Life Uncut - Your vulva is cliterally the BEST!

Episode Date: August 3, 2021

Happy WEDNESDAY Lifers and girl oh girl do we have the bonus ep for you!Today we jumping into some conversations about period sex, vulvas and labiaplasty!We kick things off with Laura & Britt discussing the ins and outs of whether you get down and dirty during ‘that time of the month.’ *Not a spoiler, we’re all about it and science backs us up!We then chat with the beautiful Ellie from comfortable in my skin about her journey with her vulva. We talk: Innies & outies What's ‘normal’? Why labiaplasty is one of the fastest growing surgeries in the world & How the one you've got is clit-erally the best! We really hope you enjoy this ep and feel a sense of gratitude for you best mate ‘downstairs’ after listening to it. We’re really passionate about normalising conversations about things that are important to women; of which periods and pleasure definitely are!Big thank you to today’s wonderful sponsor Bonds Bloody Comfy Undies. Periods can be really uncomfortable so that’s why we’re glad that Bonds have put the comfy back into your period with their new Bloody Comfy Period Undies. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi guys and welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut. Now it might be a bit confusing to some of you because it's a Wednesday and not a Tuesday day that we have a very, very, very special bonus episode for you all today. And we are so excited to bring you this. But before we get into it, I'm Laura. And I'm Brittany. And God, we do love a bonus episode, don't we, Laura? We've been throwing them out left, right and center lately. But the reason why we're bringing you this bonus episode is because a few weeks ago, now you might remember before we went on to break, Britt and I did an Ask Uncut episode and we spoke about a woman who was asking about labiaplasty. After that episode, we had hundreds of you message us and slide on

into our DMs to tell us that we needed to interview Ellie from Comfortable In My Skin. Now, Ellie is a photographer. She is a wonderful, warm woman who spends her days photographing vulvas. The reason why she photographs a whole variety of different women's vulvas is because She is working to de-stigmatize conversations around body acceptance, conversations around labia acceptance, and also conversations around menstruation and just all things that we as women experience that maybe feel too self-conscious to talk about. Before we do jump into that, we do want to just thank our sponsor, which is Bond's Bloody Comfy Period Undies.

I think it's just the absolute perfect time because periods can be uncomfortable. We do want to make sure we are at the most comfortable that we could possibly be and Bond's Bloody Comfy Undies do that. They're environmentally friendly, they're easy to watch and reuse, and they hold up to four tampons worth. As women, a lot of us use non-reusable sanitary items, whether it be tampons or pads, and the statistics around the number of those that end up in landfill every year are just absolutely mind-blowing. So 300 million tampons are sold in Australia every single year, and 500 million pads are sold every single year, and every single one of those ends up in landfill, which is just crazy. Now, Britt, before we get into speaking to

Ellie, I have a question for you. What is your opinion? And we have, okay, we speak about so much in this podcast. We have shared so much and I actually can't believe that we haven't covered this yet. So I'm going to throw you straight in. I want to know your personal views on this. What is your opinion on sex during your period? We actually haven't talked about this now that you say it my ideas around sex on my period I think it is absolutely fine I actually and I mean it depends what your period is like for yourself some people's periods are so painful and so heavy that the last thing they want to do is have a penis come anywhere near them for me I love it you're like bring that penis at me yeah I my period I'm very lucky I don't get it heavy enough

to be in a lot of pain and I get like one day where I'm uncomfortable and that's it I've been very lucky with my periods in that sense so I love sex on my period I probably get hornier on sex my period and I've heard a lot of women say that and I think it's just up to your partner I think you just have to throw it out there and say hey like I'm horny you want to do this and I can guarantee 99.9% of men are probably going to be like hells yeah yeah I mean I've definitely dated some guys who are not into it who aren't interested in having sex during like when I'm on my period or when I have my period but at the same time it almost makes me mad at them like and I know that that's not fair I know that everybody has a choice and it's completely up to them but at the same

time I'm like this is something that is so incredibly normal it happens to me every fucking month why not I mean there's ways around it of course like there's some tips and techniques that you could probably implement if you don't want to ruin your sheets if you do the math I'm just going to quickly do it here right now if you're doing one week a month so that is three months worth of you not having sex or not being able to have sex a year and that is too much that is too long for me I'm all for it I don't think it's a problem but obviously your partner has to be on board you are absolutely robbing yourself if you don't have sex during your period and I know that a lot of girls will maybe have sex at the very beginning or at the end where their flow is lighter

but for me I don't think that that really makes a difference because usually if I'm having sex at the end of my period when my flow is lighter it just brings that bad boy back on I mean you can also just have sex in the shower if you like which I think is great anyway but the fact of the matter is this is I know this is what it is for me and I know this is for a lot of people because we've done the research it can actually relieve symptoms it can make you feel better it can help with cramps it can help with headaches and there is there are a lot of articles on that and I personally know that when I have had cramps for whatever reason sex has made me feel better and I don't I don't know why I don't know what kind of witchcraft and wizardry that is but that's what's

been happening to me. Don't let anyone here think that we don't do our thorough research before doing these episodes but they are actually some different. Oh I had a lot of sex to do this research. I put the research in don't worry. Okay so there are actually a few health benefits or benefits of having sex during your period which if your partner or whoever you're dating or seeing or whatever doesn't want to have sex during your period you can now whip these out and be like I think we should it's actually better for me. Just link them this episode. Having sex in your period it can actually make your period shorter. So having sex may make your period shorter because the muscles contract during an orgasm and actually pushes out the uterine contents faster,

which is kind of the same. And this is going to be a bit too much information for some people, but when you breastfeed after having a baby, it actually makes your uterus contract. And that's what makes your uterus go back down to size faster. So every time you breastfeed, often you'll have these, they're quite painful. You'll have these painful contractions that happen at the very first couple of weeks after having a baby and that's actually your uterus going back down to the original size it helps to release hormones which contracts your uterus now similar things happen during orgasm as well which is why some people can have a little bit of pain after having an orgasm in their uterus so it also increases your sex drive your libido can change during

menstruation which is because of hormonal fluctuations it's a natural lubricant so like don't be scared ladies and also it can help to relieve headaches because of releasing endorphins So if you've been sitting on the fence or you've been scared or you've been embarrassed, go and give it a crack. Do you ever find it embarrassing, Britt? Like, is that something that ever worries you or is it just doesn't even come onto your radar? Not at all.

