Growing up in a Catholic school absolutely does not prepare you for sexual health. When I was younger, there was quite a bit of information I had no access too. And the information I did have, was explicit, from the mouths of other inexperienced people, and certainly did not realistically portray what sex would be like in real life. And that’s pretty detrimental regardless of religious education.
Women’s sexual wellness is still often not the center of discussion when it comes to sexual health. And the lack of true education around women’s bodies and what drives their pleasure has led to some large disparities when it comes to sex. This well-documented reality even has an official name: the orgasm gap. According to a recent study, 91% of men versus 39% of women experience orgasm consistently in partnered sex.
Determined to strip away some of the taboo around it, Brazilian photographer Marcos Alberti set out to try and capture the essence of a woman’s orgasm.
He called it “The ‘O’ Project,” and through a series of intimate photos documented what women look like before during and after a genuine orgasm.
“The O Project was created to explore and celebrate female pleasure in a natural, honest, and respectful way,” Alberti tells LittleThings. “It is the first project to document the female orgasm without approaching it from a sexual or erotic perspective.”
In order to do this, Alberti gathered 20+ female participants from a variety of ethnic backgrounds and documented their facial expressions as they pleasured themselves with personal massagers.
The result is nothing short of artistic beauty.
But how did he capture such thought-provoking images so tastefully? Alberti curated several factors in the subjects’ experiences to make this a possibility.
“When we usually see a female orgasm, it’s either in a personal context or through a screen, and in both cases, we are participating in a sexual experience,” he explains.
“In this project, there is no sexuality involved, the women are fully clothed, which allows us, for the first time, to observe what an orgasm does to the body and the expression it creates, from a purely human and emotional perspective. The goal is to break taboos, encourage open conversation, and highlight the beauty of authentic expression.”
That’s not an over exaggeration. According to the Geena Davis Institute, which researches and fights for equitable gender representation in media found female characters often appear hyper-sexualized with 23% in revealing clothing and 24.2% depicted partially or fully naked. That’s compared to roughly 4.7% to 9.4% of men.
Alberti partnered with Fan Yang, Global Brand Manager of Smile Makers, a sexual wellbeing brand, to bring the project to life.
“Female sexuality is more often shrouded in shame and secrecy,” Fang said of the collaboration per Alberti’s personal website. “Our partnership with Marcos allowed us to create this series to upend that social stigma around female sexuality, and encourage the normalization of female pleasure.”
After finishing the project, the women reportedly were in “awe” of their images, and it is easy to see why. In them, I see women connecting with themselves freely, without the pressures of partner or performance. They all equally look “present” in their bodies, which considering societal expectations of women, is a fairly rare thing for them to experience.
Alberti’s works can be seen on his website, where he shared “The ‘O’ Project” in full. Alberti’s other poignant series includes “3 Glasses,” which shows the progression of folks before and after each phase of drinking a glass of wine. For more of his intimate works you can visit his Instagram @marcos_alberti, and check out the full behind the scenes on “The ‘O’ Project” below.
