Cylinder seals from Syria feature some of the oldest skirt-lifting images (1400 BCE); fast forward across millennia and continents and an eighteenth-century statue of Shinto-Buddhist goddess Kannon raising her skirt is still venerated today. Published in 2003, the book explores the vagina from a scientific and historical perspective, looking at everything from the tradition of anasyrma, the centuries-old gesture of lifting one’s skirt to display female genitalia and ward off evil, to the active role the vagina takes in reproduction. According to Balkan folklore, when it rained too much, women would run into the fields and lift their skirts to scare the gods and end the rain. Raising the skirt is also an apotropaic act – capable of averting evil: vaginal display scares away attacking bears or lions, exorcises demons and drives out the devil. The culturally framed gesture of lifting the skirt or kilt Copy of a Hellenistic Aphrodite Kallipygos at The Hermitage in St.

Vaginas, the raising the skirt stories all say, are so powerful that if a woman lifts her skirt to reveal her genitalia she can make a vast array of extraordinary actions happen. I had such an enjoyable weekend during the DIY, thanks mostly to how it was set up to be exploratory and open from the outset. The famous example of the latter case is Aphrodite Kallipygos ("Aphrodite of the beautiful buttocks").Raising the Skirt: the Unsung Power of the Vagina begins by celebrating the myriad stories from history, mythology and folklore which tell of the act of anasyrma or ana-suromai – raising the skirt. Reading one with her daughter recently, she was “horrified” to see the clitoris described as small and pea-shaped. Vagina and vulva are not the wrong words, or rude words, or too anatomical words, they are simply the correct words and it is only an adult’s own hang-ups that colours them otherwise. Raising the skirt: the unsung power of the vagina reveals this revolutionary view of female genitalia and points the way to a new understanding of what it means to be female.

On young trees use secateurs to thin out a third of one-year-old side-shoots, cutting close to the main trunk but not damaging the ridge at the base of the branch or – in the case of this birch – the thin, decorative bark of the tree. Moreover, as my book Raising the Skirt reveals, the tales of vaginal valour from history and modern day activists are not the only ‘raising the skirt’ tales to tell your daughters, nieces, grand-daughters and friends.

Or if you are a 21 st century woman using ‘raising the skirt’ as a modern protest gesture, let me know. With 23 projects across the country and over 200 participants, DIY 11 generated lots of documentation.

I believe a vital first step in achieving this is using positive, respectful language for our genitals, that’s why I am campaigning too add the word verenda to the dictionary as the positive, respectful word for the vagina; it means the parts inspiring awe, respect or reverence.

Documentation from Johanna Linsley and Rebecca Louise Collins' DIY Stolen Voices can be found on Tumblr. She’d gone to see The Vagina Monologues with friends, and had found it “deeply moving”; she’d read about the discovery that the clitoris was tens of times larger than had previously been thought.

By acknowledging and resisting the sacred and divine, Canavan installs layers of symbol through the modification and manipulation of the flesh, and pursues rituals that transcend the body.Balconies and short dresses are never a good combination, as Penny Lancaster-Stewart has found out along with Paris Hilton and Kourtney Kardashian on this list. And that same year in Italy, anasyrma demonstrations protested against gender discrimination and male violence against women. Accounts of how mighty the vagina is – raising the skirt stories – are astonishingly common and long-standing, and represent a global treasure trove of women’s history. I’m also on a mission to empower girls and women – ensuring we grow up confident and proud of what we have between our legs.