It doesn't, it literally doesn't even cross my mind because it's such a natural thing. And I wonder if this is something maybe that has come with age because we didn't speak about it a lot when we were younger. These sort of conversations, they weren't being had. so nobody really went and spoke to each other about their periods and we didn't have other women that we look up to that were talking about the fact that they go and have sex on their period or that this has happened or that they've walked through the park and they've had blood on their pants you know these sorts of conversations weren't being had and periods were essentially

tied to embarrassing moments I just don't feel like that's the case anymore so for me I'm super open about it I would just be like I'm on my period you want to have sex Jordan would be like yeah, all right. I don't care. Yeah. Actually though, I think when Matt and I first started dating, I don't think that it was something that he, not that he, not that he cared and not that he was like, you know, no, we're not going to do it, but it was definitely not. I think he would have a little bit more of an aversion to it. I think he would be like, oh, I prefer not. I could wait. But I really hate that mentality. And it's not like I pressure him into having sex with me or anything, but like we have had conversations about it and he has become way more open to it

and way more understanding I think that for some guys it is a conversation that hasn't been had because maybe their ex-girlfriends or other people that they've had sex with in the past have been too scared to have that conversation too embarrassed and so therefore they have this idea that like oh I'm not supposed to I shouldn't and there's a little bit of fear factor there but you're so right like having a period is not something that you should be embarrassed about having to you know have a conversation about having your periods is not something that you you'd be embarrassed about so I do think that like maybe it's an age thing as well and as you become more comfortable in your own body that having those conversations with your partner

may become easier as well if anything Jordan's probably just stoked because he knows I can't get pregnant at that time hey so no that is a complete misconception Brittany clearly didn't do her research I know I didn't know that it's not your one ovulation day so I'm confused actually do you know what you can but look I mean it's meant to be incredibly unlikely that you can get pregnant during a period but I think like with all things err on the side of caution you also can get pregnant from the pull-out method let me tell you that like ladies gentlemen and everybody okay while it's also extremely unlikely I did do my research on this the simple answer is yes you can still get pregnant when you have your period women are not able to conceive whilst they have

their period but sperm can survive with this is I'm reading this guys sperm can survive within the female reproductive system for up to five days which means that there is a tiny minuscule fraction of a chance that women who do have a small chance of becoming pregnant from unprotected sex during this time. So I would just say maybe it's not worth risking it for the biscuit in this instance. Like if your partner's got some sperm that's like a real hanger on her own is sitting in there for like 10 days, God help him. That's Mads. You're at risk. Mads is just like going for gold. Hangs around. Mads just hangs around for a month. I have been pregnant more in our relationship than I have not been pregnant. That's literally where I'm at right now. That's insane.

Anyway, guys, so we absolutely loved this chat with Ellie and thank you to every single person who recommended her. And I mean, I honestly cannot tell you, it was hundreds and hundreds of you. This is a conversation all around just having more acceptance of your own vulva. And when we say vulva, we do actually get Ellie to unpack what that means. Because I know that there is probably going to be some people who probably may have not even heard of that term before. A lot of people would refer to it as a vagina. We're calling it a vulva because that is what is anatomically correct in this conversation. The reason why we wanted to have this conversation is because there's still so much stigma around what your vulva should look like or could look like. And

I think that there's a comparison that happens, even though we probably don't have a very good idea about what our friend's vulva looks like or what is normal on that spectrum. So I think in order for us to be more accepting and to be able to love ourselves a little bit more, this conversation is really going to help a lot of people. If you've ever thought about having labiaplasty, if you've ever had a moment where you've thought like, oh, fuck, you know, I don't like my vagina the way it is, or I don't like my vulva the way it is, then this is 100% a conversation for you. And I really hope that you walk away from it feeling incredibly empowered. Today, we have the woman from behind the camera and the vulva and the creator of

Flip Through My Flaps and Comfortable In My Skin. Ellie, welcome to Life Uncut. Thanks, girls. I'm so happy to be here and be a part of your podcast. It's an absolute honour. We're so, so excited to have you. And I know I mentioned this earlier, but when we did an Ask Uncut section, this is going back quite a few weeks now, and it was from somebody who had written in in regards to labiaplasty. And I cannot tell you how many of our listeners sent me your Instagram, sent me your details and said, you have to get Ellie onto the podcast. So it is truly just like such a joy that you have joined us to do this today and we have so many questions for you but before we get into that we do a section on every single podcast episode with every single

guest and it's called accidentally unfiltered and that is where you tell us your most embarrassing story and it's very relatable it's very humanizing and we all laugh at you together with you not at you no with and at it's both with and at well I have a story but I was thinking it's not totally embarrassing for me. But this just happened last night. And so I was thinking, it's pretty beautiful what actually happened. And I was like, I don't know, I just want to tell this story because it's just happened. About two weeks ago, I ended up hooking up with an Australian guy. They're so hot. They're so hot. We decided to meet up again. And so we went out to a bar in Byron Bay. And while I was there with him and a few other friends, I actually met a girl there

playing pool and her and I hit it off straight away then my roommate invited both of them back with a few other people so I was just in all sorts because I was like oh my goodness how am I going to deal with this what am I going to do because I yeah connected a lot more with her but anyway I was kind of on a date with this Israeli guy and so we get back to our house and she's telling me that she had never been with a girl before and that she was really nervous and anyway so we ended up going to this room and making out and kissing and then I said to her you know what this is probably not the best time for you to have your first experience with a girl because we're absolutely wasted and I have an Israeli guy waiting out there for me so it's a bit sneaky and

