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Previously I thought of my work with Rockerbox as being completely unrelated to It's Kind of a Long Labia, but really there are some prevalent parallels in that they’re both about education, encouraging wider-perspectives and providing honest, empowering information to children and young people.

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The aim of my final project is to make a short, fun and punchy animated film that will resonate with other girls/women and make a point about:

Societies unrealistic expectations of women’s bodies

More specifically, how we were miseducated on what a normal ‘vulva’ should look like

How important it is is to normalise real bodies

How inadequate our sex education was

The story is my own, and by sharing it I hope to shine light on the (frankly bullshit) shame so many girls like me were made to feel about our bodies.

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I'm not going to print them until I have a website with a private domain.

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Grace Campbell wasn't actually able to voice my vagina in time for deadline (I may have written the wrong date in the email-after spell checking it 50 times) She's still going to do it but in the meantime my good pal has stepped in!

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I will eventually pay for a private domain name, and there's other changes I will make very soon (e.g adding my animation video directly to the site rather than having a link.) They're just not a priority for me at this point in time. There's more I'd like to add too, but for now I've just started with my most recent work.

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https://indialilyfoulkes3.wixsite.com/website

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https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/582224623/2c1e49dd08/privacy

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These are some designs I created for my other cousins business, Looking for Lolly.

So far they've been used to create wrapping paper, but she plans to produce washbags, tea towels and other similar products.

Instagram: lookingforlollyshop

https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/LookingForLolly?ref=shop_sugg

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My first Job with Rockerbox was to create 'Topic Icons' for the website and app. The quality show up a bit funny on paddle, but they can all be found on the website.

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I drew all the frames using Procreate on my iPad. I made the whole thing through onion skinning, as there’s a feature called animation assist that means you can see all your previous frames and play the animation. I would have a background frame that stayed the same and then animate whatever was moving over the top.

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I used a website called Epidemic sound for the audio. I managed to get a free trial and there was pretty much any sound, piano chord or xylophone melody I could ever need. I wanted to keep the audio simple but effective. Initially I wanted to ask a talented family member if he could watch the film and produce some original sound/music for it but I just ran out of time, however for future projects I would really like to get him involved.

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I exported all my individual bits of animation and pieced them together in final cut pro, where I made edits and added the dialogue and audio.

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These are some pictures of my friends and I recording the audio for my film. In the end the best way to do it was to get one long recording that I would go through later. There was lots of switching the voice of the main character, originally my friend Abby did it but her and Dan (the shower faucet) thought I sounded more suited to the character (who is actually me so that does make sense). Abby then became the voice of the friend at the end and I recorded the voice for ‘me’, but got too cringed out at the sound of my own voice later that I ask another friend to take a shot at it.  Whilst recording I thought it sounded good, but when I edited the voice in I found there wasn’t enough expression in her voice (sorry Abbie). At this point I knew I would just have to use my own voice, dig up anything I’d learnt as a child from Stagecoach and re-record a few lines (which ended up being basically all of them). Everything was just recorded through voice notes in a quiet space, either in person or people would send them to me.

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I choose to create the film using 2D animation because it’s what I love and am good at. I remember being really little and I wasn’t allowed to watch the Simpsons but I was really intrigued by it and I would always imagine myself in their house or walking down the streets of Springfield. I thought that I must find 2D cartoon worlds really comforting now simply because of the nostgolia they carry, but I think I was always very drawn to them being a very imaginative and creative child myself. They offered escapism and introduced me to world-building.

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A website that teaches about safe sex and sex positivity and other related issues/topics.

I only discovered this website last night, but there's already so many interesting articles and blog posts I want to read as well as podcasts and YouTube videos I want to watch/listen to.

https://www.cliterallythebest.com

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This website is fantastically informative and really celebrates diversity. Like ‘what is a vulva, anyway?’ I can imagine it has brought great reassurance to girls and women who are unsure about their vulvas and if they’re ‘normal’. I think it would be a really good idea for me to direct people to both these resources when I share my animation on social media.

Link below:
http://www.labialibrary.org.au

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This is a leaflet I heard about from the Woman’s hour talk on ‘vulva anxiety in teenage girls.’ It was commissioned by the British Society and it’s such a great, positive and really informative resource. If I had been giving this when I was going through puberty, “it’s kind of a long labia” would be a very different story.

