Pussypedia

A New Definition of Pussy

WE PROPOSE A NEW GENDER-AND-ORGAN-INCLUSIVE USE OF THE WORD THAT MEANS some combination of vagina, vulva, clitoris, uterus, urethra, bladder, rectum, anus, and—who knows—maybe some testes.

The word vagina comes from the Latin word for “sword holder.” We are not down with the idea that vaginas exist as objects of service to penises. Also, vagina only refers to the canal. If we call the whole thing a vagina, we ignore a bunch of other important parts, including everything you see on the outside and the clitoris, which is made of the same tissues as a penis, about the same size as one, and responsible for our orgasms. (We wish we didn’t have to refer back to penises to make this point about how important the clitoris is!) If we call it a vulva, we ignore the vagina and everything else inside. Also, there wasn’t an available word that could include all of these parts plus testes, which some intersex people with pussies have! Like what if we had words for foot, shin, calf, knee, and thigh but no word for leg? We picked pussy because it had no prior specific definition, because you smile when you say it, it’s used around the world, and because it’s historically offensive, which is fun. We’re taking pussy back cuz we like it. We hope you like it too.

A Medical Disclaimer

PLEASE READ THIS AND DON’T SUE US:

Pussypedia is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. It is for general education purposes only. Pussypedia is not a replacement for going to the doctor. Don’t delay going or not go to the doctor because of what you read here. When in doubt, always go to the doctor. Oh, and don’t go against what your doctor said because of what you read here.

Thanks, we love you.

Foreword

I HAVE A CLEAR MEMORY OF WHAT I THINK WAS THE FIRST TIME SOMEONE TALKED plainly to me about my vulva and vagina.

My single mother often worked double shifts or night shifts. Sometimes, Ms. Smith, my sister’s first-grade teacher, would spend the night with us if it was going to be an all-nighter.

One night, as we were getting into the massive nightgowns my mother liked for us (did she want us to get strangled in our sleep?), Ms. Smith noticed that we were leaving our underpants on. “You should really take those off when you sleep,” she said. My mom grew up super Catholic—modesty was often the order of the day, so I was wary but also always interested in any potential rule-breaking.

“You’ve got to let it breathe at night,” she said. “It needs to get some air.”

Amazing.

As time went on, I learned many more things about my cunt and its cohorts from far more people and places, but what was often most impactful, what I remember the most—and I’m reaching at a point in my life where the impact of a thing is easily measured by my ability to remember it—was usually the most real. The most human and straightforward. Funny; awkward without shame. Sometimes even rude now and then, but always still smart, and never mean. Delicious, on occasion. Smelly, sometimes. Reverent, but not in a churchy way.

Like the first copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves on my mother’s bookshelf, and then later, my own; what I’d learn from friends and from more-than-friends (what in mixed company we refer to as “field research”); the one truly excellent gynecologist I was able to encounter as a patient in public health; the street; the feminist bookstore; smut. Also, you could honestly teach a whole—and highly detailed—sexual anatomy class using nothing but Irish limericks.

That’s not to discount or dismiss other avenues or ways of learning about all this. I’ve certainly learned—and also sometimes taught—my fair share doing the kind of brainy and curious deep dives (not a euphemism) with more sciencey or clinical presentations, and fallen into the kind of research rabbit holes that led Zoe Mendelson and María Conejo to start the project that’d result in this book in the first place, and that inform so much of it so deeply and so well. I’ve also learned some good stuff from other, more esoteric sources.

At the end of the day, though, when the research is all done, and it’s time to just start finding out, I feel you just can’t overstate the power of plainspoken pussytalk.

Ms. Smith, bless her heart, apparently knew that and knew how to do that in 1979, and Pussypedia (and more to the point, its creators) is particularly great at it in 2021.

Holy areolae, the art of Pussypedia: you are in for a treat. María Conejo’s glorious art gets at that reverence I love, and that I really want in something that’s about this for-real temple (!) that is our body. But María’s art isn’t ever precious, nor does it feel creepily gynecological, a thing that a million clichéd pieces of truly well-meaning feminist artwork, absolutely including some of my own, easily demonstrate are very difficult balances to achieve. Delicious? Yep.