weird and then anyway she was super super embarrassed about the whole situation and I think she maybe felt like I'd sent her home but I was like no I just don't want your first experience with a girl to be like this that's all it is and then last night I'm sitting there at dinner at this restaurant and I see her walk in with a friend and she sits at the table behind me and as this happened I was showing my friend her Instagram on my page like when she walked in I was going like she's so beautiful and we were looking at her eyes zooming in on her eyes and anyway suddenly I'm like oh my gosh she's right behind you she's right behind you she's just walked in and my friend Lulu's going well say hi say hi don't be so awkward and I was

like okay just give me a minute I need to calm down because I was feeling weird that I was showing her page and then she sits down and as soon as her friend sits down she goes so friend says to her so show me this girl that you hooked up with and yes at this exact same time lulu still has my phone with her profile up she pulls up well actually she was taking screen grabs so she'd screen grabbed from my instagram she was just in her photos not on my insta and she's going through all these photos talking about me and it was such a weird situation because this is something you do with your girlfriends all the time but I was watching it happen to me in front of me and I could hear everything she was saying and she was zooming in on everything and I was like it was such a weird

weird experience she was like zooming in on my breasts because I have really large tits and she's going you know they're just so big I wouldn't know what to do with them and all this stuff because she's never been with a girl is that what she said Ellie did she say I don't know what to do with them? She zoomed in on my breasts. I was in a bikini in the Daintree Forest, this photo that she'd taken, and she zoomed in on my breasts and she goes, they're just so big, I wouldn't know what to do with them. This is outrageous. So hang on, I need to know what happened with this girl. You're crushing on her. She's a table away crushing on you. Neither of you know what's happening. Did you speak to the girl? Are you getting married and doing a happily ever after?

Because I feel like the universe has just thrown you two together. That's exactly what, that's how I felt I'm so such a big believer of letting the universe guide you like I have total faith that the universe knows what's up for me I absolutely do too I was saying to my friend okay I've kind of let this go on for too long that now when I say something she's gonna be like why didn't you say hi earlier because I was listening and I was loving it I was like this is the dream like you get to hear everything that someone has to say about you but imagine if it wasn't good imagine if it was just like you were listening to someone say something awful how awkward would that be I know or even like when you usually show your friends like a photo of a guy and you're like oh

oh he's much better looking than that that's not his best photo and then you're like 10 like you're like 10 years deep in their profile trying to find the best photo of them he's really hot in person I swear so hot in person and you know where they all are you know where the best photos are on their whole grid so what happened well I was quite lucky so then I ended up saying her name and she died she was mortified she was horrified she was so embarrassed she was like fanning her face non-stop and I just said it's fine I joined her I said why don't we all just join tables like we may as well this is just too awkward we're sitting too close to each other to not join um and then we ended up going out to a bar and yeah we ended up going home together

at the end of the night. That's what we want to hear. Success story. Yes, girl. That's what you want to hear. I won't go into too much detail, but yeah, it was just a very strange experience. And if we ended up getting married together, I'm just like so excited that that's our love story. Ellie, tell us a little bit about who you are and how Comfortable In My Skin started. Okay. So I'm a Australian girl. I guess my story starts in high school in a maths classroom when a boy in my class tapped me on the shoulders and he said to me, he gave me a note and I opened it and it said, do you have an innie or an outie?

Hang on, how old were you? I was about 14. And he asked you if you had an innie or an outie. Okay, first of all, I would have been like, are you talking about my belly button or what? Because that's what my mind at 14 would have been like, an innie, do you want me to show you? Definitely, that's exactly where my mind went

until I was like talking with all the boys and they were laughing and they were like no they called them vaginas back then they were like vaginas can be innies or outies and that's when I learned that yes some inner labia can protrude below the outer labia or you know I learned that there was a different all different kinds according to some people some were more beautiful than others which is just absolute bullshit but anyway I surfed a lot in high school and I was always really self-conscious of my labia showing in my bikini it was like bulge and I had guys say things over the years like one guy said oh it always looks like you have sand stuck in your bikini and just all these um really rude comments and I can laugh now

because I have done a lot a lot a lot of work but as a high school you know 15 16 17 year old girl you take things to your heart and I just built up this insane insecurity of my vulva every time I slept with someone I would cry the next day and it happened all the time I just couldn't talk to anybody else about it because there's this weird insecurity with talking about these parts of your bodies that it's like it's really taboo so why were you if you don't mind me asking when you say you cried the next day is that because you were in yourself thinking about what he would be thinking or would he be talking about you or did he say anything to make you feel uncomfortable or like where did this sadness come from the day later um it was a few things so I did have some

guys say something to me after I slept with them and then that created from then on paranoia that the guys would say something to their friends also when I was hanging out with all the guys I did spend a lot of time with they would often talk about other girls that they had slept with in great detail that's where the sadness came from I was like I don't want to be one of those girls that they talk about and it just got worse and worse and worse as I got older and then when I went traveling really young and I came back from traveling and I had been sitting in a park with my sister and I'd slept with someone and I was crying again to my sister and I was like what if they tell what I look like and I was so upset and my sister said to me like Ellie come on you are

in your 20s now like you surely are over this and I was like I'm not I just it still took over my whole life and so that's when my sister introduced me to labiaplasty and was like maybe this could be really good for you it might help you because she'd seen how many years I'd like traumatized myself for. And so she was like, I think this could be good for you to look into. So that's when I started this journey of like looking into labiaplasty. And how long did you look into that before? Like, so we know, and you can tell the story, we know that you went for your consult and you were, you know, dead set on going through with this procedure. How long and how in depth did you do your research before you went to this doctor? The first time I went quite quickly

