We have the word phallic in our repertoire, an appropriate word we can use at museums when pointing out that the artist was clearly obsessed with dick, but what about its counterpart? When you look at something and the folds are just so familiar and we all know what we’re looking at…What’s that called?

It’s yonic from the Sanscrit word “yoni”.  Isn’t it sexy? I love the word; I actually can’t think of a name for vagina-like things that makes me feel more feminine or lovely than“yonic”.

Two amazingly cool women, Eva Sealove and Chelsea Jones, have taken yonic imagery to a new, fun, erotic, and clever level through the instagram @LOOK_AT_THIS_PUSSSY, which will shift your view into seeing…”yonic”.

My husband and I are really into it. We keep taking pictures of anything vaguely resembling a Georgia O’Keeffe painting and sending it to @LOOK_AT_THIS_PUSSSY. Little did we know, the world is chock full of vaginas.

Sealove and Jones brilliantly planned the @LOOK_AT_THIS_PUSSSY project to be anti-shame because there is A LOT of shame, embarrassment and outrage that comes out when you start talking about vaginas. (Not going to lie, I shudder at the word clitoris.) Even here at Improvised Life, among our usually open-minded readers, we received a few horrified emails when we posted the amazing pubic wigs — merkins — that artist Sinnae Choi devised.  

People are just not that cool with lady bits. Maybe it’s because they’re lacking the language to talk about them comfortably, causing any conversation involving labia to involve hen-like gestures and weird lingo like “whoo haa” and “mhhmhmm” and “sheshe”, or else getting down-and-dirty with dull scientific terms….Or maybe they just haven’t seen enough of them.

Boys are brought up so proud of their pork swords* they take pictures of them and send them to unsolicited women. But for girls, the vagina has been under such harsh lock-and-key for so long that many have never seen any other than their own, and have felt the serious need to look away when one is presented. While modesty can be a good thing, this kind of in-the-dark feeling about one’s own body can leave you feeling really isolated. There are many shapes an sizes this wondrous body part can take on; Sealove and Jones are here to shout that they’re all beautiful in the land of pussy.

A photo posted by look at this pussy (@look_at_this_pusssy) on

So here is Improvised Life’s collection of yonic images, some silly and others quite sensual. Have fun, and maybe try taking some of your own! (maybe not OF your own, but hey, we aren’t here to judge)

…the knee of our daughter on slightly too snug pajamas…

yonic_knee_margot

…watermelon on 125th Street…

Sally Schneider
Sally Schneider

Lucio Fontana slash painting

yonic_moma2

…unknown artwork…turn it sideways 45’…definitely yonic…

yonic_moma

 

*The author reserves the right to call a penis “pork sword” for all future sexual and non-sexual encounters or commentary.

—Mira Keras

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7 replies on “Yonic is the New Phallic

  1. So not inspired with this posting. So many others are wonderful and definitely inspiring.

  2. Thank you Sally!

    I feel compelled to respond to this post because, as a woodworker, I see far more yonic than phallic imagery in the grain of the lumber and trees I work with. For a long time I assumed it was my one-track imagination, but when I finally dared to point out a particularly fine example to my partner, she saw it immediately. Since then we point them out to each other with enjoyment. I may have a few contributions for @LOOK_AT_THIS_PUSSY.

    I like “yonic” much better than “vulvar,” which became my fallback after I read about vulva/vagina conflation (associated with the shame you mention) in Harriet Lerner’s “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Orifice.”

  3. NOT a one-track imagination…you are seeing what’s THERE. Yonic. So nice to have a word for it.

  4. Ha! Love the lead picture – inspired 🙂

  5. awesome and timely post-=glad the world is opening up, so to speak 😉

    my husband and i have always thought that driving through what i see as a very feminine bridge–the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in NYC– was like going into a vagina; or as you might put it, a very ”yonic” experience.

  6. So when i see things like this and the state of our Womanhood as a whole, I just feel compelled to write long things but… you are all so…lost. (and i don’t mean in a Christian way…) just in a very worldly and mental way. You have no idea where you go, are following trends like they say something about YOU. Searching the internet each day, for news and realities that fit YOUR personal bias. If you’d know a little more than just feel so much…to KNOW something about the world around you? not just reflect your own narratives and biases on it, pretend they are facts? “Im so glad the world is OPENING to this…” says one comment. Have you ever wondered why humanism is hundreds of years old but Feminism is what women chose to embrace? How actually deeply sexist of them…which to say is like an attack on the female existence. Do you know what troubles me most about this? the utter dichotomy, the absolute discrepancy between what women today THINK they are and what they REALLY are…Never has there been a Group so Disproportionately, many would say, unfairly advantaged as “western” women. Something that did not start with the 70s. But far further back. And yet where ever you look, youll find things like this post. Posts, Videos, Tweets and and and about,, the breakthrough” of women. The RISE of Females. Do you know what scares men most? Not Strong, intelligent women…but stupid, unknowledgeable women thinking they are because a stupid man society would just silence…but a stupid woman? What do you think? Has Feminism and focus on Phallic and Yonic differences brought you closer? or Further away from that goal? It definitely achieved to totally mislead about women’s role in history, the positions they had, the advantages they had. It has for sure managed to rile up against the “Patriarchy”, supposed Inequality, Sexism against Women…which most women know at best by the repetitious insults off what you read on Twitter by some women group. ” 1 in 3 women will be raped!”
    But hey…”Yonic is the NEW Phallic” VERY Humanist…very sign of strong women.
    What i see as the biggest problem in all this, is that the great promise of women rising we have that everywhere… but that of women taking over “their half” that…that is when equality suddenly becomes a very one-sided affair? What I see as the biggest problem with the Yonic attitude is not that its not in everyday items just as much as Phallic ones. It’s that “THE RISE OF WOMEN” so far…just has been another package to carry for the Men of our societies. And it deeply ashames me as a woman to see it in the Workforce every day, to see dirty men and paint-covered women thinking that it would be even REMOTELY the same…While there still are utterly unbelievable Muslim societies to learn what suppression IS and MEANS every day. But still, Females are Blind to their own advantages and Freedoms. That mostly Men have Fought for to defend from the “Rise of Islam”…do you see the total Irony in this? The fact the period in History is called “Rise of Islam” now the ” Rise of Women or Feminism” and in the end, it’s just another fight…just another weight for the Men in OUR society to carry? Maybe Phallic is not all that wrong to be everywhere you know? Maybe Yonic CANT BE the new Phallic? as long as it doesnt PROVE itself in the same way? If that makes sense to you?

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