Who taught you to keep your knees together?

Doodles by me - reference photo- Forrest Leo Photos

Recently I did a photoshoot for myself with Forrest Leo Photos. Now let me preface this by saying please don’t compare your journey with your body to mine and also that I would not do this type of photoshoot with anyone and all of my decision in terms of moving my body and how much of my body to show were entirely my own. I trust Forrest entirely and can’t think of another photographer who I would trust to do this. I digress. In terms of where I am with my body, I create art about bodies and sex for a living so my level of comfortability with nudity in art is going to be different than a lot of people’s.. And and and, I was reminded during this photoshoot that I still have a lot of things to work through. So shout out to Forrest for getting me off my bullshit and creating a safe space to do so. 

Photo Credit: Forrest Leo Photos

I am pretty comfortable naked. I grew up skinny dipping with my family. I skinny dipped with men and women all through college. I love nude beaches. So having a boudoir photography shoot for myself is never going to push my comfort levels anymore. I have spent a lot of time taking photos of my body. I have spent a lot of time working through eating disorder ideas of what my body is supposed or not supposed to look like and boudoir isn’t scary or uncomfortable to me anymore. And I like being uncomfortable. I think it's the space that makes me grow and think. I think its good for me to be in the same space that a lot of my clients are when they come see me. And I also think It helps me push past ideas of what is respectable and what is not. So a photo shoot where I am in a studio, a white box, with absolutely no posing direction at all and completely naked is my definition of being uncomfortable. But what I didn’t think about was the amount of things that I would have to undo to stop posing myself and the pieces of patriarchal bullshit I had still ingrained in my brain and body. 

I have posed a lot of people in the last year and Forrest’s work is very anti-posing. I have worked within him before so I knew exactly what I was signing up for.  But I realized about 40 minutes into the shoot that I was subconsciously posing myself. I was pointing my toes. I was thinking about what things looked like. And this is not what I hired Forrest for. I can pose myself and take self portraits till I go blue in the face. I know how to pose myself, its what I do for a living for crying out loud. But I wanted this space to be about letting go of posing. To let go of what my body looked like. To be weird. Of course, Forrest probably could have told me that I was posing myself within 5 minutes of starting to shoot, but I appreciate that he let me figure it out on my own. 

So I had to consciously fight against posing myself. Un-point my toes. Flop around on the floor. Be a heater gremlin (it was fucking cold okay). Be a pretzel with a stool. Fall off the stool. 

Photo Credit: Forrest Leo Photos

So that was step one.

 But I think the part that I want to talk about more (although the above is also important) is that I also realized part way through the shoot that I was subconsciously keeping my legs together. I can go through the photos from the first 90+ minutes of that photoshoot and in almost all of them I have my legs together. Why? Because how many times has society explicitly or not told women to do that? How many times are we told to hide our vulvas? That they are dirty. That they are a problem. And you might be thinking well okay but when doing photos with nudity, its fine to keep your legs together. To which I ask, when a guy does a nude shoot, what reason does he have to keep his legs together? His genitals are always on full display. There is no hiding them. The dick is going to be out regardless of if he has his knees together or not. So why did I feel like I had to keep mine together? Why do women feel like it's the polite thing to keep a vulva hidden? I fucking naked already guys, but subconsciously I was still holding onto an idea of modesty. And quite frankly, fuck that. But as I was sitting on the floor, it took a shit ton of effort to keep my legs from wanting to come back together or to fold them up and cover myself and the photos reflect that. It’s written all over my face that I am fighting with myself. And I fucking love that. I love that the photos show a woman fighting against years and years of being told to keep her knees together. Don’t man spread. Cross your ankles. Be ladylike. Nah fuck that shit. I’m going to man spread butt ass naked and call it art if I want to. 

Photo Credit: Forrest Leo Photos

So I want to pose a question: How many dicks have we seen in art over the years? Michelangelo's David is probably the most famous. Now think about famous works of nude women. Sure, there is definitely contemporary work that makes an explicit point of including vulvas, but the most famous paintings? How are the women’s legs placed? Go google it. And come back. Need some suggestions? How about Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus? Or Olympia by Edward Manet? 

I can think of one painting that is more explicit. And even in writing that sentence I cringe. I wouldn’t think about calling Michelangelo’s David “explicit”. There are dicks all over the place in classic art pieces. Just waggling all over the place.  And no one bats a fucking eye. But a vulva. Now that’s just too much. Or historically it has been too much. And while there are a lot of artists creating art to challenge this. It hasn’t percolated into mainstream culture or art. Women's shame over their vulvas isn’t something we’re going to just poof undo because we feel like it. Undoing hundreds and hundreds of years of inundation isn’t going to just disappear. But I plan on at least undoing it in myself. Even if I have to sit on a stool and force my legs apart. I’ll be uncomfortable, so later I can be less uncomfortable and choose something else to photograph that makes me squirm.

Photo Credit: Forrest Leo Photos