It is funny, never mean, though occasionally you might think it rude, and yes, smelly. Not literally, but—it’s real in here. I think the realness manages to make it almost have an actual funk.

It is always, always smart. You’re about to learn more than you thought you were going to when you got this book. I’m thrilled for you, to a degree that’s, quite frankly, starting to get a little embarrassing for me.

The facts are here, and they are meticulously researched. Meticulously. Zoe and I message one another semi-regularly. Nine times out of ten that I get a message from Zoe, it opens with a research question, or, more commonly, a research frustration, usually based in the inability to find the level of support for something, or the source of a thing, she wants. Zoe is not messing around when it comes to the facts, making very sure they are the facts and then finding a whole bunch of extra facts while verifying that first bunch. I already have to fix a good ten different things in my own work this week because of things I found in this book. Thanks a lot, Zoe.

It’s very, very human in this book. I think that’s my favorite part.

We learn all the things that we learn about our bodies and their parts from so many different places, and one person or place would never be near enough. It’s best to learn from a bunch of people, places, and situations. I think that there are some important roles filled in that. People older than you with great big boundaries who also give you good body information, like Ms. Smith up there, fill one of those roles.

Another of those important roles is a friend who knows their shit about this stuff and is suuuuper candid and open with you about their own personal feelings, experiences, and ideas. This friend will literally talk to you about pussy power. She will talk to you about it often.

This person is your scout, your most trusted drug (or sober) buddy, your partner on the field trip. They’re your peer, but they know things you don’t yet, have talked to people you haven’t, or have experienced something differently from what you knew could be a thing. They’re not going to talk to you like a doctor, and you’ll both feel some vulnerability, not just you. They also are funnier and, more importantly, don’t try as hard as doctors to be funny. (While they have a speculum. What are they even thinking sometimes?)

You get to know what the person giving you the facts also really thinks and feels herself. Now, you probably won’t feel the same way Zoe, or everyone she interviews or quotes in this book, does. That’s OK. Just witnessing someone else strongly possess and voice their own opinions, experiences, and feelings, especially about this, where so often the most loudly opinionated people about it don’t even share this anatomy, for crying out loud, gives you so much permission to more strongly claim your own opinions, experiences, and feelings.

This is YOUR BODY. If there is anything for you to have strong opinions, experiences, and feelings about and to feel rightful in owning, it is this. If you want some help with that, or just some extra company in it, Pussypedia will make an excellent companion.

In fact, hanging out with this book and the way that it and its author engage you may put you at risk of feeling more comfortable with your body and your own thoughts and feelings about it and everything and anything related to it, and feeling in good company with your body. Just so you know. I think one of my favorite things about this book is also that it’s pretty full spectrum as far as the life span is concerned, so if you keep this puppy in the living room, literal generations could potentially have that experience. I’m being serious with you.

We don’t live in a world where we come to knowledge and comfort with our bodies—and most certainly our pussies, our cunts, our twats, our vulvas, our genitalia, whatever your favorite nom de vajoo—by default. So I think it’s pretty fair to say that we all can often use some extra support and solidarity in being no-shame awkward, rude, smart, and real about what’s real, in treating our smelly-delicious bodies with reverence, especially the parts the world treats with the least reverence, and how to just be human about… well, just being human.

You’ve got hundreds of pages of it (and so much careful, caring blood, sweat, and tears of it) in your hands right now, so who knows why you’re still reading me.

¡Viva la Pussypedia!

Heather Corinna

February 1, 2021

A Note from María

FOR AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER, I’VE BEEN DRAWING MY FEELINGS. AN EMOTION, as Sara Ahmed defines it in her book The Cultural Politics of Emotions, “is the feeling of bodily change.” It’s something embodied that happens within us and doesn’t exist purely in our minds but travels from our minds through our bodies. My artistic practice began with a story I developed about a female character who loses her head one day. She becomes a headless body like the iconic image of Bataille’s Acéphale, who at first goes in search of her head but then develops a narrative of her own. She is The Body.

I believe in the power of images, of visual representation. Like with language, to depict something is to affirm its existence. The most important role that art plays in our present moment is Representation. It feels so good to see someone who looks like you somewhere besides the mirror. I have dealt with body dysmorphia my entire life and I’m still working on a more amorous and compassionate relationship with myself, and what has helped the most in recent years is art that represents the beautiful diversity of bodies that exists.

