Last week Janelle Monáe released her fourth album, Dirty Computer, which was led with a series of iconique music videos, including the incredible “Pynk”. The “Pynk” video had a lot of visual vagina metaphors, most notably a pair of trousers that the internet was quick to dub ‘vagina pants’. Following the positive response, Monáe is considering selling them to the general public.
“We may be working on that,” Monáe told PEOPLE when asked about mass-producing the pants during a YouTube event for Dirty Computer. “I’m so tickled and honoured that people are talking about the ‘Pynk’ pants, I think that it’s so cool to have discussions around women’s issues and women’s bodies.”
The pants were designed by Duran Lantink, a friend of the “Pynk” video’s director Emma Westenberg. “I really loved the idea of a giant vagina as legs,” Lantink told us about the design. “Janelle loved it, so we tweaked it into something we both loved.”
Monáe also told PEOPLE that while the video is a celebration of femininity, there’s a reason that not everybody in the video wears the vagina pants. “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.”
Monáe’s comments echo those of “Pynk” co-star Tessa Thompson, who wrote on Twitter after the video’s release, “to all the black girls that need a monologue that don’t have Vaginas (sic), I’m listening”. Monáe also tweeted, “Thank you to the incomparable & brilliant Tessa Thompson for helping celebrate US (no matter if you have a vagina or not) all around the world”.
Watch the “Pynk” video below.