to a doctor in Sydney and the thing that scares me so much is yeah how quickly they just booked me in they didn't even look at my body they were just like it costs this much you can come in straight away they were even because I was so young helping me try and get it on Medicare they were like oh if you say you have reoccurring thrush or like they were giving me options of ways I could maybe try and get it cheaper but there wasn't really anything for me to claim it under Medicare. I think if your inner labia protrudes down eight centimeters, I think you can claim it back, but there was nothing for me. And so then I had another appointment and that was maybe a year later. And then when I had the money, I was living in India. And that's when I

went to the doctor, like with the money to the cosmetic surgeon. And I was just like, give me the avioplasty. But I didn't, I was calling it the wrong name. This is the thing. It's like, I was so self-conscious and awkward and I couldn't talk properly and I said to this doctor like I want liposuction and I was just pointing down at my legs so I got myself in a really uncomfortable situation where I had this doctor drawing the highlighter on my legs and I was standing there just being like what is going on so he was ready to do liposuction on your legs yeah I was like and then and then he asked me to show him my vulva and I was really lucky that he talked me out of getting labiaplasty and he was like this is just your vulva so what did he say what was

his reaction to you asking for that surgery first he said you poor girl because he could tell how uncomfortable I was and then he ended up saying like madam like this is someone who sees you down here should love you and he's like may I recommend that you get a surgery on your chin like he told me to get a chin extension because he said it was the same price and that a lot more people are going to see my face and my chin than my pussy and I was like oh don't know about that no I'm joking like my chin is fine you're like thank you for another insecurity that I can take into my adult life that's great yeah well me and my girlfriends we always like tuck our chins in and do double chins and send selfies all the time so I was like blown away I was like what that's

like my best quality is my lack of a jawline so then anyway I ended up he went and got a side mirror and held it next to my face and I put my jawline forward and I was like having this moment with this surgeon how I could extend my jawline and I was like this is fucking crazy like this is insane why would I do this and then I started thinking like well if I wouldn't change my face and people love me for my face and I can love myself for how I am then why would I change that part of me and he said the doctor said to me you know I think you should go and see what others look like before you change yours because it's just your labia and so I've taken it a whole lot further than what he probably ever imagined but I've photographed a lot of people it's pretty

crazy that like it blows my mind in the fact that when I was reading about your story I was like wow this is so incredible that you a young impressionable girl that obviously had low self-esteem has gone to a surgeon you're like take my money cut my vagina open do what you need to do and he's talked you out of it and I thought wow that's really incredible that he has done that when he could have just booked you in but then you threw a spanner in the works and you're like but then he tried to change your chin I was like well he's like contradicting himself well he still wanted the money I mean he lives on he's a cosmetic surgeon he has to do something but I think I was really lucky that it was happened in India and the culture over there is maybe

I don't know that this is a lot more of a sacred part of your body and he I don't know he maybe he just thought that it was better I changed my face I just can't work it out but I still would have spent the money so also I think as well like I mean and this is one of the things that we touched on like there's such a huge spectrum of what is normal and we have been kind of conditioned to think that like having an any vulva is more cosmetically pleasing but that really equates for what like 25% of the population you know the majority of people don't have that and so and I read as well that um labiaplasty is one of the fastest increasing cosmetic surgeries in the country you know more women are coming forward and asking for in the world crazy isn't it and

it's like how is it that something that the spectrum of what constitutes normal is so varied but as women we're not one we don't even really talk to our friends about it we don't really say like oh what does yours look like what does mine look like you know how do you know what and where you sit in that and whether it's like you're wanting to get something changed for a functional reason or whether it's just completely cosmetic purposes and we're going to go into a little bit further down the track but I know that there are so many complications that can arise that people don't even necessarily know of when it comes to labiaplasty as well but before we get into that can you explain to anyone who doesn't necessarily know the terminology or the difference what is the

difference between a vagina and a vulva so it's the the vagina is the canal inside of you and then the vulva is everything on the outside of the body so like the clitoris the labia the vaginal opening. So it's just the names of the body terms. Everyone uses the word vagina to describe the vulva, which just shows the lack of education on this part of our body in high schools and in just in general. How did you start photographing? Because I feel like this went from zero to a hundred real quick. Real quick, super quick. I went onto Facebook and I put up a post saying, I want to photograph. I was doing what the doctor said and I should see others so I said I want to photograph 10 and make a coffee table book and I guess I've always

been a very approachable person maybe like I'm super open naturally just kind and people often do come to me with problems and so I just got this influx of messages being like I'll do it I'll do it I'll do it and then I started doing it and I the first person I ever photographed was a midwife that I went to primary school with. I was so nervous. I was photographing her standing up and she was like, surely you want me laying down with my legs open. And I was like, just being instructed by everything that she said. Then she taught me all these things that I didn't know about my own vulva. Cause she was a midwife and she was like my own anatomy. She was teaching me different names, like exactly what we just talked about. And I just learned

so much from her. And I was like, Oh, I want to teach the next person I photographed this stuff. and so then it just was the next person that came she had a story the next person that came she had a story I started learning about vaginismus I started learning about bacteria vaginitis all natural remedies for thrush it was like every single person I spoke to I was just learning learning learning and I just wanted to share it and that's when I started creating the Instagram page because I was like people need to hear these stories and people need to realize that they're not alone you know we're all going through the same thing and two of my best friends had had labiaplasty that I went to high school with and they came forward and I had no idea I was like

suddenly realized that there's this huge shame that comes with labiaplasty like you might go to your friendship circle after getting your breasts done and be like look how great they look but if you get labiaplasty it's this big secret that you don't tell anybody and it's true because I never told anyone except for my sister and I'm very comfortable socially talking about anything so then all I wanted was to create a place where people could come forward and talk about anything and nothing was off limits and they could share the I mean I created the herpes support groups and I've got 26 of them now and it's incredible because it's so common and that's like all these things that we suffer as vulva owners and we just don't talk about so it's really just like a place

