The vagina vérité project began as a response to a friend who thought that there was something wrong with the way her vagina looked. Though, she hadn’t actually seen any other vaginas. True-to-life representations of women’s bodies just aren’t common in our lives. What we do get to see are unrealistic portrayals and expectations of women’s bodies, and their parts, repeatedly reduced to objects of someone else’s desire, beliefs, politics and quest for power.

When it comes to our bodies, not just how they look, but our bodylife experiences, there’s a lot more noise than information, conversation or care. Let’s fix that.

vagina vérité, this experience, is an opportunity to just be the subjects of our bodylife stories. It’s a collective mirror, where we can see ourselves for ourselves. Join us!

What did we experience in this program?

A zone of safety and freedom where women could

• view a photography exhibition of over 100 vagina portraits. No stylists, no details about the model, just the elusive faces of the vagina in plain view;
• participate in conversations women don’t usually get to have—across the immeasurably wide landscape of what it is to live a female bodylife, in a space where everyone who is biologically female and/or identifies as a woman is welcome and included;
• meet other women and expand your understanding of each other;
• reflect on ourselves and our families, communities and personal histories; 
• continue or initiate personal inquiries and discovery;
• gain some bodylife-knowledge, through our different experiences and through similarities (sometimes we need validation to know what we know!);
• trust ourselves more, value our personal experiences as a source of information and wisdom, and be empowered by it. 

About the hosts

Alexandra Jacoby

Alex Jacoby is the photographer behind vagina vérité. Over the course of ten years, Alex made over 100 vagina portraits, produced two Vagina Festivals, weekend-long visual and performance art experiences in NYC, about vagina-related subjects, and held an unusually wide range of leadership roles in B2B businesses. More recently, she ran Operations for a couple of technology startups. The second was building a blockchain-based application. This is where the next phase of the project became clear. 

Not only do we still need to see ourselves for ourselves, but we also need to hear each other and learn from each other. When it comes to female bodylife information, experiences and services, we need to replace Google Search with a service based on an open-source index that is designed for universal access and individual safety when contributing to it and when we need help. She calls it the Bodylife Library project.

Kim Thai

Kim Thai is an Emmy-award winning producer and seasoned digital strategist, with almost 15 years of multi-platform storytelling experience. She is a certified yoga teacher, longtime meditator and a queer, Asian woman whose life and perspective have radically been empowered by yoga, meditation and Ayurvedic practices. She started Ganesh because she wants to create a world where everyone feels like they belong.

The program