I did it for the art

Vulva castings

My mother said “sex education begins at two,” by which she meant naming the parts. I don’t recall her ever telling me the names of things. Then again, I don’t remember being two. I knew penis and vagina. Vagina was what they called it in the 60’s. She meant vulva. The 60’s meant vulva. The 70’s meant vulva. The 80’s meant vulva. The 90’s meant vulva. The 2000’s meant vulva. The 2010’s’s meant vulva. The 2020’s mean vulva too.

To this day, I have to consciously use the correct term. Vagina is what comes to mind. When I hear children talking about parts, and I hear “vagina,” I correct them. They protest that that’s what their mother told them. Mine too. Parents aren’t always right. Nor are teachers. Even textbooks and doctors lie. I try to do my part, but sometimes I still make mistakes. I’m glad to say my children, however, get it right.

What is a vulva? It’s all the stuff down there that you can see and touch… including but not only, the vaginal walls. It’s the clit. It’s the labia, it’s the urethra. It’s the mons. It’s the perineum. It’s all that stuff.

Now at Tantus I made dildos. Dildos are not vulvas but they do have a very close relationship to pocket pussies; the portable, pliable, ever-consenting sextoy to stick your dick, or your dildo, fingers, into.

I remember buying some XXX Alginate from Douglas and Sturgess, the art house supplier. Alginate is a sea weed substrate made originally for dental impressions. You mix it with cold water and it slowly hardens, very slowly. Douglas and Sturgess has made a fast cure version so you could get the throbbing veins in all their glory. We were not their first customers asking for a more adult usage. We got 5 pounds when we wanted to try making realistic cocks (I mean dildos). It was probably 1999 or 2000.

For us, we looked for average joes, so finding someone to model wasn’t difficult- but the castings turned out really mediocre. The material was cold which didn’t keep a cock hard even with a short cure time. Waste? Naw, we ended up putting clay over them and creating our own veins and corona- essentially photoshopping the guys.  

But since we had the material, and those pussy’s sold so damned well- better than dildos (or so we thought… it’s always greener the other side of the fence), we tried an experiment. We’d make one of our own.

By this time we’d paid models three times to drop their drawers and let us sea weed them up and gotten no decent cast. I didn’t feel like putting out even more money for a product we were just kind of prototyping. No one had made them in silicone at that point. Could it be done?

So one night I had a bit of wine and took off my pants and lied down on a slant board, so a dam could be made. And made it was. What might have been meh for penis copies was amazingly detailed and exact for vulva’s. I’m pretty sure the cold actually helped. Every pore was duplicated, every follicle, every wrinkle, every pucker (we ended up capturing the anus too), every nuanced layer of hood and labia. It was absolutely amazing.

We never did get it engineered right with a hole and a pocket to penetrate. We tried for a while. My vulva sat in the art area of the shop for years… one of those things you know would be big bucks if you could figure it out. I’m not sure anyone has made a successful all silicone realistic version- if so I’ve never seen it.

I have the acrylic master in front of me. It still has a little green from either the dam that was made of clay or from the alginate.

Did you know vulva’s get droopy with age? Like droopy jowls, or waddling turkey neck. It’s true, the flesh falls. My acrylic vulva was done when I was all perky and the skin was all taught. I should really get some more alginate and do a comparison cast… but then, I’m afraid of what I’d see.