Linked below:

https://www.icash.nhs.uk/docs/default-source/default-document-library/so_what_is_a_vulva_anyway_final_booklet.pdf?sfvrsn=b599b575_0

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Body and sex positive sexual wellness shop. They're generally just very cool and use their social media platform to share important resources to educate people about female pleasure and conversations around it. This was a small zine I got from them that I love. “Fuck you feud” is referring to Sigmund Feud, the self proclaimed “father of psychology” that once called the clitoris an “amputated penis”. The full clitoris has a long history of being misunderstood and villainized, thanks to the sexist male anatomists too busy jostling over who discovered it. Equally, it’s still inadequately portrayed in most anatomy textbooks. It was only in 2005 that Australian urologist Helen O’Connell showed the world the true size of the clitoris, and discovered it had three times as many nerve ending as a penis.

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I think big mouth takes a really funny, smart and empathetic approach to confronting complicated issues around sex, sexuality, gender, identity and race. The episode “Girls Get Horny too” see’s Jessie (one of the main characters) have a conversation with her vagina. The conversation Jessie has with her vagina is very informative and positive, and I remember watching it a few years ago and wondering how a conversation with my vagina would’ve gone. I sort of forgot about this episode until I started personifying the vagina in the film, and then realised that it was definitely inspired by this episode.

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Sex education is an amazing show, not just because it’s funny and well-written but because of it’s wide representation within characters, casting and relationships on-screen. It’s extremely sex positive and confronts many a taboo topic. The episode that most influenced my project was episode 5, season 1, where a photo of someones vulva is circulated around the school. Throughout the episode there is constant ‘vagina-shaming’ but in the end, in order to protect Ruby( the owner of said vulva), several girls stand up in assembly to ‘claim’ the vulva. The way the episode challenges the idea of a ‘perfect vagina and the stigma surrounding body hair is state-of-the-art.

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Amazing Disgrace: The voice notes by Grace Campbell and guests

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Amazing Disgrace: The voice notes by Grace Campbell and guests

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A podcast led by Grace Campbell, in which she interviews guests about disgraceful things they have done, and then together they give advice to members of the public on their own shameful dilemmas. Like her book, the podcast is about about unpacking shame we shouldn't feel and learning to embrace these things instead. There is an abundance of discussion around sex, masturabation, mental health, coping strategies, regrets and revelations. Hannah Witton is a guest in episode 2, she’s a broadcaster and author who’s content is mostly based around sex, relationships and sexual health. There’s a bit that’s very relevant to my story, about how inadequate sex education was when we were in school. We really only learnt how to put a condom on a phallic object and saw slide-shows of untreated STI’s. We missed out on a colossal amount of important stuff. We didn’t learn about consent, pleasure, body autonomy ect. What we did get was mainly preventative, and created a breeding ground for feelings of shame. Another important point that Hannah makes about the way we learnt about STI’s, is that it meant there was a stigma attached the topic which would to lead people being too ashamed to get tested, or often face harsh judgement from others.

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Woman's hour, BBC radio 4, Emma Barnett on Vulva anxiety in teenage girls

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Woman's hour, BBC radio 4, Emma Barnett on Vulva anxiety in teenage girls

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Notes from first interview with Alex Fox, a sex journalist, broadcaster and educator.

> In the past teenage girls wouldn’t have been able to compare vulvas, but now with the internet they can.

> Girls as young as 9 now are being referred to gynaecologists with anxieties about the way their vulva appears.

> There is a lack of access to reliable information

> Girls are seeing cosmetic surgery websites and looking at before and after pictures when people have had labiaplasty. They think “I look like that, and that woman had surgery, so there must be something wrong with me.”

> Often girls grapple with these feeling for years before plucking up the courage to speak to a parent or see a doctor, but it’s hard to undo years of damage in a 20 minute appointment and convince someone they’re perfectly normal.

> In terms of what they are seeing that they don’t like, it’s almost always the labia minora.

>In medical school, they were shown the genital anatomy development of men which showed loads of changes, but in woman the only change was pubic hair. There was no comparative information in development of a vulva throughout the years. There isn’t enough information on normal genital development in woman, even though the appearance can change dramatically through time.

Notes from second interview with Dr. Naomi Crouch, chair of the British society for paediatric and adolescent gynaecology.

> The prevalence of labiaplasty and the advertisement of it as something desirable, before and after pictures, slang terms like “designer vagina”. All these things are painting an idea that surgically altered bodies are the goal.

> The standard argument is that in porn you see lots of images that are digitally altered and the people may have been surgically altered. ‘Neat, petite, and discreet’ vulvas are what’s considered conventionally attractive, so performers with these body types naturally or through surgery are more likely to be popular thus perpetuating the idea that that type of vulva is the most attractive.