and that's what a photo shoot is as well it's a place where someone can come forward and feel safe to tell me anything which is really good for your mental health getting it off your chest and not bottling it up why do you think there is so much shame surrounding this why do you think as women we feel so much shame around our vulvas and around you know any sort of conversations around what is happening, whether it be through menstruation, whether it be something like bacterial vaginosis, whether it be around STIs. We've done a whole episode talking about herpes and there is just so much shame around anything that's kind of to do with sexual health and wellness for women. Why do you think that that is so attached to it? I guess it's because society

doesn't let us talk about it. And then the only times we do see or hear about, for example, STIs is in the media and in Hollywood when they're making fun of it or if at school we were looking at something say example genital herpes they showed you this horrible diagram and it was like this is for life you know we the schools actually taught us that it was dirty and we got that stigma and then so we carried that on through you know maybe people laugh about it in front of their friends. And so then if you do, you are suffering from anything of the sort, you just keep it quiet. And that's the worst thing you can possibly do. And I truly believe that talking about anything with your friends kills the stigma. And that's why I'm always encouraging people, even on my

platform on Instagram, I'm like, comment publicly about whatever you want to say, because it's adding to, yeah, killing the stigma. Well, it's highly likely too, that the second that you finally open up to your friendship circle about a problem that you're having or something you're self conscious about or something that's on your mind chances are at least one other person in that group is experiencing the exact same thing but nobody knows because everybody's keeping quiet but in relation to your friends Ellie that you said you had two friends came forward that had labiaplasty did you chat to them and did you find out why they had it like what was their insecurity and were they happy with the procedure at the end did they regret it did they have any complications

Was there anything that you can tell us about that? Yeah, they're pretty crazy stories. One of them is actually up on my blog on www.comfortablewomen'sskin.com.au and you can see the photos of before, during and after of her labiaplasty and her story is written up there. She was the same as me. It was going to the beach in her bikini and seeing the bulge that made her go to labiaplasty.

She dated one of my friends and they had sex for four years and she never took her underwear off she'd just pull it to the side and wow yeah that's how self-conscious she was and the second she turned 18 her mum wouldn't let her have labia plus even though she asked a lot of times so the second she turned 18 she went and got it done and my other friend her mother let her get it done when she was about 16 your mum has to take you if you're under 18. So her mum took her and they pulled down the inner labia, cut off, but then they didn't sort of trim upwards. This is the thing is like, so all these doctors are just doing it and they're not asking the vulva owners exactly what they want and how they want

done. And the vulva owner is 16, so she has no idea what she wanted. She probably has never seen any other vagina either. Never and never. And her mum actually said to her when she said, I want this blah blah blah her mum said I felt self-conscious my whole life about the way mine looks so I'm happy to take you so you don't spend your life worrying like I did so her mum was coming from a good place but she wasn't happy with what the doctors did so she went back a second time when she was 18 and asked them to continue cutting because it was sort of she felt it was like still flapping and she wasn't happy with it so the one that got it done when she was 18 says that she can't orgasm and she doesn't know if it has to do with having the surgery I personally

feel like you can get labiaplasty and you can still orgasm because I've interviewed people that have so although it is cutting off a lot of nerve endings the surgery you can still find pleasure from say vaginal like penetration you know there's all different ways that you can have pleasure but I think it's her mental health she still hasn't built a great connection with her vulva and she still hasn't recovered mentally from the surgery. So she's, you know, you can't orgasm when you are feeling self-conscious and flight or flight or danger. So she needs to work that out through her mental health. And I mean, we all know there are a certain number of people and I'm off the top of my head. I can't say statistics, so I'm not going to, but there are a certain number of women

that will never unfortunately have an orgasm. And that is regardless of labiaplasty, regardless of anything. There are some women that it's a smaller number, but they just will never get there. So I guess we'll never know in her sense but of course it comes with complications and of course it comes with risk it's like any surgery but we are encouraging of anyone to do what they want with their body with for the right reason under the right research and I think the platform that you've provided is incredible because you've just you've given a safe space for women to know like if you had found your own platform when you were young before you went to a surgeon it would have changed your life. I pretty much created what I felt I needed when I was at my

worst stage. And that was always the plan. I was like, I don't want younger people to go through what I went through. And if I had have seen how different they all were, I would never have been so self-conscious. And I'm not at a war against labiaplasty. I'm just there to help people have a more educated decision before they go through and cut off part of their body. I just want them to go in knowing what labiaplasty is because now I've done so many interviews with people that feel mutilated I can show you guys some videos of people that have had the surgery one lady was 50 and you know she should she's like she feels that she should have known better because she was 50 but how was she supposed to know when there's no resources for us to go and find out what normal

is i remember when we had this question with ask uncut and like we answered this question i'm not sure if you listened to it ellie like we kind of like talked around like what our thoughts were and then it wasn't until right at the end where we were both like and fuck it we've got outies as well but it was like it took us so long to be okay with even saying that because like exactly this whole conversation which is that there is so much shame around it yeah that like even for us and we have this platform and we're all about being inclusive and we're all about talking about the full spectrum we even had a moment where we were like oh do I want to put that out there for you know 300,000 people to listen to I don't know it took me a second to be okay with that and then I

realized how crazily hypocritical that is and what like the irony of that in and of itself that I didn't feel comfortable talking about myself and what I look like because I was worried that someone might judge me whereas the whole reason that we've got this platform is to try and help to destigmatize it like it made me realize how hypocritical I was being I guess one of the things I really like so we've talked about all this the photography that you've been doing and you have photographed how many vulvas have you photographed do you know or it's definitely over 300 for sure it's a lot more vaginas than vulvas than I think the most people will get to see in their lifetime unless maybe you're a doctor or a surgeon or in the medical industry you have also

