pynk, janelle monae, movie, video

Janelle Monáe Is Teasing Us With the Possibility of Owning Our Own PYNK “Vagina Pants”

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It’s hard to pick a favorite song from Janelle Monáe’s new Dirty Computer, but “PYNK” is a top, sexy contender. Especially when you consider the video (or rather, scene, given the whole of the Dirty Computer “Emotion Picture”), full of imagery designed to celebrate female sexuality. One of the most instantly iconic images was of Monáe and some of her dancers in ruffly, pink “vagina pants,” as they’ve come to be known.

In a recent interview, People asked Monáe the question we all want answered: When and where can we buy a pair of those pants?

Now, I don’t want to get your hopes up, because really, there are no details, nd no timetable, but here’s how People describes her reaction:

“‘I’m trying,’ she admitted with a smile. ‘I may be working on it.'”

Great. Now I’m never going to stop hoping for a Janelle Monáe clothing line, full of well-tailored tuxedoes and fluffy vulva pants.

As much as we love the pants, in the same interview, Monáe reiterated what she’s said before: that while the pants and some other images in the “PYNK” video evoke vaginas, she is celebrating all women. And a vagina is not requisite for womanhood.

“Sometimes I think people interpret those as vagina pants, they call them vulva pants, they call them flowers, but it just represents some parts of some women,” she said. “There are some women in the video that do not have on the pants, because I don’t believe that all women need to possess a vagina to be a woman. I have one I’m proud of it, but there’s a lot of policing and controlling that people are trying to have over our vaginas and when you think about female genital mutilation, when you think about all these women’s issues, I wanted to make sure we were discussing these issues but we were also celebrating each other. I wanted Pynk to be a celebration of women who are unique, distinct, different, may be different from one another but when they come together they create something magical and special.”

(image: screencap)

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Vivian Kane
Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.