Designer vaginas, beauty politics and bi-curiosity: All this week on The Spill

By Erin Lindsay
27th Apr 2018

Designer vaginas, beauty politics and bi-curiosity: All this week on The Spill

Have you ever had one of those days that screamed for a wine and chats sesh with your girlfriends? Enter Image.ie’s podcast, The Spill.

The Spill is hosted by our very own self-proclaimed agony aunts Sophie White and Rhona McAuliffe. With a mix of discussion on current affairs, arts and culture and some healthy advice to our listeners, it’s the best place to unwind and deliberate the issues affecting Irish women today.

This week’s episode kicks off with an examination of the music video that’s on everyone’s minds this week; Janelle Monaé’s PYNK, which features her and her fellow dancers in opulent pink vagina trousers, as she explores female sexuality, both personal and societal. Sophie and Rhona begin by discussing whether the video is a step forward for how we view female genitalia; Sophie loved the video for bringing vaginas to the mainstream, whereas Rhona thought the depiction of female sexuality as ‘pink’, ‘perfect’ and ‘pretty’ was a bit too sanitised. Our women then moved on to discuss how society views vaginas in general. With the fastest growing form of cosmetic surgery being vaginal, both of our hosts questioned why women are made to be embarrassed about our bodies. What did you think of Janelle Monaé’s video? Do you think women are being shamed into surgery just to feel like they have a normal vagina?

A couple of weeks ago, Sophie wrote a piece for IMAGE.ie entitled ‘I’ve been ugly and beautiful and the difference is depressing‘, chronicling her personal journey with beauty standards, and how her life began to change when she became more conventionally beautiful. The transition of how she looked made Sophie realise that there is almost a hidden system for attractive people to benefit from and how she felt that she now had more value in social situations because of her looks. Rhona spoke about her own experiences of being insulted for her features, and how these instances can have such an impact on our self-esteem. She questioned if we would soon be living in a society where beauty becomes a class issue. What are your thoughts on ‘lookism’? Are people treated differently because of their level of beauty?

For Rhona’s ‘Hit Me Up’ column this week, she had a letter from a woman who was finding herself being attracted to women for the first time – in her thirties. Too Many Feelings from Laois has been with her boyfriend for six years but has recently found herself fantasising about women and is not sure how to proceed with it. Should she ignore the feelings as just sexual temptation, or should she acknowledge them as genuine and risk losing her relationship in the process?