Scare Off Those Devils
The power of the (flying) vulva
After I’d spent a little while exploring tintinnabulum-space, I started to get the feeling that there was some serious gender inequality at work. The ancient Romans definitely had a thing for penises, but what about all those underrepresented vulvas?
I started working on a winged vulva design to match the winged penis, and my algorithm obligingly began to fill in my knowledge base about the power of disembodied female genitalia.
For one, there were the medieval pilgrim badges—Christian pilgrims on the road to various holy sites would buy these little brass or pewter cloak pins to, you guessed it, bring them good luck and turn aside the evil eye. They were often penis-creatures resembling the Roman fascinum, but there were vulvas too, which were shown riding horses and shooting arrows at themselves, or being paraded around on litters carried by penis-men, or sitting on thrones with crowns on what I guess might have been their heads if they had them, or in any of various other humorous situations.
Replica badges available here. I am not affiliated with this site but I think it’s cool they’re making and selling them!
There were also the Sheela-na-gigs, little female homunculi that were carved of stone and added to the door lintels of churches and cathedrals hundreds of years ago. Lookit:
…PJ Harvey even wrote a song…
I also discovered the folklore surrounding exposed but non-disembodied female erogenous tackle, among them a solid belief that showing your nuunuu to the devil would scare him back to hell. Even just exposed breasts had power: the reason old wooden sailing ships had topless figureheads mounted to the prow was the belief that showing your tits would calm a storm and turn aside bad weather.
So what started out as just an exercise in equal genital rights turned into a project in its own right. The flying vulva doesn’t have a singular proper name, but it’s got even more mojo than the flying penis. I tried making some flying vulva sculptures after I created my first tintinnabulum and noticed something striking: Where the penis-creatures all seemed pretty silly, the vulva-creatures had a tendency to turn out a tiny bit psychedelic. After all, every vulva on the planet came out of a previous vulva, and that vulva came out of one that existed beforehand, and so on recursively back into the hinterlands of early biological evolution. It’s literally fucking profound if you think about it for a second…
Pride version: in glitter rainbows!
In any case, here’s the flying vulva. Buy the shirt, wear the shirt, turn aside bad weather, scare away devils, or go to church and be your own Sheela-na-gig. The choice is yours.
Glow in the dark!