When I was five years old, I found myself one afternoon alone in my room, lit up by the last bit of golden daylight as darkness approached. I stood staring at myself in a big mirror with wonder.

I looked myself up and down, examining my head, my torso, my feet. I took in the entire shape of my body, which led me to think about the space my body took up in the room, and then about the space it took up in my house and quickly escalating to the space it took up in my country, the planet, THE UNIVERSE! My heart quickened with anxiety. My hands began to sweat, which grounded me back in my body.

The epiphany I had in that room that afternoon has defined my whole life. It was clear to me that my body was the most important thing I owned and the only place I will inhabit my entire existence. I was never scared of it. Quite the opposite; I explored it; I liked using a mirror to look at the parts I couldn’t reach with my own eyes. I wasn’t afraid to stick my fingers into my pussy or wherever; I wanted to understand what it was, how it felt. It was an undiscovered land for me to explore.

My favorite things to do when I was a kid were to ride my bike as far and as fast as I could and to kick boys’ asses at karate. I was the only girl in my karate class, which made me feel powerful even though most of the time I got my ass kicked too. But I really enjoyed doing those things because they allowed me to spend quality time with my body, in my body, to know its limits and its capabilities, to feel every part of it.

But my happy journey of bodily amazement didn’t last forever. When I was nine, an old man harassed me on the street. It was the first time I thought of my body as something sexual. After that experience, I never wore the same clothes I was wearing that day, as if I was guilty for exhibiting my body. I remained silent. Years later, as a teenager, the nuns at my Catholic high school in Mexico would ask me to buy bigger uniforms to cover up my beautiful big butt so my classmates wouldn’t get “distracted,” reinforcing the message that my body was all wrong and it was drawing attention to itself in all the wrong ways. I also remained silent then.

No wonder I developed body dysmorphia in early adolescence. Those experiences, many others and also the fact I never got to speak about them with anyone, made way for all the patriarchal bullshit to take a seat at the table in my mind, letting the shame, the discomfort, the fear, and the dissatisfaction creep in. The only way I’ve been able to feel better has been through my work.

Drawing The Body allowed me to connect the dots between that experience I had at age five to every experience with my body since. It brought everything into full view. Seen from afar, some of those experiences looked unpleasant and unfair. I felt angry. Through The Body, I made the decision to be done with disrespect to my body. Enough from me, enough from everyone else. I wanted to restore my body’s power, and everyone else’s, too. So I made The Body the main character of all my work. I wanted it to be an invitation to others to turn their bodies into their own main characters as well. I wanted to propose that, perhaps, there is nothing wrong with having a body after all.

So I kept drawing naked bodies doing things. A lot of them. It has been challenging, to say the least, to pursue this kind of work in Mexico, a country with a deeply entrenched macho culture where internalized misogyny is rampant and 11 women get killed every day, while countless more go missing with impunity. But the response to my work has been surprisingly positive; I have been published alongside articles about feminism, gender theory, abortion, masturbation, sex, femicides in Mexico. I’ve made clothes, T-shirts, prints, stickers, tote bags with my drawings on them. I have aimed to spread my message however I could; forget about our preconceived notions, our bodies are the most important thing we have—let’s listen to them, take care of them, enjoy them.

Now that I am 32, one of my favorite ways to spend quality time with my body is still to ride my bike as far and fast as I can. But now, instead of kicking boys’ asses, I’m more interested in finding ways to have better sexual experiences with them or with other humans. And I am learning to love my body again.

So when Zoe wrote to me about doing this life-changing pussy project, it felt like a piece of the puzzle that I never knew was missing. Use my art to help spread knowledge about our bodies so people can finally enjoy their bodies, masturbate, have better sex? Fight injustice and help make this world a better, more equitable place, beginning with the Internet? And with my friend, the genius I have been wanting to collaborate with for years? Without any money at all? OBVIO! I didn’t hesitate. I was sure we were going to make this a reality. And we did.

