Why must women be likeable? 

Why must they be beautiful? 

The women fronting groundbreaking, long-overdue movements such as Me-too activism, gender based violence rallies, and climate change protests typically have a searing quality in common: western beauty and a penchant for following the rules. 

Niamh, 19, from Windsor has arguably been dealt the card of one of the lucky ones. As an able bodied, sharp minded english literature & drama student at Goldsmiths, she goes through life deliberately mocking, contradicting, the stereotypes of the body she was born into, so to make aware the perversion damned upon the female gender.  

"I hope to become a performance artist after uni. I aim to include my feelings within my work by utilising the abuse of my body as a way to shock and simultaneously evoke [feeling] from my audiences."

Upon looking at Niamh, you’re at once confused by classic beauty twisted by severe piercings and avant garde makeup, a thick south England accent that spits researched philosophy justifying her acute critique of masculinity and feminism.

“Men experience vagina envy instead of penis envy, as Karen Horney would call it. There’s the Freudian term of ‘penis envy’, but Karen Horney who was a psychotherapist and a woman, later coined the term ‘vagina envy’. Saying men envy us for the fact that they can’t create life and that we can. And that’s the one thing that women can do that men can do. So they experience vagina envy and project that by being violent to women.”

Reminiscent of the 1990 book written by Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson: “The female body’s unbearable hiddenness applies to all aspects of men’s dealings with women. What does it look like in there? Did she have an orgasm? Is it really my child? Who was my real father? Mystery shrouds women’s sexuality. This mystery is the main reason for the imprisonment man has imposed on women. Only by confining his wife in a locked harem guarded by eunuchs could he be certain that her son was also his.”


Niamh stands as a breath of fresh air on womanhood, a controversial force that both strokes the reputation of the feminine mystique, but with sandpaper hands that have crawled up from too much first hand experience on sexism.