photographed vulvas at all different stages of a woman's cycles there are photos up on flip through your flaps which are of women when they're during their menstrual cycle as well why was it important to photograph vulvas at every stage well this is a funny question because I want to be like it's to normalize all everything that we go through you know whether it's bleeding discharge we all go through it and it's again a taboo topic that we can struggle with alone i remember the first time i saw discharge and i thought i was dying you know it's dead by discharge you know i want to i really really want younger people and because i'm actually a preschool teacher so i nanny a lot a lot of young vulva owners and actually my project is equally for

the boys as well because I feel they play such a big role and they go through things themselves anyway but I just feel like the photos showing all the different things that we go through is a perfect conversation starter so someone might open it up and see that a girl is quite oh well a Volvo owner is you know got the discharge so then that can start a conversation between them but I want to say that this was the reason why I started doing it but it was actually because I was teaching at the time and I was struggling to fit in photo shoots and people would book in on the day and then they would message me and cancel and I would have taken a day off work to photograph and they'd be like hey I'm just letting you know I'm bleeding so I'm going to cancel my shoot today

and I was like no you can't like you have to come as you are and it was happening quite regularly because people would be like oh I've got thrush so I'm going to cancel I've got ingrown hairs I've going to cancel. And I started just being like, this is actually crazy. Like how people don't want to come when we're always going through something. And so then I started getting my friends and I was like, can I photograph you while you're bleeding with a tampon string in so that I can put it up and then I can say to others, look, I've done it already. You're not going to be the first, just come as you are. And so it originally was so that people would stop canceling on me. but then i started realizing how important it was to show um representations of everything

there's like if you look through there there's one girl or a few actually that have scarring from laser hair removal and so i found that in itself is really interesting because we all think we're going to remove the hair and then we end up removing the hair which you know could be a fashion that dies out pretty quickly we might all want bush again soon and now you've made this decision but also I had no idea that there was a possibility that you could have such bad scarring and I was actually speaking to this girl yesterday even though I photographed her quite a long time ago and she was like oh my gosh I would kill to have my bush back and not have these scars so it's important that we see all the things that other people are going through so we can make

decisions for ourselves whether we want to get laser you know whether the period photos start conversations around the pill and what the pill is doing to our body and why it's important to bleed and how to build a better connection with your cycle. And oh my gosh, I've learned so much about my cycle through doing comfortable in my skin. And when I photograph people that are bleeding, it's just a way to lead into a conversation about, you know, what, when you should exercise during a cycle, what you should eat during your cycle, endometriosis, like there's so many conversations that need to be started and they can all lead from these photos. so out of curiosity how busy are you photographing vulvas like do people do you have to advertise

now or do people just line up to get this photograph well I actually ended up just getting a PA because my Instagram was so active and engaging and I was dying in it I not not dying but I was just drowning in how many I mean you guys probably understand you've got a manager because there's so many people that now reach out to me like sometimes people will ask if they can send me a photo of a ballista they have down there because they're like I think can you can you tell me what this is like people have feel really safe with comfortable my skin which I love so much but I got to a point where no I don't actually at all have to reach out I I got to a point where people are just dying to be photographed which is so beautiful and I'm absolutely honored but yeah I

ended up getting a PA and so we have a wait list which you can join because I travel a lot well before COVID I did so we have all around Australia all the different states and you can join the wait list so I do all different kinds of things so if I go to Melbourne I might advertise for uh comfortable with my sexuality workshop a vulva anatomy workshop a photo shoot a group photo shoot individual photo shoot so there's all there's a wait list so you join that and then when I come to your town, I can send you out an email of everything I'm going to do for the week that I'm there and then you can join. And yeah, I am really busy. I just went to Darwin. I did loads of photo shoots. No matter where I go now, there's always people, which is incredible.

But the thing that I struggle with, which would be great if any of your listeners want to be photographed is cultural diversity. If you go through browse through my breasts, you can see there's a huge lack of cultural diversity and age diversity and weight diversity I am seem to be getting in a certain type of person which is absolutely not my criteria there's no criteria I let everybody come that wants to be photographed to come and be photographed but I really am struggling with cultural diversity. Why do you think that is? I guess some cultures maybe this is you know even when I was in New Zealand I was hoping to get a lot of Maori people and this one woman that I photographed she said it's actually really sacred this part of your

body so maybe a lot of cultures don't approve of the work I do but also I think it's just unfortunate that I did do most of my photos on the northern beaches totally where maybe there's not a lot of cultural diversity I mean definitely there's not a lot of culture for diversity but I would love to have indigenous women, black African vulva owners. I'd love to photograph all kinds of body. A company for Netflix, they're doing a show on pleasure and they reached out to me and said, can you send us eight photos? And we'd love like diversity. And I looked through my photos and I actually felt really sad. I was like, I can't send a representation of everyone around the world because no one's come forward. So sometimes I call out and saying, you know,

I'm encouraging it, but it's really hard for me to, I can't push for anyone to come and do this. So I just do the best I can. I just say everyone's welcome. Obviously everyone is anonymous. Is that right, Ellie? Yeah. I photograph a lot of lawyers, teachers, and they'll say to me, just don't put me on the Instagram page or the website, but I want to be in the book. So there's a consent page that I send to people and they get to choose like whether they want their head to be in the photo or they just want purely their vulva and anything is fine. They also get an option to share their story next to their vulva. So when the Comfortable Masking Coffee Table book does come out, there's going to be feature pages. So someone that has a story that they would like to share can go next

to their photo. It might say their age, how many babies they've had, how many sexual partners they've had and that's purely just to show that your labia doesn't change how many sexual partners you've had so get rid of those myths that say you know you might be loose or tight because of you're having so much sex but I try to debunk all those myths during this project so but if you don't want anything to do that and you honestly want to come for when I do a photo shoot I'm with you for four hours usually and we talk and often people cry and I teach them different ways of how they can build a better connection with their body or how they can become more comfortable naked or in the bedroom. So sometimes people literally just want to come for the workshop and they're like, can you