Working on Pussypedia has changed my life completely. I’ve learned a lot, not only about myself and my body but also about my community. This project has turned Zoe and me into representatives of a safe space. And that has meant that suddenly, people are very open to talking about the most personal things possible with us. I so appreciate that. This project has opened my perception to the wonderful diversity of bodies that exist in the world and to the infinite spectrum of human sexual expression. It has made me question everything I’ve ever been taught about my body. It has helped me understand why I was taught what I was taught. It has provided me the opportunity and the space to get to know my body for a second time. To be more compassionate with myself.

As I sat down to draw the images for this book, the most important things for me were to transmit everything I’ve learned and to be completely sincere. I wanted to share my wonder and amazement with you. I wanted you to understand why I believe that pleasure is the reason we all exist. I wanted to make honest, anatomically accurate images to accompany Zoe’s text. I avoided using metaphors, unless necessary, because we need to see representations of our bodies and experiences exactly as they are.

I hope you enjoy this book.

I hope you enjoy your body.

María Conejo

February 1, 2021

Introduction

I WAS A HORNY KID. ONCE WHEN I WAS FIVE MY MOM WAS TELLING MY LITTLE SISTER not to touch her crotch in public when I interrupted, adding, “You just have to do it like this so nobody notices.” I walked over to a doorframe, pressed my little pelvis into its corner, and started rubbing my crotch side to side.

“I do it all the time,” I said.

I was the one who told all my friends how babies are made, whether they asked me or not. I asked the people sitting in the booth behind us at the diner and the guy at the photo-developing counter at Walgreens if they knew that boys had penises and girls had vaginas (fake news, turns out). In middle school, at friends’ houses, I would dig around in their parents’ drawers, looking for dildos, just to stare at them. I started having sex when I was 15. A lot.

Now I’m 30 and I hump doorframes way less often, but I do still talk about sex and pussies all the time—especially now that I’ve spent the last four and a half years creating first Pussypedia.net and then this book. This is something I never imagined for my life. I studied urban planning, made a career out of writing in emojis, and was working as a freelance journalist, researcher, and Millennial Salad internet consultant, dealing in buzzwords like narratives! and content! when one night in 2016 I googled:

“Can all women squirt?”

My search yielded what you might expect. Wildly contradictory information. Pseudoscience filled with spelling errors. Videos for men about how to make cis women squirt (cis means someone’s gender matches the sex they were assigned at birth, i.e., they are not trans). Frustrated, I turned to medical journal articles, and bam. I got sucked into a vortex that I would never get out of. I could barely understand anything. I had to look up the definition of almost every word, and then look up almost every word in those definitions. But what I was finding was blowing my mind. There’s only one type of orgasm?! My bladder is where?! I stayed up the whole night, studying diagrams and reading.

Why the hell had I lived my entire life without so much crucial information about my body? Why did I not know how exquisitely normal I was? And why was it so hard for someone without a medical background to access this information? I was furious that so many people with pussies waste precious mental space and time feeling inadequate or excessive or gross—or at least that I had.

My journey from unselfconsciously horny kindergartener to unselfconsciously horny adult was long and fucked up and honestly is still not over. I spent most of it mortified by my body. Until at least the beginning of high school, in new social situations, I would walk around with my arms crossed over my belly to hide it. Shopping for clothes almost always left me crying. I didn’t wear a bikini until… like three years ago? I didn’t participate in a single sport and often sat out PE because I was so embarrassed about the bizarre way I move my body (my best friend and my husband agree that I still walk like a drunk toddler). I was disgusted by the discharge in my panties. I was disgusted by my frequent yeast infections, which were probably caused by my habit of scrubbing between my labia with soap, trying desperately to be less disgusting (no soap in the crack, people!). I was so disgusted by my body that I didn’t trust it to keep me alive, which is probably why I never learned to drive or swim. And my body would do things that would validate my distrust, like when I was 14 and one side of my labia grew into its adult form a full six months before the other. Even after they were the same size again, I felt stinging shame just for their very existence. And God, did I feel shame for being horny. So, so much.

