HOw it Started
March 2020
I was feeling so lost in understanding my own body and it’s changes after having my birth control implant taken out in late 2019. I had been on hormone-based birth control for over 10 years. Now I felt like I was going through puberty again, learning how to adjust to cycle fluctuations and hormonal mood swings.
April 2020
I had always been afraid to look, to touch, to feel. I just thought it was this icky, gross part of my body, that I thought I just had to live with.
Even when I began to masturbate (around 18) and use toys regularly, I opted for clitoral stimulation, mainly vibrators, and anything that kept me from having to touch myself with my own hands.
When I finally started learning about my vulva, and really looked at it in the mirror for the first time, I was inspired.
I had my partner help me take pictures of it every day because I wanted to know how it changed, how it looked at different times of the day, different times of the month, I became so curious. I started painting it. After a few paintings I asked myself, how would my vulva look if it was all lit up in neon light? All that excited gas, inside those sexy glass tubes.
May 2020
Using a photograph as reference, I created the first digital self portrait of my vulva, and turned it into digital neon.
There was something about how the contour lines glowed, and my vulva came to life.
June 2020
When I showed my digital neon vulva to a few friends, they loved it, and asked if I could possibly create one for them?
I was thrilled, and said, “Yes! Send me a picture!”
I received the first few photos, and I was shocked, they looked completely different from mine! That’s when I remembered something Emily had written,
“We’re all made of the same parts as everyone else, organized in a unique way. No two alike.”
I started creating portraits for friends, and then their friends started reaching out too.
It was the stories that came back to me about how rewarding of an experience the other women were having on their side of the computer screen that inspired me to keep going.
July 2020
The first brush with algorithmic censorship. My first instagram art account is taken down, and so the Genital Electric instagram is born.
“I am done living in a world where women are trained from birth to treat their bodies as the enemy.”
- Emily Nagoski
December 2020
Feeling like I was stuck and hitting a wall I attended a workshop about shame that helped me wade through some of the self-sabotaging and limiting beliefs I was carrying.
January 2021
The first neon vulva begins production, The blueprint is finished and its intended to be 4ft tall.
March 2021
A friend messaged me after spending hours taking pictures with her boyfriend for her portrait and said that through the process she got to know herself in a different way that she thought was beautiful. She thanked me for doing this, and told me I was “doing great work.” I was moved.
I realized then, that this project was bigger than me and I needed to share the stories of other women.
I created The Electric Diary to share stories, not just my own, about self-exploration, sexuality, body positivity, and our relationships with our genitals.
May 2021
After completing 18 vulva portraits, one of the models told me about Betty Dodson, creator of the Bodysex course and a huge supporter of female masturbation, “Professional Masturbator”.
I decided to do some research and found Betty popping up all over… like on an episode of, The Goop Lab with Gwyneth Paltrow on Netflix, so I dove into her work to start my love affair with myself and learn about the benefits of masturbation. Did you know masturbation is the safest sex you can have?
July 2021
With very slow growth through social media, I knew we had to do something big, something to boost the message out there.
Plans began for The Full Exposure Tour. A cross country tour of the US with guerilla-style pop up shows and a few scheduled engagements, like at the Dive Motel in Nashville, TN.
Electric ({¡}) No. 1 in neon is accepted into the Seattle Erotic Arts Festival [SEAF]. Seattle becomes the final stop on the Full Exposure Tour.
The Mission: deliver the piece to SEAF for the 2021 festival and spread public awareness along the way with pop-up events to talk about body shame, sex positivity, and pleasure.
“We’re raising women to be sexually dysfunctional…
with all the ‘no’ messages we’re giving them about diseases and shame and fear. And then as soon as they’re eighteen they’re supposed to be sexual rock stars, multiorgasmic and totally uninhibited. It doesn’t make any sense. None of the things we do in our society prepares women for that.”
- Emily Nagoski
photo >> taken at The Dive Motel in Nashville, TN
August 2021
Arrived back in NY to pick up the neon from Just Neon Sign Co. in Utica NY. Now we just needed to build a padded box for the neon to travel and get prepped for our road trip ahead.
August 16th we left upstate NY for the first stop on our tour.
Thanks to my partner Forest we documented the whole tour with these vlogs on youtube!
I have plans of turning it into a documentary of the tour.
September 2021
We made it to Seattle to drop off the Neon until the festival in October. Due to Seattle rain we ended our tour in Portland, OR at the Rose City Rollers Roller Disco! A last minute stop added to the the tour because the stars aligned for us to be in OR during the disco! It was the perfect ending to the tour!
How It’s Going…