not do anything with my photos except for send them to me? And I'm like, absolutely. There is no pressure for me to share your photos. It's completely, totally fine. But also, I guess, like not just if you're someone who's listening to this, wanting to come forward to have a photo, to have your photos taken, but just if you've ever, and I feel like every woman has felt this at some point, if you've ever felt self-conscious about the way you look, if you've ever been unsure, if it's something that, you know, you would like to just be able to feel like there are some reference images, go and have a look at Flip Through Your Flaps. And it's just, I felt like I'm pretty okay with my body and how it is now. And I've had two babies and it made me just

feel so comfortable and it made me feel so supported that there are so many other women and that there is so much diversity and that everybody is so completely different. And I think that a lot of people who have insecurities will get a lot of solace by realizing that there is no normal in this spectrum. Yeah, I just, I think it's really, really powerful and I really recommend everybody goes and has a look. When I started the project, I originally wanted to do it for teenage people to not go through what I went through. And I've actually noticed that a lot more the age demographic of people that is coming forward is mums that have had babies and they're struggling to connect with their new vulva. So I encourage mums all the time to go and check

out Flip Through My Flaps. Totally. It changes so much as well. Like, I mean, it's one thing that people, I mean, people don't talk about this stuff enough as it is, but definitely don't talk about it enough after pregnancy I mean I did a little bit on the podcast but like even from when you're actually pregnant to after you have babies like it changes at every stage along the way and that can be really isolating because like at one point you feel like you know your body and then you also feel like you've surrendered everything about your body to create children and that I know like there's parts of me that feels a bit insecure about that because I'm like well two years ago everything about me was different to how it is now and I'm really proud that I have my babies

but at the same time you still can feel a little bit like like you're not in touch with your body anymore and I think that it's really powerful to know that there's other women who feel exactly the same and that this isn't you're not isolated you're not on your own there's every single woman who's had a baby probably has had these thoughts and feelings definitely definitely and Ellie also photographs breasts as well so you can go on and have a look at the flick through my flaps and there's like every single vulva you could ever imagine and but there's also so many breasts that I love I love that as well because so many women and I have friends too that have always talked like I want to get a boob job look at my boobs they're ugly look at them they hang low look at

them they point to the side like there's always something and as soon as you go on your site you're like well no one is unusual everyone is unique in their own right and everyone everyone on the planet is different so it's nothing to feel self-conscious about no and it's funny because the things with the what I've noticed from photographing breasts is I photograph quite a few people now that are getting their implants taken out and this is the thing that's like our beauty standards is always forever changing so doing these surgeries like you can get your breast implants taken out but once you cut off your labia or your clitoral hood you can never get that back and I had a girl in hospital message me she was in Perth and she was absolutely

distraught. Um, she'd had the surgery and they took off way too much labia. She sent me the images there. They're just heartbreaking. And they'd cut her raw. And she was, she was messaging me being like, I've had, I'm up to my third surgery now to get it glued back up. And, you know, you can't actually, you can't get that back. Like I said, body standards, beauty standards are always changing. So you have no idea what we're going to want in the next 10 years. And we might when our labia back but also it's not just beauty standards in this respect the other thing is like it has a function it has a purpose and like female pleasure is so important and then when you go to the point where you're removing so much of your labia that you don't have any protection over

your clitoris which we all know is like a really really sensitive area for all women and it's really fundamental in actually enjoying sex i just don't think that people necessarily who are opting in to have labiaplasty understand fully or that everybody who goes through this process understands fully just what the side effects and what the complications can be and that you know yes you may have what media and the porn industry and men think is that's the perfect looking vagina afterwards but you may also completely compromise your ability to have pleasurable sex i know which one i would prefer the sex any day of the week me too like fuck it's funny that you um said the porn industry then because i got a message an instagram message from a porn star who i won't

say her name but she's a very successful porn star and she wrote me this really really interesting message saying that she's starting to feel quite upset that a lot of sexologists and people you know there's this big movement on instagram blaming porn industry for everyone going and getting labiaplasty and she's like go on to any of my videos and look at any of my photos and you'll see i have very long labia and she's like even after looking through flip through my flaps i can say i have very long labia and she's like it is so sexy and people love to see me having sex so the proof is in the pudding there is this weird stigma that all of this has come from porn industry and I never watched porn I and I felt heavily like this obviously but yeah it's funny

that the porn industry is getting such a blame for this whole labiaplasty thing because I I also feel like if you if us three wanted to do a porno right now all outies we could easily hello over zoom as a zoom porno yeah by zoom we could make a porno there's so much amateur porn now well we were talking about this before we jumped on this call and like I don't think it is just the porn industry i think um and i don't know if the legislation's changed we're actually trying to do some research into it before we jumped on this zoom call but we couldn't find the most current details around labia censorship so basically i know that going back in sort of 2015 there was rules around how a vagina in a swimsuit could be presented so with the labia was showing it had to

be photoshopped out it had to be single crease yeah so it had to be one crease in the photo it couldn't be any more than that and no bulging no outer labia and that was sort of the standardized expectation across all media publications so when you think of like you know if you were doing a swimsuit shoot for sea foley for example if there was more than just the single crease showing that needed to be photoshopped so we have been conditioned our entire I mean I'm 35 my entire viewing and my entire consumption of media from when I was a teenager until recently has been that that's what a vagina looks like not knowing that actually majority of people's vaginas in modern media has been photoshopped which I just think is crazy and I think that that is also