It felt like trying really hard at a game and always losing. Finally learning about my body was like finding out that my opponent had been cheating the whole time. The Patriarchy has a lot of tricks for making people with pussies feel like shit. Suppressing information and conversation about our bodies is one of them. Knowledge is power, and pussy knowledge is tragically hard to come by. I say tragically because ignorance and ensuing shame are just phase one of The Patriarchy’s evil plan to waste your MFing time! Here’s how it went for me:

Shame prevented me from valuing myself and from even having any semblance of an idea what that meant. It prevented me from asking for what I wanted and needed because I didn’t think my wants and needs mattered because I didn’t matter because I was gross. I let yeast infections get terrible before going to a doctor because they were gross and my own fault, probably for being a “slut.” I would say no to sex when I actually wanted it, to not seem like a “slut.” And I would say yes to sex when I actually didn’t want it, because I was so scared to disappoint people whose attention I didn’t think I deserved in the first place. I let men not use condoms even though it would cause me—at best—weeks of fear and guilt and/or to have to bring myself somewhere and pay to get tested and—at worst—infections or pregnancy. Pleasure was rarely part of the equation, except the kind I often pretended to have to make sure that whoever was supplying my not-so-good time had a very good time and felt amazing about themselves.

Now, this is not to say that my roughly 15 years of biblical-and-adjacent activities have been terrible. God no. I’d say about 65% of it was bad-to-terrible, with more of the bad happening before my mid-20s, when I got a little better at saying, “NO THANKS.” Even in the most casual of encounters, I felt respected enough times to learn what that felt like. I met people who made me laugh and who I could make laugh. I danced with incredible dancers. I witnessed so many different ways to think and be. There were late-night and early morning boat rides. There were blood sausages and secret concerts. There were new languages and snowmen and balconies and books and beaches. I learned what my body likes and doesn’t. I learned my kinks. I made people come. They made me come, sometimes in surprising ways. I appreciated their fat rolls and freckles and innie-outies and hair textures. They appreciated mine. We helped each other feel and release and reset. I made people coffee. They made me coffee. Sometimes I saw their pain, and sometimes they saw mine. Sometimes we hurt each other but a lot of times we didn’t.

At its best, sluttery can be a form of gratitude for being alive. Finding bodily pleasure through human connection, even when those connections are imperfect, is a holy act as far as I’m concerned. And in a slightly sadder but equally valid and beautiful way, sometimes it means pitching little tents together to shield ourselves, even just briefly, from the infinite solitude and terror that is life.

My best friend’s partner recently joked about my lovely husband, “Wow, where did you find him?” and without skipping a beat, my best friend answered, “Well, she fucked like 1,000 assholes.” I did. And I don’t regret any of it, even the bad stuff.

But still, the bad stuff was really bad. I ended up googling squirting not because I was on some sex-positive fun-times learning adventure but because I was madly in love and nearly two years into a more-open-than-I-wanted-it-to-be relationship with a professor in his mid-40s who had sex with as many women in their early 20s as he possibly could because he was still hurt about and compensating for not getting laid in high school. He hated my body hair, often complained that I smelled and that I didn’t dress sexy enough, threw angry tantrums whenever I didn’t want to have sex, and was obsessed with making me squirt. He was sure I would squirt if I tried hard enough to RELAX. I never could. When I insisted that my body didn’t do that, he argued that all women could. Cue the shame. I wanted to settle the matter so I could stop feeling inadequate or know for a fact that I was.

Thankfully, it was the former. After reading about pussies all night, shooting stars of rage were connecting dots in my brain: lack of information, shame, lack of self-worth, pleasure, health, power, why I had stayed so long in a dumpster fire of a relationship, wow, The Patriarchy.

I’m going to use the term The Patriarchy a nauseating number of times from here on out. The Patriarchy is the central villain of this book. So I’d like to quickly define it: The Patriarchy is just the way things are. It is a self-perpetuating system in which cis men have more power in society than everyone else. We all enact it together just by living and being in the ways we were taught to live and be.

The Patriarchy does not mean “men.” When I blame The Patriarchy for Bad Things, I’m not blaming men, even if and when it is men who do the Bad Things. Cis men benefit from The Patriarchy, obviously, but they are also victims of it, which is a subject for a whole ’nother book, but, like, wow, I would never want to trade places with them. Natalie Wynn of ContraPoints could not have been more on point in her 2019 video “Men,” when she said that we can’t fix men or The Patriarchy by only pointing out what’s wrong with masculinity. We have to collectively imagine a healthy and positive way for men to be in the world.²