>Porn isn’t necessarily the biggest influence. By just blaming porn we are missing other problems that need attention.

> misogynistic put downs of women’s natural anatomy and the corresponding shaming have been around for a lot longer than online porn.

> Some women have said to her that they’ve seen a greater variety of vulvas in porn and that they found some reassurance in seeing bodies that look like theirs. What needs to happen is that young women see bodies that look like theirs in education and other places.

>It’s important to acknowledge the psychological stress that comes with vulva anxiety, instead of saying “for goodness sake you’re just normal, there’s worse things.”

>Mentions finding accurate online information. There was a leaflet commissioned by the British Society named ‘so what is a vulva, anyway?” It was developed with adolescents, specially looking at the huge variety in normal at anatomy and offering reassurance.

>Website mentioned to look at: The Labia Library.

>A lot of young girls worries include what future partners will say. It’s so important to teach them about self esteem and that giving somebody access to that part of your body is a privilege and it should be respected.

>An email they received from a listener at the end.

“After a childhood of vulva exploration I was told aged 19, by a boyfriend, that when I opened my legs he felt sick. As a sexual health nurse I had seen many vulvas in my job. I knew they were as different and as individual as peoples faces and more than adequate to “do the job”. Men had also told me that you “don’t look at the mantel piece when you’re poking the fire”. But that didn’t stop me from having surgery. After three vaginal births and many years on ruminating on whether my labia was too large, aged 40, I did have a labiaplasty. It was a huge relief, I was so pleased. I later caught herpes and I’m convinced that the virus entered through compromised labial tissues after the surgery. Since then, I started a sex education business in schools delivering honest, evidence based, non-biased lessons empowering young men and women to have healthy sex lives.”

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So much of my drive for this project came from simply talking to other girls and women about their experiences with thinking there was something wrong, abnormal or unattractive about their vulvas.

The general consensus was that many of us:

> Thought that we had done something for our vulvas to look a certain way, whether that be through masturbating, or perhaps through sex.

Towards the end of my animation see's the main character handed a phone displaying a picture captioned "pussy like this, give it a miss". This came from a conversation I had with a friend, who recalled an experience in which a boy asked her if she had a ham sandwich, following a tweet that went viral at the time. Jennifer Mayers, a mother from Louisiana, tweeted an image of two ham sandwiches, one with significantly more ham showing on the left. The caption read "the reason I preach #Christianity. My daughters represents the right. Taylor Swifts represents the left". Her line of reasoning being that larger labias correlate with having more sex. This of course is completely anatomically incorrect, and blatant slut shaming. Our inadequate sex educations, however, left us in a position where we could perceive that deeply problematic 'information' as true.

> Our vaginas didn't look like the one's in porn, and therefore were deemed unattractive.

When I refer to porn here, I'm not talking about ethical porn. In a nutshell, ethical pornography is consensual, the performers are respected and paid fairly, and everybody has a complete understanding of what is happening and are comfortable with it. Furthermore, body types are more diverse, there is better representation of queer relationships and the depictions of sex are more realistic. The same cannot be said about leading mainstream porn sites, like Pornhub. Here content is almost totally centred around the male gaze, and often frames women in a degrading or dehumanising way. Equally, it's not always made in a way that is fair, respectful or even consensual. The bodies (and vulvas) we see in this kind of porn, offer little diversity and therefore often perpetuate unrealistic beauty standards.

> We wondered whether we could simply chop it (our labia) off. Or thought we should consider labiaplasty.

I don't think anyone actually thought this was a good idea, but it certainly crossed our minds. In the book "something" there is a passage about a girl that actually did this. I know a few of us discovered labiaplasty too, and thought it was something we needed in order to be accepted or deemed normal.

>We learnt from one another.

So much of our 'sex education' was what we learnt through talking to our peers. What schools provided offered little more than a shameful, fear mongering talk on STI's and putting a condom on a banana. For many of us our peers were the most obvious, comfortable place to go for answers, so we guided and misguided one another. The end of my film illustrates the former of those, showing a moment where two girls both realise they're not the only one with a 'longer labia' thus offering some comfort and lessening the shame they both feel. Often many of the things we felt ashamed of were because we "thought we were the only one" experiencing or doing something. I wanted to capture the comfort and liberation from shame that comes from a simple "me too".

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a transgender artist whose work I love for it's comedic and simplistic value, whilst holding important messages surrounding gender and sexuality.

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lots of simple drawings of diverse ranges of boobs, bums, vulvas ect. Really good account for normalising and celebrating different body types.