what's added to this feeling from people who may have longer labias or have asymmetry or that makes them feel like oh I'm not normal because I don't look like that girl in the in the photo that girl in the photo doesn't even look like that girl in the photo. She's photoshopped. It happened to my sister. She did an ad and for, it was a bikini brand, a big one. And they photoshopped off her labia. When she brought the photos home to me, I was so excited. I was like, oh my gosh, this is so exciting. Like maybe they do that to everybody. I remember being like so shook and mind blown. And I was like, they've like, we still have these photos. We laugh so much because my sister was never self-conscious in a bikini she was always just rocking it because she did surf boat rowing

and surfing and yes they completely made her look like she had absolutely no labia and i did do an interview with a girl who worked for a magazine company and she her job was editing and she said i spent like the past 10 years editing off people's labia imagine if men's dicks got edited out it would never happen they would never edit a whole penis out of board shorts at the beach so Why do you have to edit a labia? So like a natural part of a woman's body. They put fucking socks down their swimmers to make their dicks look bigger. Like that's the crazy thing.

If it's a jocks ad, they will literally put an insert in to make it look like they have a more pronounced, not like a sexually hard on penis, but like they'll make it look like it's a nice round package. Whereas for a woman, you have to be a perfectly flat box with no identifying factors that you have a vagina or a vulva or anything going on between your legs. You've got to look like Barbie doll. Barbie. Yeah, Barbie.

Barbie's vagina. That's it. It's wild. Now, Ellie, let me know. I mean, for somebody who has seen so many vulvas in her time, what do you think women can do to be more comfortable, to be more confident and to sort of be able to accept themselves for who they are and what they look like?

I think it's really important to reach out for help. So if you are struggling a lot, reach out to, honestly, go and see a psychiatrist go and see a sexologist talk to your sisters your friends your mums your dads talk to everyone you can because like I said people are definitely going through the same thing and you're not alone and when you realize you're not alone and you have people to talk about anything that you're suffering from it makes you realize that we are all different and I'm a big advocate for positive affirmations, mirror work, actually being naked, normalizing nudity, going to nude events, go swim naked at the beach, you know, just embracing the body

that you have and surrounding yourself with positivity towards nudity and pleasure. And honestly, reach out to me because I do do phone calls with people and I have so many groups. I have groups for like people self-conscious of their labia, people self-conscious of their breasts. I have a group for people with any inverted nipples. Like on my Instagram page, I have literally got a group for anything. So reach out to me with whatever you're feeling self-conscious with, and I can help you. You just mentioned something then, which I would love for you to explain a little bit more. What is mirror work? Okay. So I do mirror work every single day. So it's when you look in the mirror,

it's looking at your body with appreciation and talking to yourself like you would talk to your best friend so every single time I apply moisturizer I do it really slowly and I watch myself do it in the mirror and I just instead of being negative being like oh I've got like moles there or whatever you would naturally think you give love to that part of your body and the language that you use is so important so I might like you know brush my hair and I'll do it really slowly and I'll brush every single little bit and I'll think like oh it feels so nice to touch my hair my head's feeling really soft today or as if I was brushing a friend's hair and what I would say to them you just do it to yourself and it's kind of like it's just giving yourself love and

I had this really really really beautiful moment I was living in Tamarama on the beach not long ago and I was looking in the reflection at myself and I started dancing is this where they could this lifeguards can look back at you yeah I know yeah well it was night time it was night time and so I was watching my reflection and I started dancing like really slowly and just really gently touching my body and watching myself do it and it's funny because I used to teach mirror work in photo shoots and I feel like I hadn't got to the point yet where I was doing it naturally i was sort of like like i said fake it till you make it like forcing myself to do this kind of work and then i just had this incredible night where i just did it naturally and i was watching

myself and i was turning myself on and i ended up having pretty much the best orgasm i've ever had in my whole life but yes yes it was like i have gotten to such a good place in my body and my relationship with my body because I have done insane amounts of work so I tell people all the time I'm like you have to actually do the work on yourself you're not just gonna like one day wake up and be like oh I fucking love my body you have to spend time doing these things and eat healthy masturbate meditate you know exercise all these things go towards this self-care that everyone needs for themselves allow the time to love yourself and put the work in and that's how you get the results okay so i've got to go look in the mirror yes if you're currently in lockdown i want

meditate and masturbate to be your new mantra yes i think it is i think that's literally what everyone's doing you know it's a gift to get a dildo or a wand or a sex toy and to experiment with yourself so that you can learn what you want and then you can teach the people that you're sleeping with so you're having good sex it's so important also a gift to your fellow woman because that guy's gonna be better off like you've just set him off into the world better than he came to you that's the goal for everyone right go forth now and do better for all the other women out there ellie thank you so much for coming and being a part of the podcast thank you for sharing all the work that you're doing guys if you haven't heard a flip through my flaps if you haven't seen

comfortable in my skin go and check ellie out on instagram ellie can you let us know so it's it's at comfortable in my skin it's comfortable in my skin with an underscore at the end and i'm shadow banned because of the content i put up instagram hates me so you have to type in the whole word or else you can't find me instagram hates vulvas so you need to go and find her dig deep guys keep fighting the good fight ellie thank you so much for joining us on life on cut today we loved you everyone go and check out her page and anybody if you are feeling self-conscious if you have had those questions which so many of us women do please reach out to ellie or jump on to comfortable in my skin thanks girls well that is it from us guys we hope that you have loved

and gotten something out of this little bonus episode a massive thank you to bond's bloody comfy undies for making this episode possible and we will be back tomorrow with our ask uncut episode guys please keep those questions rolling in you can send them to our dms on the instagram life uncut podcast we love love love answering your questions and please remember to keep your embarrassing moments coming in we love the accidentally unfiltered and we need to get another fresh bunch for the coming weeks so guys if you haven't yet left a review subscribe to apple podcast jump over and do that and then you know the drill which is tell your mom tell your dad two friends two dog just go ahead and tell everyone and share the love because we love love