostly I have been making Cunts for the last 7 years.
I made my first vagina during my first year at Wimbledon College of Arts in London. My class was given the task of making embarrassing decorations for the sculpture departments Christmas party. So I gleefully put together a huge fabric Vagina doorway. The only entrance and exit to the party was through a massive cunt. At the time, I was just 19 years old and considered this to be extremely embarrassing and amusing for anyone who had to confront it.
When I was a teenager no one told me that it was completely normal to be a bit wiffy when you’re ‘on the rag’. When I looked for confirmation of my normality amongst my peers at secondary school, I was laughed and pointed at by all the girls in the room, who then took it upon themselves to spread the word that Emma had a smelly Vagina. I was mortified and completely paranoid from that day onwards.
Shortly after making the Vagina doorway, I went to see Eve Ensler’s play “The Vagina Monologues”. From the moment the three actresses ascended the stage I was rooted to my seat in awe, listening to them reenact the stories of rape, discomfort, shame, embarrassment and hatred for their vaginas that women from all over the world had shared with Eve. A change in me happened that night, when two thousand men and women in the theatre stood and chanted CUNT together, a word used in most English speaking countries as a derogatory slur, a derivative of the oriental great goddess Cunti or Kunda, who was known as the vulva of the universe, the divine passage, the bringer of life and feminine energy. We repeatedly shouted out to hear the “happy Vagina Fact” over and over:
The clitoris is pure in purpose, it is the only organ in the body designed purely for pleasure!
Among the stories of sadness and negativity that women have been dragging around in their cunts for years, there were also stories of love and pleasure and admiration; of a women whose sole purpose was to make other women come, of a man who would stare at them for hours because he thought they were beautiful and of a little girl who thought her vagina smelled like snowflakes and had a very smart brain deep inside it. I wanted to be one of those stories. I wanted to get rid of the embarrassment surrounding our vaginas like a bad smell, and bring back the powerful, protective, lusting, loving, fluid, gorgeousness that they were respected for in the days of Cunti!
The return to that respect is thwarted in our modern, accepting, western world where images of cunts, tits and arse are ‘spread’ across our supermarket shelves at children’s eye level. Most of us enjoy a bit of porn when we get home after a hard days work and need some titillating entertainment to wind down and spunk off to. However (and as much as I enjoy the odd bit of porn) there is a huge problem with the way in which our perception of the vulva has been manipulated by the simple selling standards of this industry. In Australia, censorship laws state that if a woman’s inner labia is showing in any way it is considered as “too sexy and pornographic”. This means that lads magazines such as Zoo and Nuts (in the UK and Australia) have taken it upon themselves to do a bit of DIY labiaplasty on their computers in order to keep their magazines in the most ‘acceptable’ and popular selling category of porn; the everyday man’s middle shelf bit of titty.
This is one of the major reasons young women today have become insecure about their vaginas, hence the immense increase in women undergoing the horrific cosmetic procedure known as labiaplasty (when the labia minor and majora are cut and altered to a more ‘desirable’ shape). Western women are comparing themselves to these puckered up, tight, young shaven pussies which quite often resemble the immature cunt of a seventeen year old. Women have been hoodwinked by these media images into thinking that this is what ALL men want to see, although this is evidently not true. In my experience, many young men have been conditioned to expect ‘pussy’ to be served on a plate with no extra hairy bits or happy flaps, because these are the images they have been exposed to from a very young age.
This perception of the cunt needs to change. People need to realise the enormous variety of vagina, how every vulva is beautiful, exciting, and as individual as a finger print – floppy bits, hair, fluid and the rest. Women should not compare their cunts to fantasy versions created by Photoshop and sold on the middle shelf!
In the last two months I have been revisiting the streets with my vagina art in an attempt to get the cunt noticed, by cunt ‘tagging’ in three dimensional sculpted graffiti vulvas. In conversations with onlookers the subjects of embarrassment, smell, disgust, beauty, power, strength, insecurities and admiration came up, but mostly people left smiling, dancing and chanting “Vagina”. This is why I continue to make cunts.
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