2013: A Year in Vaginas (Maybe NSFW)
American Apparel Sells a Shirt with a Bloody Vagina On It and It’s the Best: A creation of artist Petra Collins, this shirt is probably my favorite thing ever to come from an American Apparel store. It’s powerful and it’s provocative and it dares you to turn away in discomfort. This shirt is beautiful precisely because it makes the viewer deal with the fact that the vagina is perfect at its messiest and at its most powerful. As I wrote at the time, it “successfully plays with society’s continued discomfort in seeing the grotesquery inherent within the female body. It subverts female beauty (those perfectly painted nails, exposing all that pink, pink blood), without taking away any of that same beauty. I mean, just look at that little asterisk/asshole. It’s hilarious and it’s perfect and it’s covered in blood. That’s kind of what we need more of, isn’t it? A look at a woman that isn’t perfect. A look at a woman that is a mess. A look at a different kind of beauty. Frankly, that’s really hard to come by anymore. So if you can find it at American Apparel? That’s kind of amazing.”