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I went nude this weekend. I needed to banish my emotional burdens and strip down to my source. When I soak in the hot springs in Calistoga, the water takes off more than just a layer of my skin; it lets me be around other naked bodies without judgment, something that didn’t always come naturally. In fact, I still wrap a sarong around me when I strip down in the co-ed changing room out of habit. By the time I step into the Warm Pool, or emerge from the Hot Pool, I’ve let it all go. I splash down the stairs as if I own the place, or at the very least, my body.
Nancy Amanda Redd would have been proud of me. As a twenty-six year old former Miss Virginia, she set out to create a revolution as to how we view our own bodies, and her new book, Body Drama, is a big step in a healthy direction.
As I flipped through Body Drama, which is filled with straight body facts and photos of real women with real bodies, I found a chapter called “Down There,” which has a photographic spread of twenty-four different vulvas. I knew we had to talk.
Nancy, a twenty-six year old from rural Virginia who graduated with honors from Harvard, spoke to me from a publicity tour in New York. She said she knew by twenty-four that no book or magazine in print spoke to who she was.
“Every listing on Craigslist says ‘No Drama,’” she says, and that’s what inspired the title. “I wanted something that was modern that girls could be empowered by, [the word] drama makes it fun. There are different types of body drama. Our society focuses on the physical, but even before the size of my butt, I was having issues with my smell.”
Nancy, who got her period at the young age of ten, didn’t know that the smell she noticed was discharge, because no parent or teacher or mentor had ever told her what discharge was.
