It was Thanksgiving, and Matt Silver was sitting around a table with his family when his year-old girlfriend texted. He retrieved the phone with his foot. Silver, a year-old screenwriter, was telling me of receiving his first V-selfie eight years ago. The V-selfie, though very much here, is perhaps less insistent. Shared on dating apps or in texts, it has been sent to create longing and a sense of intimacy: a missive of lust and promise to lovers, or would-be lovers, who are separated. Silver, whose new long-distance girlfriend of two years they met on Tinder took seven months before she sent her first intimate portrait from her bedroom in Hong Kong in shimmering morning light, with a glimpse of a Buddha in the background. It shows an element of trust.

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A Proud History
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There are, of course, nude statues of Greek and Roman women, usually standing in a three point pose — a bent knee, a curved hip, a tilted shoulder to accentuate the form. One has a hand over a breast to communicate modesty; her hoohah is smooth. In fact, all the hoohahs are smooth: there are but modest dents around the pelvic bones of the statues, but no openings or slight separations of the pelvic mounds to be found anywhere. The forms are all Barbie-doll blank down there, like female bodies just sprung out the head of Zeus, fully formed, sometimes clothed and vulvaless. Meanwhile, the male statues rock out with their cocks out; dicks are everywhere. Penises of all sizes surround me: curled and flaccid, pert and alert, balls dropped and shrunken. I wandered around, looking closely at all of the female nude statues and fragments.
Between pornography and media portrayals of scantily-clad women, there is a stereotype of what a vulva should look like. Hairless, neat, tiny, and nearly invisible. Not coincidentally, with the rise of this conception of normal, labiaplasty in the US has increased by whopping Just look at the vulva diagram at the top of this article—there's a LOT of expected ways individuals are going to differ. In this article, we'll talk about how we got here, how wide the normal variation between vulvas can really be.