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A friend of mine who explores unrealistic expectations of women's bodies. I love her work and the way it questions beauty standards and procedures.

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As well as being an iconic writer and influencer, she is also an illustrator. Her work confronts social issues rooted around the patriarchy, and her work raises awareness of issues surrounding sexuality, body image, consent, race and gender.

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her work first caught my eye because of the way it aligned with my own drawing/animation style. Looking at my work now I can definitely see how her use of colour/gradients has influenced my work, and I did worry at times that it was too similar but I don't think that anymore looking at my finished film. What I loved most about her work is the way she captured relationships, conversations, friendship and openness between girls in both 'hot and tasty' and 'Hailey and Joanna’. I really wanted to achieve a similar authenticity within the dialogue in my film, but it was hard because I needed to fit a lot of information into a short time span, so it is a bit more blunt and too the point.

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Lydia Reeves is a body positive Artist who creates castings of women's bodies to celebrate diversity and help eradicate feelings of shame, embarrassment and negative thoughts that many women have about their body image.

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Feminists Don't Wear Pink and Other Lies, curated by Scarlet Curtis 

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Feminists Don't Wear Pink and Other Lies, curated by Scarlet Curtis 

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This book is an empowering collection of writing from a very diverse group of women. It explores their individual relationships with feminism and what it means to be a woman. I thought it was really incredible, real and honest. The curator, scarlet Curtis, writes “this is a book of feelings that are transforming into thoughts that are transforming into actions” which I think sums it up really well.

She writes a chapter called “Baker-Miller Pink” which I love and have photographed below. Basically it’s about a study in 1985 in which Dr Alexander Schauss (the Director of Life Sciences at the American Institute for Biological Research in Washington) looked at the psychological and physiological responses to the colour pink. In short, he found that the colour pink had calming affects and produced the perfect shade that had the maximal effect at reducing hostility. He experimented in prisons, painting certain rooms ‘baker-miller pink’ and seeing that it did in fact show evidence of reducing aggression and calming inmates down. Scarlet curtis writes “while there  is no conclusive evidence to show baker-miller pink genuinely changes the human brain, we are using it on the cover of this book, in combination with the books contents, to enact a little experiment of our own on a certain form of aggression that we like to call ‘the patriarchy’. The patriarchy reinforces gender stereotypes . The goal of the feminist movement is to combat this. It aims to give each person on this planet the freedom to live their life the way they want to live it, unhindered by sexism or oppression or aggression. The goal of the feminist movement to remove these hostilities is not that far from the goal of the scientist who invented Baker-miller pink.

When I was a child I absolutely loved everything pink, but I remember going off it. I know now it had nothing to do with the colour, and everything to do with what I had learnt it was to ‘be a girl’. I didn’t want to be associated with weakness, I couldn’t climb trees and kick boys in karate if my favourite colour was so ‘girly’. My parents would have never let me think I was less capable because I was a girl, but of course I would still be affected by ideas of ‘societal norms’ enforced upon us since birth. Fortunately, the anti-pink phase didn’t last too long because I realised that fitting into a neat little box was boring and impossible. To me, pink still represents feminity, but feminity represents strength, humility, kindness, power and empathy.

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Woman Don't Owe You Pretty by Florence Given 

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Woman Don't Owe You Pretty by Florence Given 

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What I love about this book is that you can read it at whatever point you’re at in your ‘feminist journey.’ There were so many things I knew but needed to hear, and Florence Given has a way with words that makes them stick. I also learnt so much from this book, and it put lots of feelings and thoughts into words for me. It explores so many progressive avenues of feminist conversation, and topics relevant to my project, from refusing to find comfort in other women perceived flaws to unpacking the male gaze.

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This book was my biggest influences and a massive, final push to make my film. It’s an autobiography by the hilarious Grace Campbell and talks about her journey with feelings of shame about sex, rejection and mental health. It’s an outpouring of truth and wisdom, about how she came to be utterly and shamelessly proud of the normal things society wrongfully deems ‘disgraceful’. I loved her book so much, and everything she stands for. On the cover there is a comment from London Hughes which reads, “finally my vagina has a voice” and I started thinking how cool it would be if I asked Grace Campbell to literally be the voice of my vagina, in my film. Below is the email I sent her. When her agent replied saying she would be happy to do it, it was such an amazing feeling and meant so much that someone I find so inspiring and amazing wanted to be apart of my project that I’ve come to care about so much.

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Animation experiments/just having fun ect

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Animation experiments/just having fun ect