American Apparel Is Selling a Menstruating Vagina Shirt

For just $32, you can walk around in public wearing a jersey cotton, sweatshop-free T-shirt featuring a graphic illustration of a woman masturbating while her vagina is gushing blood.

The shirt, called “Period Power,” is a collaboration between American Apparel and 20-year-old Toronto-born artist Petra Collins who “creates portraits exploring female sexuality and teen girl culture.” She became an American Apparel employee as a teenager and is now a contributing photographer for the company. Her work has also appeared in Vice, Vogue Italia and Rookie. (It would appear from her art that Collins is a close friend of Rookie founder Tavi Gevinson.)

Half of the proceeds of the shirt go directly to The Ardorous, an all-female online art collective curated by Collins. The platform features a lot of feminist-slanted work, much of which is brilliant, like “Lady Manes” [left], a series of self-portraits of artist Rhiannon Schneiderman wearing pubic wigs; “There Will Be Blood” featuring photos of women doing normal, everyday things while getting their periods; “My Mom’s Friends” featuring portraits of middle-aged ladies in nighties; and “Lolita,” a selection of photos that have the same dreamy fetishizing of young women as Nabokov’s novel, but subverted by all the unsightly body hair.

So it seems like a cool project to want to support. But the question remains: where the fuck would one wear a menstruating vagina shirt?